The end of a petty dictator

| 2:00 pm EST December 16, 2020
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The 9/11 Commission Report found that one factor in America’s vulnerability in the run up to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was “the new [George W. Bush] administration did not have its deputy cabinet administration officers in place until the spring of 2001.” Say what you will about the fairness or unfairness of the 2000 presidential election, unlike our most recent election, that one really was close. The resulting bona fide procedural delay in deciding who was going to be the next president meant delays in cabinet confirmations. And delays in cabinet confirmations left Americans vulnerable to attack.

This is an example from history where America really was placed in a clear and present danger from procedural delays. And the attack came. So when a procedural delay is unnecessary, when it’s promoted strictly to protect the ego of the worst bad loser in American history, it is a double disgrace.

Americans can ill afford to be placed in further harm’s way. Consider that in the 24 hours since last I wrote to you, brothers and sisters, 3,026 Americans have died from COVID-19. That’s 49 more than died on September 11th, 2001. America has, in short, enough horror and tragedy thanks to Donald Trump already. She certainly doesn’t need any more.

Yet still this madman persists in his psychotic indifference to the potential harm Americans face at the mercy of his indifferent, tiny hands. “It would not be an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump delights in putting people in danger,” says psychiatrist Brandy X. Lee. Lee attributes Trump’s monstrous impulses to sociopathy. “Sociopathy is dangerous,” Lee explains, “in part because … it actively desires people to suffer and die.”

So to the last Donald Trump remains entirely in character. Selfish to the last, indifferent to the pain and suffering and death of his fellow Americans to the last. He even delights in the death and suffering he causes. And Trump is ever ready and willing to continue to let Americans die as sacrificial lambs on the altar of his unquenchable ego.

As long as these tragedies remain statistically and theoretically abstract, many Republicans are ready and willing to continue to support the rantings of Trump the madman. What would it take to change their minds? If somehow we could arrange it so that the victims of the next Trump-induced tragedy would be their children, the next deaths would be their deaths. Only then would these monstrous enablers act, and act swiftly. Like their lord and master, many Congressional Republicans lack the critical human faculty known as empathy.

In a scant five weeks we will be rid of this monster. In the words of terminally ill Washington State elector Jack Arends, “Today was the chance to begin the end of the Trump administration. I was glad to do my duty and rid our nation of a petty dictator. Had he won a second term, there is no limit to the damage he could have done to the world.”

There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States, this has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.