This is not about politics. It’s not about partisanship. It’s not about policy differences. It’s not about Ukraine, transcripts, parliamentary procedures or whistleblowers. To be honest, at its core it’s not even really about impeachment.
This is about character and decency, and the inability to make good decisions and practice sound judgement when character and decency are lacking.
I’ve never been a particularly political person. I’ve always voted, always taken an interest in and tried to educate myself as much as possible about those asking to represent me in government positions, but I’ve never knocked on a door, handed out a leaflet, attended a political rally, or even marched for a cause. Up to this point in my life, although I’m not proud of this, I can truthfully admit to being a ‘user’ – the type of person who regularly uses tools like Tripadvisor to research and make decisions about my vacations, but has never ‘given back’ by engaging and offering my opinion publicly for others to digest. I have never been an active Facebook or social media user (I have a FB account pretty much just to track news about UVA basketball and scotch whisky.)
I’ve certainly never written an article for public consumption or written or called my political representatives. Until now.
Because now we are in a situation where even relatively lazy civic citizens like me realize that we’re at a tipping point. People like me have historically relied on our country’s foundational underpinning and collective desire to generally make the world a better place in order to ensure that goodness and decency will inevitably win out over any challenges facing us as a society. No matter what hurdles have been placed in our path, the strength and power of the American experiment has always prevailed.
Now, though – for the first time in my life as an American – I’m scared.
I’m not scared that one party is ‘winning’ at the expense of the other (I’m not and have never been a Democrat). I’m not butthurt that Hillary didn’t win. I’m not worried enough about individual policy platforms alone to write this.
What terrifies me is that the most powerful person in the world is guided almost solely by his natural base instinct to do and say absolutely anything necessary to achieve a personal ‘win’ for himself regardless of the damage to longstanding assumptions of decency and morality which have been pillars of what this country has represented since its founding. I’m scared because the person we’ve chosen to put his finger on the button of the most important decisions for our country does not possess the moral fiber or constitution (pun somewhat intended) to practice sound judgment when making those decisions.
Donald Trump lacks the empathy, emotional intelligence, attention span, moral compass, intellectual curiosity, humility or basic human decency required to serve as our President. In my opinion, these traits are pre-requisites to even be considered for the highest office in the land, and the fact that he does not possess them should have concerned us all since his candidacy began. Now that he has been our president for over three years and we have a massive sample size to draw from, all of us – regardless of party affiliation or political ideology – should be terrified to the point where we collectively agree that he is not supportable.
Anyone who is incapable of mustering the shred of humility needed to admit that they’re not always perfect is a mortal danger to whatever institution they’re chosen to lead.
I’m perfectly willing to abide by the effects of decisions made as a result of policy positions that I don’t necessarily agree with, but I can no longer sit idly while such important decisions are made for all the wrong reasons by someone so brazenly concerned more about himself than the country he leads.
Taking the wide-angle view for a moment, a president who can’t see past his own personal interests and who conducts transactional relationships with other people and entities based on a vindictive, resentful and insecure “I know you are but what am I” third grade-type of approach will simply not be equipped to successfully navigate the difficult decisions required of the office. No matter what type of policy you support, the danger that Trump has and will continue to make under-informed, misguided snap decisions based on personal hurt feelings, financial greed and/or one of several apparent inferiority complexes should disqualify whatever the outcome of his decision-making is, even if you happen to agree with the end result.
The ends you may want simply cannot justify any and all means used to get there.
Words matter. What any of us say to others in our lives has an impact. Whether we lie or tell the truth has a knock-on effect, even if we can’t always be there to see its ultimate end result. When the President of the United States fails to understand that his words carry more meaning and have greater influence than almost everyone else on earth, bad things happen. When the President of the United States knows just how much power his words convey and yet willfully and unapologetically continues to purposefully misrepresent facts, those bad things that happen become truly tragic. And that’s where we are now.
Trump – followed first by his supporters in the media and more recently by Republicans in congress – brazenly and regularly speaks words that categorically and objectively aren’t true. Not just political fudges of the sort that professional politicians have been making for centuries. No, he is now publicly doubling and tripling down on whatever he feels like concocting that props up whichever conspiracy theory or wild-haired scheme he feels compelled to defend and promote at that moment. Until now, it quite simply just wasn’t possible for people – especially major politicians – to say whatever they wanted without being called to account for such misstatements’ repercussions. Now, however, in just over three years Trump has reset our national tolerance level for blatant lying to a level that we wouldn’t accept from a child.
And it’s important. These aren’t just cases of him telling iffy but relatively harmless fibs. The 30-40% of our fellow citizens who still support him do so in large part because they are unwilling or incapable of discerning that he is lying. Or worse, they know he’s lying and they don’t care because he speaks to some issue, grievance or passion that they feel needs to be said.
There’s been a lot of talk lately by both parties about our Founding Fathers, their ideals, and about the purity of their vision for what America should become. The irony, of course, is that many of our Founding Fathers – while far from being perfect men – were largely intellectual giants. They were the ‘elite’ professional politician class that is so popularly denounced by Trump and his followers now. I absolutely want my leaders to be elite. Shouldn’t we all? Shouldn’t I insist that they be more intelligent, learned, and skilled than I am? Surely we all want the best and brightest minds debating how best to move our country forward.
No matter your party affiliation or political beliefs, I implore you to step back from the nightmare of our current existential crisis and zoom out enough to re-awaken the sense of right vs wrong that has atrophied so acutely over the past several years. The political divide that has been growing in this country (and around much of the world) has led us to a point where we seem to be unable to agree on what historically have been utterly obvious truths about where the bar of human decency should be set.
We’ve become numb to the childish and demeaning name-calling (even of children, the defenseless, and the disabled) that we would have found utterly unacceptable by our own children as something now permissible and ok. We’ve stopped recognizing hard facts even when we see them with our own eyes if someone from a particular political party says the opposite. We’ve begun looking the other way when someone we support endorses conspiracy theories previously recognized as lunacy. We’ve devalued the power and importance of words to the point where anyone can say anything at anytime without regard for its accuracy, provability or effect on those around us.
My inspiration for writing and sharing this now is a newly urgent need to try and understand how we got here so that I can do my small part to get us all back on track. I naively used to assume that I was part of a silent majority within our citizenry which placed human decency and national well-being above party differences. Even our politicians on both sides of the aisle from a generation ago paid homage to this approach – a forgotten era which, in hindsight, went hugely unappreciated by people like me who believed that personal character was the prerequisite which allowed earnest, viable debate to produce workable compromises and effective governance.
I assumed that this silent majority was still intact, but just shrouded by the ugliness of our current zero-sum, win-at-all-costs-or-burn-it-all-down mentality. But now I’m at a loss to figure out what’s being permitted to happen so much so that I’m led to one fundamental question.
It’s a question we can and should all ask ourselves. I know I certainly have. And if you’ve supported Trump in the past, I beg you to cut through the partisan noise to stop and consider: Where is your line? When is something too much? How far is too far? It’s all the same question. Most Trump supporters have been ok enough with his words and behavior to not chastise their representatives; to not raise a voice of dissent at the dinner party; to not change the channel; to excuse what have been, objectively speaking, awful words and behavior by Trump in the past. When is enough really enough? If you’ve seen parts of this slow-motion train wreck and figured it was part of the price you had to pay for higher returns in your 401k or the right judges on your courts, is there any line in the sand that he could cross that you would think is too far? Could he truly shoot someone on 5th Avenue and everyone would just shrug?
That can’t be who we are. I know many people who have supported Trump and they are good people who want the best for our country and our children. And yet despite being the easiest target of the cannon of human decency, no chinks in the impregnable armor of his support appears. Surely it can’t be what we actually want, right? No sane person would prefer to have a megalomaniac narcissist steering the ship, even if the ship were headed to the richest and most fun port in the world, right? Surely the heavy knowledge of which principles you had to compromise to get there outweighs the joy of the win, right? Again, we as a society simply cannot allow “any means necessary” (when those means are truly terrifyingly unmoored to decency) to become acceptable if they lead to a final result that we may selfishly desire.
Please help stop the madness. Please step back from the precipice and recognize that the normalizing of the words and behavior of someone with such an ambiguous grasp of reality is now on us. This is the moment that will be pinpointed in the future where people will say, “How in the world did they let that happen?” the way that we do now with other historically significant tragedies in other parts of the world.
I’m writing this as the House of Representatives is finalizing the details regarding Trump’s impeachment, and before the Senate’s sure-to-succeed minimization of the subsequent trial. There are debates to had about how the impeachment process has played out, and this is not designed to be a constitutional argument one way or the other. What I ask, however, is that we all be truly honest with ourselves about the real motives and inspiration driving those asking questions about process and parliamentary procedures. Maintaining the procedures and dignity of our political processes (including impeachment) is vital. But an even more fundamentally important question remains: what will we do about the extent to which the president has and will continue to damage our republic through his carelessly ambivalent use of words, his instincts to put the preservation of his political prospects and ability to ‘win’ above the nation’s collective good, his inability to rise above petty insults or hurt feelings, or his primal need to be liked by one segment of our population.
We’ve seen the results of his approach to the presidency. Those of us who suspected it would come to this do not feel any sense of pride in being proven correct. Those of you who assumed that ‘good people would surround him’ and counterbalance his recklessness do not have to now eat your words. No one cares who was right. All we care about now is making things right going forward, and with that in mind there is something that all of us can do for our country.
Whether you’re a quiet ‘user’ like me or a Facebook flame-warrior extraordinaire (on either side of the political divide), now is the time to set aside partisanship, put country over party, and take action.
It seems to me that there are two things you can do to make a difference:
- Contact your representative and tell them that even if you agree with a majority of Trump’s policies and positions, you cannot support anyone who enables him.
- Raise your voice. Don’t be passive when someone you like or respect defends Donald Trump. This is obviously most often incredibly difficult to do, but it’s the most powerful way to organically let those who are disquieted by Trump know that there is a silent majority unwilling to condone him. History is littered with societies who would give anything to go back in time and reverse their collective passivity when confronted with forces which are objectively wrong.
The tricky part to doing #2 above is to approach it not from a preachy pedestal, but rather from an honest ‘did you know’ perspective. In this age of uber-defensiveness, simply stating that even if you agreed with Trump’s policy positions, you can’t support him because of his character might be the most powerful argument you can make.
If, however, it’s all about policy for you, don’t you think you’d be fine with a traditional Republican president?
Want lower taxes? They’re at an all-time low. Want more conservatives on the courts? Check. Want less government regulation? You should see how we compare to the rest of the world. All of these topics and issues are valid points worth debating, and they’ll be around for the rest of our lifetimes. But keep in mind that any number of other Republican candidates for president would be pushing all of these same party lines – without the accompanying madness that guides and controls Donald Trump. I mean, is Mike Pence not conservative enough?
I don’t know what will happen with impeachment. At this point, common sense and the briefest of political temperature checks show that he will be acquitted in the Senate (or at least that he won’t be removed from office.) Stained but not stopped. I’m not making an argument specifically about impeachment. I’m not suggesting that I know the correct procedural tool to use to right this wrong. I’m just asking you to let your representatives know that it’s ok for them to fight back against the war on decency that Trump lives for. Tell them it’s not ok to make things up. It’s not ok to belittle, taunt and smear those who disagree with you. It’s not ok to make decisions based on vindictiveness and petty insecurities. And it’s not ok to have a president of our country whom we cannot point our children towards and say, “Be like him (or her).”
Use your voice and your vote to rise above whether there’s a D or an R next to a name on the ballot and first judge whether this person supports a return to basic human decency and stability – and only then on whether you agree with all of their policy positions.
I appreciate you reading this, no matter who you voted for in 2016 and no matter which cable news channel is on your favorites list. I write these words without judgment or aspersions on anyone who may have supported Trump thus far. Halfway through my life, I have just now gotten off the proverbial sidelines and hung myself out to dry in public via this website solely as a last-ditch effort to do my small part to protect the country we all love. And I do it without malice towards anyone who may find their way to read this.
And if you happen to agree with these sentiments about Trump already, the same plea applies to you: don’t play politics with this era in our country and try to ram an ideological agenda through the cracks in our constitutional foundation. Don’t assume that this is an opportunity to ‘win’ your agenda regarding healthcare for all, bigger government or free college tuition.
The first priority for both sides now should be ensuring that Trump’s power and capability of doing damage is removed, or at least minimized. Then, once we have restored a semblance of decency at the top of our government, we can try this whole part of the experiment over again, hopefully with a healthier and more productive end result.