We are struggling against a boorish, incurious, arrogant, bigoted and repulsive ignoramus in the White House.
He has no dignity, no common sense, no ability to reason, no desire to learn, no articulation, no compassion, no empathy — in short, none of the qualities necessary to earning a human the right to expect other humans to trust or follow him.
He has no grasp of foreign or domestic policy, Constitutionality, diplomacy, governing, economics, the current balance of power, or any other information necessary to the reasonable discharge of the complex duties required of a US President — and no interest in educating himself or listening to available experts.
He has trashed our domestic institutions; he has damaged our cabinet agencies by naming to their heads morons who understand nothing of their jobs, opportunists who seek their own material gain through their offices, or rogues intent on destroying the very agencies they have been tasked with nurturing. He is doing his best to elevate and enrich the wealthy and his sycophants while hypocritically claiming to support and assist those who are most vulnerable and needy. He is the wrecking ball aimed at the foundations of our international alliances which have kept WWIII at bay for 70 years, demolishing those alliances to the terror of all of Europe and much of Asia. His ego and narcissism have led him to worship and emulate Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, allowing himself and our nation to be played like a cheap violin to the gleeful benefit of Russia and North Korea, and the endangering and humiliation of the United States. His ignorance of how the actual planet works outside his own wretched Trump world — where his least whim has been satisfied unquestioningly for 70 years — has led him to morph the US from the only remaining superpower and an experiment in tolerance and enlightened self-determination into a pseudo-autocracy where his childish whims must be law, his lies must not be questioned, and his proclamations must be revered. He is a sick, twisted, despot-in-training, and his boot-licking of Putin, his refusal to put America before his own self-interest in ANY situation, and his annihilation of everything this nation has stood for for centuries have disqualified him from the office to which the majority did not elect him — even if he is proven innocent of collusion or any other crime in the Mueller probe.
This is a time of deep crisis for our nation — of deeper crisis than the Great Depression or the two World Wars, because at least during those cataclysms we had leaders and institutions which held firm, and a united population supportive of most of the efforts of a well-intentioned (albeit sometimes misguided) government. We could believe that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were generally putting country ahead of personal gain, whether or not their policies were always right (think “Bonus Marches,” “Japanese Internment camps” and “atom bomb”...) We felt confident that our institutions (military and civilian) were staffed with people of character and experience who knew their jobs and did them diligently for the good of the nation, often at great personal cost. We may not always have been right about this — no one is perfect — but at least there was the conviction that our leaders in those times of crisis were doing their damnedest to bring us safely out the other side, and this conviction helped sustain morale through disaster.
Donald Trump cares for nothing but his own self-aggrandizement and gain. No one would argue that our institutions are perfect — I certainly wouldn’t! Far from it! Government reform, from our archaic Constitution on down to civic-funded street-sweeping, is desperately needed. But Trump is not a reformer, he is a holocaust. He has no plans for reform or rebuilding, any more than he had any plans for reuniting separated immigrant families or overhauling healthcare. He does not know how to renovate or improve, only how to tear down and devastate. That is his idea of bringing change, of being an iconoclast — which has no benefit if it stops at destruction. He does not understand that reform is a two-part process — he is like a contractor who demolishes a building and then packs up and leaves without constructing its replacement, or tears down the damaged portions of a building without replacing them. He is an international Hurricane Maria slashing through a planet-wide Puerto Rico. He does the damage, but never sends FEMA or anyone else to clean up the mess or mend the heartbreak. If the Taj Mahal had a plumbing problem, Trump would dynamite the entire structure — and then go golfing!
He has gutted our governmental infrastructure, especially in the desperately vital State Department, and has either replaced skilled and experienced employees with his own ignorant toadies or has pulled the plug on the workforce and left the resulting vacant positions vacant. Those skilled and dedicated career employees who have managed to escape his hatchet in government agencies are left frantically trying to counteract his devastation and do their jobs as best they can without running afoul of his overweening ego. Trump’s performances at Singapore with Kim Jung Un, at the G-7 meeting, at the NATO summit, with Theresa May and Queen Elizabeth, and today in Helsinki with Putin were by turns toothless and sycophantic, boorish, bull-in-the-china-shop, catastrophic, embarrassing, humiliating, transparently uninformed and ignorant, irrational, repugnant and brazenly arrogant. He trashed his own intelligence agencies by siding with a gloating Putin, undermined America’s status in the world community by insulting our allies and friends, and threw America under the bus by erasing any goodwill still left to us on the planet. He is so ignorant that he has no grasp of what he’s done, but thinks that he has made great strides in “fixing” all that is wrong internationally — only because in his own mind he is always victorious and infallible. The bragging tweets and campaign rally speeches which will inevitably follow these debacles will be impossible to endure without nausea and shame.
And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg.
it is clearly useless to remind the GOP-dominated congress that they took oaths to put country ahead of everything else. They have indicated inarguably that they have no intention of jettisoning their own meal ticket, even if it means the desecration and destruction of the United States of America. There are no Profiles in Courage among the Republicans in congress. Trump’s gullible base of lemmings will never awaken from their cult-induced coma. The minority in congress is helpless. It is time for a truly radical upheaval to occur.
It is time that we, like this president, throw tradition to the winds and do the unthinkable for the sake of our nation and the planet. Fascism looms over us like the Perfect Storm, and the time has arrived for tradition and long-honored protocols to be contravened if we are to save America. It has come to this:
The five remaining former presidents, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama, must use their positions as elder statesmen and and their remaining influence with their individual parties to call for the removal from office of Donald Trump and his entire complicit administration. Desperate times call for desperate measures. It is traditional that former presidents do not interfere with or comment upon the actions of their successors — but that protocol becomes meaningless and artificial in the face of the present catastrophe. Traditions must bend to reality. This is not hyperbole. The cataclysm we face is not a partisan issue — it is an issue of common sense, enlightened vision and simple patriotism. The survival of the United States is at stake. If this nation is to be saved from the devastation that is Trump, then we must wipe the slate clean of his poisonous measures and the repercussions of his arbitrary actions, and bring this nation back to sanity. The sand in the hour glass is running out. Like the hopeless future of the polar bear, doomed by human carelessness and selfishness, America has become an endangered species, doomed by the arrogance and smug self-worship of a single man and his reckless, ignorant, self-serving administration. It is almost too late. We must act NOW.
ELECTED OFFICIALS IN THIS COUNTRY ARE THE SERVANTS OF THE CITIZENS — THEY SERVE AT OUR PLEASURE, NOT THEIR OWN.
AS A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES, I THEREFORE CALL UPON THE REMAINING FORMER PRESIDENTS, JIMMY CARTER, GEORGE H.W. BUSH, WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON, GEORGE W. BUSH, AND BARACK H. OBAMA, TO FULFILL THEIR OATHS TO “FAITHFULLY EXECUTE THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES” AND TO “PRESERVE, PROTECT AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES” BY BRINGING TO BEAR EVERY OUNCE OF INFLUENCE THEY COMMAND AND EVERY IOTA OF RESPECT THEIR PLACES IN THE EXCLUSIVE PANTHEON OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS HAVE EARNED THEM, TO DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE AND UNEQUIVOCAL REMOVAL FROM OFFICE OF DONALD J. TRUMP FOR JUST CAUSE UNDER SECTION 4 OF THE 25TH AMENDMENT TO THE US CONSTITUTION. I FURTHER CALL UPON VICE PRESIDENT PENCE, ALL CABINET MEMBERS AND TRUMP-APPOINTED HEADS OF AGENCIES TO STEP DOWN IN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THEIR COMPLICITY IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THIS NATION WROUGHT BY DONALD J. TRUMP. I FURTHER CALL UPON THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE TO INDICT AND TRY DONALD J. TRUMP AND HIS CO-CONSPIRATORS FOR TREASON FOR THE BETRAYAL OF THE UNITED STATES TO OUR ENEMIES ABROAD, AND FOR THE INTERNAL DESTRUCTION OF OUR CONSTITUTION, BY THEIR ACTIONS, BOTH DELIBERATE AND OUT OF IGNORANCE, UNDER SECTION 3 OF THE US CONSTITUTION. MY ONLY REASON FOR NOT CALLING UPON THE COMPLICIT MEMBERS OF CONGRESS, INCLUDING PAUL RYAN AND MITCH MCCONNELL, TO RESIGN IS THAT THEY, AT LEAST, WERE VOTED INTO OFFICE BY THE MAJORITY OF THEIR CONSTITUENTS. THE SAME CANNOT BE SAID OF TRUMP AND HIS ADMINISTRATION. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WATCH THEIR NATION AND ITS ALLIES BE LITERALLY DESTROYED BY THE CRIMES OF A MAN THE MAJORITY OF THEM DID NOT ELECT. IF NAZI GERMANY TAUGHT US NOTHING ELSE, IT SHOULD HAVE TAUGHT US THAT.