President Trump is in the final days of his tempestuous, tumultuous, treacherous administration. It looks like we may survive it, though we’re badly bruised as a nation from his reckless, selfish, self-serving behavior. His presidency will be considered a success by those who had a specific agenda of radically renovating the judiciary (yes I’m talking to you Mitch McConnell and all those single issue voters on abortion).
The reputation of America as a global moral leader for good has been tarnished and dented, but I promise you we will recover. We’ve done it before – from Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal, Vietnam, Nixon, the Reagan scandals, and the Clinton years. The Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle has passed and we made it to the Obama years.
For the past four years we have been led like a drunken sailor to make regrettable decisions, and now that we’re sobering up we have to deal with the mess that was made. We still have a lot of work to do to get back on the world stage with a laudable set of goals beyond just “America First”.
If there is a silver lining to the Trump Years, it is how much has been exposed of the cracks in our society that were pasted over with consumerism, and institutional ignorance. For too long we’ve been ignoring the problems of the poor, both white and people of color, that’s been made abundantly clear with the protests of the past summer, but also with the lily white “protesters” who breached the Capitol last week. I didn’t see many women, and fewer people of color (if any).
It’s not an easy topic to discuss, for both whites and POCs, because we have too many emotions around it, too little vocabulary for the impact, and an absence of understanding the emotional foundations of it all.
The Trump administration has brought into high relief exactly how easy it is to just rile people up, on both sides of an issues, any issue, and not actually move towards a comprehensive solution. This is partly an outgrowth of the dominance of the media in our lives these days, and the lack of time to actually converse with each other. Even pre-COVID the fine art of conversation was on life support, and the isolation of the past few months, along with the increased stresses have only served to increased the selfish, self-centeredness of people that impedes a fruitful conversation.
I’ve had a few discussions with some friends about the impact of Twitter and Facebook shutting down the President’s access to his millions of followers. I have friends on both sides of the arguments, those that feel it is appalling that the Commander in Chief cannot access what has become in many ways a public forum, and those that are ecstatic that the private companies have taken action to put some constraints on the “inciter in chief”. My Twitter usage is very limited. Primarily I use to announce a new episode of the Men’s Family Law podcast, occasionally to share a post from someone else that I found interesting, fun or motivational. It’s a News Aggregator for me, and rarely, a useful tool to see what is happening in Santa Monica with the Police and Fire Departments.
The silencing of the President on Twitter is frankly something that I find to be more of a cultural comment, than in actual fact of any import. The man has the ability to walk down the hall from the Oval and step up to a lectern and reach the world with any message that he wants. The President is currently in possession of the biggest bullhorn on the planet, and has chosen to insult, badger, cudgel and demean those who can carry his words. He says they misrepresent, slant, distort and flat out lie, about what he said. Except we have the actual recordings of what he said. Yes, they can be cut, edited and shortened, however, we still have the full record to examine for those who choose to know more.
We have 7.5 days to go before an adult is in charge again. I think we’ll make it. I think we’ll have a rocky path back to respectability as I expect the retired President Trump to be totally unhinged, outlandish and even more free wheeling. If he has a platform.
David Pisarra is a Los Angeles Divorce and Child Custody Lawyer specializing in Father’s and Men’s Rights with the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He can be reached at dpisarra@pisarra.com or 310/664-9969. You can follow him on Twitter @davidpisarra
