On the morning of November 9, 2016, I awoke full of dread. I knew that come January 20, 2017, a man who was manifestly unfit for the job would become president of the United States. The knot has remained in my stomach pretty constantly since that morning.
What havoc might the new president wreak on the world stage? How would he respond to natural disasters? What damage might he do to our democracy?
In the following four years, i found out just how mean-spirited he was, how racist, how unprepared for office. He lived down to my expectations in a big way.
There was one thought that kept me going: I knew that, in the world's highest office, in front of literally everyone, he was sure to fail spectacularly.
Unfortunately, to fail spectacularly as president of the United States is to be extremely destructive. His failure at managing the coronavirus epidemic has led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. His failure to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution has led to national unrest and, ultimately, to an attempted coup, as his deluded followers rioted inside the Capitol building, leading to more deaths. So, my joy at seeing him fail on the world stage is tempered by grief.
I might have written this essay in October of last year. The president's positive test for coronavirus gave me hope of a tidy ending to his regime. I am not in the least ashamed that I have checked the news almost every morning since January 20, 2017, hoping to read that he had died. No shame whatsoever.
Unlike in films and television, real world events don't usually have neat, tidy endings. This one certainly has not. Throughout the 2020 election, our hollow president hammered home the lie that mail-in ballots would lead to massive voter fraud. He had his supporters conditioned to believe that, should he lose, it would be because the opposition had rigged the election. So, when it came time for him to concede to Joseph Biden, the clear winner, he claimed that the election had been stolen from him, as he had predicted. And his most ardent supporters believed him.
So, my joy is further tempered by the fact that our ex-president is likely not self-aware enough to realize the magnitude of his failure. And, on top of that, after four years of unmitigated disaster, over 70 million people voted for him in 2020. These people do not realize that their president was a failure.
Who are these people? I think that it is human nature to look for a charismatic leader when politics seems like such a quagmire, so full of red tape and difficult decisions. Our ex-president's supporters fell for him big time. He was certainly utterly different from any politician they (or we) had ever seen. They found the difference so refreshing that they were able to overlook or explain away all of his egregious faults. Was he a flawed man? Well, so was King David. God would make use of this new flawed man. Indeed, to the religious right, he was God's anointed; to some, I think he was nearly God himself.
So many people are so easily fooled. I would never have imagined that so many people from the heartland, the places Sarah Palin would describe as the real America, would become such devout followers of a loudmouthed real estate developer from New York City.
We may be hearing more from some of those followers in the coming days. There may be danger. But I did finally exhale, and I am as relaxed as an inhabitant of this crazy world can manage to be.
