Who’s delusional now?
It’s not like we weren’t warned. During the 2016 presidential campaign, British entrepreneur and CEO of Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Richard Branson, related a shocking story about Donald Trump. Branson said,
Some years ago, Mr Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted. Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people. He didn’t speak about anything else and I found it very bizarre.
When I first heard this story in 2016 I believed it immediately. My acquaintance with Donald Trump’s littleness tracked back to the 1980s. I always knew that Donald Trump was unfit to be president of the United States, what I didn’t know in 2016 after hearing the Branson story, and what has unfolded for me over the years, is that Donald Trump is also an evil monster.
It began, around October or November or December of 2016 I believe, when I found out that Trump is a child rapist. This was on the heels of the discovery and broadcast in October of 2016 of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, wherein Donald Trump openly confesses to Billy Bush that he is a serial sexual predator. It was a near career-ending moment for Mr. Bush, scion of the family that brought America two presidents. The scandal barely touched Donald Trump.
Since then, of course, Trump’s presidency has been a daily horror show of unbelievable stunts, racist utterances at Charlottesville and other places, traitorous proclamations at Helsinki and other places, illiterate tweets, childish taunts, shockingly divisive, deeply personal insults made about reporters, other politicians and anyone who demonstrates inadequate zeal in praising him.
Trump has shown, over and over again, as he did to Richard Branson, that no occasion is too solemn, no tragedy too deep, no national risk too ominous, that he can’t make it all about his favorite topic, himself. As Mr. Branson told us when relating his story about the lunch he had with Trump on that distant day many years ago, two full hours is barely an adequate time for Trump to hold forth on the single topic of personal vengeance against people who committed the more than forgivable sin of being unable to help him. What it also told us is this is nothing new. Donald Trump has always been a flawed, petty, vindictive, hateful, stupid and evil man, and he always will be.
Ask yourselves this question: what would it take for you to vow to commit the rest of your life to destroying someone else’s life? I can only think of something on the order of, say, they’d murdered someone so dear to me that it ruined my life. But refusing to lend me money? I suppose that would be disappointing under some circumstances I can imagine. But would I vow to destroy them, would such an idea occur to me, even fleetingly? Of course not. I assume those of you reading this are normal human beings and, as such, you feel pretty much the same way.
With this as a background is it any wonder that Trump is simply too dysfunctional to lead us out of this national crisis? Of course it’s not. Trump has not only failed America entirely, he has cost untold thousands of deaths with his egotistical meddling with the work of medical professionals and his failure to take responsibility and appropriate action to head off this horrible coronavirus pandemic. Trump has, at last, graduated from child rapist to murderer, just as I always suspected he one day would.
In the midst of all we are going through right now, we must also endure Trump’s endless braggadocio about how great he is and what a wonderful job he’s doing, about how “nobody’s ever heard of closing down a country, let alone the United States of America.” What he meant by that, of course, was when he announced restricted travel from China and Europe. Trump to the contrary, lots of people have heard of that, of course, and it was a small token of what he could have done, but it did not constitute the “closing down” of the country in any case. Meanwhile the United States has the highest death toll from coronavirus in the world. Trump has not saved “tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives,” as he disingenuously claimed.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with all this, permit me to come crashing to the point. I’m seeing a lot of blather these days from people who formerly identified themselves as “progressives” about how Joe Biden is “just as bad as Trump,” and I’m wondering just exactly what drug-induced world such people occupy. It certainly couldn’t be the same world that sane and sober people refer to as reality.
If as disappointed “progressives” these people intend to destroy, not just the lives of five people, as in Mr. Branson’s story about Trump, but the lives of every man, woman, child and animal on the planet, then I submit that they are the ones who are “just as bad as Trump,” not Biden. I wonder what kind of ego a person would have to have to think that inflicting the world with four more years of Donald Trump is just vengeance on the world because a politician promising to enact their pet political agenda lost the nomination. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.