THE ELEPHANT, THE ROOM, AND THE PEOPLE
PART II

To use the immortal words of President Gerald Ford, “Our long national nightmare is over.” Well, almost. At the time of this writing, there are nineteen more days to live through until the Presidential election. And if the Ecuadoran embassy in London—where he has been holed up for the past several years to escape the Swedish government which wishes to charge him with sexual assault (and isn’t that an interest factoid?)—maintains its recent chokehold on Julian Assange’s internet access, perhaps we might even cease being regaled with dump truckloads of Wikileak’s hacked Democratic emails as well. For some reason, those Republican emails have just been too tough for folks to get to, but that’s another matter entirely.

By now we have heard a great deal from Donald Trump and his hapless apologist in chief Melania. To whit:

     He was egged on in making his lewd and insulting comments about women by Billy Bush and anyway those comments weren’t lewd at all, according to Melania. They were only “boy talk.”

     The women who accused him of sexual assault are women he has never even met, despite one of them being on The Apprentice and another being a journalist from People Magazine who had gone to his home to interview both him and his pregnant wife.

     He has two hundred generals, he told us at the last debate. I’m not sure what he meant when he said this although he did go on to assert that “twenty-one of them have endorsed [him].”

     “Bad hombres” are coming through the porous border (presumably from Mexico since he called them hombres and, for heaven’s sake, what Canadian in her right mind would want to pull up stakes and move to this country?)

     Since women can, right now, have abortions “right up to their due dates,” he will appoint only anti-choice Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe versus Wade as their first order of business, apparently.

     Although he has never met him, he knows for a fact that Putin “has no respect” for Hillary Clinton. Neither apparently has Assad, although Mr. Trump has not met him either.

     Disaster is his favorite word. Obamacare is a disaster, the Middle East is a disaster, the trade agreements are a disaster, the economy is a disaster, Pennsylvania and Michigan and Ohio are disasters, the inner cities are disasters. The climate is apparently not a disaster, nor is his record as a business man: 3500 lawsuits in 30 years; 4 bankruptcies; a court order in May to foreclose on Trump National Doral Miami for Trump’s refusal to pay $30,000 he owed a painting contractor; an audit revealing that on the Taj Mahal project, Mr. Trump owed $69.5 million to 253 contractors; lawsuits for refusal to pay filed by dishwashers in Florida, a glass company in New York, a carpet company, plumbers, painters, 48 waiters, dozens of bartenders, real estate brokers, and even the lawyers who handled his lawsuits filed by people who weren’t paid by Trump.

     Although the money returned to Iran a few months ago was Iran’s money that had been frozen in the US for years, it was actually $6 billion of taxpayers’ dough that Obama handed over to the Iranian government.

     Although 60% of the voting public wants sensible gun laws, Mr. Trump wants every man, woman, and child to be allowed to carry a weapon. And, of course, the NRA has endorsed him.

     Hillary Clinton is responsible for:
          Women coming forward to accuse Mr Trump of sexual assault
ISIS
          The wars in the Middle East although the ball got rolling under that swaggering man for all seasons of pocket lining: Dick Cheney
          The US Tax Code
          NAFTA
          Mr. Trump’s slithering out of paying taxes
          Voter Fraud
          The Violence at Trump rallies
          The Civil War in Syria
          Police shootings of African Americans
          Every death in Chicago
          His standing in the polls
          The falsity of those polls

I have probably forgotten something, but whatever ill the country suffers, the economy suffers, the world suffers, or you as an individual suffer, feel free to add it to the list since Hillary is probably involved in some way.

In these final days before the election, where we are is not, unfortunately, at a crossroads. We were at a crossroads many, many months ago when the moguls behind the network news media faced a critical decision: They had a choice between increasing their profits or maintaining (or in some cases developing) journalistic integrity. Choosing journalistic integrity would have meant diving into every claim made by Mr. Trump and holding his feet to the fire over every lie he told, including the “thousands of Muslims” he saw “celebrating in the street” when the Twin Towers came down. Choosing profits, however, meant that no matter what Mr. Trump said, the journalists wouldn’t go for his throat and the news would keep its focus on him—rather than on any of his boring GOP challengers—because people would watch if the stories were endlessly about the latest Trump outrage, and viewers meant money for the network. So at that crossroads, the choice was made. From that time we have traveled a route along which nothing at all has mattered and at which truth has been sacrificed for “entertainment”: ugly comments about people’s appearance or their ethnicity or their religious faith or their weight, pledges to pay for the attorneys of anyone who was arrested for punching out a protester, mockery of the disabled, joking about his sexual exploits during the Vietnam War, talking about the size of his penis, tweeting insults, belittling opponents with offensive soubriquets, having “secret plans” to defeat Isis, having no other plans save a plan to build a wall. That is the road we’ve been on for months and now we face the brick wall toward which we have been hurtling at breakneck speed:

Mr. Trump has said that he just doesn’t know if he’s going to support the results of the election (unless he wins, of course). Mr. Trump has said he’ll just “keep you in suspense” about that.

If we set aside the political weeping and gnashing of teeth that has gone on since Mr. Trump made this statement at the final debate, we can take a look at what his words actually tell us. They tell us the worst, I’m afraid. They tell us that the last thing Donald Trump can stand or will ever stand is to be ignored or to be deemed irrelevant. We have seen that he does not care if he is found out to be a fraud. He does now care if people know that he hired illegal immigrants to work for him so that he could pay them less when he paid them at all. He does not care that he has been outed for not paying taxes for at least the last 17 years. He does not care that he’s been unveiled as a sexual deviant who must prey on women to bolster his faltering self-esteem. He does not care if the nation knows that he bilked hundreds of people out of their hard-earned money so that they could attend “Trump University” which turned out to offer them nothing at all. He does not care if the world has seen him humiliate his wife and his daughters. What he cares about is garnering attention, and should he lose the election and then concede it with good grace, the attention he hungers for wanes and ultimately disappears. For as we know and have seen time and again, losers do not get attention…unless they lose with a degree of bad grace that will keep them front and center in the public eye.

Donald Trump is not a narcissist. He is a bottomless pit of need. Public attention of any sort meets that need, but only for as long as the public attention is just that: public and entirely focused upon him. Thus, Donald Trump is not intending to go gentle into the goodnight of this election. Indeed, he is not intending to go gentle into the goodnight of anything at all. Going away, crawling back into the sewer from which he emerged, disappearing onto a remote island, locking himself in his gilded penthouse…None of this is going to happen. We are stuck with him until he draws his last breath. We can try to make him irrelevant by handing him the worst defeat a candidate for President has ever seen. But I doubt even that will do much good. We own this one, and the world knows it.

- Elizabeth George
Whidbey Island
Washington State