Whatever you do, don’t make this huge mistake
My days of needing to shout at the radio (or TV or computer screen) some epithet unbecoming a family news outlet, after hearing (or reading) yet another solemn assessment of the say-what-you-will-about-him-otherwise variety proclaiming Donald Trump a business genius, are finally over. That it required three years and change to reach this point is a testament to the thick-willed and slug-brained intractability of the human zeitgeist. Even so, the final epitaph of Trump’s now fictional business genius has at last been written, and in case you missed it, I’ll state the obvious one more time: Donald Trump is an appallingly bad businessman. Enough word about why and how Trump is lousy at business has finally gotten around so people are finally beginning to believe it in consequential numbers, even if they don’t entirely understand it. That he was ever given credit for being otherwise is down to the common gullibility to believe that a white, (apparently) rich, limo-chauffeured six foot tall male is a stable genius at business simply because he says he is, a gullibility that is sometimes referred to as “stupidity” in less polite circles.
But I’ll go even farther than that. Donald Trump is bad at everything he does. Trump is a bad negotiator, a bad speaker, a bad leader, a bad explainer, a bad ally, a bad political strategist, a bad speech writer, a bad father, a bad husband – in short, he’s the ultimate incompetent. A jack of no trades. And no, Chris Cuomo, Michael Moore and any number of talking heads who aver Trump possesses some unique talent to the contrary, there is no “secret” to his “success.” Donald Trump is president of the United States for one reason and one reason only: because sixty three million morons voted for him. Period.
Most of those morons are still out there, still of voting age and still disposed to vote the incompetent idiot Trump a second term. If that shocks you then a reminder is in order: that’s why we call them morons. They’ll vote for Trump again because they’re morons. That’s what morons do.
If that still shocks you it shouldn’t, because we have our own brand of morons to worry about, and we are in no position to judge. For want of a handy definition of a moron, I’ll give you this narrow one for our purposes: someone who doesn’t learn from bitter experience. For example, those sixty three million morons who voted for Trump thought they were getting a great deal. Most of them still think so despite staggering evidence to the contrary in the form of the bitter experience of runaway corruption, numerous imprisonments of Trump’s “best” people and scandals at the rate of three a day. This is stupidity on a cosmic scale, not unlike the kind that existed with those voters who recognized Donald Trump for the charlatan that he was, and then threw away their vote in 2016 on a weak third party candidate who had absolutely no chance in hell to win – and they plan to do it all over again in 2020!
That they exist among us and talk openly and proudly about their plan to throw away their vote, as if we ought to be filled with admiration for their boldly taking a stand against the political norm, is proof of just how misguided they are. They are magical thinkers, mirthless, bovine, dull, monochrome, full of themselves, people dying of thirst in a desert and turning aside a canteen full of water because it isn’t Evian, and they just might make it possible for Donald Trump to get re-elected.
Politics is the art of the possible. That is why it is full of compromise, why sometimes the second best option is nevertheless the overall best because it can be done. Among the current crop of possible Democratic candidates there are some I prefer over others, of course. But I will vote for whoever she or he it is that turns out to be the Democratic candidate. I do a disservice to the word “preferable” when I say that any one of the possible Democratic candidates is preferable to Donald Trump. This time around our home is at stake, our planet, and it will not survive another four years of Donald Trump. So don’t be a moron. Make up your mind now that you will vote for the Democrat, no matter who it is.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.