John Lewis said what a lot of us have been thinking: that
Trump is not a legitimate president because of voter suppression laws in a
handful of states that broke to Trump by micro-thin margins and decided the results
of the Electoral College. The Georgia Congressman also implied that Trump
delegitimizes himself with his behavior and language towards minorities, immigrants
and women. Finally, Lewis rejects Trump’s vision for America as its putative
symbolic leader for the next eight, four, two or one year(s) that he’s
president.
When not trying to bully women or his campaign adversaries,
Trump often takes off on figures with halos over their heads, people who both
the religious and non-religious consider saint-like: A Gold Star family. The
Pope.
And now John Lewis.
On both the factual and the symbolic level, Trumpty-Dumpty’s
recent tweet attacking Lewis was as wrong as wrong can be. After
mischaracterizing Lewis’ vibrant and relatively wealthy Congressional district
as a crime-infested rat hole, Trump said “All talk, talk, talk—no action or
results.”
John Lewis. No action?
On the factual level, the district itself belies Trump’s
accusation that Lewis doesn’t spend time helping it.
On the symbolic level, John Lewis epitomizes the man of
action. Remember that when police officers and soldiers put themselves in harm’s
way, they carry weapons and are willing to use them and, if American, they
typically outnumber the other side.
But John Lewis went out to face the enemy with nothing but
the courage of his conviction that peaceful disobedience was the most powerful
weapon to achieve social, civic and economic justice. When he led the
demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that bloody
Sunday in 1965, he knew he was going to take a bad beating, and he took it. He
took it for Dr. Martin Luther King, who didn’t march that day. And he took it
for the civil rights movement. He took it for the entirety of the United States
and for everyone who ever believed that the right to participate fully in
society belonged to all men and women, regardless of their color, religion or
condition in life. I’ve read the Gospels
and a lot of history and I’m still not convinced that such a man as Jesus
Christ ever existed. I definitely question the concept of a person suffering
for the sins of the collective. But if there were ever a Christ-like human
being, it was—and is—John Lewis.
The simplified form of the twentieth century philosophy
called existentialism is “You are what you do.” By that measure, Lewis is an
existentialist’s existentialist, the highest form of the man of action.
While John Lewis has lived his life as the embodiment of
true heroism, every public act of Donald Trump’s existence manifests the
extreme narcissism and greed of a spoiled but very dull four-year-old. While
John Lewis has dedicated himself to the ideals of helping others, Trump and his
cabinet of billionaires and multi-millionaires have dedicated their time on
earth to selfish ends or to rolling back the gains made by Lewis and others to
bring social and economic equity to all.
Some people are bemoaning that Trump is an accidental president,
a product of a bizarre series of one-off events. Others blame racism and
misogyny for the still hard-to-imagine horror of 60 million people voting for
him. Still others say Republicans fixed the Electoral College vote with voter
suppression laws. All of these explanations for why this ignorant loutish
racist who lost the popular vote by almost three million still ended up
president is enough to delegitimize his moral authority for John Lewis. And for
tens of millions others, too.
Including me. Donald Trump may assume the office of the
presidency in a few days, but he’ll never be my president.
On the other hand…if he would keep and extend Obama’s energy
and environmental policies; fund infrastructure improvement with new taxes on
the wealthy; veto all legislation that would end the Affordable Care Act or the
individual mandate or cut funding to Planned Parenthood; come out in favor of
the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian mess; embrace the Iraq
nuclear deal; advocate raising the minimum wage and lifting the cap on incomes
assesses Social Security taxes; nominate Merrick Garland as Supreme Court
justice; encourage parents to give their children timely vaccinations, stopped
using Twitter to create prosecute personal feuds, stopped dissing our allies
while praising Vladimir Putin…
In other words, if Trump acted presidential, I would
consider him president.
Fat chance of that.
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