Donald Trump’s Degradation of America Must End

There are many important reasons to deny Donald Trump a second term but one, I believe, is more lasting than any other.

The success of the human endeavor, much less the American experiment, depends on our growth as human beings. With each passing year, we become more powerful in our ability to shape the world to our will.

Do we become wiser in wielding that power? If not, we imperil our children and our grandchildren.

Donald Trump is a serious threat to our future because he degrades our consciousness and takes us in the opposite direction of wisdom. As President, he wields extraordinary influence in our media and our collective conversations. The presidency shapes the beliefs, morals, and values of a new generation by its example.

Donald Trump is a force for wholesale regression. With almost every word he speaks, he degrades us. He makes us more primitive. More bigoted. Less compassionate. He pushes us from long-term planning into short-term point-scoring. He lies so regularly and with such aplomb that he has called into question the very notion of truth itself. He engages in overt criminal corruption, protected by a subservient Department of Justice and a cowed Republican Party. He pillages the People’s House for his own personal gain.

He tells us that selfishness wins. Savagery triumphs. Power is the only thing that matters.

He does not lift up our vision to a brighter possibility but drags us into the muck.

For those who have supported him, he has, at best, given them a guard dog that has protected the courts from change for the next decade. But the moral and ethical costs to those who embraced him as a leader will be profound.

Within a year’s time, I believe that Donald Trump will be seen, even by the vast majority of those who supported him, as a treasonous con man who duped more people than anyone in the history of our country.

Support of Donald Trump will be a stain that will not wash off of families for a generation. The Republican Party will lose its standing as a credible, principled party as it was revealed as having one principle alone: power.

When history required their spine, Republican leaders failed us.

The good news, of course, is that in the face of Trump’s deluge of degradation, the human spirit has risen up. We are seeing unprecedented voter turnout in spite of the pandemic. We have summoned our better angels to rise against the creeping hand of tyranny. We have declared an end to racist ideologies. Women are claiming more power and running for office in vast numbers. Some noble Republicans have broken with their party to say “no more.”

We will, I believe, come together in a watershed election to create a resounding enough victory that the attempts at vote thievery and voter suppression will not suffice to change the outcome.

But the coarsening of our consciousness will take a longer time to rectify. Trump supporters will need to undergo something like conversion therapy to deprogram from the drumbeat of lies, dark conspiracies and ideologies, and repetitive, mind-altering chants. We will need to come together as a country and find forgiveness and a path to redemption for those who once rattled the sword of violence and forced racist rhetoric down America’s throat.

Donald Trump will, I believe, face justice for his crimes. He cannot be seen by our children or grandchildren to be above the law for it emboldens dangerous, anti-democratic beliefs to do so.

It will be a long journey to heal our country from the raging pandemic, the cratering economy, and the wildfire of white supremacy. And it will be a still longer journey to grow the 40% of our country out of the addictions that made them so desperate for dominance that they eroded the Constitutional foundation of our country. And it will be a still longer journey to address the very real shared threats to our future such as climate change.

But our forward progress as a country and a society cannot happen with another term for Donald Trump. The damage will be too lasting, the safeguards against authoritarianism too corroded, the numbness of our conscience too deep.

We can only turn the eyes of our children away for so long.

If they perceive that being a con man equals being a winner, our future is lost.

No, they need, and we need, to see justice done. For the unjust ruler to fall and face oblivion, for the criminal to face justice, for the liar to face Truth.

Our children need to witness this so they grow up with a moral compass and recognize that real winning comes from triumphing over our baser instincts. Real winning is about nobility of soul and depth of character. Real winning is about leading the way forward rather than padding bank accounts and evading taxes. Real winning is about respect, service, and generosity.

Someone who peddles lies for power cannot be seen by the generation to come as someone worthy of admiration or emulation. Donald Trump needs to become a cautionary tale for a whole generation of Americans, a warning of what can go terribly wrong even in the long march of American progress.

A future in which America walks the hard road to redemption begins with each and every vote. It is likely that we need to triumph by millions of votes in order to overcome the vote suppression and the dirty tricks obviously being unleashed by a man and a party desperate to hold onto power and avoid accountability. It is likely that we need every single one of us who recognize the threat that Donald Trump represents to our future to stand up and be counted.

I believe we WILL do this, for the good of our country and the good of our world. We will close this dark chapter. We will wake up those who remain entranced.

We will slingshot our country forward to offset these four years of regression.

We will fulfill our mission of E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one.

I believe we will because, as MLK said, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. In the march of human civilization, we DO evolve, we DO become better human beings, we DO grow.

It sometimes just requires calamity to course correct.

Donald Trump has been that calamity, taking us far lower than most of us thought we could go. We had become too casual in our care for our democracy. We had indulged too many cynical conversations and too much mudslinging. We had lowered our expectations for politicians who really should exemplify the best in us. We had gotten attached to winning at any cost.

And that cost is ultimately Donald Trump, the man who has done more to degrade the White House, sully our national reputation, and endanger our democratic foundations than any president in our history.

He has left carnage in our country: an appalling count of dead and sick, a mountain of lies, long lines of unemployed, a legacy of hate groups, the horror of children separated from their parents, and appalling scenes of protestors gassed and beaten.

He has created the country that he described in his dystopian Inaugural address: a country filled with carnage.

Joe Biden is a decent, compassionate, and nobly-motivated public servant. Kamala Harris is whip smart, principled, and will break multiple glass ceilings with her vice-presidency, giving hope to a new generation of girls. Together, they represent our country moving forward and the opportunity for redemption. They can bring us back together.

History will not be kind to America if we do not vote Trumpism into the dustbin of history and begin the repair and rebuilding of our country.

It is time. A brighter future awaits us.

Vote as if your future depends on it, for it truly does.