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Forbes today reported that trump “said Thursday that he’s holding up a stimulus deal over Democratic demands for funding to USPS and for mail-in voting, saying Democrats ‘need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.’”

Let that sink in for a minute!        

Without delving into all the horribly wrong things packed into that revelation, allow me to point out what is perhaps its most worrisome implication.

That he can be saying such a thing at all without it resulting in an earth-shaking outcry from the public shows how a steady diet of outrageous tweets, utterances and actions designed to inure people to things that would, under normal circumstances, provoke great and rousing outcry, has failed so far to do so. One of the favorite tactics of authoritarian leaders throughout the world, the president has been doing this ever since he took office. The fruits of his labors have been productive up to now, as evidenced by the relatively mild public outcry so far to this latest gambit.

Someone observed on FB the other day that “our democracy is dissolving while we’re watching Netflix.” A sobering assessment if there ever was one, and one that might someday well adorn a tombstone marking our republic’s passing.

For this president to admit, in a public setting in front of television cameras, that he is deliberately holding up negotiations over a stimulus package whose passage could postpone eviction proceedings for, conservatively speaking, hundreds of thousands of people affected by the economic crisis is itself abhorrent by any measure. But for him to do so for perceived political gain betrays not only a poverty of spirit unbecoming of someone in his position, but also an utter absence of common decency, as well as proof positive that he has no interest in the welfare of the citizens he is pledged to look after; it also shows the depths to which he will stoop to win.

What normal person could take pleasure in a prize won through dishonesty and cheating? Yet he and his Republican acolytes continue with their undoing of our democracy as if they believe they will, in the end, receive get-out-of-jail-free cards. And they well might, if his schemes succeed.

He pines for the respect he sees accorded to others he would fancy as peers—if he believed he had any—but he knows nothing of respect or how it’s earned because he’s never earned his own self-respect, much less the respect of anyone else. I shudder to think what it would feel like to be donald trump seeing himself reflected in a mirror if the mirror had the capacity to display, as Dorian Gray’s portrait did, what remains of his shriveled and miserable spirit.

Tim Konrad

2020.08.14