President Donald Trump is so unpopular and afraid of protesters surrounding the White House that the parimeter had to be extended out with ugly fencing, which is now covered with BLM graffiti: Glynn Wilson

The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson - 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Not since Richard Nixon sat forlorn with a bottle of whiskey in the West Wing trying to stave off impeachment during the Watergate scandal has a president found himself so isolated, alone, hated and embattled in the White House.

Will Donald Trump resort to strong drink before this is all over? Or will Adderall, Xanax, hydroxychloroquine, bleach and McDonald’s hamburders be enough to counter the stresses of being alone at the top in the highest office in the land?

People who have seen the president in recent weeks, including allies and advisers speaking on the condition of anonymity, describe a “woe-is-me” preamble from Trump, without even the most basic pleasantries and greetings.

The president rants about the deadly coronavirus destroying “the greatest economy,” one he claims to have personally built, according to reporting out Friday from the Washington Post, the paper often credited with bringing down Nixon. Trump laments the unfair “fake news” media, which he vents never gives him any credit. And he bemoans the “sick, twisted” police officers in Minneapolis, whose killing of an unarmed black man in their custody provoked the nationwide racial justice protests that have confounded the president.

“Instead, Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation’s turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim — of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country.”

Many presidents have looked up at the portraits of previous presidents in the White House and lamented their isolation, like John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. Books and movies have portrayed the “it’s lonely at the top” scenario of being president of the United States, the so-called “most powerful man in the world.”

The official White House portrait of John F. Kennedy, a.k.a. the Contemplative Kennedy: Glynn Wilson

Who does Trump look up to?

Andrew Jackson? Really? The man who orchestrated genocide against Native Americans, most notably the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears?

An afternoon view of the north lawn of the White House with the statue of Andrew Jackson rearing on horseback in the foreground and the Washington Monument in the background on Sept. 11, 2015: Glynn Wilson

Even Nixon was interested enough in trying to figure out why people didn’t like him that he famously visited the Lincoln Memorial to chat with young, hippie protesters.

Nixon Library

He didn’t use the Secret Service, local police and the National Guard to tear gas protesters so he could do a photo op in front of a church for political purposes.

President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside of St John’s Episcopal church across Lafayette Park in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020: AFP

As corrupt and mentally ill as Nixon was, even he respected the institutions of American democracy enough to resign in the face of inevitable impeachment and removal from office.

This man is totally devoid of any redeeming character or class. If he really cared about the people of this country and their values, the future of this culture and society, he would resign the office immediately and give us a chance to heal and fight the coronavirus pandemic and economic collapse without all this divisive, racist rhetoric.

Nixon may have pioneered the Southern Strategy, but even he would not resort to such a blatant display of racism from the Oval Office as Donald Trump has been guilty of lately (at least not for public consumption, the tapes tell a different story). Nixon was a “true believer” in this country and its institutions, if he sometimes abused the language for political purposes.

Trump doesn’t believe in anything except how many Almighty Dollars he can collect for himself, and he won’t go, of course, because he only cares about himself. He’s a classic narcissist, as his niece Mary Trump recently pointed out in a book about the Trump family, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, describing how a decades long history of darkness, dysfunction and brutality turned her uncle into a reckless leader who, according to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, “now threatens the world’s health, economic security and social fabric.”

That’s not the words of some politically partisan liberal pundit on cable news. Ms. Trump, a clinical psychologist, asserts that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria as a narcissist.

“The fact is,” she writes, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for.”

Election 2020

So the American people have a critically important decision to make, arguably the most important electoral decision in our lifetimes. I have many Republican and independent friends who went for Trump in 2016, for some understandable if disjointed reasons. He was yapping about standing up for the little guy against establishment types in New York and Washington, just like George Wallace of Alabama.

Here at the New American Journal, we saw Trump’s famous magnetism for working people in person when he first came to Mobile in 2015. We knew that the key words and phrases he used to appeal to every manner of disgruntled potential voter had a certain attraction for them, and might just work on Election Day. We were right about that, while every other pundit in the land said Hillary Clinton was a lock to win.

But we are in a different place now, and not just because of Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 response and economic reopening. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters have awakened not just in Washington and across the country but around the world and responded to this blatant racism by rising up against it.

How can anyone of good conscience, anyone who calls themselves a Christian, not respond in horror to these videos?

CNN: Three videos piece together the final moments of George Floyd’s life.

Did the president go on television and reassure a stressed-out nation that this kind of brutality would not happen again, on his watch?

No, he went to Mount Rushmore and doubled down on the wrong side of history, trying to cling to his shrinking base. I will not dignify his position by repeating what he said here, but you’ve all seen it by now in a variety of forums.

Clearly Trump has firebrand Steve Bannon back writing his speeches and tweets. But Bannon too is on the wrong side of history, and we have already proven how he can be beat, even in Alabama.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

We will do it again in November. Trump is going down, baby, and there is nothing he can do about it now.

A majority of the American people are going to show up in record numbers to vote him out in a landslide in November, right people?

Even the fairly conservative polling outlet Gallup has Trump’s job approval down to 38 percent, while most polls show Biden leading Trump by 4 to 12 points with less than four months to go. None of these polls are within the margin of error, however, as they were back in the race between Trump and Clinton. It was always within the margin of error. Clinton never got to 50 percent. Trump led by seven points in the LA Times poll with two weeks to go. It was considered an outlier.

I don’t care if Joe Biden is your favorite Democrat or not, or if you don’t even like Democrats. No one of good conscience can vote for Trump now after seeing how he works.

Even Bernie Sanders is working with Biden to beat Trump.

Biden is not out there like Trump holding in person rallies. He’s staying safe at home for the most part. But he’s not missing a news cycle to make comments and is now laying out a populist economic vision to revive and reinvest in American manufacturing, calling for major new spending and stricter new rules to “Buy American” as part of an effort to more aggressively challenge President Trump on two of his signature issues: the economy and nationalism.

While Trump is going all out to appeal to the racist tendencies of a minority of the population, thoughtful analysts are now writing about Trump’s “Lost Cause.”

“… voters are horrified by Trump’s handling of race issues and of protests. The president’s unfavorability rating remains high … there’s been an immense shift in opinion on race. White voters have changed their minds, and they’re no longer with the president—but he’s sticking to the same talking points,” according to The Atlantic.

“The president rode to power by exploiting racial grievance — and now the backlash against his inflammatory acts may doom his reelection chances.”

Trump’s America Is Slipping Away

Americans today are far more racially diverse, less Christian, better educated, more urbanized, and less likely to be married than they were in Nixon’s day. They are more tolerant of interracial and same-sex relationships, more likely to acknowledge the existence of racial discrimination, and less concerned about crime. Non-college-educated white Americans will make up only 42 percent of voters in November, half of what it was in 1968. College-educated white voters and voters of color will represent about 30 percent of voters in 2020, twice what it was in 1968.

White Christians comprised fully 85 percent of all American adults in 1968. Now they represent only half that, 42 percent. Those who identify as secular or unaffiliated with any religious tradition represent 24 percent of the population today, while it was only 3 percent in 1968.

“The groups Trump hopes to mobilize — non-college-educated, non-urban, married, and Christian white voters — have significantly shrunk as a share of the overall society in the past 50 years. The groups most alienated from him include many of the ones that have grown over those decades: college-educated white people, people of color, seculars, singles, and residents of the large metro areas.”

While Trump is trying to channel Nixon with his war on crime, crime has been in decline for the past 50 years and Quinnipiac University last month found that college-educated white people were twice as likely to say that having Trump as president made them feel less safe rather than more safe.

“Trump hopes that reprising Nixon-style messages about disorder will allow him to mobilize massive margins and turnout among the white voters who feel threatened by these changes. But the country’s underlying evolution shows how narrow a path Trump has chosen. He is betting the Republican future on resurrecting a past that is dissolving before his eyes.”

Military Brass

Even the nation’s military brass have finally come around on the race issue and the problem of honoring so-called heroes of the Civil War.

The military’s top officer just described Confederate leaders as traitors and said he is taking a “hard look” at renaming 10 Army installations that honor them, despite President Trump’s opposition to any changes.

“The Confederacy, the American Civil War was fought, and it was an act of rebellion,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told members of the House Armed Services Committee. “It was an act of treason at the time against the Union, against the Stars and Stripes, against the U.S. Constitution, and those officers turned their back on their oath.”

The Army is now about 20 percent black, he pointed out.

“For those young soldiers that go onto a base — a Fort Hood, a Fort Bragg or a fort wherever named after a Confederate general — they can be reminded that that general fought for the institution of slavery that may have enslaved one of their ancestors,” he said.

Here’s another reason we think Trump will go down in November.

Even without a pandemic and economic problems, people have been on edge ever since Trump got elected because of the seemingly never ending tweet storm. We have been reeling from one crisis to another since Trump was sworn in. For the past three and a half years the stress on the country has cycled nearly out of control. As we reported early on, heavy drinking and drug use have been way up in the Trump years.

Then with the health and economic crisis and then the protests raging, people are surely fed up. Trump is seen as a problem, not a solution.

So no, this cannot stand any longer. We must make a change in November, if we want to survive as a country and a species.

Many experts in the science community are now saying 2020 Is Our Last, Best Chance to Save the Planet.

You don’t have to believe and agree with me on everything. But you cannot believe anything Trump says. Can we at least all agree on that, and vow to show up to vote him out in November?

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