So...Donald Trump is a wartime President. I can see him, like James Madison, fleeing the White House just before the British burned it to the ground in the War of 1812. Or, maybe like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, risking his entire political career to help save Britain from falling to the Nazis and then successfully fighting a war against both Germany and Japan. Come on, you just know that Trump would have been just like the Charles Lindbergh character in HBO's ultra-scary The Plot Against America. Trump would have sucked up to Hitler ("a strong leader"), turned his back on England and the European Jews, and then crowed about how he kept America out of "somebody else's war."
My favorite story of a president during wartime involves Abraham Lincoln shortly after the fall of the Confederate capital of Richmond. It was April 4, 1865, so the war was still officially on. The Confederate troops that had been guarding the capital had evacuated the city and Jefferson Davis was in full flight mode. But it was still an incredibly unsafe place to be. Lincoln and his son, Tad (who was celebrating his 12th birthday), went down the James River, got off the boat and just walked through the streets of Richmond.
Freed slaves tried to bow down to him, but Lincoln insisted that they stand up and shake his hand. Seriously, can you imagine Donald Trump doing anything like that?
Lincoln was an actual badass, unlike Trump, who's just an ass. Lincoln fought in a real war (the Black Hawk War in 1839), while Trump was a draft dodger. In the early days of the Civil War, Lincoln grew so impatient with his reluctant-to-fight generals, he said, "If (General George B.) McLellan is not using the Army, I should like to borrow it for a while..." Trump is just a blowhard who would be (and obviously is) terrified of any kind of an actual fight.
I have always been a news junkie, so when Trump started doing those daily crap-a-thons about the pandemic, I watched. I knew immediately that they would be mini-political propaganda rallies, but I sincerely hoped that he could, at least a little bit, rise to the occasion. This wasn't a petty monetary beef with NATO (a beef he continuously misrepresents or simply doesn't understand). It wasn't a mutual pleasuring with some third-rate dictator who can't get the time of day from real world leaders. This is a life-or-death situation with Americans dying by the thousands.
After he completely blew the initial response by first joking about the virus, then downplaying it, and always lying about it and himself, I told myself that I would still give him another shot at manning up. This was a beach ball being floated across the plate. All he had to do was say, "Hey, I messed up, but now I see how serious this is and I'm going to do everything I can to fight this." He would have hit it out of the park.
Instead, he immediately reverted to Little Bitch mode. I knew it all along. I take no responsibility. Blame the Chinese. Blame the Europeans. Blame the Mexicans. But mostly, blame the Democrats. I'm No. 1 on Facebook. (He actually has half as many followers as Barack Obama.)
Being a cockeyed optimist, I spent all of 2017 expecting Trump voters to realize that they had conferred dangerous powers upon a seriously flawed human being. But that didn't happen. He lied about almost EVERYTHING and they cheered. He copped to committing felonious sexual assault and they cheered. He sided with white supremacists and they cheered loudly.
In 2018, he started destroying the fabric of American government as though he were some drunk bastard trying to play speed Jenga. He lied to and stole from the American people and still two out of five cheered.
In 2019, they realized that their side had lost the midterm elections because too many people who didn't look like them had voted, so they set about to deny citizens their right to vote. Anything to keep their Giant Tub of Goo in office.
It has become all too apparent that the average Trump voter is beyond help. They don't care about America; they care about "their" America—white, vulgar and intentionally stupid. But I have a logic problem for those Trump voters who possess triple-digit IQs. It's only for them. Trying to explain logic to the average Trump voter would like trying to explain the workings of the Large Hadron Collider to a baseball bat.
For the few who might understand, here we go. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, did Wyoming declare war, followed by Louisiana, Ohio and then Vermont? Or did the United States declare war? If we're at war with the virus, then the entire country is at war. And the country's leader needs to be leading, not dumping responsibilities (and lots of blame) on state governors who don't sufficiently kiss his ass.
So what is it, Trump lovers who can actually read this? Is he a "wartime president" or is he a cowardly, self-serving shirker at the time of his country's greatest need?
History is already guaranteed to declare him the worst president in the history of America. His current actions will certainly doom his petty soul to eternal damnation.
