Lock Him Up

Trump’s fans love him. I’ll never understand it, but they do – and in that unquestioning way people love invisible deities. Yet the object of their love is no deity. The words Trump and love strike me as mutually exclusive.

We’re a few months into the Trump administration, and nothing about him has changed. He has shown time and again that he has no leadership skills at all. He has no charisma. He is a pathological liar indifferent to truth. He has all the warmth and charm of a spiny-tailed iguana.

Trump, I think, may survive the various crises that have been with him since even before his inauguration. Any one of them would have destroyed an ordinary politician. Trump is not ordinary. He has shown a singular ability to weasel out of tight situations through lying, deflection, and other means that decent people would never stoop to.

Neither is he extraordinary, mind you, in that word’s usual sense. I don’t know what word best describes him. He is in a class by himself, which also has positive connotations that do not apply.

Everything I have thought about this deplorable human being has been reinforced during his first eighty or so days in office. He is transparently corrupt. He is a manifestly unqualified officer-holder, a grotesque caricature of a politician, a national embarrassment and a national disgrace.

Yet somehow, Trump and his government by chaos survive – thus far. Caught in a series of controversies that should have consumed him, he somehow won the election (although plainly, he and it are not legitimate). During the campaign, a lot of what came out of his mouth was self-revealing, a kind of projection: Crooked Donald. Fake news. Lock him up.

It is inconceivable that Trump lasts a full term. Even a full first year is far-fetched. Yet this bastard has so far survived that which no one in public life should survive.

His supporters? I cannot begin to understand them. Surely his base has dwindled since January 20th. Surely, at least some of them have seen through the lies and deceit. It is for this reason that we must resist saying, “I told you so!” Hell hath no fury like one betrayed.

I struggle with conflicting ideas: on one hand, I long ago gave up believing in government as it is taught in high school civics. The apparatus is largely a charade. I do not buy into the idea that Trump tapped into an angry, disillusioned electorate.

I only vote because local issues are more or less legitimate, probably. It matters who sits on the local school board.

My ballot for President? Yes, I fill in a little box in black ink and make sure I don’t go outside the lines. But it is largely pro forma and meaningless. I don’t vote for any candidate so much as against the more objectionable one. It doesn’t mean much.

And yet I’m caught up in the ongoing psychodrama of Trump. It will not end well. Just how it ends, and the price we all will pay, is the troubling, lingering question.

Lock him up.