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Bankrupt: The Story of Donald Trump

Below is an excerpt from Presidential: America’s Great Non Sequitur by Otis Adams. The paperback is available at Amazon.com. E-mail [email protected] to be notified when the audio book is available.

Buy Presidential by Otis Adams here.

Bankrupt By Otis Adams

President Trump’s ascendance to the White House as a Republican is truly baffling. He is a middling businessman whose success came from inherited wealth, a reprobate by Christian standards, admires the Republican hobgoblin Vladimir Putin, champions the use of tariffs that are typically a tool used by Democrats…and he became the Republican nominee for President of the United States?

The Republican Party is both the party of business and the party of Jesus. This is a peculiar and conflicted marriage on a normal day, but how did Donald Trump become the choice for either group?

God’s Man

Let us begin our two-part investigation into the Trump mystery with those among us who are most prone to singing with closed eyes.

Christians have embraced Trump. If this were not so, he would not be the president. Many seem to do so with the childlike faith that God will excuse their votes if they were cast with a held nose. Others, those with that boundless talent for belief, have elevated Trump to the cast of God-chosen biblical leaders.

Trump has not only reformed the philosophy of the Republican Party, but has done some remodeling work for American protestant Christianity. For instance, President Donald J. Trump has rekindled a bit of the interest Christians once had in the Bible by autographing a few. You too can own your own Trump autographed Bible for $325.

I have written and said for years that we are in the midst of a Second Reformation. Protestants, whose forefathers rebuked the authority of the clergy in favor of the infallible authority of the Bible, are now altogether adrift as they are no longer tethered to the Bible either. Authority now resides with each individual’s interpretation of their own emotions.

This, I am certain, adds to the agility of the historically adaptable faith as there is no way to debate a believer’s beliefs if they don’t know what they are.

The modern Christian’s ignorance of Christianity is not a hindrance to church attendance as an abundance of professed believers can be found serenading the Lord in every American town and city on Sunday mornings.

This newish breed of dingbat is however doing damage to democracy and traditional American ideals and aspirations. The most obvious evidence of this is that Christians elected former game show host and WWE Hall of Famer Donald J. Trump to preside over the United States of America…and afterward shifted blame by claiming this was God’s will.

If Christians are playing by the (Good) book, they are not allowed to be dazzled by the wealth of the wealthy. Their concern is to be the teachings of Jesus. Jesus, who turned over the money changing tables. Jesus, who told the rich man to sell all that he has, give it to the poor, and follow him. Jesus, who said a camel can more easily pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man can enter the gates of Heaven.

Trump’s cupidity, for centuries a disgusting sin in the eyes of Christians, is now a virtue. That the Bible says this love of money is the root of all evil is of no consequence. The Bible is of little concern to the modern confused Christian. Neither do traditional elements of good character cross the mind.

Christians are supposed to favor truth over lies. Yet, they nominated and then voted in the millions for the most prolific liar in the history of the American presidency. His demonstrable lie tally since becoming President recently rocketed past the 13,400 mark.

Christians are meant to be concerned with integrity but deflect any responsibility for handing the reins of power to a scoundrel who repeatedly cheated on his wives with pornographic actresses and nude models.

Instead, they twist and contort their own beliefs in order to make room for Trump. They pervert the New Testament teachings on forgiveness as a free pass to avoid any effort at attempting a virtuous life. They draw tortured equivalencies between Paul of Tarsus and Donald Trump, pretending that infrequent mentions of God in speeches to religious groups is not bald pandering, but a sinner striving to repent and get right with his maker. They circulate false equivalencies with Trump playing the role of King David and Stormy Daniels being a breast-augmented version of Bathsheba, apparently substituting Trump’s lies and cover up of the affair for David’s repentance and dead son.

I was shocked when I first heard a variation of the argument that the President of the United States needn’t be a Boy Scout to get the job done. I have since heard this a couple dozen times from Christians I went to church with growing up, who now divorce integrity, accountability, and moral fortitude from the list of qualifications for leadership.

In another vertigo-inducing example my 60-year-old mother, who has gone to church for 60 of her 60 years, describes herself as a “Trump girl”. I tried to tell her some of the scandalous things Trump has said and she scolded me for using that language in her house. I showed her the nude photos America’s First Lady posed for and she said, “Well, she is a really pretty lady.”

I keep waiting to hear a Rod Serling voiceover emanating from the heavens as he explains my plight in the Twilight Zone.

In an effort to lend a hand to those confused Christians I find using social media, I’ll review the story in which Jesus said the one without sin could cast the first stone. This was the scene in which Jesus was writing in the dirt, deep in thought about something else as I recall. The neighborhood watch dragged a woman over to Jesus and accused her of adultery and asked something along the lines of, “Hey, you want us to start throwing rocks at her?” Jesus then somewhat encouraged the Socratic tenet of living an examined life by requiring the rock hurlers be sinless.

The point Jesus was trying to get across was that throwing rocks at an adulteress until she’s dead was not an equitable response to her actions. We might intuit that violence is a poor answer to another’s mistakes. It is also fair to glean, from this and other New Testament scenes, that Jesus wanted us to look at our own motivations and actions before examining others.

However, he absolutely was not suggesting that a person’s character is meaningless and we should make the adulteress the leader of the free world.

The cognitive shenanigans American Christians are willing to engage in to scoot their belief in God aside to make room enough for Trump causes me to wonder if they actually buy into those claimed beliefs. If they truly think they will stand before God one day and explain why they granted power to this man, twisting Biblical teachings to do so, and making him an example for an entire generation of children.

Surely arguments of ending abortion would fall short before such a judge as all the other Republican candidates were pro-life. Winning the Supreme Court for conservatives is another whimpering effort as Marco Rubio is unlikely to have nominated Bob Dillon and Gloria Steinem as replacement justices if he had won the Presidency.

Hillary Clinton was the most beatable Democratic nominee in my lifetime and American Christians had several candidates to choose from to go and do it. Without Christian support, Trump could not have won the nomination. After getting him nominated, Christians then maneuvered to the position that it was a choice between two evils and Trump was the lesser of them, clumsily trying to shed responsibility for making him the nominee.

Instead of acting as armor, the faith of American Christians was somehow transmuted into a religious faith in Trump. It is almost as though being people of faith made them vulnerable to Trump, priming them to believe in the unbelievable. They support Trump with disembodied faith that is no longer coupled with the traditional morality of the religion in which it was born.

There is a growing bit of data to support this notion that the faithful are more gullible than the faithless, though the report card doesn’t look great for either class.

The number of Americans who can’t discern fact from opinion or something that’s known from something believed is staggering. Millions of people who grew up going to American schools and living in towns and cities with public libraries have opted not to gather any of the logic skills that have been within arm’s reach their entire lives. Instead, knowing something has become the finish line for belief rather than an entirely separate category. Regardless, knowing something does not mean believing it a whole lot.

Pew Research Center findings suggest that American adults would benefit a great deal from asking a second grade teacher for a few of those worksheets where you circle facts and underline opinions. Only about a quarter of American adults could successfully identify the five factual statements among the list of ten they were asked to look at. For those who do not trust the media’s honesty, the number falls to 18%.

The confusion Americans have over the definitions of fact and opinion were brought into the light by the research. It shows, with overwhelming clarity, that believers are ravaged by the disease of the brain called Confirmation Bias. They set up their conclusion first, then they call information they find supportive of that conclusion a fact while counterevidence is, at best, an opinion.

This perversion of faith is evident among most of the Christians I know and even the preachers who are televised on Sunday mornings. Never mind the small scolding Jesus gave Thomas for seeking evidence, or the Bible’s repeated dismissal of knowledge and exaltation of faith. Never mind that if something is knowable there is no option for belief, only acknowledgment. These Second Reformation Christians have broken away from the authority of the Bible as Protestants broke with the clergy. They instead give their own interpretation of their own emotions at any given moment the dizzying authority of the true word and will of God. As the Bible falls out of fashion for American Christians, so too does the value of faith – or even the understanding of what the word means. Instead, they will say, without hesitation, that they know this or that about God and his will.

The faith a third of American’s have in Donald Trump is akin to deity worship in some ways. Anything Trump does is good by virtue of Trump having been the one to do it. Any reporting of his misdeeds is viewed as the enemy of the deity trying to confuse his loyal followers, as Satan confused Eve, and should be met with plugged ears and closed eyes. The faithful await word from the deity’s spokesperson, Pope Sarah Huckabee Sanders so that they can hear and memorize the words of the deity and go forth and multiply, repeating Trump’s teachings throughout the day to non-believers. If he says something that sounds bad, the flock will work together to explain what he meant by what he said, and it’s sure to be something good. If a longtime Republican politician opposes Trump, they’re RINO heretics. Anyone who disagrees with Trumpians are guilty of persecuting the flock.

Republican leadership has discovered that repurposed Christian faith is a useful leash for millions of voters. While some of these faithful are only people of average intelligence with a talent for willful self-delusion, it is also evident that there must be many millions of Americans with a genuine inability to distinguish truth from lie, fact from opinion, or reliable source from unreliable. Nothing is gained from, and there’s something vicious about, mocking this latter group. While the willfully self-deluded earn the bruising quips sent their way, a person without the ability to do the job should be offered patience and sympathy.

Let’s run through a few examples of how faith has been used as a tool for manipulating voters.

In 2012 the Associated Press conducted a survey that revealed that more than 40% of Americans believed the new health care bill included death panels. The basis for this belief was a claim made by Reverend Sarah Palin, who invented an Orwellian Democratic scheme to create a panel of folks who would be in charge of whether to kill elderly parents or children with developmental disabilities in order to save on medical costs.

Before becoming President, Trump himself made enormous political headway by yanking on that faith leash as he championed the lie that President Obama is not a citizen of the United States. In the lie’s heyday, about three-quarters of Republicans either agreed or weren’t sure. Over 40% of Republicans still believed Obama was secretly a Muslim in 2015.

Millions of Republican voters believe that Hillary Clinton had a side-gig of running a child sex ring out of a pizzeria basement in Washington D.C. Trump, as the conspiracy theory goes, quietly began the heroic work of taking down these sex rings and bringing the celebrities and democrats responsible to justice immediately after taking office!

These are good examples of believing on faith alone as twenty minutes of research, supposing common sense did not dismiss the absurd claims immediately, would reveal facts dispelling the lies above. Instead, they take their preacher’s word on it and see evidence to the contrary as stumbling blocks placed in their paths by the great deceiver, the mainstream media.

Christians have butted heads with science for centuries, since evidence-based discoveries began disproving elements of papal teachings. This became another handy vulnerability for the Christian’s party mates, the businessmen, to exploit. As the leadership in corporations that make money off things that cause harmful emissions started to get nervous, they found the solution of sending out Christian soldiers to roll their eyes at Global Warming any time it snows. Beleaguered climate scientists, aware that this misunderstanding was more likely mischief than ignorance, began using the term Climate Change.

When I was in high school their position was that Global Warming was not taking place at all. Christians, with their marching orders, repeated this wholeheartedly in their daily lives. A few years later this argument began sounding so absurd that the pundits shifted to the idea that maybe Global Warming was happening but it wasn’t any more caused by mankind than the last ice age. Christians broke into new denominations. Some held the line while others fell back to the new trench and pretended they had been there all along.

The new position that’s popular today is that Global Warming is probably taking place, and maybe human activity has slightly contributed, but we have passed the tipping point and should not do anything that risks the economy in the name of a problem that needed action twenty years ago… back when they said it wasn’t real.

The eager faith of American Christians and their predilection for opposing scientific discoveries when they move too closely to things that are believed made them a useful tool for the business side of the party. When the decision was to either acknowledge the findings of a staggering number of scientific studies or believe a few conservative radio and TV talk show hosts, they chose the latter without hesitation. They were well prepared to believe in often ridiculous lies about the opposing party while ignoring glaring truths about Trump.

Those Christians who want to collapse the separation of Church and State should recognize this separation is not in place only to protect the state. American Christianity could not even survive, in any recognizable form, after mingling with a single political party. Instead, they lost themselves.

Christians are mandated to have compassion for the poor, though they have become sycophants of the rich. Christians ought to feel an empathic pain when they see a toddler pulled from his mother’s arms at the border as an added deterrent for illegal immigration, though they shrug and call them criminals. Christians are meant to insist that leaders be devoted husbands, free of the filth of greed, not prideful, above reproach, honest, good tempered, patient, kind, and charitable.

Unfortunately, American Christians have abandoned their post.

A Modern-Day Vanderbilt

As we rang in the New Year, 2019, the stock market was plummeting. The American government entered a shutdown for the third time in a year, a feat that had not been accomplished for decades. The national debt reached its highest mark in the history of the nation. Trump had been President for 24 months.

Trump’s reputation as a self-made billionaire who rose to the top thanks to the buoyancy of his business genius is mostly a fiction manufactured by him. Donald Trump has reportedly been the longtime clown prince of America’s wealthy since the 1980’s, often the butt of jokes at parties on yachts where I imagine women smoke cigarettes in those Cruella de Vil cigarette things and men exchange tips on how to improve their croquet games. Among America’s top businessmen, Trump was a punchline.

Trump’s business acumen is only impressive to those who are ignorant of his record beyond what they have read on magazine covers. Often, he made it into those magazines through self-promotion and a bit of trickery.

John Barron is one of the characters Trump would play to promote himself in telephone calls to reporters and columnists. (Trump’s alias John Miller was in charge of calling gossip magazines.) This alter-ego can be heard in taped recordings talking to Forbes reporter John Greenberg in an effort to get Trump on the magazine’s list of richest Americans. Trump had been lobbying to get on the list since its inception a few years before and winced as it reported his wealth as being a fraction of what he had been boasting publicly. Even so, Trump’s smoke and mirrors apparently benefitted him as the magazine determined he had $100 million. Greenberg says that he now regrets the mistake as new research proves that at the time Trump had about $5 million.

On a side note, the choice of creating an alter-ego named Barron gives some insight on Trump’s psyche. Perhaps he sees himself as a baron from feudal times in Europe or a cattle baron from the 19th century American West. In any event, he likes the name well enough to give it to himself when prank calling magazines and he gave the name to his youngest son as well.

Trump wanted to be thought of as an American billionaire, regardless of having $5 million. “Fake it until you make it,” might be a good credo for the Donald. The tactic he used was to try and confuse reporters as to how much of his father’s wealth now belonged to him. While Trump privately tried to convince magazines that he owned what belonged to his father, he publicly pushed the idea that his father gave him a small loan to get him started, but the rest of his success was well-earned.

By the 1990’s Trump was in fact extremely rich. He gained an enormous amount of wealth by joining with his siblings to create a fake corporation, its purpose being to, “disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents,” The New York Times reported. He also helped dear old Dad evade millions of dollars in taxes by lying about the value of assets they held and advising the old man to take deductions illegally. The tax fraud saved the Trumps more than $500 million.

Donald Trump deftly played this shell game, wanting the public to think he was a self-made billionaire due to his swashbuckling brilliance in crafting deals, trying to convince magazines he was super-rich because he inherited daddy’s real estate empire, and telling the IRS he was living paycheck to paycheck.

His mischief paid off though. In today’s dollars, Trump was able to leach off over $400 million from his father’s empire to keep for himself.

While Trump has had business successes, his numerous failures keep him off the list of the great businessmen he wants the public to believe he is the champion of.

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney provided a damning list of failures in his famous speech urging his party to choose a more qualified nominee in 2016. He said, “But you say, wait. Isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about? No, he isn’t and no he doesn’t. His bankruptcies have crushed small businesses and the men and women who work for them. He inherited his business. He didn’t create it. And whatever happened to Trump Airlines? How about Trump University? And then there’s Trump Magazine, and Trump Vodka, and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage. A business genius he is not.”

How the Republicans morphed from the party that nominated the upright Romney in 2012 into the one who nominated the degenerate Trump in 2016 is baffling, but the former champion of the GOP was swiftly villainized by Republicans for truthfully reciting Trump’s resume. His loyalty to Republican policies and commitment to ideals of at least attempting to have strong character were rewarded with accusations of being a traitor.

Trump’s philosophy in life is that reality is the story he presents and truth does not exist. Trump acolyte Kellyanne Conway revealed these teachings as she told Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd about, “alternative facts”. That Trump successfully sold himself as a modern day Vanderbilt, Carnegie, or Rockefeller to those voters enamored by the rich might unfortunately prove his philosophy of deceit as a workable path to success. He was awarded the nomination over far more qualified Republican candidates.

It is part of Trump’s standard operating procedures to boast, even about failures. His loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton is an example. There he claimed voter fraud, without any evidence. Without this imaginary voter fraud, he would have won with record-breaking numbers. His approach to business is much the same as he describes his bankruptcies as just smart business decisions that are commonly made by high rollers such as himself. To support my claim that he is nothing more than a middling businessman whose success relied upon inheriting much of his father’s vast wealth, let’s look more closely at these bankruptcies.

Tax records revealed in 2019 that Trump took a billion dollar loss between 1985 and 1994. From 1990 to 1991 he was number one in the country in losses, more than doubling the hit taken by the nation’s second biggest loser. As with the bankruptcies, Trump dismissed the story as smart business decisions that common people would not understand.

What is a bit more difficult to dismiss is that in 1990 Trump’s hotels, casinos, and airline were performing so poorly that they could not even cover the interest owed to the dozens of banks who loaned the future president money. For Trump this could have meant bankruptcy. Lucky for Trump though, it also would have meant heavy losses for those banks. The banks decided to loan him another $65 million to keep him from missing his payment deadlines. One cost of the loan was that Trump had to surrender managing control of his companies to the banks, who expected that Trump would spend the time they bought him to sell enough of his properties to pay them back.

Even after all this, Trump’s three casinos filed for bankruptcy. The Plaza Hotel had to do the same in 1992 and the banks took many of his remaining assets. Trump would have had to file personal bankruptcy, damaging the fiction he was presenting to the public during these years, but the banks worked with him and his father gave him money to prevent it.

It was because of these enormous failures that Trump was locked out of the big business deals he had been attempting. Instead, he began selling his name. The lie he had been telling about his legendary business genius somehow endured these setbacks that would have been crippling had his father not saved him. He has been selling that lie ever since.

RINO

The typical routine for candidates in both parties used to be to drift toward the extreme side of your party to get the nomination because that is where those eager enough to vote in primaries lived. Then the job for running for president was truly a race back toward the center, where most Americans lived, before the election.

When I was a kid, my neighbors had a two-party household. My father, raised by a democrat mother and republican father, was a republican and my mother went along with it without having any real partisan convictions I can recall at that time. Even so, we frequently got visits from my mother’s democrat friend and her pro-union husband. My dad would grumble, “Those people are idiots,” before they arrived, and then for the next three hours I would watch television while they played cards at the kitchen table. In those days, my home state earned its nickname as the Show-Me State because neither political party had Missouri in its pocket. The nominees had to prove themselves.

Those days have gone, though I hope not forever.

Today, the parties have moved so far apart that the distance naturally creates more distance. It used to be that a president could expect his fellow party mates in Congress to support him 60-70% of the time. By the time of Obama’s presidency that party loyalty was closer to 90%, and has topped 90% with Trump. The once commonplace pro-life Democrat, for example, is now seen as repugnant by both parties and is quickly shamed into compliance or shunned – as religious communities often deal with heretics.

Being in the political center is now mocked by newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who frames having centrist views as a symptom of having no convictions about America’s future.

The right also pushes this fiction that the greatness of your patriotism will be shown by how extreme your political views are. Conservatives shame people away from the center in many ways, but one of them is with the term RINO. This stands for republican in name only.

Once some tipping point in recent decades was reached, the widening of the partisan divide took on some characteristics of a perpetual motion machine. If Republicans took a step to the right, Democrats took a step to the left. Each time one party moved farther from the center, the other party responded in kind.

Center-left and center-right voters find few options. If you considered yourself a Democrat but voted for Ronald Reagan, you still voted for someone who agreed with you on about 80% of the issues. To cross over now might mean voting for someone who disagrees with you on 80% of the issues that are important to you because politicians are fleeing from the center.

This divide and team sports mentality means that voters are no longer considering the character of the person running for office as they once did. Instead, they are more and more voting for their team, regardless of the individual wearing the jersey. The party leads the people.

There are several popular explanations for how the Republican Party went against its own established principles to nominate Trump, and then how the nation went on to elect him. They range from angry voters trying to teach Washington D.C. a lesson to angry voters trying to tell Democrats to get back to helping the working person. These are not robust enough explanations to satisfy, and I am afraid I will not be offering my own guess.

I will say, however, that in 2016 the Republican Party chose a RINO as their nominee. This indicates to me that it is not only agreement with a nominee that leads to their winning the White House, but that voters’ revulsion toward that nominee’s opponent that motivates. To put it more directly, voters have become so saturated with the poison of partisan loyalty that they were going to the polls to vote against Clinton, which they would have done no matter who her opponent was.

My calling Trump a RINO does not mean that I consider him a centrist. He is not genuinely left, center, or right politically – and at the same time he has been each of these things over the course of his life. He is whatever works. If Trump had seen a clearer path to becoming president as a Stalin Communist, he would have told his people to find Ivan Drago and talk him into being his running mate.

By calling him a RINO, I am just saying that he won the Republican nomination, but does not keep with long held Republican ideals. By this point, it would likely be more accurate to say that the party itself has shifted to meet Trump, transforming its claimed ideals so that it can fit around the president.

There was a movement of a sort when it began to look as if Trump might be the nominee. These Republicans called themselves Never Trumpers. This amounted to an enormous portion of established Republican politicians when it seemed like a safe bet that he would never become president. After he became president, the Never Trump movement lost a lot of momentum, but many soldier on in defense of what the GOP was before Trump.

From time to time a petition or letter signed by a few dozen preachers standing up to Trump will make the news, but they have little lasting impact. Christians who are not moved by immigrants having their children taken away from them and held in detention centers are not likely to feel their spirits stirred by a petition.

One effort from a Christian magazine did hold a spot in the headlines for a few days. Christianity Today, held in high regard by some believers because of its ties to the late Billy Graham, published a very clear rebuke of Trump concerning his impeachment.

“The typical Christianity Today approach is to stay above the fray and allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square… (We want to be) a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and remind everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being… But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral. The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationships with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone – with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders – is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”

It did not take long for most Christians to forget the article, though it was an overdue stance from a significant Christian periodical and the magazine should be proud to have taken it.

The National Review is the conservative magazine that taught Ronald Reagan Reaganomics. It is safe to say that when they took their early stance against Trump being nominated to lead the party, they believed they still held a good deal of influence over voters. As they tried to draw comparisons between Trump and Obama, it seems that not many were listening.

The rise of Trump also marks the moment the main body of Republican voters broke with Republican intellectuals. This could hardly have come as a surprise to those intellectuals. The growing disdain for experts on the far right as well as the spreading virus of baseless hubris among those voters had been obvious to anyone paying attention. These are the voters who know more about current events than the press. They understand climate science better than climate scientists. Their Google-powered research makes their conclusions about vaccines more valid than that of the world’s community of medical doctors. Their opinions are stronger than facts and their beliefs can withstand any evidence. What use could such a group as the far right have for conservative thinkers like George Will when they have emotion and intuition to guide them?

Susan B. Glasser wrote an interesting article for the New Yorker in March, 2020 following the efforts of Never Trump Republican Sarah Longwell. In part, the article describes some of the organized groups attempting to hold to traditional Republican principles, and how their disobedience infuriates the president who warns, “Watch out for them, they are human scum!” Longwell’s hope is to build a coalition of the center and she hopes that Joe Biden can represent this. Her hope beyond this is that, as after the Nixon debacle, the Republican Party can take the following four years to redefine itself.

After Trump was the nominee, Longwell began feeling very lonely as her allies hopped over the line to join the New Republican Party. As the 2020 Presidential Election grows near, Longwell has found allies like George Conway and the Lincoln Project, and continues trying to make her case to likely voters.

The aroma of petrichor is in the air as signs of a rejuvenating rain begin to mount. The avalanche of Trump’s scandals and embarrassments seem to vex reasonable Republicans who ignored them two years ago. The very early polls suggest that Joe Biden could win comfortably against Trump in November, in part because he is not reviled by the right in the way Hillary Clinton is, and so his nomination may not ignite the same fire in Republicans.

If the historical mistake of Donald Trump is corrected in November, we should keep in mind that the 30% of Americans who make up his base will remain. They are the ones who showed themselves in a poll released yesterday, in which 70% of Americans were in favor of mail-in voting for November’s Presidential Election in order to protect lives from Covid-19. The remaining 30% are not moved by the elderly poll workers who are distressed by the idea of risking their lives. Instead, they either understand that the fewer people allowed to vote, the better Trump’s chances for re-election, or else they are so gullible that they can be manipulated by claims of mail-in ballots leading to a rigged election absent any evidence.

People who are happy to undermine American Democracy, whether it be through the meddling of a foreign government or homespun ways to keep people from voting, have likely always been around but were too weakly organized to derail America. Supposing Biden does win over the financially and morally bankrupt Trump, we will still have to wait to see if the reasonable center has been restored well enough to dominate the extremes in a lasting way.

The checks and balances built into the foundations of our government by our Founding Fathers have remained intact, though they have been damaged in the Trump years. It is naïve to take for granted that American Democracy will endure no matter how irresponsible the American people. We have been reminded many times throughout our history that America is an experiment that can either succeed or fail. America can only continue unbroken if each generation keeps it until passing it to the next.

The adults in the center must regain control of the children on the edges or our future might read like Lord of the Flies.

#Donald Trump #Otis Adams #Presidential book #Presidential: America's Great Non Sequitur #Christians #2020 Election #Mitt Romney #RINO #The Lincoln Project #Presidential Quotes

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