After four years, a deadly pandemic and an economic crisis in office, and the country still doesn’t know exactly what’s going through outgoing President Donald Trump’s head.
He will leave office at noon on Jan. 20, 2021, having been defeated in a fair election by President-elect Joe Biden — Trump’s falsehoods and Twitter rants saying otherwise be damned.
The man who would be king has definitely lost his crown. The immense power he was imbued with in January 2016 is about to stripped away ingloriously.
He loved that power. And he often used it cruelly.
Only 7 days into his reign of terror he banned citizens from seven predominately Muslim countries as well as from the Sudan from entering the United States.
Not long after that he approved plans for a devastating Keystone XL oil pipeline through native lands.
He called far-right protesters “very fine people,” repeatedly referred to Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” “while Mexicans were nothing but “bad hombres’.”
Trump ordered children separated from their families as they tried to cross the border from Mexico into the U.S. These kids were kept in putrid conditions in cages, scared, confused and alone — and in our name, whether we wanted that or not.
The list of Trump’s cruelties goes on and on. And now, amid this pandemic and a crippled economy, he refuses to sign into law a $2.3 trillion pandemic aid that factors in $892 billion specifically for coronavirus relief and extending emergency unemployment benefits? A situation almost poetic, with the power literally lying in his hands by way of his presidential signature, which is hastily losing its almighty significance.
Trump says this deal is inadequate. He’s right that the $600 direct payments should be much higher. And while more must come during the Biden administration, it’s cruel to hold everything up now.
Just as Nero fiddled as Rome burned, Trump golfed as America suffered.
With only a little over 20 days left in office, Trump too is running out of time. There’s not a chance in hell he’ll broker a relief deal that would distribute his desired $2,000 to needy citizens. As best we know, Trump is both a narcissist and the sadist. The narcissist in Trump wants his final farewell to be triumphant, moral. But the sadist is making all Americans pay for his defeat.
His final tweet might as well be, “Let them eat cake.”
A puppeteer impressed two children with his display of Humpty Dumpty at Central Park East.
Photo by Dean Moses
