Dear Doctor: My husband and I disagree about you and about Donald Trump. He doesn’t care for you (or worse) and he loves Trump. I, on the other hand, love you and can’t abide Trump. It’s incredible that we’re still together. We obviously cancel each other out when it comes to voting for president. Now that the election is over and Biden has certainly prevailed, things have gotten really testy around here. “Jerko” (we’ll call him that) says that Biden has stolen the election. He hopes that Trump figures out a way to “seize” (his word) power. When I tell him that Trump is a Fascist and that his actions would be unconstitutional, Jerko gives an erudite answer. He says, “Who cares?” I ask you, Doctor, who’s right? Sign me: Beneva in Brooklyn.
Dearest Beneva: First of all, thanks for your vote of confidence. I will always try not to let you down. Obviously, Trump is a bully (Andrew Cuomo calls him that) and is both narcissistic and uncaring about the people who work for him or voted for him. We have seen and heard signals from Trump and his group that he will not go quietly into the night. He has said all along that if he didn’t win, the election was rigged. I have never figured this guy out. Had he seen the pandemic as an opportunity and opted to save lives, he would have been overwhelmingly reelected. For whatever his reasons, he didn’t go that route. Instead, he continued to be the uncaring person that he is.
There are several reasons why Trump can’t give up power. We really don’t know all of them, but we can guess. First of all, when and if he leaves the presidency, he will face a host of lawsuits and possibly even criminal charges. In other words, he could end up in jail. Even if he pardons himself or gets Mike Pence to do it, he will still face charges in New York and any other state where he may have crossed the economic street in the wrong way. We are told the guy is dejected and I feel terribly sorry about that (sarcasm alert). But should he stand convicted of a crime, he belongs in prison. Even his own Supreme Court has said, “No person is above the law.” It would be a huge mistake for the incoming Democrats to say that in the name of unity, he should be pardoned at the state level. I would hate to see New York District Attorney Cy Vance or New York State Attorney General Letitia James go for that one. Trump is the guy who is always arguing to lock people up, including his political opponents.
The second major reason is that losing exposes him as, well, a loser. This is not a guy who likes to lose. He doesn’t play by the rules and he obviously doesn’t give a damn. As president, he refused to take action, and hundreds of thousands of people have been infected and are dying. He has broken norm after norm. In other words, if it isn’t a law but is an established practice, he just won’t do it because he doesn’t have to. Right now, he has been refusing to transfer power to Biden.
Then, too, the value of Trump’s properties has been benefitting from his presidency. There are some folks who still don’t know whether he really is a billionaire or a pauper. We will certainly learn a lot more about him once he has left office.
So yes, Beneva, you are right and “Jerko” is dead wrong. He is representative of too many people who just won’t wake up and smell the flowers.
