Since the ancient Greeks invented democracy, it only fits to give them the last word after Michigan, Donald Trump’s Waterloo. They caved, the transition process has begun.
There is something tragic, after all, about Trump, locked in his castle, raging against reality, afraid to be seen, surrounded by doting counselors who feed him lies.
His presidency was defeated, but now it is dying by a thousand cuts.
Socrates said that the best tragedy dealt with the big themes of love, loss, pride, the abuse of power, and the fraught relationships between men and Gods.
I see Donald Trump in every word.
Slaves are never friends and counselors.
They can’t dare to tell the truth. In Greek tragedy, dictators and kings fall from great heights. Narcissists, of all people, need people who are willing to stop them from setting themselves on fire.
The strongmen have always surrounded themselves with weaker ones; they can never bear the truth, so they fall out of reality.
The shrinks say that when malignant narcissists fall, they fall hard because they never see it coming and never believe it when it comes.
I have a good friend, she is a long-time therapist, she says Donald Trump is the most malignant person she has ever encountered. She can treat child molesters, but she couldn’t bear to treat him.
In his free fall, can we look at him with some pity and reflection?
Typically, the main protagonist in a tragedy commits some terrible crime without ever realizing or being told how foolish and arrogant he has been.
The Greeks are always right in their predictions, and it gives me no joy to say that Donald Trump has just wrapped up his best years; the worst are all ahead of him.
Yesterday, Michigan certified its voting results, making Biden’s win there official, and also leaving Donald Trump’s terrifying and stomach-churning assault on our democracy in shambles.
It was yet another humiliating defeat, a rout actually in Donald Trump’s personal war against democracy. He lost big this week. His loss was Democracy’s gain.
At the cliff’s edge, some Democrats and some Republicans found something to agree upon. Perhaps that will be infectious. I’m going to keep my hopes up and my eyes open.
It is surely something to build on, fingers crossed.
Trump lives off of hatred and controversy; more and more, he calls to mind Dracula in the sunlight, retreating into his castle at dusk, desperate for fresh blood to drink.
Trump, like the Count, was a great corruptor. He had a whole circle of Renfields, happy to eat flies to please him. I see all those cowards and liars in the color of green.
He drew people to him with almost mystical power and sucked every drop of blood out of them before tossing them outside. He leaves feckless bodies lying all over the ground.
The election is over. Trump has no chance of winning the election now. Every day he pouts, and rails make him look like more and more of a loser, the label he hated most of all.
He can’t comprehend grace.
He is no longer worth your anxiety or suffering. It’s okay to scale it back and move on.
The worst thing that can happen to Trump is to lose, and he is losing more intensely than he has ever lost.
His fragile veneer is shattering. I’ve seen few leaders in my life who took a tougher and more prolonged pounding and humiliation than Trump took this week. That is important.
The next to the worst thing for Trump is to be ignored, to see his successor get all the publicity day after day while he plays golf six times in less than two weeks.
Power is an aphrodisiac; defeat is not.
Donald Trump will be ignored soon enough. A lot of judges ignored him all week.
And he is a loser, maybe the biggest loser in modern times.
Yes, he got 74 million votes, and that matters. But right now, that makes him look all the more poignant and pathetic. He is the King of the Losers after this week.
This was his last chance to show some grace and some class, to grow up and step outside of himself, his last chance to be a human being. He blew it.
To my sadness and surprise, Donald Trump turned to the dark side in 2016, somewhere in the middle of his campaign for the presidency when he suggested that Mexican immigrants were racists, and then again, a year later when he praised the Nazi’s in Williamsburg as “good people.”
After that, he only got worse. He seemed to delight in offending and upsetting people. And then the pandemic, which is doesn’t believe is real.
No, definitely not a healer.
We know now that what he lives for his attention and approval is learning that truth Matters. He lives only for himself.
As often happens to people suffering from what the shrinks call “malignant sociopathy,” all that power made him mean and crazy and increasingly delusional.
All of us need somebody to tell us hard truths. Without that, we can go mad. I did.
There is no longer anything funny or interesting about him, nothing noble or uplifting. His presidency became a stain on America, a drain on our souls; he shamed us here and all over the world.
I wish his many followers well. They will need some good wishes.
One e-mailed me this morning, and she said that the process of supporting Trump was exactly like having an enema.
I winced; I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Before getting elected to the presidency, Trump was Manhattan’s biggest tabloid joke, a role he relished and seemed to love. He was proud of lying and abusing women.
Now, he is just a nightmare. He leaves a shaken country, a bleeding democracy, a sea of scandals, and a broken government.
And once again, those loyal followers get left behind, who will fight for them now?
Trump also leaves behind his greatest legacy, more than 250,000 Americans, whose deaths he did very little to stop.
As Biden skillfully chugs along, making strong appointments to his new government, Trump soils our electoral process, the crown jewel of American democracy, to the shares of his needy and enraged followers.
No one foresaw it, surely not me, but he is a tonic, a healing force.
In contrast, Trump looks smaller, pettier, and more pathetic by the day. He can hardly mention the pandemic; while 1,000 people a day were dying in American Hospitals, he got in six days of golfing at his New Jersey Golf Resort.
He can’t even mention the dead.
Not exactly a profile in courage.
The Dalai Lama says that if we want to find and sustain happiness, inner peace may be easily found by doing one thing: letting go.
I can’t tell other people what to do, but I can talk about what I intend to. I love writing about politics again, and I plan on continuing that when I have something to say.
But Michigan has a message for us.
It’s time to move away from Trump’s Crazy Train as the only face in the window and start getting him out of our heads. That will neither be simple or quick.
I have learned my lesson. If I forget about democracy, it can die.
For so many, Trump became a trigger, a one-person mental health epidemic. When he leaves the White House, he will take a lot of the inner noise with him.
When it comes to getting into people’s heads, Trump was an evil genius, a Nosferatu. He seems to have the power to turn people into zombies and sycophants. Then he feeds on them.
Trumpism will certainly live on, but I believe when Trump is out of power, he will look pretty bare and strange with that nest on his head.
We see this week that the Emperor really has no clothes, and neither do his truck driving, flag-waving trolls. You can wrap yourself in a flag, but you can’t make it run a country.
Trump and his people came at our democracy as dangerously and completely as anyone has ever done in modern times, and they hid their hypocrisy behind big cars and trucks and boats and flags and death threats.
For years now, Trump has frightened and disturbed people; he has made our country an awful stew of anger, hatred, lies, and fear.
It’s time to start moving away from him and looking forward. Your country needs you to do that, to shake your head over Donald Trump, and check your Iphone 100 times a day.
Our sister the earth is bleeding to death. She needs our love and care.
We all need to heal and find peace and quiet. The Dalai Lama says inner peace comes from letting go.
“Psychologically speaking,” wrote the moral historian Hannah Arendt, “one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, but he also wants to convince himself.”‘
This week, the mask really came off of Donald Trump, and he does not appear virtuous to others. He fell off his wall, and he is shattering into many pieces.
He thinks he is strong, but the most pathetic thing about him is that he is finally showing his weakness and vulnerability.
God Bless America. I don’t think I ever wrote that before.
I truly believe what hurts Trump the most is to be ignored….. hating him only gives him more power. I am no longer looking at his tweets & trying to not pay attention too much to the side show. This does remind me of him in the 80’s & 90’s. He didn’t care how humiliating the tabloid coverage was, as long as he was being talked about. I do feel guilty in that as a middle aged college educated white women I have the luxury to ignore him in that I am not being hurt
I feel committed to take a break, trust Biden & Harris to be steady during the transition. Take the time to see what is most important to me & then after January 20th, see where I cn contribute.
Michigan certified four hours ago, not yesterday.
Ryan, my wish for you is that you find something better to do than this..
Facts matter, John! If you post things that aren’t true, you’re no better than Trump and his disdain for truth and accuracy.
I’m lower than whaleshit Ryan, that should be obvious by now….thanks for your thoughtful and eloquent post.
Tonight’s news said Trump wants a third recount in Georgia. Trump may be going along now with Biden’s transition requests but the news said he’s still not recognizing Biden’s win. So he’s still trying to undermine our democratic process. Meanwhile the death toll is over 260,000 tonight. A decent president would have addressed the nation and supported the infectious disease physicians who keep repeating it’s safer to stay home this Thanksgiving. The airports are jammed. But I’m being silly. Trump doesn’t do anything for anyone except for himself. He’s a spoiled brat and the most dangerous president to ever reside in our White House. Until Biden and Harris are safely in the White House, I guess I will keep wetting the bed and e-mailing Republicans to get the lunatic out of our White House. Remember folks it’s our house not Trump’s.
Today is a good day. Finally the new order can begin. But trump’s ilk and followers are never going to quit coming at democracy; they now have a blood thirst.
Jon…
Recovering from the outer damage he brought will take a while – for some, never – but I pray others will find it easier to recover from our inner nightmare. I promised myself a swift recovery after Nov. 3, when I realized the pain would soon begin to ease.
Even the destructive acts he continues (withdrawal from Open Skies Treaty) seem to have less impact because, hopefully, we could reverse those actions soon enough.
My attention is shifting to our president-elect, now free to pursue his transition. Already, sensible appointments of experienced and qualified individuals are emerging. With proven negotiator Kerry (Iran Nuclear Deal) as our Climate Envoy, Biden is signaling his seriousness.
Follow Biden’s progress on the Front Pages. As for the “other guy”, look for his name in the Entertainment Section.
But when will we be ready to face him in retrospect? The Vietnam War ended in 1975, with, according to one source, 282,000 US and allied military deaths. But the first Vietnam movies didn’t appear until 1978 (“The Deer Hunter”) and 1979 (“Apocalypse Now”).
On 11/23/2020, in a growing tragedy of similar proportions, USA COVID deaths totaled 257,671 (Johns Hopkins COVID Dashboard): all innocent civilians.
It’s so easy to pity Trump.
I hope we will finish that phase soon and turn to organizing a strategy that will ensure the events of the last four years will never happen in the U.S. again. Bernie showed the way: he put his own ambitions aside and started working for the team that he believed would best lead the country. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
I am glad Biden will finally get what he and the country needs, but Trump still has 8 weeks t do whatever he wants t strip this country of necessary things. He is still trying to pull out of treaties, he is getting rid of necessary equipment and not continuing funding to replace it, he still can do a lot of damage. And the worse he feels, the worse he will act.
I have always felt the true fault for our nation’s tragedies is the people who supported Trump to the bitter end. They knew better. If we can agree that Trump is a mentally ill person, then we can understand something I learned from my therapist. “Hurt people, hurt people.” It’s not an excuse, it’s a reality. Someone recently told me that we should have a “Dump Trump day.” My response was, “You know what? I am not into putting him down, I just want him to go away and not to destroy any more lives or our country.” As Michele Obama has expressed so well, “When they go low, we go high.”
Counting the unnecessary deaths and the mayhem he has caused, to look at Trump with pity would take a super-human effort and still not succeed.
With Trump’s dethroning from the Presidency, we would like to think that the shackles are off the Republican party. But Trump being who he is, will continue to use the Republican platform to forge his post-Presidency life and have another attempt to the WH in 2024, scary but for this sociopath nothing is off-limits. If the GOP hangs on to his coat tails and Trumpism take over, it will be the last nail in the coffin for the Republican Party. If they have any sense of respect and feelings for the true Republican loyals, they should disengage from all his influences. Letting go will be solution to get back to be the real GOP.
From Mary Trump’s book we can gather that Trump can never accept defeat or humiliation – good observation and reason to why he has not formally conceded but planning to travel to a State he officially lost and hoping to change the results.