The
Donald wasn't the worst thing about 2015, but he was the most irritating.
By Donald Kaul
Is 2015 over yet? Is it safe to come out now?
What a bummer. Mass shootings, cops using unarmed civilians for
target practice, the Middle East in rubble, terrorist attacks, Donald Trump.
Trump wasn’t the worst of it, perhaps. But he certainly was the
most irritating.
It was a spectacle worthy of
Tennyson — “Trump to the right of us, Trump to the left of us,
Trump in front and behind. Into the valley of Trump rode the 300 million.”
A year ago he was a loud-mouthed reality show host who
moonlighted as a developer of ugly buildings. Now he’s the leading candidate
for the Republican presidential nomination.
To any patriotic American with a sense of history, it’s
embarrassing. We are a country of 320 million people — many of us smart, some
informed and reasonable. And the best we can do is Donald Trump?
I used to marvel at the Italian propensity for electing ludicrous buffoons to high public office — people like Benito Mussolini and Silvio Berlusconi. How could so civilized a place treat the vote so lightly?
But, I reasoned, the Italian national pastime is the opera: the
province of great, outsized, slightly ridiculous characters. Their politics
seemed to be an extension of that.
Trump’s supporters don’t suffer traditional opera gladly.
They’re more the Grand Ole Opry type, a different thing altogether.
It’s as though the Republican Party, a year ago, took an ad in The
Wall Street Journalwhich read:
“Wanted: energetic self-starter to run a large, diverse
organization. No experience necessary. As a matter of fact, experience is
probably a disqualification.
“Nor is any knowledge required, particularly in the fields of
science and arithmetic. A complete ignorance of history would be welcome, too.
“What we’re really looking for is someone who believes. The
specific content of the beliefs required will be given to the applicant once he
or she wins the job, but a passionate belief in God and the free market will be
paramount among them.
“The job offers a handsome six-figure salary, free housing, and
a liberal vacation allowance (that’s the only thing liberal about it), as well
dynamite retirement benefits.
“Candidates must be prepared to spend the better part of the
next two years telling people what they want to hear. Integrity is optional.”
It’s as though they ran the ad and, lo and behold, applicants
began crawling out from under their rocks all over the country. And the
loudest, most outrageous of the rock dwellers was Donald Trump.
So-called political experts like myself have been predicting
Trump’s demise ever since he flashed upon the scene insulting war heroes,
women, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, the mentally ill, and worst of all, journalists.
We all thought that, politically speaking, he’d be sleeping with
the fishes by now, along with more plausible candidates like Scott Walker, Rick
Perry, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, and that Democrat from Virginia whose name
no one bothered to learn.
Well, to make a long story short, that’s not the way it rolled.
Ted Cruz, the meanest kid on the block, is gaining in Iowa, but
the Donald is still leading in national polls.
Is it possible that, against all odds, this joke goes on into
the general election — with Trump carrying the Republican banner into battle
with Hillary Clinton?
I still say no. Not possible. We are not Italy. I refuse to
believe that one of our major parties — the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt,
and Dwight Eisenhower — would pick a clown like Trump to represent it. Ronald
Reagan was bad enough, and Trump makes him look like Thomas Jefferson.
I don’t know who the GOP candidate will be, but not Trump.
On the other hand, one of the pluses of last year was Barack
Obama awakening from his six-year slumber to begin acting like the president we
elected, actually doing things despite the relentless opposition of the
Republican Congress.
It wasn’t nearly enough. But in the land of Trump, every ray of
sunshine is welcome.
OtherWords
columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.