by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
It was inevitable, given the ebb and flow of American political history that someone like Trump would become president. Trump just has put his own idiosyncratic spin on things. It’s not like if Hillary Clinton had won that we’d be in much better shape, given that the entire Right is based on a hysterical belief that it’s being oppressed.
I have said for two years that Trump is an existential threat to America and it definitely seems as though he’s getting worse. He’s starting to figure out what being president means and he’s kind of a surreal, malevolent version of Bill Clinton at this point. Clinton, too, had a lot of chaos at first in his administration and then he figured out what he was doing.
The issue now is there anything that can stop him. What’s the end game. Does Trump signal the final lurch of the United States into it’s late imperial stage or he a blip. In other words, is Trump founding a new Trumplandia or is he a Caligula. All signs are he’s growing stronger by the day and we risk losing sight of what really make America great to begin with.
Things are growing more and more dark. I’m the product of a precocious child watching too much Cold War liberal TV news. That’s my frame of reference. Mid-80s TV news liberalism. That’s the America I know and love and I don’t know what happens next. It seems as though the volk has an almost endless ability to process Trump’s dumpster fire of an administration.
When the final history of the United States is written, Trump could be the moment when we finally succumbed to our worst instincts. I like to think the individual rises to the occasion and given the opportunity he or she will show their true colors. They say history is but the biography of great men (or women) for a reason.
What would Lincoln have been without the opportunity and crisis of the Civil War. I mean, hell, Grant was a listless drunk for about a decade before fate happened to tap him for greatness. So there’s still an opportunity for individual greatness in America. Trump hasn’t sapped that out of us quite yet.
But it’s going to get worse before it’s get better — much, much worse.
It’ll get worse because Trump has no shame and will never quit and the Vichy Republican Congress will never impeach him, no matter what he does. So, we’re stuck with Trump for the time being.
Only time will tell if we can save ourselves from ourselves.
