In 2016, like a lot of folks, I didn’t think that clown could win. But he did. Then I desperately hoped that after the election, but before he got sworn in, he would take to the mic and pull off the mask to reveal he’d been Andy Kaufman all along. But he didn’t. And what initially was a comically bad transition team and all the mistakes that only an amateur could make turned slowly (though in some cases rapidly) into a nightmare joke of a presidency, where the man’s word isn’t worth the tweet it’s posted on. Lies and contradictions and bad decisions and disgraceful displays on the national stage. Surely, I thought, the Republican party would rein him in. And maybe they tried. Quietly. Behind closed doors. But publicly no one stood up to him as he trashed all the mores and traditions of the office.
I do think that a democracy only thrives when there is opposition and compromise. But the Republican party has shown that they are no longer interested in compromise, or even democracy. Just opposition, and power, and money. And the current administration… there are plenty of wild conspiracy theories about the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and “the Left”, conspiracies that would put anything about the JFK assassination to shame. There are so many dots to connect and so many of those threads are completely fabricated. There is a lot of “What if…” and not a lot of “Here is a fact…” But the current criminals in power, it’s like someone once told them the best way to hide something was “in plain sight” and so all of their criminal activity doesn’t require conspiracy theories, just connecting two dots with a fact. “Did the Trump campaign meet with Russians?” “Yes, and here are the emails and calendar appointments that prove it, and also the guilty parties just tweeted out that they did it.” “Are people paying for access to Trump?” “Here, you can see the Mar-a-Lago membership rates are at their highest ever even after a large price hike, and Trump spends a lot of time there.”
It’s like if you start reading a murder mystery and the butler just admits right up front that he did it, hands over the murder weapon, and the security camera footage of him doing it. And then the next 200 pages are the butler’s family and friends, and hat wearing supporters, trying to convince the reader that maybe facts aren’t true and maybe the guy wasn’t even murdered at all anyway, or that murder shouldn’t even be a crime when it is committed by butlers.
Two years of this, with no end in sight, has finally turned me into a card carrying member of the DNC. And until the GOP collapses I will continue to be.