Donald Trump, you’re fired!
I’m perfectly aware that it won’t be invoked, but if ever there was a time for the 25th Amendment, this is it. Donald Trump has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt, let alone a reasonable one, the lengths and depths he’s willing to go in order to subvert democracy and the Constitution in the name of his desperate cling to power. Trump will never concede this election. Anyone with personal experience with narcissists will recognize this inevitability.
Nevertheless, the reality is clear to me now. President-elect Biden (and how I love writing those words!) is probably going to finish with 306 electoral college votes, two more than Donald Trump wound up with in 2016, and four million more popular votes than Trump. Any way you cut it, in 74 days Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. will become President of the United States.
This lame duck president currently infesting the sacred President’s House is in the grip of a paranoid delusion. We can not afford to have a man of unsound mind with access to weapons and troops continue for 74 minutes let alone 74 days. Trump must go now. Meanwhile, Trump must not be allowed to continue to covertly encourage violence through his henchmen and his family against Americans in the name of his paranoid delusions. Nor can this make-believe president, this pretend American, be allowed to encourage armed insurrection against the duly constituted government of the United States.
Trump’s cabinet is finished. Members who wish to salvage an ounce of their own credibility can and should move to oust him by way of the Constitutional provisions in the 25th Amendment while they can, before Trump does something deadly that will destroy lives.
Since last I wrote to you, brothers and sisters, 1,277 Americans have died from coronavirus. In other words, more Americans have died from coronavirus in the last 24 hours than have died from that disease in 75% of the world’s nations since the pandemic began. With only 4.2% of the population, America is responsible for nearly 20% of the world’s pandemic deaths. That alone should tell you that Donald Trump doesn’t care whether Americans live or die. If he will sacrifice that many Americans in defense of his laziness and his golf game, imagine how many he will allow to die in the name of his desperate cling to power.
This is the calculus of mortality one must make when dealing with a malignant narcissist. No American life is safe while Trump is in power during this dangerous time. He must go as soon as possible. This rabid madman, whom Anderson Cooper likened to an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, must be perp-walked out of the White House before he destroys someone else, before he takes us all down with him.
In the run up to the election I predicted many times that the Hunter Biden “laptop scandal” would disappear like a mirage after November third, and so it has. This is vintage narcissism. The minute the need for a pearl-clutching, hair-pulling “outrage” goes away it never gets mentioned again. And so it won’t. Trump’s latest pearl-clutching, hair-pulling “outrage” is the “injustice” of how votes coming in are racking up against him. This thing he so vehemently inveighs against is what we call “voting.” The American people have spoken. The fact that Donald Trump doesn’t like it is just too goddamn bad. Mr. President, you’re fired!
Whatever damage Trump does between now and Inauguration Day, it will be his last as president of the United States. It will be one of the great pleasures of my life to watch him lose everything by the rule of law, the same law he so often and so falsely claimed to protect. In the end, Donald Trump will finally learn the true meaning of law and order, and I guarantee he will not like it. 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.