close in many states, the overall outcome seems like a repudiation of Trumpism.

5 min readNov 12, 2020

I know how you’re feeling. You’re tired. Angry. Defeated. You’ve staked your hopes for the future of the United States on the fortunes of a political leader who represented everything you knew to be right and true. You felt proud to be American once again. After spending the previous eight years wondering how the country had drifted so far from its erstwhile status as the “shining city upon a hill,” you were back on top and life was good.

But just as soon as you began enjoying the feeling of the wind at your back, it was all taken away in spectacularly public fashion, your once soaring spirit now crushed beneath the weight of expectations gone unfulfilled. I know. I’ve been there before myself.

In Trump some of you saw a pious patriot, a tough, self-made billionaire of great moral conviction who nevertheless was not afraid to “tell it like it is.” Others saw a useful idiot, a dilettante who could be counted on to execute a far-right conservative agenda crafted by his trusted henchmen, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. Either way, you overlooked who Trump really is.

Here’s the reality. A twice-divorced serial draft dodger who was a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009, Trump was handed more than $400 million over the course of several decades from his father through tax dodges and fraud. A silver spoon firmly planted in his mouth since his youth, Trump managed to translate his staggering inheritance into businesses that filed for bankruptcy six times. (We would know more about his finances, but Trump never released his tax returns as he promised he would, violating a tradition going back 40 years.)

As President, Trump was perhaps most well-known for his propensity to lie and exaggerate even the most mundane of things, like the size of his inauguration audience. His comic rejection of truth gave us “alternative facts,” an Orwellian euphemism for “falsehoods.” Trump also proved to have razor-thin skin, which was on brilliant display in the Twitterverse every time he lashed out at one of his favorite adversaries — the media, Democrats (especially women of color), a few disloyal Republicans, and political correctness — when he felt even the slightest grievance. His incessant projection of victimhood showed him to be less macho man than delicate snowflake, the obese embodiment of fragile masculinity.

To reasonable observers he never possessed either the temperament or the moral clarity required to serve as head of state. For example, as a man who reinvented himself as a far-right populist through the emergence of the racist birther movement, Trump demonstrated the important place of faith in his life when he misquoted the Bible and had protestors teargassed so he could stage a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C. After four years as President, it became abundantly clear that Trump’s religiosity was a mere parlor trick intended to galvanize support among Evangelicals, who are only too happy to serve a leader willing to obliterate the separation of Church and State in favor of installing an American brand of theocracy à la Handmaid’s Tale. But to those who saw through Trump’s carnival act, he was obviously bereft of piety, compassion, humility, and humanity, the traits of a good Christian. To quote Peter Gibbons in the film Office Space (1999), Trump “represents all that is soulless and wrong.”

Even in the 11th hour of Trump’s time in office, he couldn’t help but remind us of this fact as he celebrated an attempt by an aggressive caravan of his supporters to run the Biden-Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas (the FBI is now investigating this event) and cast doubt on the entire electoral process by claiming (without any evidence) that Democrats were trying to “steal the election” from him. Who would have thought that someone who had been privileged his whole life, had no relevant political or military experience, and was most well-known for his opulent lifestyle and reality TV game show wouldn’t be up to the task of governing the United States?

This embarrassing chapter in the story of America simply had to end for society to have any chance of redeeming itself in the service of achieving a brighter future for our nation and the rest of the world. One term in office was exhausting and disruptive enough. Another term might have exploded into civil war.

close in many states, the overall outcome seems like a repudiation of Trumpism.

Written by Enamulddesk