By Edwin Cooney
Yes, indeed, raw rhubarb is an acquired taste and I've acquired it. However, unlike 73 million Americans, I refuse to pick my rhubarb from Donald Trump's rhubarb patch.
The beauty of rhubarb is that, in addition to being a fruit, it is often described as a quarrel: "I had a real rhubarb with my lady last night and she beat the hell out of me! POOR ME!”
It was essential that in 2017 I started out giving the newly minted president the benefit of some doubt. True, he was a different sort of man. First, he came from a business rather than from a political background. Second, he came from privilege thus having little taste or even regard for the less than privileged. Third, for millions of Americans he was an anathema to other politicians. Too many Americans, to suit this observer, were ready to "throw the baby out with the bath water!” Thus, as he entered the White House, President Trump, with majorities in both houses of Congress, had a pretty clean slate on which to write. So, the obvious question is: what did he write on that clean slate?
Not all of what he wrote was negative. After all, he had his party's conservative agenda to fulfill and he did that within months by introducing tax cuts to stimulate a rather sluggish economy. Even his proposal to do away with Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act was well within the domain of his presidential and political prerogative. The same was true of his proposal to build a wall that he swore Mexico would pay for. However, the tone of his administration was “rhubarbish” from the very outset. His insistence that foreigners, Muslims and, certainly, socialists and most communists (Vladimir Putin excepted) were an anathema to the future well being of the American people.
President Trump's obvious enjoyment of confrontation came from his earliest experiences in business and finance. For too long, as the president and his closest advisors believed, government was too much about politics and, although he avoided Calvin Coolidge’s assertion that "the business of America is business," there was little doubt that he believed exactly that. (Note: many Americans since FDR's day had hoped and prayed for a strictly business oriented administration.) He demanded from Congress precisely what he wanted.
There was no such thing as there once was, the existence of a "loyal opposition.” It's true that some Democrats between election day of 2016 and 2017 Inauguration Day questioned the validity of Mr. Trump's election, but there was nothing new in that. After all, following the 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes, the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, and most certainly the contested 2000 election of George W. Bush, there had been widely based wonderment of the legitimacy of those elections. It has even been speculated that had Hillary Clinton been elected over Mr. Trump, the Trump people were ready to proclaim the election results "a hoax" and immediately proceed with the help of Fox News and other sources to establish an election bid in 2020.
As uncomfortable as it is to assert, Mr. Trump's ongoing rhubarb (or, if you prefer, quarrelsomeness) prospers because we've become a quarrelsome people. We seek our own facts on topics we're barely educated enough to understand. People's religious or nonreligious orientations are dismissed as secular, socialist, and fundamentally both suspect and evil. This all became apparent even before the occurrence of January 6th.
Politicians, from FDR through Joe Biden, in one way or another, have used fear to advance their respective causes because a free peoples' hopes and dreams are inevitably the stuff of alternatives and choices at the ballot box. This natural reality, however, has always been accompanied by an expectation that the wishes of the voting majority ought to prevail until the next election.
As we approach 2022, what seems to matter to most Republicans is the ultimate return of Donald Trump to the White House. This seems to be taking place despite the legitimate ambitions of other possible Republican candidates named Pence, Pompeo, and, perhaps, even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. (When was the last time a former vice president and a former secretary of state were available for either party’s preference?) This observation is by no means anti-conservative because Pence, Pompeo and DeSantis all regard themselves as rock-ribbed conservatives.
The reality, however, is that we're currently embedded in a national rhubarb which is flavoring our future — largely due to the courtesy of Donald Trump. It's hard not to worry that we're headed for a government of, by and for Donald Trump.
Taste for that outcome is in too many American mouths to suit me! The former president's rhetoric is clearly more divisive than uniting. Saddest of all, Mr. Trump's rhubarb sourness appears to be deliberately designed toward disunity and political domination, more than has anyone's rhetoric since that of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. No nation's peace and prosperity has ever thrived on disunity — and that includes the The United States of America!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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