Donald Trump is Terrible at Everything He Does. What Makes it Hard for the Rest of Us is That He Loves Being terrible.

We're going to have to take that one pleasure away from him. Simple as that.

My flag on a smoky morning. I chose this picture because this flag is and always will be MY FLAG.

I’ve read far and away enough about Donald Trump—TONS of articles and essays and opinions, the personal, the scholarly, the lawyerly, and here’s what I’ve finally come away with: Donald Trump is simply a rotten, terrible person who gets away with and who gets off on being rotten and terrible.

Yes, he’s the president. That’s enough to make many of us (well…me) want to chew off our arms and gouge out our eyes and hope to hell we wake up soon to find it’s all a bad dream and here we are, awake, arms and eyes intact, breathing again, ready for whatever god-awful thing the day ahead might bring.

I don’t have to tell you, it’s exhausting.

Donald Trump is president of the United States and if there’s anyone in this entire country who shouldn’t be President of the United States, it’s Donald Trump. It happened. I don’t care anymore how it happened or who the culprits were, I only care that it did.

I don’t want to regurgitate every bad or stupid or embarrassing thing Donald Trump has done and still promises to do. We’ve been there. It hasn’t helped. He’s still there.

So now I’m going to offer up something simple: Let’s throw all of our energy into stopping him. Let’s stop analyzing or blaming or trying to one-up everyone else with our superb ideas on what we’ll have to do next if this thing we’re doing now doesn’t work.

We don’t know what we’ll have to do next. Unless we’re one of the proven experts—whoever they may be—our authority ends with our opinions. What kills us, metaphorically speaking, is that we know we’re dealing with a stupid, stupid man. I mean…stupid. Calling Donald Trump a half-wit is giving him too much praise by half. Yet our greatest minds seem to be admitting they can’t figure out what it will take to end the absolute, unprecedented chaos this one pissant of a man is causing.

It’s a dilemma. He’s a challenge. We’re embarrassed and disheartened by our inability to stop him. Knowing and sharing everything we know about him—all of the damning things we’ve thrown out there as proof—hasn’t done a damn thing to stop him.

It’s true that he has ‘friends’ in all the right places, both here and abroad, and they’re the ones we should be fixated on, yet the world wastes time trying to figure out a man who isn’t the least bit stupid about the rules he learned at his conman father’s knee: Keep ‘em guessing. Never let them see you sweat. It isn’t a lie if it’s going to save your ass. There are no friends, only marks. If you hurt them, they were losers anyway.

That’s all there is to Donald Trump. Just basic petty conman stuff. If you know going in that this is how he reacts to everything it means you’re going in armed. Talking to you, mainstream ‘reporters’ and pundits. Don’t pretend you’re working hard to delve into his psyche. He doesn’t have one. He goes on predator instincts. It’s him or the rest of us and it’s always going to be him.

Throw facts at him. Don’t let him argue or ‘explain’ with his signature toddler-talk. If he yells, yell back. If he threatens, make him tell you what he intends to do. Outsnark his snark. Diminish his power by laughing at him. You may only get one chance to do it, but take it. Let it be your moment. You may even become famous for it.

The only downside is you may have to feel frightened for your life. That’s the new normal now, something we’ve never had to face before. But use that, too. Yell bloody murder if someone threatens you. Name names, take pictures, release videos, call lawyers, build armies, raise holy hell.

The Trump sycophants hate that sort of stuff. They’d much rather we keep on trying to figure out what the hell is happening. They want us to wring our hands in fear, they love our lamenting, our confusion, our innate need to make it easier by placing blame on those real public servants who aren’t a threat and are probably trying to help us.

The bottom line: We’re overthinking this whole thing. While criminal minds are at work trying to dismantle our government and thus our very way of life, we’re still working on the principle that might shouldn’t make right. That this is wrong. That any day now the bad guys following along and encouraging the biggest baddest bad guy will come to their senses and stop doing that.

It kind of looks like they won’t. So is there a Plan B? Can we stop the incessant reminding of icky past performances, the constant public analyzing, the pathetic “Here’s What We Need to Do to Get Out of This”, and get to work using the resources at hand to stop them by any means possible?

I don’t know what those means are, and probably neither do you, but more than one person out there does know, and if they’re at work doing it, well, yay! I’m assuming they know this is an emergency.

Today would be a good day to get it done.

I don’t need to know right now what they’re doing or how they’re doing it. I understand the need for secrecy. We’re not dealing with the PTA here. These are real bad guys. But I would like some assurance that there are crews of real patriots working long into the night to put an end to this disaster.

When my power was out for several days last month I went looking for every report that crews were on the scene working to get my power back on. I didn’t need to know how they were doing it or what their next plan was. I didn’t need a long lecture on previous power outages. I only wanted to know how close they were to turning on the lights.

It’s like that now. Tell me you’re here to help without going into meaningless detail.I don’t need to know what in our past history caused this terrible thing, as interesting as that might be at some other time.

Make me proud of your efforts right now, even if I’m having to be proud of you in the dark.

Then get back to work.

Fix it.

That’s all anyone really cares about.

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