As there's little more than a week left before Donald Trump becomes only the second American president since Grover Cleveland to serve two non-consecutive terms, I've found myself asking over and over again "how?"
The 44th and 45th Presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, chatting during former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral services last week…
Yeah, I know that the exit polls last November indicated that Trump's decisive win over Vice President Kamala Harris was primarily due to concerns about inflation and whatnot despite a strong economy. But I continue to shake my head at the idea that a con man, one who as of last Friday is also a convicted felon, was able to convince a vast majority of the electorate that he and his fellow billionaire oligarchs are willing and able to get prices for food, housing, energy and medicine all under control!
The irony is that every day in state and federal courtrooms across America, juries are instructed to weigh a witnesses status as a convicted felon when determining whether said witness is credible or not. But none of that will stick to the “Teflon Don,” a man whose bombastic policy promises during his first term went completely unfulfilled (see, for reference, the return of coal and manufacturing jobs—and a vast border wall paid for by Mexico), as will similar bombastic promises to lower prices and improve the quality of living for the average ordinary American citizen.
Four years ago today, as Trump faced less than a week before leaving office—less than a week after trying to overthrow the peaceful transition of power on January 6th—I wrote the essay below...a closing argument if you will...on his single term in office. Now, cognizant that Trump has arisen from his own ashes to get a second bite at the political apple, I share those words to remind my readers where we were—and where this nation may be heading:
I begin this final summation by restating the obvious, which is that Donald Trump was an unqualified and unabashed bigot who was wholly unfit to serve as President of the United States in the first place. From my vantage point, Trump’s 2016 election was a confluence of, 1. Deeply held white supremacist beliefs that arose in opposition to a Black First Family that had inhabited the White House for eight years and, 2. A strong dislike of Hillary Clinton due to her gender, her personality, her politics, or perhaps all of the above.
While few Americans back then would have trusted an ignorant amateur to perform a surgical operation to remove a malignant cancer, millions of Americans chose to trust a blissfully ignorant amateur to occupy the highest political office in the most powerful country on Earth. A lifelong grifter/conman, Trump has repeatedly and falsely taken credit for an economic upsurge owed to his presidential predecessor, Barack Obama.
Lest we forget that the conned were attracted to Trump’s promises to “lock Hillary Clinton up,” to “build that wall and have Mexico pay for it,” and to “drain the Swamp;” he accomplished none of these promises and proved–through his family’s grift–to be the worst adder in his very own swamp. Undaunted, the conned cheered each time Trump tried to ban Muslims or claim a “war on Christmas.” They roared with laughter when he called Black NFL players protesting police brutality “ungrateful Sons of Bitches” or when he referred to African and Caribbean nations as “shit-hole countries.” The conned claimed to be patriots that supported the military, but they turned a blind eye to credible evidence that bounties were placed on American military lives by Russia and with regards to Trump’s penchant to disrespect Gold Star families and the late Vietnam War hero, former Arizona Sen. John McCain.
As the Coronavirus started killing thousands of Americans per day, the conned applauded when Trump called the same “Kung Flu” or “the China virus” and snickered as he mocked mask wearing and social distancing; some of his supporters, like my Morehouse Brother and MAGA Republican Herman Cain, laughed and joked right up to the point that the fluids from the coronavirus choked their laughs and lives away in hospitals!
Yes, many of the conned chose Trump because in him they found a kindred spirit and a champion, a half-literate, anti-science “Know Nothing” whose rhetorical racism via Twitter, or, through his labored breathing, index finger reading speeches, summed up their own racial and religious hostilities! Trump quite deftly played upon the fears of his great unwashed that white birth rates would be eclipsed by this century’s halfway point, thus the real reason why “pro-life judges” that will “end abortion rights” are so important to him and his ilk. An ilk, I remind, that wish to prevent abortions among the very demographic that has the numerical majority of the procedures so that they can stop “them” (Browns and Blacks) from taking over “their” (read WASP) country. If nothing else, that Trump appointed 200 of these types of judges, including three on the Supreme Court, will be to the lasting chagrin of progressives for the next half century.
Thus, Trump’s legacy is apparent to anyone with any modicum of sense that could have detected from the first that his vitriol towards opponents and friends alike were attempts to deflect from the fact that he was neither intellectually qualified nor morally sound enough for the office he surprisingly won. An office that he further tarnished by unleashing his rabid supporters on a separate and co-equal branch of government simply because he lost fair and square–and was too much of a sniveling coward to admit defeat.
Looking back, the people who knew Donald Trump best, his first wife in her divorce filings, his sibling the federal judge, his niece the writer, and his porn star paramours, tried to warn “them” about how insecure and narcissistic Trump really was; I emphasize “them” in this seeming oxymoron (insecure/narcissist) because the majority of my Black kinsmen knew who and what Trump was ever since he tried to have the innocent Central Park Five executed back in the late 1980s.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush was prescient back in 2016 when he said: “Donald Trump is a chaos candidate, and he would be a chaos president…
But that’s just the thing about the nature of bigotry in that there are some Americans who will easily put aside their so-called Christian beliefs to align themselves with Lucifer Incarnate or, worse yet, a traitorous “Jude the (not so) Obscure,” one whose “First Lady” has slept in separate quarters for four years—if it serves to make America more like it was in the 1950s. Yes, the ’50s, their so-called “Happy Days,” a time when white men ruled, white women stayed at home barefoot, pregnant, and mute–and racial minorities were either second class citizens who “knew their places,” or were excluded from this country altogether per the 1924 Immigration Act.
Thankfully, Trump’s legacy will also include a resounding defeat by a multiracial, multicultural, and multi-gender group of citizens who see what America once was–and dare to dream about what America can still be if it strives to live up to its de facto motto, “E Pluribus Unum” or, “From Many, One.”
And now, in 2025, we, the people, are right back to where it all started to fall apart…
Lest we forget!
#TrumptacularDumbAss followers and those who voted for him are racists and anyone of color who voted for him, is consumed by self-hate. Point blank, Period. Shout out to the pillar at President Carter's funeral for doing what should have already been done, cut that sucka out of sight.
The electorate largely has "Itching" ears. And in the words of Forrest Gump, "That's all I am going to say about that!"