Everyone has done it, most of us more than once. We have bought the too-expensive phone that blew up a week later, or the car that was in the shop more than in your driveway, or the expensive diet pills guaranteed to cause you to lose weight, but only in your wallet.

It is always difficult to admit the first time that your best friend’s iPhone actually is better than your flaming Samsung, or that your Ford Pinto was maybe the worst and most dangerous car on the highway, or that the 200 bucks you spent on the diet pills would have better spent burning up calories lighting your money on fire.

But, always, there comes a moment when your denials of these truths no longer works for you even internally, and you are forced to acknowledge that, indeed, you made a terrible choice, a rotten decision.

But what happens when America rolls the dice, takes a chance, elects a non-politician to the Presidency in the hope that he will make things work better in Washington, but discovers his personal demons may make him unfit to serve?

Donald Trump is impossible to ignore, not because of his accomplishments for the nation, for those are minimal, but because of his almost daily diatribes via Tweeting, insulting everything from individuals to institutions and allies. One can almost say Trump never met anyone who won’t fall out of favor with him and be personally attacked, but for his reverence of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But if you are not Putin, if you are just the Senate majority leader who you need to pass any legislation, or if you are just the Pope, or a past president, any past president, or the creator of Amazon, sooner or later Donald Trump will attack you in a very personal and embarrassingly childish way, with his severely limited vocabulary leading the way.

Were that our only problem with this president it could perhaps be seen as a quirk, an irritating oddity of character. But the deeper issue is that this president trusts no advice, takes no council, and runs the presidency like it is an operation from the back of a grocery store owned and operated only by family.

This great shrinking of the presidency poses a national security threat, because we have few controls on an imbalanced president from taking us to nuclear war on little more than an exchange of insults with Kim Jong Un, causing this president to attack, as he attacks all who criticize him.

This week, no less than former U.S. Intelligence Director James Clapper, he of a nearly 40-year career protecting the nation, said he questions Trump’s “fitness to be in this office.”

Clapper went on to say, “…there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary.”

It is “pretty damn scary” that a man who would attack Mother Teresa, were she alive, has few constraints to prevent his dangerously narcissistic personality from overloading his senses and taking the nation to a war of global import.

A former supporter of Trump, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker,R-Tennessee, this week said the President hasn’t “been able to demonstrate the stability needed…” and further argued that this president has not been able to “move way beyond himself.”

America did not just buy an explosive phone, nor a dangerous Pinto, nor a fake diet pill.

America hired an explosive personality, a dangerously mercurial leader, harboring a fake set of facts, and governing by rightwing media fables.

The real question is, how do we fix our mistake?

 

Jim Crawford is a retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.