“America has not had a moral compass, let alone moral conscience, since the death of Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, so nobody listens to liberals anymore.”
There is some doubt that the Trump presidency will go full-term. Many left-leaning liberals have created a persistent, strident and amazingly resilient call for his head. However, America has not had a moral compass, let alone moral conscience, since the death of Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, so nobody listens to liberals anymore.
What’s more telling is that calls for a beheading are coming from the right. Stephen Bannon, one-time Trump supporter and senior political and strategy advisor, recently said of Trump’s political prospects: there is a 33.3 per cent chance of the Mueller investigation leading to the impeachment of the president; a 33.3 per cent chance that the president would resign, perhaps ahead a threat from the cabinet to remove him; and a 33.3 per cent chance that he, Trump, would limp to the end of his first term. There was a 100 per cent chance, Bannon said, that he would not stand again.
I believe that, but not for any of the reasons Bannon postulates. I believe Donald Trump—if he reaches that far will not run again because in the first place he didn’t want to be where he is today and in the second place, and prior to his November 8 2016 election, he never thought he would be.
Those contentions are not without supporting evidence. Trump is a game-player—in fact, he is more often than not The Game. He is also a reality-star, who has by his own admission cultivated an image—a brand. Why not display it on the grandest stage of all—an American presidential election. Moreover, he could play the spoiler, which would be fun—God help Trump (and America) if he won though. That wasn’t the intent. That wasn’t The Game.
Also lining up in support of Trump not believing he would win, is something he said to his wife Melania. According to Michael Wolff in his book on the early Trump years, Fire and Fury, two weeks before the election, Melania came to Trump in tears. Wolff said she was fed up with the amount and the type (mainly critical) of media attention she was getting. She wanted out. Trump’s purported reply was that it would all be over in two weeks and they could return to normal (whatever normal means in the Trumpashere). Two weeks later, on November 8, Melania was again in tears. Normality was not to be part of the life of a president’s wife, even a wife who lived with an abnormality—her husband.
Second in the absurdities, was the length Trump took to accumulate his senior staff—a process not yet complete and, given the fractious whim of the president, unlikely to be. He and his staff were woefully unready to assume office—because they never expected (nor wanted) to! Only one of Trump’s initial senior staff, Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs, David Shulkin, was a hold-over from the Obama years—and he’s gone.
In fact, and as of last count, 65% of Trump appointed staff have left. Trump promised to “drain the swamp”; it appears he has done so, but of his own people.
So, there is evidence that Trump never wanted to be president and was distressingly unprepared for it. So was his staff. So was his family. Now that he is the president, albeit a reluctant one, I think Trump is bored by the role. His ego may keep him in office for another couple of years, but boredom, political paralysis and possibly legal matters will persuade him not to stand again. However, he will offer none of those reasons for standing down. He will instead say that it was the media that hounded him out of office.
The Master of the Deal…will become the martyr of the masses.
