Donald Trump Triumphs as The Lady Weeps

Lady Liberty is weeping today as the 240-year-old grand experiment with democratic greatness that is the United States of America has crashed and burned in the person of a foul-mouthed con artist who will now have the power to steer the ship of state.

“What can they have been thinking?” we all ask each other of the voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump. “Don’t they know what will happen next?” “Don’t they have any sense of history?” Jackboots persistently march through our memories and we cringe.

Alas, too many Americans do not understand the ramifications of voting a narcissistic megalomaniac into the highest office, the Presidency, but somehow think they have “won.”

No, Trump voters, we have all lost. Your minions in particular.

Bigly.

Trump will do nothing to help his struggling white male voters regain their sense of worth and their value in the marketplace. But they won’t learn this until it is much too late.

And The Donald cemented his victory with—what else?—a tweet:

“Such a beautiful and important evening! The forgotten man and woman will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before.”

No, Donald, we will not all come together as never before. You have torn us asunder as never before. You have conquered the country, and the world is horrified at the wreckage you have left in your wake. Your campaign was modeled on the Red-baiting consigliere Roy Cohn approach to problem-solving: “Asked about Mr. Cohn in 1980, Mr. Trump was blunt in his assessment: ‘He’s been vicious to others in his protection of me.’”

Stephen King succinctly summed up the results: “No more book recommendations, politics, or amusing dog pictures for the immediate future. I'm shutting down.”

And Trump supporter and former Imperial Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan David Duke messaged: “GOD BLESS WIKILEAKS.” If Leaker-in-Chief Julian Assange was previously thought by some to be disloyal, he is now reviled by a substantial number of people for his—and his Russian confederates’—malicious interference in the American election. Assange is nothing less than a traitor.

And let us not forget the pinpoint precision of James B. Comey, disgraced Director of the FBI, who brushed off stern warnings from the Department of Justice to keep his mouth shut and instead tilted the playing field for Trump with breathtaking audacity when he made his late-October announcement about yet more phony Clinton email misconduct.

My mother, who died five years ago at the age of 92, was the child of Eastern European immigrants, a young pre-war bride when she first voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She married in haste so that my father would not be eligible for the new military draft that was imposed more than a year prior to Pearl Harbor—and he ultimately served in the Navy with distinction. She lived through the Second World War with its courage and self-sacrifice, the sinister McCarthy years, the stultifyingly boring post-war Fifties with their coercive uniform codes of conduct, the upheavals and reforms of the Sixties, the dawn of the electronic era, into the new millennium, and the election of the first black president with all that followed in the wake of these developments.

She welcomed that new millennium, never afraid to go forward. She always voted Democratic and eventually convinced my father to do the same. She tried not to follow the herd but taught me and my siblings to think for ourselves. In her own quiet, nonadversarial way she announced that she alone would decide what manner of living was moral and ethical and right—and what was most decidedly not.

In her selfless, understated style she personified the Lady with the Lamp. No Trump herd could ever have swayed her. No chants of “lock her up” would ever have turned her against the public servant we thought would be the first woman elected president. She would never have permitted such careless disregard for the truth to have changed her mind. She knew the power of lies that, when repeated enough times, accumulate gravity and power. She would have railed against those vile lies that misrepresented the conduct of the only qualified nominee for President in November 2016, Hillary Clinton.

My mother would have been appalled by the very idea of a Donald Trump in the White House, horrified, incredulous, speechless.

I am glad she never lived to see this day. It would have prostrated her with grief.

As many of us in these United States are this morning.

My mother was a teacher, and she knew the power of persuasion for good and for evil. This year in America, evil has triumphed.

God save the Republic.