Throughout most of its history, America has loomed large on the international stage. A global economy and super power status did it. Now that idealistic democratic experiment, however cruelly flawed, features Ralph Kramden as president. Pow, right in the due-process kisser.
How did we get here? This arrogant, nativistic, emerging police state is oligarch friendly, ally-alienating, tariff-roiling, legal system-assaulting and free speech-attacking. And let’s not forget the well-soiled machine that is DOGE and its indiscriminate downsizing, which helps nothing but Elon Musk’s ego. This iteration of America has an unread, unethical, autocratic, felonious narcissist in the Oval Orifice. One where constitutional guardrails no longer include checks and balances.
We’ve seen an America First playbook before. Now it’s America Fist First. The bully pulpit shouldn’t include a bloviating, bully pulpiteer with a zero-sum worldview. A United States president shouldn’t be the avatar of unhinged authoritarianism. Nor should he be an insurrectionist. “He’s the kid in the garage with matches standing next to the gasoline tank,” noted Trump biographer Tim O’Brien.
But we did some fast-forwarding in 2008.
So many of the MAGA cult followers didn’t like their lives and needed scapegoats and those to look down on. Nobody was farther down than African-Americans. And now one of them was president. Game on. For the otherwise apathetic, it would be voter incentive.
It also hardly helped that the losing ticket featured Sarah Palin for vice president. She was an embarrassingly uninformed performance pol who was an insult to the electorate, especially women. She would have been a heartbeat away from the presidency had John McCain won. That leadership bar was now at a subterranean depth. Dan Quayle never looked so good.
Too many poorly educated, easily misinformed Americans then found their voice and their candidate in the Kramdenesque Trump. The born-rich, grifting billionaire racist talked like a “deplorable” and sounded like he was delivering punch lines to Norton and Alice. Also joining in: evangelical hypocrites, some addled greed heads and the SCOTUS-vetting Federalist Society.
What would it take to put Trump and Trumpism into the rear-view mirror of history? Democrats obviously can’t play the complacency card, as Cory Booker underscored. Grass roots efforts have helped in some special elections, indicating that hope remains–just like when Dems pushed back and helped defeat Trump’s first-term effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, even though GOPsters controlled both the House and the Senate.
This isn’t about right and left; it’s about right and wrong. “The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent, and we all must do more to stand against these,” said Sen. Booker in his marathon Senate speech.
One other thing. This country needs to take a serious look at education. Americans are notorious for all they don’t know about history and geography, including, most notably, their own. Mandatory civics classes that actually teach about our electoral system, including its obvious flaws, would help. That would include use of the 25th Amendment, just in case a would-be Mussolini becomes president. And stop playing the racial insult or placation card—and teach racial reality, not theory. Also include real-world economics that would put tariffs, for example, into a relevant taxation and global context, as well as online reality as it relates to misinformation.
What America doesn’t need is a retribution president who considers the US more of a Trump brand than an impactful player for world peace, climate control, human rights and free trade.