My last words on Donald Trump
Alex Ganeev/UMD Statesman
These are harsh political times. Now more than ever, we’re far less willing to reach across the aisle.
However, I am going to try. I won’t lie, I skew liberal on many things, but I grew up on a farm in rural America. I spent five years in the military. My pedigree screams conservative. I know the other side and I know you.
We need to talk about Donald Trump.
I know, I’m one more member of the elitist, crooked media bashing the president. Just hear me out. I have a thought experiment for you.
Imagine seeing these headlines in a newspaper.
“Trump resigns presidency at noon today, urges time of healing.”
“Tearful Trump tells group of clerics, ‘I have sinned.’”
Can you imagine either of those? No, you cannot.
Those are actual headlines. I just replaced Nixon and Clinton with Trump. Two presidents that faced disgrace and admitted their shortfalls.
Trump will never do that. I know that is what some like about him, but that is also the problem.
I want to take us back to January, when the bastion of journalistic credibility Buzzfeed published a story on an unverified dossier that Russia collected compromising information on him. There was an abundance of potentially fascinating information in there, enough that government experts took it as seriously as to brief the president on.
But let’s be honest, we only cared about the part that said he paid prostitutes to urinate on each other.
This story was completely unverified to the point that even the biased, unfair liberal media giant The New York Times doubted it.
So what’s the problem here? The problem is that it doesn’t really matter if it’s unverified.
Even if you are the most die-hard, unwavering Trump supporter, there is no way way you read that and were not completely willing to believe it was true. That is the reality we’ve created, and that reality is terrifying.
Imagine those same accusations leveled at Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of conservatism. Even as someone who skews liberal, that’s unimaginable.
Trump has created a persona that is impossible to defame. We’re talking about the man behind “grab her by the pussy.” If the line wasn’t drawn there, would urinating prostitutes really matter? Would that really be the last straw?
But Trump doesn’t realize that he can’t be defamed. Because if there’s one thing he loves more than rage-tweeting his policy, it’s the court system. Even if he really doesn’t get how the law works.
We’re talking about a man who hired undocumented workers and threatened them with deportation when they asked to be paid, who was accused of marital rape, who misappropriated funds to commission a gold plated statue of himself, and who used campaign finances to buy up copies of his own book to drive up sales.
One of those four things I made up, and now you have to furiously google it because all of those things seem terrifyingly plausible.
Trump has only been president for about a month. He’s already racked up over sixty lawsuits. At this point, he’s basically collecting lawsuits like pokemon.
Eventually, that is going to hit a wall. Trump is no stranger to lawsuits. He’s encountered literally thousands of them as a private citizen. Seriously, his legal history has it’s own wikipedia page. But the key phrase in there is “private citizen.”
See, Trump isn't an idiot. He knows when he can't win. Maybe because he occasionally gets tired of winning.
So you get examples like Trump University, the sham college he set up and settled out of court for $25 million. Which is one of numerous examples of Mr. “I won’t settle out of principle” settling out of rationality.
Only when you are the president, you can’t settle with the American people out of court. So when he hits that wall, something is going to have to give.
Those first two headlines I presented you won’t happen.
The question is, what will?
