Trump’s Acts of Damage To Our Nation May Actually Be a Boon in the Long Term
The reader I mentioned the other day, Tom, says in response to my post outlining the criminal and otherwise despicable acts Trump has performed during his years in office, “I would still be interested in what single item stands out in your mind, something that you find provable.”
As I said in the post itself, it’s impossible to know which of these is going to have the most damaging and longest lasting effects.
We need also to understand that some of this garbage is immediately reversible, and a significant portion of it never actually went into full effect. Take, for example, the enormous swing Trump has taken against the environment in favor of corporate polluters; a great deal of this is still hung up in court, and will ultimately die there.
Yet another comment to be made is that, ironically, all this damage could possibly have a net positive effect. We are now a country that has seen first-hand how a demagogue goes about his business and what results from it.
There is no need for any of us to be scholars of 20th Century European history. We’ve now lived through the lies, the sabotage of our institutions, the denigration of the free press, the purging of all dissent, the humiliation of our nation on the world stage, the nepotism and the brazen self-enrichment at taxpayers’ expense, the cruelty to children and other innocents, the incitement to violence, the plundering of rule of law, the role that evangelicals play in keeping all this alive, and the bumbling incompetence at what was perhaps the most inopportune moment in our history.
As a consequence, we’re extremely unlikely to elect another person with any resemblance to Trump whatsoever. Kids a century from now will be reading about this in their textbooks. This horrific passage of our history and the brush we had with the death of a nation will never be forgotten.
