Lamar White, Jr. sums up my feelings exactly. Bolding added by me for emphasis.
Nearly nine years ago, a biracial man with the middle name of Hussein and a last name that rhymed with the name of our worst enemy won more votes than anyone else in American history.
He wasn’t perfect in his two terms.
But go back and watch the footage.
He was obviously brilliant. He was almost always cool, calm, and collected. He was fundamentally decent. He changed the way the entire world understood our country.
Yesterday, I spent some time re-watching his most important speeches: The incredible speech he delivered as a candidate titled “A More Perfect Union” about race and reconciliation, the remarks he delivered in Tucson and after Newtown and Charleston, his victory address in Grant Park and his farewell address down the street, and in his final act as President, his stirring and poignant remarks honoring Joe Biden.
This dude was the real thing. His family was the real thing.
They made all of us who weren’t poisoned by racist vitriol feel proud of this country, even those who disagreed with him on certain policies. They transformed the White House into something that felt inclusive and welcoming and occasionally even rad.
But most importantly, that man took his job more seriously than himself. He laughed frequently. He cried when tragedy struck. He danced and sang and did all of the things that decent, normal, well-adjusted human beings do. And somehow, he possessed this enormous reservoir of empathy despite the fact that his critics smeared him – not for what he had actually done- but for who he was and what he looked like.
A black man. Maybe not even a real American. Maybe not a real Christian. Maybe a terrorist sympathizer. Yet he never became indignant about this bullshit. He laughed it off.
Today, the White House is occupied by a mentally unstable man in his seventies who has learned almost everything he knows about politics, government, domestic policy, and foreign affairs from television programs that are sponsored by reverse mortgage companies and people who want to sell you gold bricks. We don’t have a functioning East Wing, because his own wife prefers living in a different city, away from her husband as much as humanly possible.
The rest of the world thinks he’s a madman; the most talented and experienced people here in America wouldn’t even consider working for him; athletes and entire teams don’t want to be even recognized by him at the White House; musicians boycott anything having to do with him, and the media, understandably, is scared to death by a guy who calls them the enemy every chance he gets. Oh, and it’s now plainly obvious that he’s held captive by Vladimir Putin.
Also, the man can barely string together a coherent sentence. He can’t spell. He is too lazy – or maybe too arrogant – to even be bothered to read an actual book or a full intelligence briefing. He’s managed to convince people that he’s smart merely by virtue of the fact that he has money. And the people he convinced of this are clearly right in some respect: He’s definitely smarter than they are.
It’s really stunning. He’s not just comically awful; Donald Trump is an existential threat to the integrity and the sustainability of American democracy.
Less than a month ago, our President was a genuine American patriot, and now, we’re stuck with a paranoid sociopathic trust fund baby with some sort of weird body dysmorphia complex and a worldview that never evolved after his teenage years in an elite military prep school for spoiled rich kids whose parents would rather not have to raise them.
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