Watching Trump vomiting lies in his own defense, I can't help but reflect that the greatest threat our democracy has faced since the Civil War has come not from a rival great power or a brilliantly conceived conspiracy but from a small-time thug, a vulgar, ignorant con artist.
Our system, conceived & nurtured by brilliant minds & leaders of character & immense courage, is at risk because from the dregs of our society has emerged one of the worst of us who tapped into the basest instincts of the hateful and the greedy to win our highest office.
He is not someone you hire to work in your office. You would not buy a used car from him. You would certainly never leave him alone in a room with your daughter or sister or wife or mother. And each and every day he transforms our great institutions to be more like him.
America has never been perfect. Our leaders have often been flawed, sometimes very deeply flawed. But there has been no other leader on a comparable level who has so manifested that which is wrong with our society. He's not the disease but is one of its ugliest symptoms.
But we must remember that no matter how vile he is, how profoundly he debases his office, those who have empowered him or defended him or tolerated his abuses and his crimes in order to advance their narrow self-interests are every bit as bad.
He is just their vehicle of the moment. When he outlives his usefulness or strays so far from defensible norms that he must be set aside, others will emerge to advance their agenda which has for 4 decades used racism, misogyny, nationalism, and all other forms of demagoguery...
as a way of stirring support not for an agenda that helps in any way those who cast their votes for them but for one that helps a tiny fraction of the tiny fraction of us with the most money and power. They are willing to bend democracy to their purposes or failing that...
gut it, delimit it, neutralize it if it captures for them 1 more dollar, ensures 1 more minute of the imposition of their values on all of us. Trump is repellant, not so much a person as the kind of thing you would scrape off your shoe with a stick.
But when you look at him and are repulsed by his words or behavior, by his face, bloated with contempt, by his arrogance or just his raw stupidity and unfitness for his office, remember he is the manifestation of a much more grotesque monster that insatiably feeds...
on the dreams of the innocent, the hopes of the weak, the aspirations of the young, the trust of our allies, and the ideals on which this country was founded.
