The Trouble with Trump

When you read that headline, what was your first thought? Probably it was the same as mine—and I wrote it! My first thought was not Trump again, haven’t we heard enough about him? Aren’t we trumped out? Surely Trump inertia has moved in.
All of which is true, though that largely depends on your perspective and—I am bound to say—level of masochism.
The trouble with that, however, is Trump himself. He won’t leave us alone. Knowingly or unknowingly, intentional or not, he seems set on feeding an insatiable media and through them each of us. If you are anti-Trump he will feed you all the material, let’s call it fertiliser, you need to grow your loathing of this buffoon. If you are a Trump supporter you will be congratulating yourself on your unprecedented level of imagination as you seek to excuse his actions. Trump’s supporters will trumpet that he—Trump—is indeed “making America great again.”
For the rest of us, he is just making it grate.
And that I think is the problem for Americans who care. They are through the actions of their President  entering a period  of self-analysis and introspection to a level unprecedented since their civil war. Some of the more enlightened will be looking with deep dismay at the way America is being perceived by the world. Those for whom the world view doesn’t matter will be looking at themselves and their neighbours and asking is this the America they want.
Of course it is wrong to blame the American people, even those who voted for Trump, for this strutting personification of Eugene Burdick’s Ugly American. Could anybody, any American, have seen this—him—coming? No doubt some did. Even more today will say they did. But even if you did, you got belted by the Bible Belt and the Rust Belt. And there was nothing you could do about it…for yourselves or for us.
You now have live with the voting decision made by others. We all do.
And there perhaps is the only silver lining—for once the world is united behind America: united in its loathing of a President who nobody saw coming and nobody deserves.