Matthew Wilkinson

I make you this pledge, thoughtful readers. Hand on heart. I will not spend the next month lambasting Donald Trump or the cult of craven constitutional contrarians who have caused the coming congressional cataclysm (okay… so I like alliteration!) they face this November. I’m not even going to dwell on the polling, which is using words like “bloodbath” for Republicans; I will, however, mention one, from CNN, which has the president’s approval rating on the economy at 27%.

The economy is not a sexy issue, but it’s one everybody can relate to. And it doesn’t matter what your views are on abortion, trans athletes in school sports, or green energy. Everyone “gets” the economy (without knowing what it is – exactly) because they have to buy food to eat to stay alive, they have to buy gas for their car to drive to work (if they can find a job) to earn money to by food to eat to stay alive, and they have to pay rent or their mortgage for a place to store the food they bought to stay alive. That, grossly oversimplified, is the economy. Apologies to my friend Mike C. who has a degree in Economics from UCLA. I could go on, but I’d need charts and graphs.

Along the way, people need to buy clothes, so they’re not running around with their bait and tackle bouncing in the wind or their fun bags flopping up and down for everyone to see. This is an important one, and is tragically under reported. Think about it, who wants to see their neighbor naked? Or their coworker? Now I am a realist and understand that some of you do. Perverts! Allowances are made for those who have a really hot neighbor or coworker – this is known as “the margin of error.”

James Carville, the famed Democratic political strategist behind Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign, famously said “It’s the economy stupid.” Climate change may be a concept that is hard to grasp, as may be a boy who really knows she is a girl, as may be a pregnant woman who is not ready to make the sacrifice and long term commitment to raise a child (which is fundamentally and exclusively her choice to make), but everyone gets it when they can’t buy groceries, fill up their tank, or cover their body with something to conceal their private parts. Hell, even Adam and Eve had the good sense to use fig leaves to cover up their bits!

So, for all the shouting, and there’s an awful lot of that, about ballrooms, performing arts centers, war in Iran, genocide in Gaza, stalemate in Ukraine, Greenland, Canada, and maybe Cuba joining the American fold, sneaking off planes in food trucks, files detailing the activities of a known pedophile and his rich and powerful friends which included the current president of the United States, renaming gulfs and lakes to prove some kind of jingoistic point masquerading as patriotism, deporting or harassing anyone who is not white, anatomically male, inclined to do sexytime with anatomical females, with a Jesus fish bumper sticker on their Ford F150 truck with a gun rack, spelling “tax increase” as T-A-R-I-F-F, and press access to the White House when the organization in question doesn’t sing from the same hymnal as Donnie and his deranged cabal of sycophantic ass-kissers – for all that, which is important, it really comes down to whether you can afford a box of raisins to tide you over until dinner.

And Americans get that. It’s hard not to. You’ve either got enough money in your bank account – we can talk about what constitutes “enough” another time – or you don’t. Any government’s first job is to protect its citizens. Yes, from threats like drug-selling and violent gangs, terrorists, public health crises, hostile foreign nations, natural disasters, and Garth Brooks, but fundamentally from poverty. In his second inaugural address in 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself quite a wealthy man, laid out what I think should be the guiding principle of any government:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

And by that metric alone the United States government under Donald Trump and Republican control of Congress is not fit for purpose. We are, unfortunately, stuck with Trump as president for two more years, but we can, and we must, tear up the blank check he currently enjoys cashing at the nation’s expense in the form of a subservient and acquiescent Congress which has abdicated its role to balance presidential power and ensure it is wielded for the good of the people – all the people.

I’m not going to bang on about what a terrible mistake it was to let Donald Trump anywhere near the Oval Office. Twice. I’m not going to broadcast how horrified I am at his UN General Assembly speech this week in which he openly mused about committing a war crime:

Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

Well, okay. There’s this. In his speech he spoke of the ongoing war of choice he is waging and talked about destroying the “Islamic Republic;” fair game, if this implies the Iranian military, a legitimate military target. But his reference to annihilating future generations suggests he meant to threaten the Iranian people. Attacking them would be a blatant war crime.

He’s got form in this regard. In July, he vowed to destroy Iran’s bridges or power plants which is itself a threat to commit war crimes. The international criminal court (ICC) has charged four Russian military commanders for doing precisely that in Ukraine.

But let’s not get bogged down in that. And I don’t want to spend the month of October cataloguing all of the ways Trump is a failure, a dangerous, self-serving, malignant narcissist for whom nothing is out-of-bounds when it comes to burnishing the gilded coating of his fragile ego. Because our job right now is to put guardrails in place to save Trump from himself, and us from Trump. And to do that we have to give control of Congress to the Democrats. They aren’t perfect. But right now they are necessary.