Making America Mean

      "That is so mean! " was my initial response to the crude obscenity Donald Trump used last week to describe African countries and Haiti before stating  his preference for immigrants from countries like Norway.
        "How disgustingly racist,"  was my second response.  "How amazing," was my third.
      Amazing, in that here is a man whose racism is so ingrained that he thought he could, as President of the United States, drop a vulgar racist slur without consequence during an important meeting with lawmakers on the subject of immigration reform.
        Donald Trump is such a racist he's blind to the fact that his is one.
       Still, that being said, I do believe that what Donald Trump is, first, foremost, and above all, is mean.

   But how did he become so mean? What twist during his privileged formative years made this celebrity billionaire, who's never in his life missed a meal or a golf game,

...into a self-centered, foul-mouthed bully who refers to some of the poorest, most vulnerable populations on the planet as excrement?

     Who knows?
     But I believe that meanness is what defines Donald Trump; it's what drives his foul mouth and behavior and what feeds not only his racism, but his sexism, his misogyny, his cruelty, his xenophobia, his homophobia, his bullying, and his narcissism.
    Or maybe it's Trump's narcissism that feeds the wellspring of his meanness; but I guess it doesn't matter, the two sins likely living in close symbiosis in the pit of his soul.

      A few days before the 2016 Presidential election I attended a Hillary Clinton rally at which President Obama spoke (see post from 11/2/2016).

     What I most remember from that day was Obama sharing his observation that, "Who you are, what you are, does not change once you occupy the Oval Office.  The only thing this does is it amplifies who you are.  It magnifies who you are.  It shows who you are."

     How true this has proven to be with Donal Trump. The meanness he exhibited before he was president, bragging about assaulting women, calling them pigs, slobs, and worse, making up belittling nicknames for his opponents,  cheating the contractors and workers he employed, defrauding the students who attended his bogus university, insulting Muslims, Latinos, and African-Americans, demeaning John McCain for the suffering he endured as a prisoner of war,

...joking about then flippant-ly pocket-ing the  Purple Heart offered to him by an elderly veteran,

...and I truly didn't understand how anyone could vote for Donald Trump after he made fun of a disabled reporter.

     But alas, they did.
     And now we are a country with a president who has brought meanness in its many expressions into style.

     Sadly, his meanness sometimes begets meanness even in those who oppose the awful things he's said or done.

     And all the while Donald Trump's supporters close their eyes to - or celebrate - his execrable language and behavior and his cruel, racist agenda and praise him for the current economic boom in this country and the ever rising stock market.
     Do you suppose the stock market will rise up so high that it will serve as as a stairway to Heaven? 

"Equal and Opposite Reactions"
        by Patti Liszkay
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