An American Embarrassment

Donald Trump is an American embarrassment! There are far more reasons for this conclusion on my part than I could fit into a dozen columns. Let me boil them down into just two categories.

1-HIS POLICIES

From the outset of our experience as a free and independent people, our leaders and those who have supported them have worked tirelessly to make the United States a nation of compassion and concern for every citizen, as well as for those who have come here lured by the hope that has marked us and for which the Statue of Liberty is a symbol.

It started with a Constitution immediately augmented by a Bill of Rights--- human rights. Over the ensuing two and a half centuries we have struggled to makes those rights applicable to all within our borders. For our forced laborers, slaves brought in chains from Africa, it took a brutal civil war followed by a century of struggle before civil rights for them became a reality.

With FDR and his “New Deal,” America enshrined in law a fairer society for workers, women, the elderly, children, the disabled and others who had been left behind. The goal was to offer everyone a share in the opportunities inherent in the American dream. In recent years the natural world—the only one we have—has been included in our vision of the possible. We are currently struggling to see health care as a human right, not a privilege reserved for the affluent. All of these advances have been or are being codified in our nation’s laws and regulations.

There are many reasons why the United States has until recently consistently moved in this direction. Substantial to this commitment is an ethic that religions have planted in the good soil of American morality.

The religious fervor that currently supports and is embodied in Trumpism is committed to dismantling every one of these humanizing policies and programs. He prides himself as the ultimate deal-maker, but looking at his policies and appointments he seeks to turn the new deal back into a raw deal for all except his elite cohort. Not a single one of his announced policies advances the compassion which we have been building in this nation during these centuries of slow but steady progress.

He is even taking on the commitment of the world’s nations which in the Paris Accords have begun to counter the disastrous effects of climate change. For Trump, saving the planet gets in the way of his America First agenda. As the seas continue to rise and the earth becomes less habitable every year, the science describing the issue is ridiculed as a fake for the sake of profits for the fossil fuel industry

Reversing the Robin Hood image, his policies take from the poor and give to the already rich what has been stolen. Look at his tax plan and see what is cut and who is further enriched. He and his party’s most recent health plan drops 23 million Americans from coverage.. What is enshrined is a multi-billion dollar wall across our southern border, and billions more for the arms industry. I cannot think of a single one of his proposals that makes America a more compassionate just nation.

2-HIS PERSONA

Trump continues to demonstrate that he is at core an obnoxious, self-centered, egotistical buffoon. Perhaps America saw just who he was early in his campaign as he exited a bus with Billy Bush bragging about his sexual domination of any woman he chose to humiliate.

Of all the examples that might be cited, I choose just one that occurred within the past month. Trump was attending his first meeting with America’s NATO partners at the new headquarters in Brussels. He was meeting with twenty other heads of state. A photo op was scheduled to take place. Without a word he rudely pushed to the front of the group, shoved aside Dusko Markovic, the Prime Minister of Montenegrin, stuck out his chest and pursed his lips ala Benito Mussolini, humiliating the other heads of state, and embarrassing the millions of Americans who observed the incident on television. This arrogant display was hardly an isolated event, but typifies who this person really is. America can do better than that—much better. Finding a way to bring Trump down will relieve our humiliation and that of our world partners.