Nothing to Say

The year is almost half-over, and I haven’t written anything for my blog.  What gives? 

I can explain in two words: Donald Trump.

Despite my many reservations and its many flaws, I still thought of the United States in my own mind as the greatest country on Earth.  No more.  The greatest country on Earth does not make someone like Donald Trump its head of state. 

On election night 2016, Trump’s achieving the presidency, in the words of a friend, “felt like a death in the family.”  It was the death of my confidence in the American people to make reasonable choices.  

In 2016, 62,984,828 voters looked at this boorish bully and thought, ‘Yeah, he’d make a good president.’

The fact that so many voters — albeit not a majority — could look at the 2016 campaign and see Trump as presidential material is unfathomable to me.  If anyone saw this boorish bully on the campaign trail as someone who ought to be entrusted with the nuclear launch codes, we have no common point of reference for any kind of conversation.  That’s one reason why I haven’t been using my blog to articulate my opposition to Trump: his unfitness for the office of president ought to have been self-evident.  If you can’t see that, I have nothing to say to you.

I’m disappointed that the mainstream media nitpicked every tiny flaw in Hillary Clinton’s career — ultimately turning the insubstantial issue of her e-mails into a full-blown crisis that did much to cost her the election — while giving Trump free airtime and a free ride, largely laughing off his campaign until it gained too much momentum for them to seriously affect.

And I’m especially disappointed in those ultra-liberals who could see “no difference” between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and chose either to vote for a third-party candidate or sit out the election altogether.  If you could see no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the 2016 elections — if you believe that a President Hillary Clinton’s administration would be under investigation for collusion with Russia or something like it — I have nothing to say to you.  However, I’m sure that a Republican-controlled Congress would have been perpetually investigating President Hillary Clinton, whether circumstances warranted it or not, because Republicans like to use investigations as a political weapon, to keep their opponents on an unsure footing.  

Given her constant criticisms of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, this is what I imagine ultra-liberal Susan Sarandon must be thinking.

I thought that the ultra-left had learned its lesson during the 2000 election, when they regarded Al Gore as insufficiently progressive and split the vote enough for the decidedly non-progressive George W. Bush to win.  But it happened again. Because the Democratic presidential nominee insufficiently championed the appropriate progressive causes, those on the ultra-left enabled the election of a president determined to roll back those causes.  And it will probably happen several times in the future.  If a progressive can’t see the absurdity and futility of that position, I also have nothing to say to them. 

And above all, Trump’s election proves that eloquence and reason ultimately don’t carry the day, so why bother engaging in them?  It will be interesting to see where the United States — and, indeed, the planet — will be four years from now.  Maybe I’ll feel like breaking my silence before then, maybe not.  Until then, I’ll have nothing to say.