Implosion is defined as the instance of something collapsing violently inwards. We are witnessing implosion on the national stage right now as our current president’s time in office winds down and as he continues, unable to concede defeat, to undermine a legitimate election process that voted him out of office.
The man who has been our president for the last four years embodies so many stereotypes that it’s hard to believe he is not a fictional creation: blowhard bully, unapologetic misogynist, democracy denier, aggressive power-grabber, systematic liar and conservative outlier. This man represents a whole load of Hollywood stereotypes rolled up into one. Somehow by mis-happenstance he was elected president of the United States.
Once he took office, our land of immigrants became the land that separated mothers from their children at its borders. In October of this year, four years on, the New York Times reported that more than 5,500 children had been separated from their parents at US borders under this president. And the Washington Post reported that the parents of 545 children separated at the border still haven’t been found. The president’s own children suffered no such fate. They benefited hugely from his term in office; no separation was deemed necessary there at all. Despite pledges that their term at the helm of the family’s core businesses would not profit from their father’s stint as president, the president’s children ultimately deemed the president’s name their greatest asset. During this presidency, we quickly went from being the country most admired around the world to the country most doubted, most questioned in terms of our support of democratic ideals.
In four years, the current Tweeter-In-Chief has undermined our democratic foundations, turned our backs on world leadership and disavowed compassion as a core human value. Arrogance and the desire to belittle, he knows only too well. In powers of confrontation, he is disproportionately blessed.
He had no problem letting us know his innermost thoughts of Mexicans, a population of some 1.3 million people. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. In his first week in office, he demonized Muslims. He decreed that all refugees and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen would be excluded from the US.
He promised again and again that he was going to build a wall on our southern border. He assured anyone who would listen that Mexico was going to pay for his wall and millions of Americans believed him. It never happened. Billions of dollars were diverted from other essential US military needs, but this mythical wall never came into being. The New York Times reports that along the 1,954 mile-border between the United States and Mexico, as of Nov. 13, this administration has built only 402 miles of wall. President-elect Biden has said he will halt new wall construction.
Remember when this president was going to transform the American healthcare map, replace Obama’s groundbreaking initiatives that expanded coverage to 20 million Americans. He was going to replace Obamacare with something terrific, something great in his own words. He had no idea how to do it. And so four years on, there is nothing terrific, nothing great to replace ACA.
More infrastructure spending was his most popular presidential campaign promise. His first speech as President-elect promised to begin the urgent task of rebuilding the United States of America. And today? Do we have new airports to rival the best in the world? Nothing at all like that.
Being a loser apparently has special significance for this president. According to Dan Barry in the New York Times, he is hypersensitive to the notion of losing:
“The first thing he calls someone who has wronged him is a loser,” said Jack O’Donnell, who ran an Atlantic City casino for Mr. Trump in the 1980s. “That’s his main attack word. The worst thing in his world would be to be a loser. To avoid being called a loser, he will do or say anything.”
Right now, he is saying just that, anything, to avoid accepting what the recent election shows clearly.
This time he is the loser.