Real Donald Trump

16,000 LIES IN TRUMP'S FIRST THREE YEARS FOR STARTERS. BUT THE LIES AND DISTORTIONS AND PUBLIC TANTRUMS CONTINUE AMIDST CONTINUING INCOMPETENCE, INDIFFERENCE, AND CONTEMPT FOR THOSE OF US WHO WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE LIVING, AND MAYBE EVEN SALVAGE DEMOCRACY.

Following are some of Trump's recent false claims:

"Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion." Actually, many people predicted it, including some of his own officials. Plus the National Security Council published a 69 page playbook to fight pandemics when President Obama was in the White House: among other things the Council advised how to track the spread of the virus, how to conduct tests effectively, AND WHY IT WAS NECESSARY TO STOCKPILE EMERGENCY RESOURCES.

"It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle--it will disappear." The evidence? The virus will "maybe go away. We'll see what happens. Nobody really knows." South Korea and Taiwan took a different tack. They organized massive testing, tracing, isolating, and they protected their first responders. They didn't wait for miracles, they didn't blast hypothetical enemies. They didn't deny science. They concentrated on saving lives, not winning reelection.

"Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. We--they-re here. They have the tests. and the tests are beautiful." Actually, we didn't have the tests. We don't have the tests. Even doctors have had trouble getting them. We still lag in testing. And now it is late, very late. 

"I've always known this is a pandemic . . . long before it was called a pandemic." Trump probably doesn't know the meaning of pandemic. Remember his word: he called it a hoax, a Democratic hoax. Something that Nancy Pelosi invented. Later the hoax became a Chinese virus. That was bad enough. Then he decided that all this dying was bad for business. So he started to call us back to work by Easter, actually on Easter we should all go to church and celebrate, he said. So if the virus didn't kill us, Trump was determined to assist the virus in getting rid of many of us. Now we know he has extended a stay-at-home order until the end of April. 

​And finally, this: "Americans will have "vaccines, I think, relatively soon." Actually we won't. We don't. His own people, those who actually don't deny science because, well, they are scientists, estimate we are a year away. Whatever the time lag, it won't be relatively soon. In the meantime, while Trump vents rage and displays contempt for anybody who is rational, many of us are needlessly dying.

DONALD TRUMP DID NOT INVENT RACIAL STRIFE, SOCIAL INEQUALITY, POLICE BRUTALITY, DECAYING CITIES, AND THE PANDEMIC. But he is not the president to address and find solutions to any of these smoldering problems or to bring Americans together in a moment of historic and multiple crises. And now as America is burning and hurting, he continues to hide behind the military and police. Instead of showing compassion for the nation he is supposed to lead, he continues to use vulgar rhetoric against perceived enemies, he continues his barrage of lies, disinformation, and false innuendos. 

Donald Trump's legacy will be monumental failure. Failure to provide moral leadership, failure to respond to racial injustice except with taunts, failure to address poverty or to protect those of us who are most vulnerable, failure to protect doctors, nurses, the health care community, first responders against a pandemic washing through our cities and states. Failure to protect our democracy, our institutions, the norms of decency. Failure to provide hope to communities of color who are suffering from longstanding issues of poor health care, poor housing, poor schools, and continuing police brutality. Failure to confront White Nationalism, an enduring legacy of four centuries that this president has failed to challenge; instead he has been its cheerleader.  

If Donald Trump is reelected, America will cease to be a democracy in any meaningful sense. He has already demolished the Republican party which has surrendered to him any lingering decency the moment it allowed his shambolic presidency to claim moral equivalency between White Nationalism and anti-fascist demonstrators at Charlottesburg, Virginia. He has compromised the judiciary by consistently putting ideology ahead of qualifications. He has demeaned Congress with crass, divisive rhetoric. He has eroded our trust in government, he has inflamed our distrust of each other. He has dismantled all benchmarks of decency. He has lied, distorted, misinformed, denounced, equivocated, relativized on all issues, on all themes because he despises truth, just as he despises expertise, knowledge, truth-seeking, and the journalists, historians, academicians, scientists, and public servants who care about the difference between right and wrong, between decency and indecency, between democracy and tyranny. 

We will wait in vain for a speech that seeks to heal us. We will wait in vain for sympathy and compassion. We will wait in vain for this president to denounce racism, police brutality, White Nationalism, inequality. We will wait in vain for this president to protect our health, to rebuild our cities, to provide moral leadership and compassion to help heal our divisions. 

Instead we will continue to have what we have now: an authoritarian bully who continues to use the rhetoric of hatred and division, who calls on the use of "vicious dogs," and "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," without a murmur of police brutality.

This is not who we are. This is not how we should ever be. And this is not the path to make America great again. It is instead a sign of decline, of massive weariness, of a nation without a rudder.

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