When something horrible happens, our rational mind wants to make sense of it.
WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?
A loved one commits suicide, a man opens fire in a mall (it’s always a man), domestic violence strikes a close friend – we NEED to figure it out and often times we come up with rationale to sooth the situation, place blame on another or invent a cheap anaylsis to convince ourselves this “happened for a reason.”
But in the end, the old cliché´ holds true.
It is what it is.
The effect is what we are left with and we have to keep going.
We’ve done this with Trump for two years now. EVERYONE has a new theory as to why he does what he does. He was abused as a child, he’s a sociopath, he’s Putin’s pawn, he’s a racist… the list goes on. Countless hours of CNN panel discussions dissecting his word salad press conferences and tweets, MY own daily Facebook & Wow Report posts, and to what effect? Do we understand him anymore? Is it helping us?
This latest public meltdown about Charlottesville has the country wringing its collective hands and wailing that we have a white nationalist in the White House. I think it’s much simpler than that.
In an epic Twitter thread Vox‘s David Roberts hit the nail on the head for me,
“Trump *only* sees dominance/submission, and he must dominate, so in a situation like this he can’t *help* himself from defending his people, in terms that even a moderately self-aware white supremacist would know better than to use in a nat’l press conference!
He’s like a malignant, narcissistic Chauncey Gardner, stumbling through history, being carried by its currents.
He’s at the center of some *extremely* dangerous & volatile historical currents, w/ absolutely no awareness or agency and no ability to contain, channel, or control them. He doesn’t know what’s going on — the bigger picture beyond his gaping ego.“
Roberts says that Trump is NOT a White Nationalist, because that requires a set of beliefs and principles, of which we know, he has none. But this is not a comfort, he says. He just cannot help himself, which is much worse.
But back to my original point,
THE WHY IS NOT THE ISSUE.
The result is what we are left with and this train wreck of a person –who, no matter HOW he got into the highest office in the land– is unfit to sit in the Oval and is bad for the nation, and the entire planet. Period.
The question then is not “Why IS he this way?” but rather “What are we going to do about it?”
We know who is in control in D.C. at the moment, so your move GOP. If you turn on him, and realize what you’ve done to all of us, he is toast. Otherwise, tweet your shock, goose-step in line, it doesn’t matter he’s going to keep the country held hostage with one insane thing after the next. That much we HAVE figured out.
He has got to go. As many of us said after two weeks of his Presidency, we as a people can’t withstand 4 years of this.
