Donald Trump, we’re told, is the law-and-order candidate for president. Unless he wins another 4 years, the country will be overrun by crime and lawlessness – or so the story goes. At the Republican National Convention, Mike Pence said, “We will have law and order on the streets of this country for every American – for every race and creed and color.” But when is that going to start? The Republicans have had the presidential reigns for going on 4 years and murder rates are up, police are indiscriminately killing African Americans, there’s rioting in the streets, people are roaming the streets with assault rifles, citizens are gunning each other down, hate speech is running rampant, human beings on our borders are treated horribly, members of the administration are being accused and convicted of crimes, and the administration – including our sycophantic attorney general – is trying every which way it can to put itself above the law. So, “Law and order for everybody but us, because we’re special,” I guess is the message.
If Donald Trump is reelected to another 4 years, is all this magically going to stop? No, of course it isn’t. Law and order have been on a steady decline on Mr. Trump’s watch. Electing him to 4 more years will not magically make things better; it will realistically make things worse. Why? Because Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t have the capacity to make things better. By his nature, he makes things worse. For example, what was his answer to protesters in major cities? He sent in uninvited federal agents who used guerrilla tactics against peaceful protesters, including even literally kidnapping some protesters off the streets. By all accounts, Mr. Trump made things worse.
A competent leader, instead of impotently sending in uninvited agents, would say, “Why are citizens protesting so forcefully even to the occasional point of violence? Maybe there’s a real problem I can help with. I’ll ask.” The competent leader would then probably learn that everyone has reached the boiling point due to being continually, disrespectfully, destructively, and sometimes even fatally marginalized. People have had enough! But that’s beside the point. The point is that a competent leader would do more than tweet that all this is somebody else’s fault, but, if we reelect him to 4 more years, all the problems that he’s helped create will magically go away.
If Mr. Trump were asked why things are so terribly bad on his watch, his first typical response would be something like, “Well, things aren’t so bad; in fact, they’re better than they’ve ever been before.” If pressed, assuming he didn’t just storm out of the room as he’s done before, he would probably admit that, “It’s those demented Democrats’ fault. I just can’t work with those losers.” And therein lie three of Mr. Trump’s biggest problems: he hurls insults around like an unruly teenager without even the slightest nod to civility, he continually stokes the extreme polarization crushing our nation’s soul, and he just can’t seem to work constructively with anyone, Democrat or otherwise. We need someone who can. It’s time for Donald Trump to be shown the door.
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