So finally here we are, on this day of days, tempting fate as a nation. It should never have come to this. Four years ago the warning signs were flashing in neon red, yet still we were plunged into madness by a minority of voters – a motley mix of the reckless, the feckless, the racist, the naive, the oblivious and the stone cold ignorant.
At this late date, our only viable option is to land waves of freedom fighters on our electoral Omaha Beach, storm our way inland to the heart of evil, and implode it with extreme prejudice.
My metaphor may strike you as a tad overwrought. But we live in overwrought times, plagued by a poseur with Louis XIV pretensions (“L’etat c’est moi,” said the French king — “I am the state”), a demagogue who plunders America’s democratic institutions and aspires to role-model Russian despotism, a stoker of violence, a sociopathic liar who has dodged accountability his whole life. And thanks to the cosmic inexplicable error of 2016, we’ve all been paying the price.
On election eve four years ago, I wrote: “If this is truly the path we prefer – an authoritarian sensibility, a strongman cult – a systematic breakdown of our democratic institutions – then, by all means, Donald Trump is the man to make it happen here.” I had no special insight. I simply stated what was obvious.
In the not too distant future, will we look back on this fateful week and celebrate our resilience? Will history record that we stepped back from the precipice and reinvigorated what has long made America great? After what happened last time, I don’t pretend to know what’s motivating voters this time. But if there’s truly anyone left who is undecided, I would hope that they merely measure the empathy chasm that separates Trump from Joe Biden. That alone should be determinative.
If you strip away everything else – hard as that may be – the choice is between a guy (Biden) who wants this election to be about you, and a guy who wants everything to be about him.
Flash back to a key revealing moment during the final debate. Trump was trying to pepper Biden with baldfaced lies about how Biden supposedly took money from his son’s foreign business dealings. (Biden has released all his tax returns; there’s zero evidence for Trump’s lies.) Biden, in response, turned to the camera and said, “Look, there’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey…He doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family, and your family’s hurting badly…You’re sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, ‘Well, we can’t get new tires. They’re bald, because we have to wait another month or so.’ Or, ‘Are we going to be able to pay the mortgage?’ Or, ‘Are we going to tell her she can’t go back to community college?’…We should be talking about your families, but that’s the last thing he wants to talk about.”
Trump doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to sit around a table and pay bills and worry about Covid. As we know, sociopaths can’t even fake empathy. So he responded with sarcastic mockery: “That’s a typical political statement. (Joe) goes, ‘The family around the table, everything…Let’s get off the subject of China, let’s talk about sitting around the table.'”
Trump was repeatedly prompted to speak directly to his fellow Americans, all in vain. When asked whether he understood how painful it was for Black parents to tell their kids how to deal with racist cops, his response was to boast about himself (and lying in the process): “Nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump.” When he was asked to emit a smidgen of empathy for the parents who are worried that sending their kids to school in the midst of a pandemic will endanger their families – the question was, “What is your message to parents?” – this was how he answered:
“I want to open the schools. The transmittal rate to the teachers is very small. But I want to open the schools.”
Not a single word about the parents. And a “very small” transmittal rate won’t mollify the terrified teachers.
None of this is new. The evidence of Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder has been front and center since the spring of 2016, for anyone who bothered to pay attention. Strip away everything else about the guy (if that were even possible at this point), and his dearth of empathy and decency is more than enough to render him unfit for another four years of destroying all we hold dear.
It will likely take years to repair the havoc he has wrought. But the long journey to national renewal must begin with a single decisive step, and that moment has finally arrived. Let’s make it happen.
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Want to Zoom with me?
Tomorrow at noon EST, if you’re not drunk with dread or pulling blankets over your head, perhaps you’d like to join my special Zoom room. As best I can, after a long night, I’ll try to analyze in real time what we know and still don’t know.
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