To put it mildly, I’m not a fan of former reality TV show host Donald J. Trump.
To put it more precisely, I think Trump is a living piece of run over echidna dung who isn’t remotely qualified to be president of a high school student council, let alone President of the United States.
Still, I’m not ‘afraid’ of a second Trump term. Sure, he has said a lot of alarming things about what he plans to do if the electorate returns him to the Oval Office. Those things include mass deportations, taking revenge on his political enemies, being a dictator on Day One (but only for Day One, apparently, because that makes sense) – but my belief is he will do exactly none of those things.
The reason I believe Trump will do none of the more extreme things he has promised to do is we’ve been here before, many times, often with far less impractical promises on which he likely could have delivered, if only he had an ounce leadership ability, any persuasive arguments to offer, or even anything resembling useful guile. In the end, his rhetoric on all of it proved empty.
Here’s a brief recounting of Trump’s greatest hits from the campaign trail and elsewhere.
The Claim: Trump will build a wall and Mexico will pay!
The Reality: Trump built little (but expensive) pieces of a highly ineffective barrier and Mexico didn’t chip in a thin fucking dime.
The Claim: Trump will vigorously enforce the nation’s obscenity laws!
The Reality: There were precisely zero obscenity cases filed by Trump’s DOJ. Not one.
The Claim: Trump will lead the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act!
The Reality: One thumbs-down from the late Sen. John McCain was all it took to derail that fantasy.
The Claim: Trump will LOCK HER UP!
The Reality: Hillary Clinton is a free woman and continues to walk among us.
I could go on and on and on, because Trump can scarcely open his mouth without promising to deliver something that might sound good on paper to the Tucker Carlsons of the world, but that has very little prospect of being ‘accomplished’ here in the real world.
All this is not to say Trump can’t or won’t do real damage if he’s elected to serve a second term. He can and will. But that damage will come in the form of continuing to undermine public confidence in things like elections, institutions like the judiciary and select law enforcement bodies (the FBI, for example) and possibly emptying the federal bureaucracy of anyone who might have a clue about how to do their job.
What he’s not going to do is crack down on the porn industry, haul people off to MAGA concentration camps, somehow overturn or affect a reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate birthright citizenship, or eliminate term limits on the Presidency, enabling him to stay in the Oval Office until he finally dies in there.
As was the case with the endless parade of bullshit artists who proceeded him, Trump can’t simply bluster and lie his way through the process of amending the Constitution. He’d need a lot more sycophants in Congress and/or state legislatures around the country before he could even clear the first hurdle, which requires either a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress (good luck with that) or getting two-thirds of the states to request a Constitutional Convention.
During the first two years of Trump’s first term, his party was in the majority in both the House and the Senate – and he still couldn’t get them to pass some of his most cherished legislative brain farts. The notion he can convince Democrats to get on board with a Constitutional Amendment of any kind is beyond farcical.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether America is a great nation. I tend to believe it is, or at least that it aspires to be great. What no reasonable, thinking person can believe is that America is a once-great nation that stopped being great, was great again for a four-year period, then stopped being great for four years, and now is poised to become great again, if only we elect a serial fabulist to the highest office in the land.
So yes, in a sense the good news is Trump is full of shit.
The other, more significant good news is, the things that do make this country great – like due process, free speech, the right to counsel, entrepreneurial spirit, the pursuit of useful technological innovation – aren’t dependent on who resides in the White House. Those things are bigger than any individual, no matter how fat and orange that individual may be.
