Reflections on a Potential Trump Presidency

I have been trying to write about a variety of matters in recent weeks but, alas, am fixated on the ramifications of a potential Donald Trump presidency.

The man is insidious. He is an abomination. He gets under my skin.

To prevent my thoughts from being tarnished by what may happen at the so-called first presidential debate of 2016 scheduled for this evening, I decided to publish them in advance of that potential debacle.

I have been hounded for months by a sense of unease that a vulgar, ignorant reality television star may be elected my president. Psychologists who have been polling their patients report that most of them have been similarly obsessed and depressed with the possibility of a Trump presidential triumph.

In fact, as one columnist has astutely observed, the nation is having a Trump-induced nervous breakdown. Free-floating anxiety is everywhere. The sooner the election is over, the sooner we can begin processing either the end of the Trump candidacy or the hideous ramifications of a Trump presidency.

I have considered emigrating to Nova Scotia if the worst occurs. Political campaigns in Canada don’t last nearly two years. Canadian politicians are less offensive and even stellar. The winters would be cold and breezy, but the summers would be exceptionally pleasant. Beaches are abundant. And if I were to commit to working again rather than merely enjoying my retirement, I might be eligible for a gift of free land.

Of course, I would miss the United States in which I have spent my life, and could never again anticipate strolling across Central Park or grabbing an Italian meal in Little Italy during one of the religious festivals or watching the St. Patrick’s Day Parade swerve down Fifth Avenue or singing choral concerts in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. These would be significant losses. The siren call of New York City is firmly embedded in my DNA.

What motivates a singular, terminally offensive outlier like The Donald? Many pundits believe he was always a selfish, narcissistic man who was covetous of the power and public spotlight inherent in the presidency, that he was too often close to that power and spotlight but never entitled to claim it in his personal business portfolio. Hence, envy plaguing a man who had been propelled to the public consciousness by a reality television show could easily have caused that man to covet still more power and glory.

Others recall President Obama’s withering public takedown of Trump during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the evening when the “President took apart Donald Trump, plastic piece by orange part, and then refused to put him back together again.” Comedian Seth Myers added more fuel to the fire, after which the cameras lingered on Donald Trump as the astute ridicule cut through the venue and was broadcast to the public, showing a man unable to respond or leave, confined to silence, rooted at his table, and glowering with suppressed rage at his public humiliation.

According to Roxanne Roberts of The New York Times, who sat immediately next to Donald and Melania, the following theory du jour evolved: “Trump was so humiliated by the experience . . . that it triggered some deep, previously hidden yearning for revenge. That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature in the political world.”

This takedown occurred in the wake of Trump’s “birther” initiative, a racist, Islamophobic campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s birth and hence his presidency, a campaign without modern precedent, founded on a shrewd assessment of the inherent racism that had been surfacing from the Stygian depths throughout the country during Obama’s presidency, positing that the president was a practicing Muslim who had been born in Kenya and was hence ineligible to be president. That birther campaign continues to exist in spite of Trump’s recent efforts to lay it to rest via his startling and false allegation that it was initiated by Hillary Clinton.

Most people don’t think we’ve heard the last of birtherism, a malignant concept to undermine political campaigns when office seekers may not look, live, or sound like majority European-origin caucasian Americans. The barely suppressed racism that has propped up Republicans and their Tea Party compatriots for the past eight years has emerged via Trump’s campaign and other outlets in the form of full-blown bigotry unrestrained by any notions of fair play or even smart politics.

Some would argue that Trump’s birtherism campaign helped rouse his white supremacist troops, who have been out in force during the endless presidential political primaries and thereafter, when people of color, Muslims, the disabled, immigrants, and women have been targets of unrestrained fury, social media-inspired contempt, and threats of violence.

America’s ability to educate its citizens to think critically about a host of issues has been revealed to be a widespread failure, permitting a demagogue like Donald Trump to become the ascendant politician in a presidential race of unprecedented vacuous vitriol and insults. We older Americans like to believe we are immune from the ramblings of a Donald Trump, that only younger voters such as millennials are trapped in or convinced by the circular reasoning of an American Hitler on the campaign trail. But we would be wrong.

Too many voters of all ages have failed to assess the real dangers of Trump should he reach the Oval Office, and even admire his determination and continual bluster and roaring at one rally after another. When Trump yells to his listeners that he alone can “make America great again,” they are oblivious to the facts that Obama has guided the country back to prosperity following the Great Recession of 2008, killed Osama bin Laden during a time of terrorism, led this country with grace and dignity, and diligently addressed the hobgoblins of global warming and nuclear proliferation.

A saving grace is the civil and criminal lawsuits and official investigations now being directed against The Donald regarding Trump University, illegal payments from the Trump Foundation (of other people’s money), providing campaign contribution bribes to at least two attorneys general to persuade them not to join the Trump University litigation, and rape of a minor. No matter the results of the litigation and investigations, Trump will attempt to put his unique and dangerous spin on the outcomes. As for the 3,500 or so past court cases involving Trump casinos, rental tenants and condo owners, small business contractors, and racial discrimination, Trump is dismissive about his liability and secretive about the settlements he has imposed on many long-suffering litigants.

In the final analysis, what is really frightening, according to Garrison Keillor, is that “the biggest con job since the Trojan horse is taking place in our midst. Millions of Americans are planning to base their votes for a man who has lived his life contrary to all of their most cherished values. They are respectful, honest, generous, loyal, modest, church-going people with no Mafia connections and good credit records who try not to spout off about things they know nothing about.”

Further, continues Keillor, “[t]he man is a fraud, a tax cheat, a compulsive liar, a clueless playboy, and his presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the country.”

And that is what keeps me up nights, immersed in a free-floating sea of anxiety, wondering just how stupid American voters are, how prone to accept at face value without more Trump’s narrative of a “crooked” Hillary Clinton, a woman of uncommon knowledge and experience who has been demonized in extremis. This Donald, this fascist candidate who boasts that he would leave the governing to his vice president and “do deals” to reduce the nation’s National Debt and punish members of NATO who failed to pay in full for American military commitments, whose knowledge of the Constitution is nonexistent, and whose commitment to the Free World extends only as far as his made-in-China lines of clothing and his business payments from Russian oligarchs, may be about to take the reins of government.

Which is why I haven’t been able to sleep for months and am considering a move to Nova Scotia.