Donald Trump and the Unravelling of America

Donald Trump is starting to panic. He can see the writing on the wall, and he now realizes that he is heading for defeat in November. 

So he is now trying to buy votes anyway he can, and promising that only he can make America great again.

But it's a little, or a lot too late for that.

For as the anthropologist Wade Davis writes, the unravelling of America began long before Trump. He is the product of that decline not the cause.

And Covid-19 has only made that hard truth impossible to ignore.  

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.”

And it is a hard truth.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

As is the ugly fact that those who believe that worshipping a flag is a sign of strength, are only fooling themselves.

Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.

Just like they failed to understand that by electing a man like Trump for President, they were not making America greater, they were only hammering another nail into the coffin of their dying country.

One shudders to think of what it will mean to the world if Americans in November, knowing all that they do, elect to keep such a man in political power. But even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.

Wade Davis who lives in Canada, has some nice things to say about our country.

But what he doesn't say is that Canada and its values are under attack from our own Trump-like Cons.

And that if we do not defeat them, and bury them in the garbage can of history.

We too could lose everything, and regret it forever...