How Trump Lost Control

History will regard the shocking results of the 2019 (off-year) elections in which Republicans lost control of states that had been theirs for decades as a watershed event.  As we sit in wonder as to what happened, let’s consider this:

We Americans have our faults.  We have deeply ingrained and systemic racism.  We have widespread ignorance, child hunger, and a gun culture from hell.  We’re a violent people; we glorify war, but treat our veterans terribly.  We love money, but we have a reckless indifference to science.  We have levels of corruption that are hard to find outside of the planet’s banana republics.

Now, if a clever and ruthless politician wanted to exploit these and gradually take increasing levels of control until he held our country in a death-grip, he probably could have.

But he didn’t.

He couldn’t control himself, and his dream fell apart accordingly, like the addict who watches himself dissipate in front of his own eyes, powerless to seize the reins and take the level of command he knows he so desperately needs.

A pathological liar, he was erratic to the point that many people at all points in the political spectrum doubted his mental health and emotional stability.  People became terrified of him as he tweeted hateful recriminations in the middle of the night.  He abused his power of office in ways so brazenly criminal they would have made Stalin or Caligula or Kim Jong-Il blush.  Rapidly, he emerged, even to a number of his supporters, as a vulgar pig, a sexual predator, a cruel, vindictive child, and a great danger to his country and, by extension, to all the peoples of Earth.

He could have simply “boiled the frog,” slowly raising the water temperature until it lost consciousness and died.  But he was emotionally incapable of that type of method and reason.  With a cruel sneer, he tossed the frog into the boiling water.  And, sure as the metaphor goes, it hopped out, and made its way to safety.

Perhaps all we learned last night is that the Republicans have their hands full, since they lost control of two cherry-red states.  But I think there’s more to this.  Yes, Americans have our faults, but we’re good people at the core.  We’ve spent the last three years in a swirl of vertigo and confusion.  It’s as if we’re falling from the top of a tree, and gaining speed so rapidly that we don’t know what branch to grab a hold of.

It appears we may have found that branch.