A Pathetic Return

So, as we have seen, the President’s return to the campaign trail with a Tulsa, Oklahoma event didn’t turnout to be as robust as he and his staff had anticipated. And having watched most of the actual speech, I can report even that part didn’t work very well. I am NOT an objective viewer of what Trump does or says. If he walked off the side of the earth I would wave good-bye, laugh and invite everyone I know out for as much beer as they could ever drink. I would be just delighted to see him go.

I hope the reports of low turnout being a function of teenage scamps at work are true, which is another reason to love our teenagers!

All this being said, I am wondering why there isn’t (as best we can tell) a therapist or psychiatrist on the White House staff to help the president work his way through the very apparent problems he has with criticism of any kind, and also with his over-acting in trying to respond. I’m referring, of course, to the West Point ramp and water drinking incident, which took up about 15 to 18 minutes of the address. Lots of people who watched the West Point event provided an instant diagnosis: “Parkinson’s disease,” that was completely inappropriate since they aren’t neurologists and didn’t see him in person. But it sure looked like something was wrong.

Slippy shoes, he says, and fear that he would spill water on his magnificent silk tie! (How many of those do you think he has?) That’s why he was so cautious, and so hesitant on the ramp.

Now, make no mistake, I’m not suggesting a diagnosis of Parkinson’s should eliminate him from the presidency. Our greatest modern era president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was crippled by polio. It did not stop him from rebuilding the nation or winning our part of World War II.

But Donald Trump is no Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, he may not even be the Donald Trump most of his backers came to know during his “You’re Fired Apprentice ” cable TV days. He just looks like a stupid man these days in a job that is way too demanding for his meager collection of skills.

I had a conversation about this with my wife, and she asked how we would have reacted as high school kids to a president who gave a speech like the one Trump delivered in Tulsa. I thought for a moment, because I had time to and said, “We’ve never had a president give a speech like that one.” Then I recalled Dwight Eisenhower on the military industrial complex, John Kennedy on Berlin and freedom, Lyndon Johnson on Civil Rights and voting, and, of course, Barack Obama on race and just about anything else. That about covers my presidencies. I can remember lots of what those men said. Big, weighty subjects from big, skilled politicians. I can also remember the fact that they were certainly not perfect, but were not clowns either.

Donald Trump is a clown, but not a funny clown and not an ironic clown like those smarties at Cirque who tease us with their ironies and thoughtful, pensive looks. You would never hit one of those clowns with a pie (unless you could bake one full of angst) because they would just cry. But you could hit Donald Trump with a pie any time you could get close enough. He would shout and thunder at you and then probably scrape it off and eat it.

Then he would claim it was the communists and street protesters who did it and how they are wrecking our nation and all the things we hold dear.

That, of course, is another lie. There are no communists, generally because anyone with the brains to get that far in politics recognizes that communism simply didn’t work. I lived for about three years in the old Soviet Union, so I know about this.

All the things we hold dear can still be held dear, whatever that means. The nation has hit some hard bumps in the past few months, but it will survive and return to good health. That will happen sooner if we get rid of the strange clown who claims the presidency.

Donald Trump is a clown, and not in a good clown way. He longs for the affirmation of the crowd, just like old fashioned clowns did. (Not Cirque clowns, who are ironic and full of subliminal messages and the like. No one hits a Cirque clown in the face with a pie.)