When I still used Facebook, I used to get a lot of posts involving US president Donald Trump. I constantly saw memes, videos and Tweets that ranged from embarrassing to disgraceful. I lived through the 2016 elections as if I were an American, as if the outcome would affect my life. I rooted for Hillary – a flawed and unsympathetic person but anything is better than Trump – though I would have preferred to root for Bernie Sanders. My mind reeled at everything that became known about Trump (the pussy grabbing thing, the countless boasts and lies) even before the election. These are things that would have disqualified any presidential candidate…but not Trump, because “he says it like it is”. The entire sub-college-education electorate voted for him because this megalomaniacal turd who literally takes a shit on a gold toilet was going to “stick it to da man”. Add to that the countless lies and revelations after he had utterly unexpectedly won the election (Stormy Daniels, the inaugural speech attendance crowd size, his crazy-lying press secretaries, the list goes on and on). All the racist insects are crawling out from under the stones, scum comes to the surface. They feel emboldened now their bigot president is, like his followers, more in touch with the reptilian part of his brain. Breeding fear. Sowing dissent. Flaunting bigotry.
As a result, though, I have become more interested in politics. I have read my first non-linguistic non-fiction in the past year. Michael Wolff’s “Fire & Fury” and James Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty” are fascinating page-turners that showcase the ins and outs of American politics and, of course, this cluster-fuck of a current presidential situation. I say it is fascinating but it is also somehow dirty, kindof like wanting to know everything about the oddball eccentricities of Michael Jackson. The desire to know stuff about celebrities is, I guess, a human character trait that I don’t understand, don’t like, but am also somewhat helpless to resist. And these books have an unmistakable message: With Trump at the helm, it’s only a matter of time until we (the US, maybe the world) hit some rocks. It’s not a question when it’ll happen, but how big the rocks will be.
I follow Trump on Twitter. At the moment he has nearly 52 million followers, who get a constant barrage of pro-Trump talk, tweets about how America is being made great again, and how For God’s Sakes Nothing Happened With Russia No Collusion! I have learned to treat those tweets as if generated by a lie machine. I don’t know why I read them – probably the same human character trait I mentioned above. If you want to know whether UFOs have ever landed on planet earth, all you need to do is wait until Trump tweets they never have. Then you know they did.
So why “The Good Side to Trump”, then? I guess, on a very small scale, it has caused me to become more interested in world politics. That might be a good side. Not that I really benefit from that, because world politics usually just fill me with a lurking feeling of dread. But Trump is also doing something good on a bigger scale. Like Comey writes in his epilogue, something better will come to replace this. Maybe this is something that needs to happen before big reforms and improvements can happen (I am paraphrasing him). It is always darkest before the dawn, right?
I am hoping for dawn to come as soon as possible. But while it’s still night, pick up those two books I mentioned, or at least Comey’s.
