Where I Wish President Trump Failure – The Washington Post

Gentle Reader – A Trump failure might doom our country, perhaps even our world. Yet I am unsure that success will be any better. How can I wish success to a man who wants to evict 11 million people from our country ? How do I wish success on a man who says he will order our soldiers, sailors, and marines to torture ? In what world do I wish success for a man who believes – and insists he will – commit war crimes by killing the families of those we believe are terrorists ? How can I wish success to a man who brags about his sexual predations ? And anyway, how could I face my daughter, Maria, and my granddaughters – Marianna, Sloane, Harry – if I wished him well in these things ?

My parents are 1st generation Lebanese, both sets of their parents came over to the US about the time WW I began. My mother’s parents came through Ellis Island, the “legal way”; my dad’s parents entered through Canada and then simply crossed the border into the State of North Dakota. My paternal grandfather became an active participant in the populist movement in North Dakota. During WW II, my dad was a sailor on the USS Yorktown; my mom a Coast Guard’s Woman. My son is a former Marine.

My son asked me to help with the Military Medical Corps so, even though I am not the person who follows orders or enters into a disciplined body of people with ease, I complied with my son’s request. I signed up for the (first) Army and then Navy Medical Corps. If my son needed better care, so did his buddies and if they deserved it, so did our enemies. After all, I am a physician; we take care of all who seek our aid.

My Navy packet is in its last stages of either acceptance or rejection ( I am a bit older than they prefer but have pretty good trauma and burn skills). If they were to have said “Yes”, I would have gone.

Would have.

I am pulling the packet. I cannot serve under a commander in chief who has said he would order torture. The reasons I walk with little spring in my step these days are the following: not only do I fear the President-elect’s behavior, his policies on a woman’s right to control her body, climate change, and so forth. No, not only that.

I wanted to serve my people more than I have done in the last 35 years; I was to have been a Navy physician. And now, because I will not serve a man who would have us torture, commit war crimes, I cannot.

Gentle Reader, one simply carries on.

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Where I wish President Trump failure

By Eugene Robinson Opinion writer November 14 at 7:28 PM

The people chose Hillary Clinton. But it’s the electoral vote that counts, not the popular vote, so Donald Trump will be president. And no, I’m not over it.

No one should be over it. No one should pretend that Trump will be a normal president. No one should forget the bigotry and racism of his campaign, the naked appeals to white grievance, the stigmatizing of Mexicans and Muslims. No one should forget the jaw-dropping ignorance he showed about government policy both foreign and domestic. No one should forget the vile misogyny. No one should forget the mendacity, the vulgarity, the ugliness, the insanity. None of this should ever be normalized in our politics.

The big protests that have followed Trump’s election should be no surprise. You can’t spend all those months trashing our nation’s values and then expect everyone to join you in a group hug. Trump made the bed in which he now must lie.

How did the unthinkable happen? Is Trump, like Brexit, part of some world-sweeping populist wave? Are the Rust Belt hinterlands in open rebellion? Was Clinton just a spectacularly flawed candidate? Did FBI Director James B. Comey boost Trump over the top? Did too many anti-Trump voters stay home out of complacency?

There is evidence to support all of those theories. But the urgent question isn’t why? — it’s what now?

Nationwide protests have gripped many cities for days following the presidential election as thousands march against Donald Trump’s victory. Trump tweeted to condemn “professional protesters, incited by the media.” (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

If a normal Republican had been elected, I could say the polite and socially acceptable thing, something like “I didn’t support So-and-So, but he will be my president, too, and I wish him success.” But I cannot wish Trump success in rounding up and deporting millions of people or banning Muslims from entering the country or reinstituting torture as an instrument of U.S. policy. In these and other divisive, cruel, unwise initiatives, I wish him failure.

I do hope he succeeds in avoiding some kind of amateurish foreign policy blunder that puts American lives or vital national interests at risk. And let me be clear that I am not questioning his legitimacy as president. When the results are certified and the electoral college casts its votes, Trump will be the nation’s duly chosen leader, ridiculous though that may be.

But he has not earned our trust or hope. Rather, he has earned the demonstrations that have erupted in cities across the country. He has earned relentless scrutiny by journalists, whom he shamelessly made into scapegoats during the campaign, and he has earned the constant vigilance of the public he now must serve.

There have been more than 200 reports since the election of harassment and hate crimes, mostly directed at minorities, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. During an interview broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Trump addressed his supporters: “I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.”

That would have been a better start had he not also sought to minimize the incidents, saying there had been a “very small amount” of them; and had he not also claimed the media was somehow applying a double standard in reporting on the protests.

The most troubling post-election development thus far was Trump’s appointment of campaign chief executive Stephen K. Bannon — a prominent figure in the racist, xenophobic alt-right movement — as chief strategist and senior adviser. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said the move “signals that white supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump’s White House.”

On “60 Minutes,” Trump hinted that he might moonwalk away from some of his most radical promises on immigration, the issue that made him stand out from the crowd of Republican contenders. He said he will still build a wall on the Mexican border, but there “could be some fencing” instead of an actual wall in places. And he said that “we’re going to make a determination” about the fate of millions of undocumented immigrants who have not committed crimes — sounding as if he knows his pledge to carry out mass deportation cannot be fulfilled.

He also backed away from the idea of having a special prosecutor reinvestigate Clinton over her emails. “They’re good people, I don’t want to hurt them,” he said of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

If Trump is beginning to confront reality on some fronts, that’s a first step — in a thousand-mile journey toward credibility and respect. But appointing Bannon is a big step backward. We must watch Trump, and judge him, every single inch of the way.

Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture, contributes to the PostPartisan blog, and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section.

Follow @Eugene_Robinson

About AJ Layon

AJ Layon was, for 28 years, at the University of Florida College of Medicine, in the Division of Critical Care Medicine, in Gainesville, FL. For the approximately 10 years until September 2011, he was Professor and Chief of Critical Care Medicine at UF; In September of 2011 he became System Director and Co-Chairman of Critical Care Medicine in PA; this ended in 2017. He served as a Physician in the Surgical Group with Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors without Borders) through 2018 and is presently an intensivist in Florida, struggling through the SARS-CoV-2 crisis. While his interests are primarily related to health care, health care reform, and ethical issues, as a citizen of our United States and our world, he will occasionally opine on issues of our "time and destiny". Follow on Twitter @ajlayon

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