Can we tolerate Trump?

Trump “lost” by about 3 million votes, yet he is now “our” president. What if the differential had been 10 million votes? Twenty million? Shouldn’t Trump supporters view themselves as less than honorable in so gleefully celebrating such incongruity?

Even though we live in a constitutional republic (representation) and not a democracy (one-person, one-vote), the spirit is of majority rule. Anything else smells like patriotic infidelity. What has been put into government through shameful gerrymandering are despot wannabes willing to sell their personal and professional honor to rule the country for an ignoble minority of social and economic pirates.

But beyond that, it’s about Trump’s abject penchant for dishonorable behavior and his miserable failures of judgment. Why? World War II precipitated astounding advances in military weaponry that are orders of magnitude more dangerous than previously envisioned – technologies that could end our civilization and, indeed, destroy our world.

Up until that war, we could tolerate and even survive a presidency of not only the incompetent and the foolishly egotistical, but those with dangerous – even treacherous – personality and moral defects. That war was perhaps civilization’s greatest seminal moment. It rather decisively defined who both we and the world could tolerate as America’s president – and, especially, who we shouldn’t.

Donald O. Capstick

Spokane