Donald Trump, the Everything is Terrible President

A Mexican man named Jose Ines Garcia Zarate recently made headlines when he was acquitted of the 2015 murder of a beautiful blonde woman named Kathryn Steinle, much to the anger of Donald Trump, who made the case a cornerstone of his Presidential campaign. 

Not surprisingly, Trump took to Twitter to use his deafening bullhorn to attack the verdict, howling into the digital wind, ““The Kate Steinle killer came back and back over the weakly protected Obama border, always committing crimes and being violent, and yet this info was not used in court. His exoneration is a complete travesty of justice. BUILD THE WALL!”

This is not unusual behavior for Trump. In his mind, complete travesties of justice happen on an hourly basis. He has a compulsive cable news consumer’s continuously exercised sense of outrage, and what famously enrages him is the idea of brown or black people getting away with the rape or murder of pretty white women Trump’s gut-level racism tells him they’re obviously 100 percent guilty of, even if they’re being let out of prison or being given tens of millions of dollars in damages for clearly not being guilty and being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. 

I’m talking of course about the Central Park 5 case, an early, alarming instance of Trump’s virulent, more or less undisguised racism so closely aligning with the racism of the general public and the people who would become his voters and constituents that even when the 5 were completely exonerated and Trump still insisted that he was right and that the black men were all guilty of rape and should be killed, his incredibly racist position didn’t seem to hurt him at all with voters. 

For Trump, judges are crazed Deep State Marxists perpetually overstepping the boundaries of their jobs in their naked lust for power, just as colleges overflow with America-hating Marxist black revolutionaries, the Media are the enemy of the American people and the Civil Rights movement is a hotbed of far-right, anti-America, anti-Trump hysteria. 

Donald Trump does not trust institutions, particularly democratic institutions. No, he only trusts his own gut. If an institution goes along with his gut, then it has legitimacy. If it does not, then it is yet another attack not just on him but on truth and beauty and the American people. That is exhausting. 

Trump’s Presidency has done seemingly irrevocable damage to the concept of civility as a core component of American public office. The idea that opponents should be treated with dignity and compassion, as worthy collaborators with a shared interest in serving the American people is utterly foreign to Trump. More alarming, the idea that allies and friends should be treated with dignity and compassion, as worthy collaborators with a shared interest in serving the American people is also utterly foreign to Trump. 

Trump is the “Everything is terrible” President. He loves to stoke the free-floating fears of the American people. Gas-lighting is his game, and he toils endlessly to create the ludicrous impression that just about every element of American life is under relentless attack from internal and external threats and the only thing that can protect the American people are Donald Trump, Trump’s family, his “generals”, the military (not the FBI, of course), cops, Christians and first responders (oh, but Trump has a thing for first responders. In his make-pretend fantasy life, Trump undoubtedly drives a big truck with an even bigger horn and is a first responder).

Basically, Trump’s worldview boils down to this—you can’t trust anybody other than white people with guns, preferably at brown people. 

On a spiritual, existential level, all of this fear and hatred is bad for the American psyche. I feel like we’re in Ghostbusters 2 and instead of ghosts our hate and fear and anger is giving us Donald Trump and Roy Moore. I’m not sure which is worse, but Slimer at least had a little vulgar pizzazz, unlike these creatures of the dark. 

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