Joy-Ann Reid penned an outstanding essay on Donald Trump for the Daily Beast. I encourage you to read it in it’s entirety. Reid captures the poignancy of a nation without a real leader, with only a cardboard cutout leader lacking a moral compass to give guidance; and so there is none.
Monday is President’s Day. It will be the second consecutive such holiday without an American president. Sure, Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office, when he’s not golfing. He lives in the White House, at least in theory with his family. But he is not the president of the United States.
When Trump addressed the nation in the wake of the Parkland massacre, my team and I looked at the TV but the words coming from his mouth had no effect. They neither resonated nor moved a single person in the room. It truly didn’t matter what he said, particularly after he tweeted out blame for the carnage at the neighbors and classmates of the killer. Trump is as hollow a vessel as there has ever been in the White House. His rule lacks even a shred of moral authority. [...]
We have entered an age of unreason; an American dark age. A major political party has fallen into decay, seized full on by extremists and overrun by racism, tribalism, greed, xenophobia and demographic panic. It is no longer a question of whether their president can ever be our president, and speak to the nation with moral authority. He can’t. His legitimacy is too much in doubt and his character too absent. The only question is whether the majority can hang onto its collective outrage long enough to drive the neo-Nazis, anti-modernists, haters and fear-mongers who have organized under the Trump banner back into the shadows.
If the Trump White House wants to talk about empty barrels, they have the poster child in the Oval Office. Trump is a characterological cipher, a man whose emotional depth runs the gamut from A to B. Allies of this great nation shake their heads in sympathy and sorrow and long for the day, as do we, when the real America returns from this period of eclipse and is restored to its rightful stature in the world. Trump does have the ability to Make America Great Again — the day he resigns or otherwise leaves office.