Destroying the Presidency Itself

Beyond his insane 'policies,' Donald Trump is ruining a sacred institution

A few years ago, I was working with a distinguished biochemist, a man with dozens of patents, on his autobiography. He had grown up in what they used to call a rock-ribbed Republican family in a semi-rural part of New York state. When he was not quite seven, he came home from school to find his mother crying.

“President Roosevelt died today,” she told her little son. Bewildered, he said “but we’re Republicans!” His mother responded, “Yes, but he was President of our country.” What we often forget is that in America, the president is both the top figure in government and the head of state. In Great Britain, for example, the King or Queen is head of state no matter which party is running the government.

But here, the roles are combined. Even the weakest presidents have understood this, and known that they must transcend partisanship, that there is something eternal and sacred and mysterious about sitting where Washington and Lincoln and the Roosevelts sat.

Donald Trump is no more capable of understanding, much less caring about that, than is the bacterium that causes fatal syphilis. The level of corruption I’m talking about goes far beyond money under the table. The New York Times makes its share of mistakes, but is still the best newspaper in the world, and its lead story on Memorial Day documented and chronicled something not even imaginable before.

“The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas business deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch,” which you pay the Trumps $500,000 just to join, according to “Trump Blares Profits, Eliciting Barely a Peep,” a story written by highly respected veteran reporter Peter Baker.

The biggest scandal, however, is not the money-grubbing by this loathsome band of grifters, but that nobody seems to care. Once, all of Washington went nuts over rumors that Hillary Clinton made a few thousand investing in cattle futures. (She actually hadn’t.) Now. the grifter-in-chief is skimming off untold and perhaps unimaginable sums in “the most brazen use of government office in American history.”

And his voters, and the Republicans in Congress, seemingly couldn’t care less.

Someday, Trump will be gone. But can we ever get back our country’s soul? Even the most depraved drug-addled prostitute can sometimes be reformed, but they can never become a virgin again. The honorable ideas that our Constitution has stood for since 1787, and a centuries-old standard of behavior, and the aura surrounding the most powerful position in history, have been contemptuously destroyed.

I have no idea whether we can ever get our America back. I only know we must try.

But I do know that if you still support Donald Trump, you are either abysmally stupid, unable to tell right from wrong, and make that essentially guilty of the worst kind of treason against your country and mankind’s future.

And you poor fools don’t even realize that it will be you, not him, shelling out the 30 pieces of silver.

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