America is Donald Trump

As a soldier stationed in Germany just after it was permitted to be fully self-governing, I, along with my fellow soldiers, pondered the question of how the Holocaust happened.  We wondered how and why the people assented to it with little or no criticism.  At the time I was there,  however, the Germans were on their best behavior around the NATO troops, and displayed a strong disapproval of what the Nazis represented.  Some of our cadre who had served in Germany during and shortly after the war told us not to be fooled:  the fact was that a preponderance of the people were in full support of Hitler and his regime.  The Holocaust was not something forced on them;  it was what the nation was at the time.

And that describes the circumstance of Donald Trump.  His major asset is his wealth and the power it has on people.  As a person, he has no merits of intellect or character.  He lies prodigiously.  He is a convicted felon.  He is a sexual predator, a failure at many business enterprises, an ignoramus (who wondered on national television about treating Covid by rinsing the blood vessels out with laundry bleach).  He stiffs companies that have worked for him.  He promises vengeance on people who oppose him or try to correct him.  He begins his second term with mass firings and threats of retribution which can be carried out by staffing the government with those obedient and loyal to him.

He was elected to the presidency, however.  A majority of the voters wanted him.  He is not merely an American.  He is what America has become.  The big question is whether people will be content or so cowardly as to let it stay that way.  

The answer has been provided by the Republican Party.  We have witnessed it cower and crumble before Trump in a display of sycophantic idiocy.  It has lost any claim to be the party of Lincoln.  This acceptance of intellectual and moral turpitude is done in the name of making America great again.

What happened to Germany in the mid-twentieth rrcentury is happening to America.  It's what some people want.  What they don't want is a democracy as defined by America's history and the direction it has taken for its people.   

Rather than focus on Trump, it is essential to focus on these people who are outraged by an Anglican bishop who asked him to be merciful to those who are scared, a message on which Christianity was founded.

Trump has martialled the forces of government to drive out migrants.  It is ironic that they come to a country for better lives when it is  regressing, in fact, to a plutocracy, a country under the control of a few rich people.  If America continues in the direction Trump is taking it, a lot of Americans will either need to revolt or find some other place to go.  They might themselves migrate and colonize in the lands the migrants a coming from.  

When the Nazis took over Europe, America benefited greatly when informed and talented people escaped and migrated to this country.  If democracy and its attendant decencies are to survive, the American experiment may have to take place in the lands to which we are now deporting migrants.  America is headed for a future as vile and demented as Donald Trump.  People of good will and good purpose will not be wanted here, and they might need to plant the American ideals elsewhere.