Why Donald Trump can't grasp this moment (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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In his mind, he seems to think it's the riots of the 1960s all over again, and his reaction appears both terrified and angry. "LAW & ORDER!" was the response he voiced via Twitter on Sunday and again in a public address on Monday.
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a hellscape governed by a man frozen in his childhood and out of step with the times. The world is spiraling out of control and its most powerful man is abjectly unprepared and unqualified.
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By 1989, when he spoke out about the infamous assault on a jogger in Central Park he would decry "the complete breakdown" of society and yearn for the days "when I was young" and he saw cops rough-up two loudmouths who had harassed a waitress. He wanted a return of that sort of policing and called on New York State to adopt the death penalty after the arrests of the five young black and Latino men in the jogger case. Years later, those men were found to be innocent.
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the trauma of the violent response to the civil rights struggle and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy led to a lifelong struggle to understand and address the pain of our fellow citizens who sought dignity and equality
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His drive for the presidency ended with him in the Oval Office thanks to an Electoral College system that lets the loser of the national vote gain the presidency.
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When asked about when America was great he recalled the time of his childhood, the 1940s and 1950s, when "we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do." He also remains nostalgic for the stereotypical 1950s housewife, speaking wistfully of women like actress Donna Reed, who always seemed to play the role of a gentle and accommodating woman.
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With no experience in government, the military, or genuine civic engagement, Trump brought his true self to the White House, where his team included many who seemed to share his back-to-the-50s mentality. At the Justice Department federal efforts to safeguard civil rights were curbed. The Department of Education rolled back protections for the rights of women and minorities. The Pentagon barred transgender recruits.
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There was an inevitability in the way that he first denied the problem and then banked on solutions that reeked of his pre-'60s childhood, when polio was defeated by a vaccine and new drugs arrived to vanquish infectious diseases.
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he had never noticed that the world and its problems are complex and require respectful study and difficult, collaborative work.
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That the US is a country in crisis, without a leader, is now so obvious that as Time magazine reported last week, cracks are forming in his once-unbreakable base. The doubts the magazine documented before the country was convulsed by recent protests against police brutality reflected his failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which contributed to a death toll now exceeding 100,000
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he economic toll that includes 40 million unemployed, hit the poor and working class harder than others. Then George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street as a police officer pressed his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes.
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That the President has been deaf to the suffering, and incapable of responding like any previous president would, reminds us that his character, his view of humanity, and his life experience, made him wholly unqualified for the role he now occupies.