I guess I've been quiet long enough. My opinion piece [View all]

In 2003 I had a successful architectural practice in Southern Oregon. When it became obvious to me that we were about to blunder into a senseless war, I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper opposing the war. That letter, that ended my guilty silence, was printed as an op-ed and reprinted in papers with larger audiences, including two in Italy. As I expected, it cost me some clients and caused strife with friends and family who did not agree with me.

Speaking out publicly was not my way of dealing with things. In college I was adamantly opposed to my fellow students protesting the Vietnam War. It was not until I served in Vietnam as a Naval Flight Officer that I realized that my government did not deserve my unquestioning allegiance.

Reading letters in this paper demanding fealty to the most corrupt and incompetent president in my seventy-five years has triggered my need to speak up again after a long silence. I have no clients to lose. The people I care about agree with me. I am in the process of becoming a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. I can be brutally honest and I will be.

Donald Trump was never prepared for any public service and he never expected to actually be a public servant. His candidacy was another of his many cons, intended to resurrect his failing brand. A climate of hateful ignorance and the aid of a brutal dictator wanting to sow chaos in our democracy swept him into the unexpected position of the world’s most powerful human being.

He had no idea how to form a government, much less how to run a constitutional democracy. He assembled a cabinet of obscenely wealthy misfits, each ideally suited to and morally inclined to sabotage the mission of the agencies they led. The few who might have been capable of effective, principled leadership were soon weeded out. They were surreptitiously fired or resigned in disgust.

His first year in office was punctuated by criminal indictments, convictions and guilty pleas. The 215 criminal indictments so far in this presidency eclipse the meager 76 of the Nixon era and the zero of the Obama administration. These staggering numbers alone should cause any rational conservative to question Trump’s suitability for any position of public trust.

Like many disbelieving Americans, I was confident that Trump would be content to just play the president on TV. Surely he would let experience and expertise carry the load while he basked in the glory of his improbable presidency. Barring an unforeseen calamity, America could survive four years of Trump.

To my immediate horror, Trump began to actually take the helm of the ship of state. He could not refrain from inserting his grotesque ego into matters of great national and international consequence. He shattered alliances, trashed solemn treaties and waged war on the people he chose to demonize. His brutal treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers made it clear that malevolence and incompetence would work hand in hand in his administration.

We now know that the business acumen that sold him to just enough voters to win the electoral vote was as phony as his hair and his sprayed-on orange patina. It wasn’t a million dollar loan from his father that gave him his start. It was a 400 million dollar inheritance, much of it stolen from his own family and hidden from the tax collectors. Bankrupting casinos was not a big enough red flag to voters aggrieved by eight years of success by a popular black president.

Books will be written for years about America’s foolish experiment with a reality TV president. Historians will paint a more comprehensive picture of the treachery that led to his impeachment and likely more grievous offenses for which he should have been impeached and convicted. Nothing will stand out as prominently as his willful failure to protect the American people from a predictable, actually predicted, pandemic. His vanity and his need to maintain the legal immunity he enjoys as president caused him to ignore the onrushing plague and to thwart the best efforts of our public health professionals. The number of souls lost to his abuse of office will probably exceed a quarter of a million by Election Day.

I still have faith in America and trust it will undo its disastrous mistake of 2016. If that faith proves unwarranted and Trump stays in power, I will be claiming my sainted grandmother’s Irish birthright. My wife and I will be resettling in Ireland, a land more attuned to my notion of democracy. We will be leaving behind family and friends. I trust they will not think we are abandoning them. They will understand that we have no desire to live or die in Donald Trump’s America.