Shut up. (An essay on why I have decided not to talk about him or anything he does anymore– after today.)

I have come to the conclusion that it is useless to talk about our current *president.  Revelations about his personal behavior or his actions on the job, or even how he spends his nights and weekends, are uniformly bad.  His policies, his Cabinet, the people he appoints as judges and justices– all are wrong, incoherent, corrupt, and incompetent.   That is not to mention his obvious bigotry, destruction of precedent, xenophobia, homophobia, and sexism.   His presence in office is maintained by his popularity (verging on idolatry) with about a third of the country, who are distinguished by their cupidity, ignorance, whiteness, bigotry, and sadism.

There is nothing good that can be said for this presidency or the people who support him.  If they had their way, our country would devolve into a weak, divided, economically retrogressive, authoritarian– almost feudal– failed state.

All this has been apparent since the election of 2016, if not before.  Nothing that has been said to point this out or to correct the record has had any effect.  All the lies he has told have gone without an effective response, least of all from those he has maligned and betrayed.  We should have contradicted him, loudly, from the very beginning, but instead we played broadcasts of his stump speeches as if they were important, breaking news.  The news networks gave him an estimated $1-3 billion in free publicity.  No wonder that the man who learned the art of speechmaking from reading Hitler’s speeches was elected president: he was allowed to lie without contradiction or interruption for months on end on CNN and FOX.

He has gotten to the point where he feels free to change history in the way that it was done in “1984”, completely reversing the facts.  A few days ago he was quoted in an interview saying that Obama started the policy of child separation on the Mexico border ( in fact, Obama only separated families when the children were being abused, or under similar, extreme conditions) and that he should get all the credit for ending the policy and none of the blame (when he, in fact, deliberately instituted the policy against otherwise blameless parents for the express purpose of deterring undocumented immigration– and only stopped when the public outcry became too great to ignore.  What’s more, he set up no mechanism for re-uniting separated families and no database showing all of the families separated or where they were sent.)

In the end, every people gets the government they deserve, and we deserve the supremely narcissistic ignoramus that we got.  In fact, I’ll go one step further and call him what no-one else has dared to say: he’s a coward.

Therefore, I have decided that after today (and a few parting shots), I will no longer have anything to say about him, his administration, or the United States government that he leads so ineffectively.  Nothing that I or anyone else has said has made any difference, so why bother?

(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)