There’s something telling in the fact that the White House press office assigned “spokesman” Davis Ingle, currently number eight out of 11 in the White House press corps depth chart, and all of 26 years old, to inform the global public that President Trump no longer cares about poll numbers because, “the ultimate poll was November 5, 2024, when nearly 80 million Americans overwhelmingly elected him.”
With a 2024 victory margin of 1.5 percent of the vote, one could quibble with the claim that Trump’s second election victory was “overwhelming.” What is overwhelming is the staggering drop in Trump’s public support since he launched his war on Iraq, became more involved with the Lincoln Monument’s reflecting pool, a 250-foot high archway outside Arlington National Cemetery and a White House ballroom that could cost $600 million, then he is with the welfare of the American people. This while the price of gas is stuck on “too much” because Iran is blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and while average Americans can’t afford the essentials : healthcare, food, housing and, well, let’s just say it, the American Dream.
This is not a record any political party would want to stand on, and perhaps it has begun to occur to you – as it has to a growing number of independent candidates for local, state and federal offices all across the country – that part of the problem may just be the centuries-old, stagnant, decaying and completely siloed political party system.
The Democratic Party has the almost free gift of an increasingly senile, emotionally unhinged and intellectually ignorant president who has lately expressed paramount interest in his remarkable discovery that the word dumb ends with the letter ‘B,’ a revelation he can’t help sharing with reporters and the public, as if he had just discovered a new planet next to Mars no one knew was there.
The Democrats can, and certainly will, make hay with Trump’s increasingly pathetic (and therefore increasingly dangerous) efforts to govern. He still has, it must not be forgotten, the keys to the nuclear football, and there are more than two more years within which he can become ever more unstable, irrational, childlike and mindlessly impulsive. Greenland, are you listening?
But here’s the most important thing most Americans should be thinking about: How can we fix the country? When he is gone, what steps do we need to take to repair the damage and reinforce the foundation, the walls, and the roof of democracy to address the design deficiencies Trump’s amoral, immoral and selfish rule has revealed in the engineering and the architecture of what somehow remains the greatest form of government ever designed by humans. All of it, amazingly, done without power grids, mainframes (or even laptops), cell phones, Wikipedia, airplanes, Morning Joe, Seinfeld, SNL, Google, Apple or AI. Amazing!
What I’m worming my way toward is the tremulous conclusion that the existing political party system has utterly failed to meet the challenge of the 21st Century – Democrats and Republicans both – and, unless we chart a different course it may be too late.
Climate Change is real. So is the obscene influence of corporate money on political decision-making, the decision-making that is lethally postponing effective national efforts to address climate change.
And it is that same corporate influence that refuses to acknowledge or understand the crippling impact of the current tax structure that is driving the national debt into outer space, while it incrementally and cruelly reduces the bedrock economic resources available to the middle and lower economic classes.
I have ceased caring about what political party people belong to. I want to know what their values are, what they care about, who they feel compelled – or at least willing – to help. And if you claim to be Christian, why don‘t you practice what you preach?
It’s not enough to satisfyingly and self-righteously denigrate and ridicule the cowardly enablers who have kept Trump in office. We need to assume proactive responsibility to reach outside party lines, seek, find and support any willing candidate for public office willing attack the indefensible disparity in income and wealth in America; get corporate money out of politics and get politics out of the church.
We need a new political paradigm, respectful of political independence and adverse to political power structures. Which brings us back to getting private money out of public policy.
If he doesn’t start a nuclear war, Trump will be gone before long. But the wreckage he leaves behind needs an entirely new vision to heal. And it’s hard to believe that vision will come from either political party. Easier to assume that political parties will burn time, money and energy bickering over strategies they can agree on, then that they will, together, arrive at some effective solutions.
This is a conversation that demands to be continued.
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