A Box Of Chocolates

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” the plainspoken philosopher Forrest Gump once said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”

In a normal world, these words would be oh-so-true, but in the crazy scenario of November 2016, we knew what we were going to get — and we plucked the biggest, fattest, ugliest chocolate out of the box anyway. We elected Donald Trump our president.

Admittedly, the alternative choice was also not much to our liking, but with the gift of hindsight, we’d never be in the gooey, sticky mess we’re in now if Hillary Clinton had gotten the Electoral College votes to match her popular vote count. Instead of a candy much more to our tastes, we picked the one made of bitter chocolate and full of nuts.

I still cannot fathom why, given what we knew, people actually stepped into voting booths across America and made black marks for such a “black mark” on our rich and honorable American history. What were we thinking?

Well, let me remind you. All of the following were said or written to me by real people concerning Donald Trump:

“Just look what he’s done for the economy! The stock market is booming! Unemployment is at an all-time low!”

There were lots of comments like this — and look at where we are now. For those of you sputtering, “But that’s not his fault! It’s because of the pandemic!”

True, the pandemic is not Trump’s fault (more on that in a minute), but in a world where everything is connected, he took his eye off the ball. Neither did Trump make the economy great pre-pandemic. He only made sure to push it along, and he did that by saddling our children, grandchildren and probably our great-grandchildren with trillions of dollars in debt that will eventually have to be repaid.

Today, there are even more trillions being doled out to artificially support an economy that Trump has broken due to his dreadful handling of the current coronavirus crisis. “I am the king of debt!” Trump often crows. That’s one of the very few true things he has ever said.

A couple more of my favorites:

“He may bend the truth a little, but, c’mon, who doesn’t?”

Honest people don’t. Those with confidence in the truth don’t. I even had one guy write, “Donald Trump hasn’t told one lie — ever! What has he lied about?” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has totaled up over 18,000 lies, misstatements and Pinocchios, so far. Some of them have been uttered multiple times, and some lies have even been stated, contradicted, and then restated again in the same press conference.

“Yes, he’s made a few mistakes, but he’s a good Christian. He reads the Bible every day,” she wrote to me. I seriously doubt good Christians grab women by their private parts at will, pay off porn stars and Playboy bunnies to keep their affairs private, lie about the true state of their finances, rob their own charities, make money off the federal government while being employed by same, stiff contractors, bilk banks, and, perhaps worst of all, if you happen to be a good Christian, use the church as cover for some of your nastiest insults and basest tweets.

Reading the Bible? Hello! He doesn’t even read! He can barely mangle a speech laid out for him on a teleprompter screen. I promise you, there is no Bible by his bedside, only a little black Android whose keyboard is barely big enough for his pudgy little fingers.

“Donald Trump is a victim of the Deep State conspiracy in this country. They are trying to destroy him!”

I hate to put crimps in your tinfoil hats, but there is no deep state. I worked for the government for 25 years, and in some interesting alphabet soup departments, so if there was a deep state, I’d probably have a clue. And if I did, believe me, I’d sell that story for a lot of money.

I can’t, because it simply isn’t true. But that won’t stop Trump from bleating about it — anything to send jolts of electricity through his base.

The best — and worst — defense of Trump comes from Trump himself, when he responded to a reporter’s question not long ago with this beauty: “I take no responsibility at all.”

And therein lies the biggest challenge of all. Trump wants all the attention, all the credit, all the adulation, but none of the blame, or the responsibility.

The saddest aspect of this awful presidency is that tens of thousands of Americans who were alive 90 days ago could still be alive today if Donald Trump had taken responsibility and actually followed his oath of office promise to “preserve, protect and defend.”

This is, without question, the deepest, darkest, most terrifying period in American history. We are balanced on a razor’s edge. Down one side of the razor, we can follow the madman who currently occupies the Oval Office into the abyss of racial divide, financial catastrophe, economic oblivion and pandemic. Or we can tip the country to the other side, toward hope, salvation, common sense, decency and economic recovery.

Joe Biden may stumble once in a while, and mangle his participles, but he would never, ever, put us in the kind of hellfire that Donald Trump relishes. Trump has saddled the horses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine and Death), and he’s opened the barn doors to let them loose on his own people.

Why? Because, as he famously said, “Only I can fix it.” Except he can’t — and never could. It’s been happening ever since he took that famous ride down the escalator.

By the way, did you know that all the cheering people at that event were extras hired by the Trump Organization? It’s true. It was smoke and mirrors then, and it still is today.

And you know, of course, that I am mostly right.