Opinion: A heartless Trump presides over US decline

By Harvey Dzodin

Congratulations, Donald Trump! You’ve finally done something successfully. In less than four years you have ripped America apart at the seams. Our once great country is on fire and melting down. Angry rioters are at your very front door. Thanks to you, it’s apocalypse now.

With your little Twitter finger you have created a tribalism in America not seen in generations. It is poetic justice, isn’t it that the same technology that you have used to split us into warring factions will contribute to your undoing because horrified witnesses of Mr. Floyd’s execution used their cellphones to record the incident, which might have been covered up like were many others.

A group of protesters surrounded several National Guard vehicles that were driving on Lake Street towards the blockade under the Hiawatha Light Rail station and forced them to reverse out in Minneapolis, Minn., on May 29, 2020. [File photo: Star Tribune via AP]

How is it that unlike most of your predecessors of both political parties who have led us in times of existential emergencies you are missing in action? You must have ice running through your veins because other than words scripted for you to read from a teleprompter, you expressed no real sympathy for those feeling the pain at the senseless murder by a Minneapolis police officer of a handcuffed black man accused of committing a petty crime pleading for his life and calling for help to his dead mother. Instead all you could do is further inflame people of all races who are hurting by saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. It’s no secret that you hate black people and you’ve said so yourself. Your hatred knows no bounds but extends to Africa and other places with what you have called “shit hole” countries. Have you no sense of decency sir?

I’m not saying you hate all minority groups. You clearly do like the 1% of the richest Americans who you have enriched at the expense of the other 99%.

And where is your leadership in the COVID-19 crisis? Because of your lust for re-election you knew in January that the epidemic was headed your way but you engaged in happy talk for months and now you personally are responsible for the rising number of deaths, well beyond 100,000 in America. And you are compounding your grievous error against the advice of your experts by prematurely opening the country. I know you are seriously concerned about election fraud, but dead people don’t vote.

A few weeks ago you took time away from watching TV to schedule an interview with your mouthpiece of choice, Fox News. You chose to sit at the foot of the statue of your great predecessor Abraham Lincoln in his magnificent memorial hoping to have his greatness rub off on you. Your clumsy attempt didn’t work. It just highlighted the vast difference of his leadership in a war to save the nation over the moral repugnance of slavery and mistreatment of an entire race of people, and your increasingly desperate attempt to be re-elected no matter what the cost in human life.

If you had taken a moment to glance away from your mirror to see if your every hair was in place, you could have read, perhaps for the first time in your life, Lincoln’s words on the wall from his second inaugural address that “we must bind up the nation’s wounds”. By comparison, since you began running for president four years ago, you have only poured salt on the nation’s wounds that you have successfully ripped open. Let me clue you in Mr. President I know you don’t like bad news or the messengers who carry them but your words “I don’t take any responsibility whatsoever” don’t endear you to the people and aren’t going to get you any memorial in Washington, even if you offer to build it yourself. Not to pout, sir, you will however get a footnote in history as one of the nation’s worst leaders who hastened its decline.

I know you have never been a student of history but you have chosen to start a new Cold War with China, eschewing President Xi Jinping’s call for a new model of great power relations. You may never have heard of the Thucydides Trap where an established nation feels threatened by a rising nation and usually goes to war. Maybe you don’t know the wisdom of the philosopher George Santayana that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I’m not holding my breath, Mr. President. I can see from your callous indifference to life that it’s not even “America First” but “Trump First”. Heaven help us all.

Note：Harvey Dzodin is a Senior Fellow of Center for China and Globalization and formerly political appointee in the Carter administration.