Thank you for this response. I also wrestle with how much character matters, just as much as I wrestle with how much intelligence matters - for people in politics. More than anything, however, empathy matters to me. And that is where I believe that we, as a country, have failed the world in electing Trump.
Although I didn’t vote for either of them (not that I could have voted for Sr., as the 2000 election was the first I could vote in), I found both Bushes to be empathetic men. I felt the same way about Romney and Dole. I don’t see any empathy in Trump. If we are being honest, I think Trump views empathy as a weakness, a flawed character trait.
At my heart, I am very much an “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” man. I believe that that statement should be at the core of who we are as a nation. It is one of four maxims that I hold dear as it relates to my experience as a United States citizen.
The second one is at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The third comes from early in the colonial era, and is a from a sermon by John Winthrop: “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”
Those three statements have defined much of who I am and how I choose to identify myself, as a citizen of this country.
Trump strikes me as a man who will never understand that first statement, scoffs at the second, and only views Winthrop’s City Upon the Hill through the lens of power.
For the first time in the course of my nearly half century on earth, I am no longer certain that any of those three quotes represents where this nation is going. And I don’t know what to do with that, other than assume that the fourth American maxim that I hold dear, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” means something very different to Trump supporters than it does to me.
We can debate policy until the cows come home. But goodness should not be up for debate. Yes. We have had corrupt politicians in the past. Yes, I even voted for some of them. But Trump just hits different.
There is a level of cruelty and vindictiveness to him that is a malignant cancer, and it is spreading across America.
That is where I’m coming from. And I believe that others on here agree with me, particularly those who were once a part of the Republican Party, but left because of a man who views the world through a lens that many of us thought died with WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, at least in this country: one of conquest (personal, political, and global).
Add in Elon Musk, a man who is so wealthy that he will probably die having bought and sold several countries, and I honestly don’t know where we go as a society - not only over the next four years, but for the next 40.
That’s not a perspective that I have ever entertained before, and certainly not to the degree that I do now.
Something wicked this way comes.
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