Trump has split U.S. in half
Donald Trump is the first ever president to give the backhand to good old American democracy.
Indeed, the president goes out of his way to slap the living daylights out of such things as freedom of the press, religious tolerance and objective truth. An expansive view of the American future? That’s not the Trump way.
Lately, you’ve noticed, he’s taken a sledge hammer to the world order -the world order the Greatest Generation fought and bled for — the world order that has been growing and evolving ever since Roosevelt and Churchill met at sea in the early 1940s and proclaimed the Atlantic Charter. Ever since the storming of the Normandy beaches.
In other words, a long, long time ago and over successive generations.
Minus some bumps in the road as well as some very large potholes, a lot of us thought the world was going our way. Guess not. Not according to President Trump. So long, Paris climate accord.
It’s true that the president admires the authoritarians of the world — the Saudi princes and Russia’s Putin. Democratically elected leaders not so much. He’s cozy with the former, at arm’s length with the latter.
The president recently chatted up the murderous Duterte of the Philippines, inviting him to the White House. Oh my.
In short, our dear chief of government has a chip on his shoulder for democracy, for modernity; he is intolerant and narrow-minded with a cramped and crabby view of the U.S.A. and the world – believing, apparently, in views expressed in The Wall Street Journal by his national security advisor and his chief economics advisor, that the United States is, and always has been, a lone predator, tramping the woods for prey in a game of kill or be killed. Us against them, all of them.
Ironically, one of the most metropolitan of presidents (born and bred in New York City, he spent his entire adult life living and working in the Big Apple), Trump is an urban hick, a city rube.
There has never been a president like Trump. Where he’s leading us should shiver the timbers of every American.
Donald Trump is a divider, not a uniter, and I mean that in the most ordinary sort of way. All the great presidents with the possible exception of Washington have been men of strong actions that cleaved the nation and in the process split apart friends and families.
Trump has so far proved to be bewildering, chaotic and therefore wildly ineffective, yet he’s been the catalyst for many a break up. A woman I know in her late 30s was deleted on Facebook by a close friend from high school days on account of the 2016 election for president. My acquaintance was on the side of Clinton, her friend was with Trump.
Exchanges between the two came to an abrupt and sudden end, and it looks like it’s going to be that way indefinitely.
The campaign was the high point for bitter feelings. The traffic in Facebook insults between the two sides and among erstwhile friends was terrific. More than a few friendships withered; some died.
Truth be told, Trump started it all — going all the way to his candidacy announcement and the Republican mud-baths otherwise called debates. Cries of “lock her up, lock her up” in the fall exacerbated matters.
Trump is like the neighborhood guy who knocks down the kids’ basketball hoop and then calls for the kids to be sent to George Junior Republic.
I recently heard from a friend. “I’ve long ago gotten tired of my ‘conservative’ friends deriding me for believing … ‘fake’ news,” he emailed — “fake news”, of course, being one of Trump’s golden oldies.
My friend went on to lament the state of his relationship with a sibling, who is deep in the woods with both Fox and the Trumpster. “There is a limited number of topics that my sister or I venture into with him,” my friend wrote. “The weather is always high on the list. He is still our brother, but we don’t know where he came from or where he is going.”
Now, not all things are equal, but this road travels east as well as west, north as well as south. For every to, there’s a fro. Example: The Kathy Griffin affair. How utterly stupid of Griffin, a Joan Rivers wanna-be who will now never be.
The affair that got Griffin kicked off CNN was summed up by New York Post columnist John Podhoretz:
“Imagine,” Podhoretz writes, “living in a bubble so impermeable it didn’t occur to (Griffin) that retailing a photograph of a decapitated president’s head would be a horrendous career move — a bubble in which (she doesn’t) know anyone who doesn’t think the world would be a better place once Donald Trump had had his head cut off.
“That is the world Kathy Griffin lives in.”
Many so-called liberals live in bubbles, while not as severe as Griffin’s, severe enough to view with disdain those Trump supporters, the “morons” of the campaign, who continue to sustain the president.
Liberal derision goes back a ways. I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve heard, in newsrooms and elsewhere over the years, in which the poor and uneducated were the butt of jokes.
Bad grammar? A twang? Missing teeth? Owns a gun or two or three? Well, you’re not in our league.
Politically, Americans are not merely divided; they lead separate lives. The number of Democrats, in the most recent Pew Research poll, who think Trump is doing a good job stands at 7 percent. Asked the same question, Republicans respond with 82 percent positive.
And the beat goes on.
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted on the heels of the Kathy Griffin debacle: “Disgusting but not surprising. This is the left today. They consider this acceptable.”
Most of the men who have held the office of the presidency have been elevated by its duties and responsibilities. Donald Trump may be the first president to actually shrink the office, and to shrink inside its once magnificent contours.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.