KINSELLA: America a failure under Trump as it marks its 250th year
· Toronto Sun
Canada and America both had birthdays this week. Theirs was more consequential.
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Not, however, in the way that birthdays are supposed to be – not with lots of joy and singing and celebrations of achievement.
America alights in its 250th year with none of that, really. No discernible joy, no proper celebrations, no singing by anyone you would ever want to hear . Uncharitable as it may sound, America slides into its 250th year like a dead and decomposing whale on a remote beach somewhere, foul and desiccated, but too big to easily remove.
So the rest of us stare at it, marveling at what it once was, not what it is. Wondering if we should blow it up, like in a YouTube video, or just wait for the tide take it back.
America 2026 is a failure
What America 2026 is, on which there is broad agreement in the rest of the world, is a failure. America was never a perfect union, of course (nothing is). But it has now permitted its imperfect id to seize the wheel, and steer the whole shebang into the ditch.
America was always crazy, but it always had a certain charm, too. Even as a kid, attending David G. Burnett Elementary School in suburban Dallas, Texas, I liked reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, my eight year-old hand positioned above my heart. Even then, I liked the notion of being connected to something greater than oneself. I can still recite it, word for word.
And then, of course, there was the craziness: the friendly Dallas neighbor, outlining how she’d use her rifle to prevent the arrival of Black children at the aforementioned David G. Burnett. A friend of a friend, killed in a gunfight in a bar, and no one seeming to be very alarmed or even upset by the news. My father, a young doctor, expressing disgust about a system that bankrupted people just because they got sick.
My own experience with their craziness was limited, but memorable. Our teachers, for example, would require us to have regular air raid drills in which we would be instructed to crouch, silent, under our smallish desktops. To protect us against an errant bombing run by the North Vietnamese Air Force, 9000 miles off-course? To shelter against the radiation that would follow a Soviet nuclear ballistic missile attack on Texan suburbia?
I’d ask my father why. “They’re Americans,” he’d say. “They’re different from us.”
They sure are.
America made mistake of electing Trump again
Proof came when Donald Trump was elected the first time. It seemed like what political people call an outlier, however: an aberration, an exception to the rule. He was a racist, demented kleptomaniac; he was obviously crazy. But America would come to its senses, we assured ourselves. They wouldn’t make this mistake again.
But they did, didn’t they? Even after all of the duly-sworn, uncontested evidence from Trump’s first term and thereafter – the two impeachments, the criminal conviction for fraud, the $5-million civil finding that he had raped a woman – even after all that, 77 million Americans voted for him again.
The “fool me once” clich é applies, here. The American people – they always call themselves that, to add solemnity, perhaps, but who knows – can perhaps be forgiven for Trump One. None of us really expected him to win, and none of us expected things to get as crazy as they did.
Americans got the government they deserve
But Trump Two? To vote for the Mango Mussolini a second time, knowing everything they knew after the satyricon of Trump One? Political scientists have a phrase for it: “voting against your own self-interest.”
But that doesn’t quite capture the magnitude of America’s self-immolation, does it? Seventy-seven million people knew Trump One was a disaster, and they went for Trump Two anyway. They now go on CNN to express surprise (checks notes) that it’s a disaster again.
That’s why, for some of us, there is no pity on offer. None. The ICE brutality, the naked corruption, the Iranian war quagmire, the isolation from former allies, the trade and tariff economic destruction, the lawlessness and grifting, the vomitous racism and sexism and narcissism of Trump himself: America richly deserves all of it. They voted for it, after all.
People get the governments they deserve, goes the truism. America at 250 years surely does.
Perhaps that’s why our teachers had us hiding under our desks at David G. Burnett Elementary, way back when: they were getting us ready for the sh–show that is America in 2026.