The Glorious Legacies of
President Trump and King John
I never imagined
I’d thank President Trump for anything. But even I, a radical progressive, must
admit that he has already accomplished what I’d long despaired of: Trump has
woken America
up.
To truly
appreciate his achievement, one must consider what has transpired in this
country over the last decades. The United States of America engaged in
preemptive strike, regime change, rendition, torture, drone war, assassination,
rampant spying…all under the pretext of defeating terrorism. Actually, we only
exacerbated it, while enriching the obscenely wealthy oligarchy already in
control of the Military Industrial Complex as well as our supposed democracy.
The environment, the middle class, our unions, our schools, and our
infrastructure have all teetered on the brink, as have our civil liberties.
Meanwhile, America has
slept. Voter turnout plummeted to dismal levels, even for us. And, the only
incident that managed to galvanize my liberal San Francisco Bay Area into
thronging the streets with a million or more hysterical citizens was the Giants
and the Warriors winning their respective championships. It was enough to
depress a hyena.
Bernie Sanders
offered an unexpected lightning bolt of hope, garnering more than 30,000 passionate
supporters at some of his media-blacked-out rallies. (Where had they been
hiding?) However, with everything including the DNC allied against him, a
Sanders’ presidency wasn’t to be.
Instead, we’ve
ended up its antithesis, President Trump.
Nonetheless, I’m glad!
You see, Trump is so narcissistic, so bigoted, so misogynistic, so selfish and
unscrupulous, so ineloquent and mendacious, so crass, so dangerous, so…awful
that American citizens have risen up as never before. They clogged cities everywhere
during the Women’s March (nearly 3 million diverse people, the largest
demonstration in US History), and then did the same to airports throughout the
nation only a week later. At one rally, people chanted, gleeful at themselves,
“This is what democracy looks like!” Indeed.
Even Congress may
be rising up, introducing a bill in both houses that would prohibit Trump (or
any president) from a first-use nuclear strike without a congressional
declaration of war. (Oh, he’ll be
tweeting a real tantrum about that!)
Just as in 1215 AD,
when England’s
terrible King John roused the nobles to find the courage to oppose him, to
force him to sign the glorious Magna Carta (the precursor to our Bill of
Rights), Trump’s nefarious administration may go down in history as a similarly
glorious turning point in American history. By so starkly embodying the absolute
worst of our country, Trump has inadvertently held up a mirror to America. And
we’re aghast—finally.
I am grateful to President Trump for
fulfilling his campaign pledge. He is truly making America great again.
Berkeley
resident David Ellison, author of Bloodletting:
Why Education Reform is Killing America’s
Schools (Stairway Press, 2014), teaches history in Union City, California.
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