By Ben Olson
Reader Staff
Right off the bat, I’ll say that I have never been a fan of Donald Trump. I never watched his TV show, I never stayed at his hotels. What’s more, I never took anything he said seriously after his relentless efforts to prove that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. He wasn’t.
It’s not Trump’s politics. I can handle political ideologies from all over the map, no matter how dastardly they appear. I believe a mixture of political leanings is essential to a healthy democracy.
No, what I truly loathe about our president is the way he plays the victim, whines and continually lies and badmouths our great nation.
Whether he’s telling 45,000 impressionable Boy Scouts that their government is a “cesspool” or “sewer” and egging them on to boo former President Obama, or telling Golf Magazine that the White House is a “dump,” this is by far the most self-victimized, loathsome person to sit in the Oval Office.
Trump whines relentlessly. He whines that the media doesn’t treat him fairly. He whines that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” and that “no other president has been treated this unfairly.” While two-thirds of the country is waking up to the fact that Trump is not going to change, the other 33 percent of people that support him without fail don’t view him as a whiner, but as yet another of their own kind — hiding behind a banner of white privilege, anti-elite elitism and a longing for “better days.”
The whining needs to stop. So does the lying. The public trust in our government should not be eroded by one man with a score to settle. We are facing some difficult times ahead. We need a president who we can trust. Trump isn’t that man.
For someone who professes such love for the United States, President Trump sure spends a lot of time and energy attacking the very institutions that make America great in the first place.
Without a free and independent press, we wouldn’t have the democracy that we do today. But, in Trump’s (and Steve Bannon’s) eyes, the press is the “enemy of the American people.”
Here are some words of advice for our president: Stop tweeting vitriol. Stop disparaging women. Stop demanding unflagging loyalty from your staff — demand excellence. Stop with the personal attacks on those who don’t support your narrow world view. Stop eroding human rights. Stop claiming climate change doesn’t exist; it does. Stop gaslighting the American people. Your day of reckoning will come. Whether it be after one or two terms, or after a messy impeachment, history will not be kind to the likes of Donald J. Trump. The best thing he can do at this point is shut his mouth and let the oxygen back into the room. I love this country, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit idly for three more years of Trump badmouthing it.
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