I will admit it- I was wrong about Donald Trump

During the heat of the 2016 election, at a time when our divided nation was in the midst of a presidential race between businessman Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, I wrote a post that apparently did not make anyone happen on either side of the political divide.

As I often do, I began with a story from my past, this one about an incident that took place during my first year of teaching creative writing at Diamond Middle School and eventually the story led to my assertion that no matter which of the two candidates ended up taking the oath of office, it was not going to be as bad as the other side thought it would be.

If Hillary Clinton ended up president, the world was not going to fall apart.

By the same measure, if Donald Trump won, it would not be the end of civilization as we know it.

What a fool I was.

While it is true that our civilization did not fall apart during the nearly four years of Donald Trump's presidency, I keep wondering if that was on the agenda for a second term.

I was already living in the past and with a knowledge of history that showed that the minute presidents are elected, they begin working to show the others who did not vote for them they should change their minds when the next election rolls around.

I took comfort in our nation's history.

I never dreamed we had elected a president who didn't have a clue about our nation's history and did not care learn from it or even about it.

It never occurred to me the nation had elected a president who would spend all of his time obsessing about his enemies and kissing up to our nation's enemies.

While I was not surprised that President Trump would seek to tear down what Barack Obama had accomplished, simply because of his antipathy for his predecessor, I never suspected he would use his time in office to rip apart the foundation that had been built for this country by earlier presidents- Richard Nixon's Environmental Protection Agency, Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Harry S. Truman's creation of the NATO Alliance.

When Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, I resigned myself to him being our nation's commander-in-chief for the next eight years.

While I never believed Trump was any kind of great businessman, I fully expected him to make some intelligent moves during his first few months in office that would silence his critics. It would have been so simple.

All he ever had to do to put his critics on the defense would have been to tell the FBI and our intelligence agencies to get to the bottom of this Russian interference in our elections. That could have been done while saying that they didn't get him elected, but no one was going to mess with our nation.

After that, all he had to do was to put forward an actual job-creating national infrastructure plan, instead of wheeling out infrastructure weeks every few weeks during his first and only term.

Instead, he never did anything about Russia and spent his entire time in office decrying a Russian hoax that was anything but a hoax and he launched all-out warfare against the Affordable Care Act.

Even that could have worked for him, if he had presented a replacement plan.

In the 10 years since Obamacare was approved, the Republicans have won election after election blasting it and creating the "repeal and replace" fiction.

Over the past few years, it became apparent there never has been any replacement plan, primarily because they never thought they would have to have one.

During the past four years, President Trump has promised a "beautiful" health insurance plan. He never had one. Given four more years, he still would not have one.

Planning was never a big deal for President Trump. 

Work was never a big deal for President Trump.

His chief appeal for many of those who supported him was that he hated the Democrats and he hated the media.

And that was enough.

Somehow that was enough for him to convince his supporters that everyone who worked in the FBI and for our intelligence agencies were part of the fictitious "Deep State" and were out to get him.

If judges ruled against him, they were "Democrat" judges (even if they were appointed by Republicans).

If people protested against him, they were all a "violent mob," but if they were an actual violent mob who supported him, they were patriots.

Every news story that was written about him that was not to his liking was "Fake News." That even held true when a few weeks later the president would admit that the "Fake News" was real, but that it did not matter since he was on to something else.

Everything had to be about Donald Trump.

He made fun of people with disabilities. He mocked Gold Star families, prisoners of war, people who had died, people who wore masks and spent four years bragging about the number of people who attended his rallies and his ratings.

President Trump tweeted his way through four years and spent much of his time watching TV and then tweeting some more.

The one thing he did not do was work.

He was the one who supposedly wrote The Art of the Deal, yet he almost never got involved in the deal-making process. He would leave it to Congress and then if he did not like what they came up with, they would have to start all over again.

President Trump was the dealmaker who claimed Mexico would pay for a border wall when that obviously was never going to happen. Miraculously, he got his deal, the kind of deal that would have been a major success story- the Democrats agreed to pay for his wall in exchange for allowing the DACA recipients to stay in the United States. The president threw it out the window when a few of his major right wing media supporters opposed it.

For the last four years, a large percentage of Americans remained devoted to someone who exhibited the type of behavior they never would have tolerated from a visitor to their homes.

I am sure some of you will take the time to tell me why.

For your sake, I wish that President Trump could have been the type of leader you and all of the American people needed.

The shortcomings of a presidency based on grievance and showmanship came even more into focus after COVID-19 reached our shores.

By this time, the president had eliminated every voice of reason that surrounded him among his top advisors and did not pay attention to the scientists until he found a Fox News commentator who agreed with his view.

Instead of endorsing the use of masks that could have saved tens of thousands of lives, he mocked them, even when the failure to use them brought the coronavirus into the White House.

For the most part, we shut the country down for six weeks, a time that was designed to give us a chance to nip this virus before it gained a foothold and the president did nothing, except continue to claim he was doing a "great job."

As the death toll continued to mount, he never shared any concerns with the nation and at one point said, "It is what it is."

After President Trump recovered from COVID-19, he immediately took to the road, not only gathering large crowds of mostly unmasked people, but telling them that he was "cured," that the miracle vaccine was around the corner (it will be here by November 3) and hardly anybody is going to die. 

Scarcely a word about the now close to 240,000 who have died.

And at the same time that so many people have lost their jobs and their company-paid health insurance, the president moved full-speed ahead in his support of a lawsuit that would potentially strip millions of their health care and remove the option of affordable care for those who lose their health insurance.

But that's OK, because President Trump has a "beautiful plan" and it will cover pre-existing conditions.

So I was wrong in my September 27, 2016 Turner Report post when I said this country would be OK whether Hillary Clinton was elected or whether it was Donald Trump who ended up being sworn into office on January 20, 2017.

This is what I wrote in that post:

In my first year of teaching, in the fall of 1999, I had an unusual opportunity, though I did not realize it at the time.

I taught a writing class called Creative Language Arts at Diamond Middle School. The man who previously taught the class had moved to the high school, which was located on the same campus, so I asked him where I could find the curriculum for the class.

"There is no curriculum," he said. "You make it up as you go along."

For a beginning teacher who had not been in a classroom since my student teaching, also at Diamond, in 1981, those were not words that were welcome to my ears. I needed structure and if there was going to be any structure, I had to be the one to provide it.

My initial lack of structure turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me. I was able to write a curriculum that embraced everyday writing and examined issues that were in the news.

I did not have folders filled with old lesson plans. Another teacher taught the traditional English class, so I was able to concentrate completely on improving students' writing skills and much of that was done through the news- everything from personal essays to compare-contrast papers, to research papers. The class featured frequent discussions and occasionally a video recorded from a news program.

In the late fall of 1999, the 2000 presidential race was well underway. There was no secret as to who would be the Democratic candidate. Vice President Al Gore had that wrapped up.

The Republican race was another matter. A dozen candidates had thrown their hats in the ring, with the best known names belonging to former Texas Governor George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain.

The list also included a businessman with no background in politics, Steve Forbes, an African American conservative who also had no background in politics, except for a stint as an ambassador, Allan Keyes, Sen. Orrin Hatch from Utah, and some others.

I recorded an early debate and inflicted it on my classes. At first, they were upset that they were having to sit through a bunch of old men talking, but as the hour moved along, they were beginning to get into it.

The debate occurred before George W. Bush hit his stride and he performed poorly. It was not one of McCain's best either.

However, when it came time for the class discussion and papers on the debate, it was no surprise that many of the students thought Bush or McCain had done the best. After all, those were the names they had heard the most often. A surprising number thought the best candidate was Keyes, who was on the far right of the far right. Keyes was well-spoken and struck a chord with those students.

One girl, Melissa, was steadfast in her support for Orrin Hatch during the discussion and I had a hard time figuring out why. Though he had considerable experience, he did nothing to make himself stand out. To Melissa, no one but Orrin Hatch would do.

The next day, the students wrote a paper in which they were to provide examples from the debate on why they supported their favorite candidates. It came as no surprise that Melissa wrote about Orrin Hatch. As it turned out, she had an excellent reason, in addition to his qualifications, to support the senator- Melissa had grown up in Utah before moving to Missouri and she was familiar with Hatch.

The students' papers offered insight into their thinking and often, the thinking of their parents, as well.

The following year, Orrin Hatch, Allan Keyes, and even McCain were long since gone and the only two remaining were Al Gore and George W. Bush. I showed a portion of one of their debates to my classes and in their papers, quite a few of them wrote something in the line of "Couldn't we come up with anyone better?"

It was a question I had heard before.

How in the world did we end up with Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, a year when an obscure senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, developed a strong following among young people and another candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of a former president, and a governor  from a large state who appeared to be far more qualified than Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, were in the race? There was even a Romney in that election, Mitt's father, George, who dropped out before the race really got underway.

And we ended up with Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey?

But it wasn't just 1968. I remember hearing the same thing four years later when the choice was Nixon and George McGovern and four years after that with unelected President Gerald Ford and obscure former Gov. Jimmy Carter.

Now that I think of it, every four years comes around and we end up with two people that we wonder how they ever wound up as their party's presidential nominees.

Come on. An actor named Ronald Reagan. The next thing you know some reality television star will be elected president.

If someone had suggested 20 years ago that the general election presidential candidates in 2016 would be the First Lady and someone whose television experience had consisted more of WWE than C-SPAN that person would have been considered to be someone in serious need of psychiatric help.

How do we end up with these people?

One of our problems is that no one lives up to the picture we have in our minds of what a president should be. No one thought Abraham Lincoln would turn out to be Abraham Lincoln when he first ran for president and history shows even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had their critics.

So we end up once more with a choice that is far from perfect, but what can we do about it? Some are talking about staying at home on election day and that is their choice. If those people don't want to take the time to study the candidates we do have and their stances on various issues and their personal qualities that could either make them great presidents or poor ones, then I would prefer they stayed at home and leave the voting to those who care enough to take the time to study the candidates and the issues.

If we elect Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton and it doesn't work out, it won't be the end of the world. The Republic will survive. In two years, we can make changes at mid-term elections in the House and Senate, and two years later, we will select two more candidates to run for president.

And once again we are likely to ask the same question. How do we end up with these people?

Our candidates, just like everyone else in this country, are not perfect, but as long as we involve ourselves in the process, research, vote, and speak out for what we believe, our system will continue to work, maybe not always the way we want, but there's always the next election.

Shortly after I wrote that post, Joplin liberal blogger Duane Graham took me to task, in a post titled "Randy Turner Gets It Wrong."

This isn’t a contest we can take so damned lightly. The fact that Turner felt it necessary to call his piece, “If Donald Trump is elected, it won’t be the end of the world,” should have told him something. 

And what it should have told him is that a lot of people, especially people in the foreign policy and national security establishment, are scared to death of what might happen if an obviously unqualified and temperamentally unstable man with a fondness for Russian thugs gets in touch with real power.

A voter’s job in this election is not, as Turner suggests, deciding whether Clinton or Trump will make a “great” president or a “poor” one, in terms of how history might judge either in the future. The job in this utterly unique case is to make reasonably sure there is a future in which historians can make such judgments! 

The voter’s job is, and has been since June of last year, deciding whether an unstable reality TV star is a man Americans should trust with the world’s most powerful military and nuclear arsenal, with weapons that could very well mean the end of the world, at least as we know it today. 

And unless Turner has some evidence that the cartoonish con man we have been watching for over a year now will somehow transform himself into a stable, steady, solicitous president, he should spare us the “there’s always the next election” nicety and stop trying to convince voters that they are not making an existential decision. With Trump in the race, that’s exactly what they are doing.

I doubt seriously that Duane Graham reads this blog, but nevertheless, I owe him and everyone else an apology for writing that post.

I was wrong.

As a nation, we were fortunate for the first three years of Donald Trump's presidency. Much damage was done, but there was no war.

The pandemic has proven the fallacy of my belief that the presidency brings out the best in those few who hold the office.

But for some reason, I still cling to that belief.

For the past few months, I have heard President Trump and his supporters mocking Joe Biden and asking how is he going to accomplish anything when he has not accomplished anything in 48 years.

I take that issue with that assessment, but I will grant that Joe Biden, like all of us, has made mistakes.

Somehow, I still have the idea that 48 years of public service is exactly the type of resume we need at this point in history. We need someone who has faith in our system and who is willing to work with even the people who have opposed him so vigorously throughout this campaign

Better than that, we now have a president who has actually read history and is willing to learn from it.