Let’s Not Be as Petty as Trump
The horrible drama of the Trump (lack of) administration continues, and now I really have to say something to his many detractors: Lay off the personal comments about his hands, hair, weight, and skin tone.
This is not because he’s been ill-used. All the misery he’s going through has been brought on himself by his own supersized ego paired with a paper-thin skin and the emotional maturity of a five-year-old. Everytime he responds with another tantrum or ill-considered tweet, he just gives his enemies more ammunition.
This is not because he deserves our pity. He’s shown none for the millions of people who will lose health coverage, Medicaid, and Medicare so his tax bracket can reap a windfall. He’s shown none for the long list of people he has mercilessly ridiculed. I doubt he’s capable of feeling real pity for anyone but himself.
It’s not even because he’s president. While that office is supposed to garner respect, the occupant has to do at least something to earn it. In five months, I’m not sure that I can recall even five instances in which I was able to nod approvingly at what Trump said and how he said it. The overwhelming feeling the Trump presidency engenders is deep embarrassment, for him and for the country. The United States is being mocked by not just Stephen Colbert but the whole world.
So yes, to everyone with eyes to see and a voice to protest, go after the narcissitic incompetent, but hit him where it matters, at what he does and says and how it hurts us all.
The White House is in total disarray, but it’s not because the president may have spent too much time in the sun or the tanning booth. He should be called a glutton because he wants to gobble up taxes that should continue to help the poor, not because he tends to supersize his fries. Our foreign policy, and indeed our international reputation, has been shipwrecked, but his petite hands had nothing to do with it.
Everytime someone goes for the cheap laugh by pointing out these physical characteristics, he sabotages his own argument, makes the speaker appear petty. And it is petty. Because if Trump were a decent president, rational, mature, honest, caring, with good ideas for the nation and strong determination to work for them, it wouldn’t matter what he looked like.
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This theme is central to my book. Take the heroine, Jess Riordan. If you looked at her from the right side, she was the most beautiful woman around. But there was no getting around the left side, which was mottled by a wine stain birthmark that covered much of the jaw and traveled down her neck. She was denied a teacher’s position because the men on the school board found it too disconcerting.
But Aaron Collins was able to see the true beauty shining through:
“I see I made ya blush, I ‘ope in a good way.”
“Oh no,” she clapped a hand to her left cheek, but looking pleased nonetheless. “That always makes the marks darker.”
Aaron reached through the bars to pull her hand away, which he then somehow forgot to let go. “Like flowers blazin’ in a harvest field. Tha’s what I see when I lookitcher face, and blushin’ jus’ makes ‘em that much prettier. Yer beautiful, Jess, y’always were. I shoulda perked up ‘n’ noticed long ago.”