This morning, I woke up to see that the Outgoing President had tweeted this:
While this may lose me followers, I think it’s time I addressed this outside of the limited framework of social media.
While I’m probably more positive on President Elect Joe Biden & Vice President Elect Kamala Harris than some, my priority wasn’t so much getting them into the White House as it was getting Trump out.
Now we can argue about the merits of my opinion another time but for now, I feel I need to outline my perception, so hopefully some of Trump supporters finally get why 80,000,000 votes for Biden isn’t some unfathomable shock.
Full disclosure: I didn’t much care for Trump before his election and I wasn’t very enamored with him prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With that said, I’m pretty pragmatic about these things and I’m intellectually honest enough to know that there’s plenty I don’t know.
The Trump supporters I know, insisted that even though they may not like everything he says or the way he conducts himself, they felt he was doing a great job of running the country.
When COVID appeared on the horizon, my position & attitude changed. In times of crisis, you set politics aside and come together as a nation, or so I thought. I even mused that we’d finally get to really see what Trump in action looks like. His leadership skills and ability to organize and run the country would be front and center. No more speculation about approach or political policy: we’re all involved in this so his talents would be laid bare.
I even had to admit that COVID might be a silver lining for him. If he turned out to he the guy his supporters claimed and knocked this out of the park, that could amount to a lot of votes.
So, understanding we were headed into a crisis, wanting to do my part, to get the latest information, the outlook, the instructions as to what my personal responsibilities would be, I started religiously watching his press briefings.
It didn’t take too long for me to reach the conclusion that far from his followers being right about him, he was justifying my concerns about him. It wasn’t too much longer before I reached the conclusion that I hadn’t been concerned enough.
What I perceived before me was not a strong leader, doing all he could to keep his country safe but a weird, incompetent, calloused man whose concerns were squarely focused on what this pandemic meant for him.
At the start, he acted like this was no big deal, playing it down as something mainly happening elsewhere, that he’d kept at bay by restricting travel from China. We had 15 cases and soon they’d be nearly zero, despite the numbers coming from Italy suggesting otherwise.
I recall thinking “Bollocks… it’ll be 200 by the end of the week”. I was right.
He speculated that the summer heat would make it go away, that people could have it and still go to work. He whined on television about people leaving a COVID-infested cruise ship because it would add to the number of cases tabulated for the US and he liked the numbers where they were.
Mere days before the initial lockdown, he was tweeting that we have 40k deaths from flu each year and that we didn’t lock down for that, yet we only have 545 cases of COVID and 22 deaths.
Then once the situation was so dire that he could no longer deny it, he did a bad Winston Churchill imitation with his “Wartime President” fighting “an invisible enemy” speech.
His press briefings were laced with every form of misinformation from boldfaced lies to incompetent errors. Who could forget him contradicting his own health experts as they gave a realistic outlook on testing by claiming anyone can get a test? Or the time he sent panicked people flocking to airports when he erroneously stated that there was a total ban on travel from Europe?
What truly distrubed me though, as the weeks rolled on, wasn’t so much the idiotic things he would say but the way the tone seemed to shift based on what he felt would best serve him. As I said above, he played it all down before the initial wave, gave his big rallying call when he could deny it no longer, then swiftly switched to supporting protests against the lockdown and health and safety measures.
He vacillated between saying he supported masks and social distancing and complaining about them. He paradoxically bounced between claims that he held authority over state governors and that COVID cases in Democrat states were the governors fault. When early test kits were found to be broken, he put the blame on the CDC, when testing was instituted and widespread, suddenly “they” became “we” and “we” were doing a great job. Then there was his effort to pass the buck entirely by trying to supplant the colloquial terms for the pandemic “COVID”,”COVID-19″ and “Coronavirus” with the “Chy-Na Virus”.
If there was any doubt about his penchant for passing blame and claiming the credit, you only need look at his attitude to the virus as a whole, when the RNC talked about the ongoing pandemic in the past tense. He and his party waxed lyrical about how he’d beaten it all. At the time of writing, we’re seeing daily deaths between one and two thousand in the US.
Of course, there is so much more I could go back over. Everytime you thought he’d reached his lowest point, he’d spectacularly prove you wrong. His tweet prior to being released from hospital during his own bout of the disease was a staggeringly irresponsible claim that this disease was nothing to worry about.
His attitude to protests was to be draconian. His approach to the coming election was to hold mass rallies of thousands of people where his tone on masks, lockdown and social distancing went from wishy-washy, vague claims of support, to outright complaint and mockery.
By now, it seemed pretty clear to me; this guy didn’t care about American lives. Not Democrats, Republicans, his base, even his colleagues as he swanned around events, mingling and unmasked knowing he’d secretly just tested positive.
Then you look back and remember all the comments that verged on xenophobia, his cruel approach to asylum and immigration, his Muslim travel ban, and an attitude towards the checks and balances meant to hold him accountable, as a scarce inconvenience that need only be ignored.
Oh and appointing an Attorney General that seemed to share his Unitarian attitude that as President, he should have ultimate power.
Making it scarier, is the fact that there’s certainly a ton of stuff I’ve left out and even forgotten, so vast is his array of problematic moments (I haven’t even touched on his attempts to obstruct the Mueller investigation or his impeachment).
So basically, when I looked at this man prior to casting my vote, I perceived somebody who is willing to let virtually anyone die if it gets him closer to his aims, who has a flagrant disregard for his own accountability, believes he is owed full control over government & even states, isn’t shy about using force to quell protests or even get a photo op outside a church and dedicates a huge amount of time to delegitimizing any section of the media that criticizes him, even if they’ve generally backed him.
That’s without mentioning the fact that white supremacy has been emboldened by his careless rhetoric.
So there you have it: whether you agree with my assessment or not, my vote against Trump is based almost entirely on the view that I see him as a dangerous wannabe despot, who doesn’t care about my life and the way he’s throwing tons of shit at the wall in a bid to overturn an election he lost just reinforces that opinion.
There are many like me and if you remain in any way confused as to why this assessment of Trump wouldn’t have us heading to the poles in droves, then you’re either stupid or wilfully ignorant.
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