Thus Dies the Lingering Remnants of my Faith in Humanity
The unthinkable has happened: Trump won the 2016 election.
I woke up the morning after election night hoping the disastrous outcome that had appeared increasingly inevitable would be miraculously averted. That was foolish: even if you believe in miracles, you can’t count on them. Trump won decisively, taking swing state after swing state until he finally became the leader of the world’s most powerful country. The pre-election polls had been leaning in Clinton’s favour, but polls remind me of a quip regarding “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Trump simply inspired more of his followers to get out and vote, and the boy (I still refuse to call him a man) certainly has an undeniable charisma, plethora of failings aside. He inspired people. He inspired the darker side of the psyche that tells you to screw everyone who isn’t you, but he inspired the hell out of it. Now I sit with a glass of rye and diet cola in arm’s reach, contemplating the implications of what may be the most disastrous election in American history. Trump won. Typing those two words makes me sick to my stomach. It’s almost dystopian.
Upon realizing and acknowledging his victory, my first reaction was to go through a list of US presidents in the last century, and try to determine if any of them were as sociopathic, narcissistic, or simply as morally questionable as the new president-elect. In all fairness, some questionable men have taken up residence in the White House. George W. Bush went wherever he was pushed, if you want to be generous enough to assume his disastrous foreign policy was the work of his handlers. Bill Clinton’s sexual misadventures are common knowledge, and openly lying to the American people will probably haunt him until the day he dies. Reagan was going visibly senile during his second term, and I like to think that he was just doing a better job of hiding it in his first, considering that Iran-Contra was basically high treason. Also, his policies crippled the American middle class. Nixon was a crook (jowly denials aside), Johnson desperately tried to live up to Kennedy’s image as a lothario (utterly failing, of course), and Woodrow Wilson was an unapologetic racist who played the KKK-glamourizing “Birth of a Nation” in the White House. If you wanted, you could probably dig up all kinds of dirt on some of the other guys, but this is the stuff that stands out to me, and it shows that America has a long history of electing questionable characters as presidents.
That said, when it comes to sheer narcissistic sociopathy, none of them come close to Trump. Trump has made his living ripping people off. He is an unrepentant crook who sues people for saying as much. His business enterprises are notorious for failing in a dramatic fashion, yet he passes himself off as a financial wizard. I guess he’s right in that regard: give him money, and it vanishes faster than you can say “abracadabra”. He couldn’t even turn a profit on casinos! Calling him a successful businessman is like calling a rapist a player. His empire is a monument to sheer narcissism, and his lack of remorse for exploiting his investors is a monument to his sociopathic leanings. That his name and image must go on damned near everything he sells is further testament to his narcissism. The man can’t sneeze without signing the tissue, and demanding the garbage bin pay him for the privilege of accepting his mucus. Ted Rogers would have told the guy to dial it back a bit, and he had the Skydome and two of Ryerson’s buildings named after him. At least Rogers’ business practices were only somewhat dubious (and at least not blatantly illegal).
But Trump being a crook is only half the story in regards to him being a truly and fully awful person. First, we have the story of the Central Park Five, a group of five ethnic youths who were falsely accused and convicted of a gruesome rape and attempted murder of a jogger in 1989. Trump placed ads in all major New York city newspapers calling for their execution. After the five young men served their prison sentences, a convicted rapist and murderer named Mattias Reyes admitted to the crime, the five’s convictions were vacated, and eventually received a combined $41 million from the city for their wrongful conviction. After they were exonerated, Trump not only refused to apologize, but implied they were still guilty, simply because they were in the park at the time of the assault. He called for the deaths of five innocent men, and refused to apologize.
Second, there’s the incident where he purchased a building in New York, hoping to demolish it so he could build a luxury condominium. The existing tenants refused to vacate, so he made their lives hell. He tried to evict them, cut off heat and water, and had the building manager refuse to do repairs, to a point where two tenants had mushrooms growing on their floors as the result of a leak. He also placed ads in New York newspapers offering vacant units to homeless persons, not out of any sense of charity, but to encourage the existing tenants to vacate (city officials turned him down, because of course they did). On top of that, he sued the tenants for $150 million. Fortunately, he failed to have the building demolished and lost the civil case, but the amount of effort he put into having people kicked out of their homes is nothing short of monstrous.
Finally, “grab them by the pussy”. Excuse me as I try to retain the contents of my stomach. I’ve already covered his sexual misdeeds in a previous article, and don’t want to repeat myself on that issue. I couldn’t write a whole paragraph on that subject without vomiting on my laptop, largely because following the events of election night required the consumption of large quantities of Seagram’s (Seagram’s: it’s better than Schenley’s!). I’ll let those five appalling words speak for themselves.
Trump is a monster, plain and simple. While I resent the DNC’s promotion of Clinton despite her lack of charisma and refusal to learn anything from Sanders’ surprising rise to prominence (thus alienating or disillusioning many voters), it’s hard to imagine that anyone could lose to Trump. He’s a pathological liar with no redeeming qualities who has spent his entire life ripping people off while promoting his own name. Only in America could such a person not spend most of their adult years in prison. He is the worst kind of swine, but America has decided to go Animal Farm. America was given the political equivalent of going to a restaurant, and either ordering the cheeseburger and fries you have every time, or burning the place to ash and shooting those who flee the flames. They voted for the flames.
Let’s hope this is just a lit match, and not the inferno that ends the world.