From his chemically treated off-orange face down to his chronic venous insufficient ankles, rot and corruption descend from he-who-would-be-king to his apple-polishing consiglieres, and his toxicity finally reaches we the people who must suffer his obnoxiousness and loathsomeness. We don’t need a ghost to augur verdicts we already know: something is rotten in America. The moral health of our nation suffers from deceit and corruption, and, naturally, nothing good will come from the man who brings shame upon our house. Excessive pride, arrogance, and braggadocio ultimately lead to ruin, and Trump possesses a mother lode of hubris. Also, we don’t need a professional diagnosis to conclude Trump has sociopathic character traits: lack of empathy, narcissistic tendencies, compulsive lying, manipulative behavior, and pleasure in harming others. Add those weaknesses to his fragile self-esteem and his inability to keep healthy personal relationships and a convincing picture of a sick and dangerous person emerges.
The America in which we live is not the same place we have known. The Statue of Liberty fittingly represented us by displaying a universal symbol of freedom, democracy, and opportunity, a beacon of hope for immigrants as well as a symbol for what we as Americans valued. With Trump, all those assumptions have changed. We now offer freedom for some, democracy for no one, opportunity for rich people, and little or no hope for immigrants. Though the talk of fascists and tyrants may overstate the menace, the vitriol and needling coming from Trump and his handlers has turned the public square into something like a caged combat sport, a cruel amusement Trump evidently enjoys. His bully bearing and need for constant blandishments is wearing thin on tolerance, even among some of his most ardent partisans. No Queensberry rules for Trump. He goes dirty and vindictive, disregarding all tenets of decorum in fighting adversaries. If you disagree with him, he’ll sue you. If you complain, he’ll find a way to have you fired. If you are a person of color, he will demean you unless you kneel before him. If a judge rules against him, he’ll appeal and appeal some more, refusing to surrender. Ever. It’s not tenacity he exhibits; it’s irate pig-headedness. He is the ideal angry man, Archie Bunker with a stable of a hundred lawyers to sue you, your mother, and the horse you rode in on (since the mid-70s he has been involved in over 4000 lawsuits). Trump is an infectious decay. The accelerated spoilage moves quickly from the White House to every precinct of our country.
Vengeance is a constant theme for Trump, payback, counterpunch, never turn the other cheek. Having no empathy nor qualms about the feelings of others, he will insult you, sue you, arrest you, jail you, or kill you. Facts or legal judgments will not give him pause. He makes the rules. If he insists those Black kids in Central Park did the crime, no matter the proof of their innocence, Trump will insist he’s right and everyone else is wrong. If he declares Obama is not a US citizen, no one will ever convince him otherwise. If he decides climate change is not a thing, he’ll tell his big oil friends, “Drill, baby, drill.”
He has a history of not paying his debts and has used bankruptcy laws six times to skip paying investors and suppliers. He dodged the draft as a young man, later labeling many who served and even died for our country “suckers and losers.” We know his history of over 30,000 lies while in office, dozens of rape and sexual harassment allegations made against him, his swindles in inventing fraudulent charities and a sham university, his unprincipled hypocrisy in mocking his distractors as guilty of the same failings he demonstrates, and, of course, his attempt to overturn the election of 2020.
But wait! There’s more. Republican Senator Ted Cruz put it succinctly when he said, “The man is utterly amoral…Morality does not exist for him.”
More, laws and rules do not exist for him.
Just for us!