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By Geoff Carter
Set aside his greed and his corruption.
Set aside his complete contempt for the law and the Constitution.
Set aside his callous disregard for human life and the suffering of millions—many of them children.
Set aside his lust for power.
Set aside his incompetence.
Set aside his unlawful arrest and detention of immigrants and U.S. citizens and their unlawful imprisonment in barbaric detention centers.
Set aside his pathetic need for recognition—even to the point of creating “awards” for himself and slapping his name on every building or monument he can.
Set aside the broken promises to the people who voted for him. Set aside his complete ineptitude in his handling of our national affairs.
Set aside his aggression towards our long-time friends in Europe and North America.
Set aside his complicity with our Russian enemies—those who are currently aiding and abetting our wartime foes.
Set aside his destruction of the White House—the people’s house—and his determination to decorate Washington D.C. as if it were a New Orleans whorehouse.
Set aside the allegations of sexual abuse.
Set aside his racism, misogynism, and antisemitism.
Set aside his felony convictions.
Set aside his ambitions to be king.
Set aside every other despicable act he has committed.
Set aside his unprovoked invasion against the sovereign nation of Venezuela and threats against Greenland, Cuba, and Panama.
Set aside the fact he refused to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election and attempted to violently overthrow the government.
Set aside the fact that he has waged an unnecessary and already disastrous war against Iran that has become not only a strategic disaster but an international embarrassment.
Set aside his chronic, pathological, and habitual lying.
Setting all this aside, all that defines a corrupt, avaricious, self-centered, narcissistic, disgusting, cruel, murderous, and criminal human being, what do we have? What’s left? A man who is still unfit to be president. When we peel the orange, we find a rotten core.
He is incompetent. He’s not the successful businessman he’s claimed to be. He’s not smart. He’s completely overmatched by other players on the world stage and has been outmaneuvered and outsmarted at every turn: Putin played him. Netanyahu played him. Now Iran is playing him. The man is good at just a few things—marketing, shilling, bullshitting, selling. That’s it. That’s his skill set. That’s it.
On top of that, as bad as all that is, his mental health is deteriorating. He’s losing his mind. Some medical experts have expressed concerns about his mental health, partly because his behavior has become increasingly erratic.
As Alex Rusbridger reported in Prospect, “ We can no longer ignore his conspiracy-obsessed mindset and his lack of control. We can see for ourselves his increasing detachment from reality, along with his increasingly frequent delusional claims. We flinch at his emotional volatility, his disregard for democratic norms. We shudder at his disinhibition, blustering menace, vengeful rantings and foul-mouthed posturing.”
He is delusional as well as profit-mad. He has sold trading cards portraying himself as Superman, a boxer, a sheriff, an astronaut, a cowboy, and a country-western singer. He has recently—and most egregiously—posted an image of himself as Jesus Christ—a move which has outraged members of his base, the Catholic community, and just about everyone else with a shred of moral decency. When asked about the post (which he had hastily removed), the president proclaimed that he that he was being portrayed as a doctor, not Christ. He has publicly threatened to destroy an entire civilization on his social media platform. And this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Widespread concerns have been raised about whether Donald Trump is still (or was ever) fit to lead our country not only by the political left, but by retired generals and officials, and even his Republican allies. Increasing lapses in memory, disjointed diatribes about snakes in Peru, and attacks on Pope Leo for being soft on crime have caused wide-spread consternation.
And yet we have done nothing about this man. We tolerate him. We accept his tantrums and odd behaviors as personality quirks. His base makes excuses for him. He still controls the largest and most deadly nuclear arsenal in the world. For all these crimes and misdemeanors against the people of the United States, we have not moved to remove him from the office of presidency. Why?
Like a parent who refuses to acknowledge the fact their child is a danger to himself and others, the American people—and their representatives in Congress—keep giving Donald Trump second chances. Whether it is because we have become so accustomed to Trump’s bad behavior (how long ago was the “grab ‘em by the p—-” remark?) that it has become a new normal, or whether we are reluctant to throw sand into the machinery of what some of us still may believe is the greatest government of the world, we cannot seem to do the right thing, to remove this man from the levers of power.
And like any parent with a problematic child, we have a big blind spot. We don’t want to believe the evidence of our own eyes, the proof that our child—our president—Is an unhinged monster, and that we have enabled his monstrous actions. We don’t want to believe we are responsible for empowering such evil into the world, but the evidence has become so overwhelming, it can no longer be ignored.
Even using the metrics of a normal presidency—or a normal personality—his performance has ranged from irresponsible to vindictive to incompetent. Inflation is up. Gas prices are soaring. Millions of Americans are now living without health insurance. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE are out of control, responsible for the deaths of at least four citizens.
A reasonable person might conclude his unfitness for office is beyond dispute, yet members of Congress, particularly his Republican colleagues, have refused to rein him in. Democrats like Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin, and others attempted to curtail his war powers but have been stopped in their tracks by the Republican congressional majority.
All this begs the question of how one man could get away with all this. By relentlessly bombarding the American public with outrageous behavior, ridiculous bombast, and ostentatious showmanship. Like a spoiled brat, he has worn us down to the point where we tolerate behaviors that were once unthinkable coming from a United States president.
Who could imagine Barack Obama making fun of a disabled reporter? Or George W. Bush saying to the Iranian government, “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” (NPR). Or Joe Biden telling children during the White House Easter Egg Hunt that they could sell his signature for $25,000? These quotes would have been shocking at one time, now they are routine. We have become used to these idiotic, crude, and inappropriate comments—they are now part of our national fabric.
The American people are more than aware that there is a problem. Nine million Americans participated in marches against the president in the last No Kings protest, but still our government refuses to act. What will it take to get them to move? A nuclear holocaust?
Perhaps it is they, not the president, who need an intervention, a wake-up call as to what their enabling of this monster is doing to our country. They need to see the suffering he is inflicting on the people of this country. They need to see this will not go away on its own.
I would like to believe most of this damage can be repaired once he and his MAGA and Heritage Foundation cohorts have been removed, but this man could very easily do something so ruinous before then that our country, our way of life, and our world will forever be beyond repair.
And the American people deserve better.
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