Failure

It is the crumbling of a dream. It is the closing of a door. A potential future shut out and drawn away from reach. The rejection of one’s hopes and efforts. The aggravating refusal of will. The path that has fallen away.

I lament for my country. And I burn against the stupidity which fuels her fall.

Once again, Trump will enter the land’s highest office. It’s a wonder how quickly it all went. I was prepared for a longer show. After 2020, with its elongated ballot-counting and its much elongated decry-ments of fraud, the 2024 election seems to have been over in a blink.

It’s a wonder that after four+ years of alleging fraud, of screeching that our institutions were too corrupted to offer us a fair election, all of the detractors seem to think our election process is now perfectly adequate, serenely fair. It seems that Trump won, and by an observable margin, too, so, I guess it isn’t rigged after all!

This will never be reckoned, and that is a damnable shame. In itself, it should bar the painted ghoul from candidacy (and in respect to our upcoming Veterans Day tomorrow, ridiculing prisoners of war also should have destroyed any presidential aspirations, but we decided we’re okay with that). To spend every waking moment deriding the system as a corrupt swamp which illegally stole your power, to lead an insurrection against it, to never concede your defeat—your failure—to refuse the peaceful transfer of power, to leave ambiguous if you will respect the results of the election you are currently running in, to do all that in the face of failure but abandon it without even a breath the instant you are promised victory, this cannot be how we act. A free society cannot exist when those who act so cravenly, out of ultimate self-interest and egoism, are rewarded in fullest brilliance.

Our elections are fair whether you win or lose. If it is fair when you win, but rigged when you lose, it is not the election that is at fault but the candidate. That this is apparently unclear to the majority of the country’s electorate is an indictment of them.

To be clear, I indict them. I indict you.

That you would propel someone and something so virulently un-American to our highest office makes me morally sick. My spirit is mauled by the deification of this putrid, idiotic monster. The soul of America, the promised ideal which its founding and thriving strive toward, is flatly rejected by Trump with every hate-filled lie he utters. Every baseless attack on our institutions, every demonization of those who oppose him, every rejection of hard fact in favor of soft, self-assuring untruth, these rot us.

As Trump takes office, he will claim credit for the economic boon that has already been brought to us by the Biden administration. Lower inflation? It’s 2.4% right now. Improve unemployment? It’s already at its safe and efficient minimum. Increase GDP? Already growing normally. Post stock market all-time-highs? Also already happening.

Trump might hurt this progress if he does actually tariff everything. That will increase prices and make everything more expensive. Though, if he can manage not attacking the economy too impudently, he will simply take credit for all of Biden’s achievements. Improved infrastructure? Biden passed it when Trump couldn’t. Manufacturing jobs? Biden brought them higher than Trump ever did. Immigration? Trump got nothing done and then cratered a Republican-authored bill which would have provided relief because he wanted to run on it as a campaign issue.

Energy? Despite being a climate change denier who desperately capitulates to fossil fuel corporations, Trump led America to producing less oil than Biden. But don’t worry, in office Trump will once again attack climate progress at every possible avenue—he will delete reference to it off government documents, he will fight the development of clean energy projects throughout the nation, he may even literally destroy NOAA and decimate the EPA—but that won’t be for the benefit of Americans or to increase our energy independence. We already produce the most oil of any country ever. Trump will destroy the natural world, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, because he wants to. He will further the global warming and climate catastrophes, the death of biodiversity and destruction of habitat that I am sure will demarcate the 21st century for all of time to come. The world I hope to bring children into will be made indelibly worse because of him.

Trump is a despicable man and a weak statesman. In almost every aspect of policy, he failed to produce meaningful results during his first term, and then he attacked the foundation of our democracy when the people voted him out.

He was never held accountable for his failed putsch, and now he will be back in power, with promises to rout out the enemy from within, to fight back against the ever-dastardly Lügenpresse, to stop the outsiders who are poisoning the blood of our country.

Where have I heard this before?

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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Does Lady Liberty’s light guide Trump? Is the Lady even safe with him?