Whom can we trust with deciding the presidency? You? Me?
UPDATE: The New York Times published an anonymous column from someone claiming to be an insider fighting against the president within the system. The writer speaks directly to the claims in the new Trump book, and also speaks to the concerns in my column, about the president’s fan base. “The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”
The Chicago Tribune published an opinion column August 6 about President Donald Trump that prompted this essay. The column is pointedly titled: “GOP strategist grinds Trump into hamburger in new book, ‘Everything Trump Touches Dies’.”
The author, Rex Huppke, writes:
The book is called “Everything Trump Touches Dies,” and, because it’s written by a 30-year veteran of conservative politics, it does what no squishy liberal newspaper columnist like myself can do: It pushes the modern-day Republican Party into the public square and roundly shames it for allowing an obvious con man like Trump to become its standard-bearer.”

Huppke says the author of the book, Republican Rick Wilson, and a small in-group of conservatives, started the “Never Trump” movement to stop what has now become the status quo.
At a time when honesty and integrity were as gone as the dodo in politics, Rick demonstrated both. And he and his band of Never Trumpers fought mightily to remind Americans what it actually means to be a conservative. (Hint: It doesn’t mean being a conspiracy-theory-bellowing liar hellbent on fomenting outrage and inflaming the misguided aggrievement of what Trump would call “the poorly educated.”)
This got me thinking. Trying to make sense of the election, the media finally settled on one of several ideas: That they (the media and the country) had misundertood a large majority of white Americans who felt marginalized, and who responded in the voting booth.
So here we have two groups, according to Huppke and Wilson: A group of conservative insiders who could foresee what Wilson calls “chaos,” and another group of conservative outsiders who saw Trump as their leader.
We know who won.
Of course, there was everyone else who either voted for Hillary Clinton or did not vote at all. And you might be right if you think the non-voters are the real reason for Trump’s win.
But if the American Republic has the right and the privilege to elect our president, and you wildly disagree with the Trump vote, whom can we trust to make the right decision?
Politics is insanely complicated, and we know the electoral college plays a major role. But as I watch what is unfolding in our nation’s capital and media backlash to an aggressive administration, I can’t help but wonder how we got here.
When I cast my vote, I may disagree with the other party but I would never think to undermine my country and the underrepresented voices who live among us.
There are those who would do just that — who cast a vote to promote their own narrow views, no matter what it would do to the country. Of course, in the minds of these voters, that doesn’t matter. Their view is what matters and if it means destroying society in the process, so be it.
In a very different way, Ayn Rand proposed the same thing in “Atlas Shrugged.” She wrote:
“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — What would you tell him?”
Rand would tell Atlas to drop the world, let it all go, let it burn. Her 1957 fictional story was about a dystopian United States; capitalism vs. government charity; and those who produce vs those who would sit on the backs of the producers. As I said, a very different idea than the 2016 election.
But her theory is the same: Destroy society to get to the promised land. But whose promised land? If that is the thinking of these voters, it frightens me. And, to answer the title of this essay, I can’t trust them to decide the presidency.
Stay with me here, and just think about the number of alt-Right media, organizations and their websites promoting Trump. Some are more openly racist than others. Here’s one: look at this advertisement from the National Alliance, a white supremacy group, whose leader, Will W. Williams II, faces sentencing Oct. 10 after being convicted of misdemeanor battery on one of his former employees.

The website promotes one group, one people over others (with curiously effective design and imagery). Is it just a fringe group, or have these ideas insidously spread throughout a new Conservative base? There are nearly 400 pro-Trump mentions on its Forum page.
Hear me on this: This group has FREEDOM to speak its agenda and the RIGHT to do so under our First Amendment. I do not agree with its mission, and I don’t agree with this ad. I don’t hate this group’s members. I believe they are misguided and dangerous, but I don’t hate them as human beings. I do not want to “erase White people,” as this ad says.
But I certainly don’t trust these people to make good decisions that affect the leadership of my country.
So what? My feelings aren’t going to change the system, and I know I have to live with it because I’m not proposing to take away their American right of voting. But it certainly gives me grief.
So, I’ll keep my eye on Rick Wilson and his theories about how everything “Trump Touches Dies.” If he is right, maybe it will work itself out.
Atlas will shrug, drop the world, and we’ll start over. Maybe it’s the only way.
God, I hope not.
