By Edwin Cooney
Dear President-Elect Donald J. Trump, Sir!
As the two-hundredth and twenty-eighth year of our federal republic opens, three realities are simultaneously true.
First, you have been fairly and legitimately elected the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. Think of it: only 44 other men have attained the honor you’re about to achieve in ceremonial majesty and you’ve spent a major part of the last 21 months defaming and almost dehumanizing three of them! Second, from what I’ve observed of you in recent years, you’re a stupid, deliberately insensitive, self-centered, intellectually narrow-minded man. Not only do you appear to be incapable of drawing distinctions between cause and effect concerning social and political realities, but you are unwilling to even consider doing so. Third, however, by your legitimate acquisition of the presidency, you’ve earned the benefit of the doubt and the good wishes of your national constituency. I assert this, not because you’re a good fellow, but due to the reality that the well-being of us all depends upon your success as President of the United States of America. Although you campaigned like an eight-year-old playground bully, now it is time, even passed the time, for two important changes to occur.
First, it’s time for your political opponents to give you their respectful attention as you take on domestic and international matters of state. Second, it’s time for you to start acting like a president worthy of every American’s benefit of the doubt. It’s not for me to judge whether you can start acting in a statesmanlike way, but it is passed time for you to abandon the punkish adolescent public persona that appears to be ingrained in your psyche so that you might begin acting presidential.
Stepping off the lecture platform for a minute, I offer the following observations about you that Americans might grasp onto for a greater sense of emotional stability. First, there is the almost inevitable ideological clash between you and the traditional conservative GOP. Your unpredictability is like that of Andrew Jackson whose behavior had a Trump-like outrageousness to it. Jackson didn’t become president because he had a lot of good ideas; he was elected president because he had been a victorious general during the War of 1812 and because he was a ruthless Indian fighter willing to protect and advance land speculators hungry for Indian lands in the southeast and even in the west. What “King Andrew” wanted, “King Andrew” went after no matter who it pleased or displeased. Even President Jackson’s quarrel with the second Bank of the United States turned out to be a personal squabble between Jackson and bank president Nicholas Biddle. It wasn’t a principled or ideological quarrel at all. It was both personal and territorial. You sir, I believe, are capable of becoming involved in that kind of a squabble. There are advantages and dangers to this tendency. Such independent latitude possesses its assets and its liabilities, but it’s not unprecedented.
Your unpredictability has an even greater precedent in the person of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. My favorite FDR story has to do with an occasion in about 1935. FDR sent one of his top advisors to Capitol Hill to persuade a congressional committee to pass a piece of legislation vital to the interests of the New Deal. After the advisor, Tommy “The Cork” Corcoran left, Roosevelt continued discussing this piece of legislation further with other advisors. Suddenly, “the boss” had a change of mind about the whole matter. Shortly after, “The Cork” returned to the White House and told FDR, ‘Boss, I got it. I got the whole thing for you.” “Tommy Tommy!” said the president, “After you left, I decided that I needed the issue that proposal addressed more than I need the solution it provides. I’ve decided that the issue, not the principle or the accomplishment, is what really matters.” FDR often admitted that he often didn’t let his right hand know what his left hand was doing. I see a little of that in you, Mr. President-Elect. Again, like a physician’s most powerful drugs, this strategy can be deadly, more often than not.
Mr. Trump, you’ve attained your gallant office not by demonstrating understanding, but rather by stirring the hot coals of anger and division. You didn’t start the inferno, but you’ve had a lot to do with its increasing intensity. Seldom during the campaign did you offer a solution because it was the issue that served you best. FDR’s practice of that strategy was much, much milder while yours was blatantly injurious to at least our short term national security.
Politics is indeed a contentious game and you’re far from the first to indulge in its petty aspects. However, you’ve promised a lot of angry, frustrated Americans that you’ll feed their demand for “red meat.” If Hillary Clinton isn’t indicted, if “the swamp” of Wall Streeters isn’t drained, if conflicts of interest in government aren’t adequately addressed, if climate issues aren’t taken into account, if nuclear proliferation is the cornerstone of your foreign policy, then you’ll be answerable for all the effects these matters will have on the national psyche. That you inherited these problems from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will not save you from the legitimate wrath of a spurned public!
As the calendar and the clock count off the final days of the Obama administration, there’s time for you to revel in the fact that you have yet to make a strategic misjudgment, a single personnel or policy error, but these realities are on the way. You may be a business genius, but you’ll soon be out of the realm of business where your orders prevail and where you are the lone decider as to who is rewarded and punished. You’ve reached the presidency slashing and thrashing. Now, it’s your turn to be verbally slashed and thrashed. Your political advisors and many of your supporters anxious to justify their judgment of you will come to your defense and continue to hold Obama and perhaps both Clintons responsible for all less than successful events after January 20th. Had you campaigned rather than bludgeoned your way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, your legion of support might be a political firewall.
Those of us left in your political wake, forced as we are to taste ‘Trump dust,” have at least the satisfaction of knowing that we can count over 3 million more votes than can you. That’s not a bad base to begin from when one anticipates 2020.
Yes, indeed, you’ve won. You’re the next President of the United States.
How much of a man you are is yet to be seen. If there’s more to you than we recollect from the recent presidential campaign, then all of us are the beneficiaries. If not, then you’re more of a jerk than anyone you trashed (Hillary Clinton included) in order to prevail.
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
No comments:
Post a Comment