Our President Is A Monster

On Wednesday night, after I'd written much of the Weekend Update that I just posted, I realized again that I'd again fallen into the same trap we almost necessarily inhabit: I was writing in a rational way about facts and speculations in the world, the actions of presumably sane adults, and evaluating the impact of various political events--highly unusual ones mostly--on the upcoming election we cannot afford to ignore.

Apart from the fact that I realized I was once again analyzing and obsessing over situations I will not remember--will not want to remember--in six months, I realized that I was necessarily doing a terrible thing: I was in some sense normalizing a monster.  And I had to do it because many Americans, through how they voted and how they didn't vote, elected this monster President of the United States.  And we've been stuck with trying to deal with his monstrous words and actions ever since, without ourselves going insane.

Tonight--Thursday night-- there is further evidence that Donald Trump is a monster, in Jeffrey Goldberg's reporting in the Atlantic, which has since been confirmed with other sources by at least one other journalist.  Though there is a difference in dimension in the attitudes Trump expressed to witnesses, it is not a difference in kind.  As he was running for President he said--to the delight of his fans--that John McCain as an American soldier was not a hero because he was shot down and captured. Goldberg reported at the battlefield where 18,000 US Marines who died in France in a decisive battle of World War I are buried, Trump called them losers and suckers.

This piece demonstrates within this context that Trump is incapable of human feeling other than greed and resentment.  Absolutely everything is about money and fame, his ego and his own pleasure.  Any sort of compassion, selflessness, sense of duty, empathy or even warmth are utterly alien to him.

Add this to everything else, to the cruelty and corruption, and to the other evidence that in even the most basic ways, Trump is inhuman.  Yet he successfully persuades and intimidates people.  He is a monster.

I am disgusted but not surprised by these latest revelations, just as I have often been shocked by Trump's words and actions but not surprised.  I saw him for what he was in 2016.  That others did not and do not, still to this moment, has implications it is very difficult to accept and therefore to define.

So all I can say here is that my observations on this campaign notwithstanding, this is not normal.  The President of the United States is a monster.  It's going to take a long time after this election to fully digest the importance of that.  But it should take only surviving a few more weeks and casting the votes, and counting the votes, to get him the hell out of the White House.