Donald Trump is a national embarrassment. Corporate media
pundits have declared this statement to be true and millions of people are in
agreement. As a candidate and as president Trump has certainly deviated from
the norms of acceptable public behavior, but how much does that really matter?
Many Americans love to brag that theirs is “the richest
country in the world.” There are certainly big banks, rich individuals and
trillions of dollars in the treasury but the masses of people rarely benefit
from this wealth. This country routinely ranks near the bottom when compared to
other “developed” nations in any measure of how it treats its people. It is now
considered a “second tier” nation in terms of the wellbeing of its citizens.
It is certainly unusual to have such a decidedly boorish
president. Trump literally pushes other presidents aside, engages in public
feuds with celebrities and makes anyone an enemy who dares to oppose him or his
policies. He makes up terms like “bigly” and “modern presidential” and
excoriates the press when they criticize him. Condemning this kind of behavior
is the lowest hanging fruit.
Trump can be blamed for quite a lot during his first six
months in office. His travel ban against citizens of seven nations is an
unconstitutional exercise in Islamphobia and has been struck down by federal
judges. Trump bans Libyans from traveling to the United States, but Obama
destroyed that country and created an ongoing humanitarian disaster.
The concluding remarks are most interesting, “The list of
reasons to be embarrassed about America is very long and it existed before
Trump was inaugurated. He has surely added to that ledger, but legitimate cause
for concern shouldn’t be pushed aside in favor of phony outrage about optics.
President Trump is an ill- mannered, impulsive, happily uninformed bigot. Most
of his predecessors were better behaved and followed rules of public relations.
But they filled the jails, ended the right to public assistance, killed
millions of people abroad, kept wages low and used a variety of schemes to make
the rich even richer. Despite his obvious shortcomings Donald Trump is not the
worst among them. And that is the most embarrassing fact of all”.
