Petulant, arrogant, rude, imperial, angry, humorless, Trump showed the world in the first presidential debate why he consistently has the lowest approval rating of any modern president.
Totally unable to listen or share the spotlight with anybody else for just two minutes, he constantly interrupted Joe Biden and even took on the moderator, Chris Wallace, who simply wanted to enforce the rules Trump’s team had agreed to.
His call for white supremacists to “stand by,” and his belief that this election will be fraudulent or rigged unless he wins should be frightening to all of us who cherish our democracy which is now in mortal danger.
Perhaps the moment in the debate that stands out most to me is when Biden was talking about his son Beau, who served in Iraq and died of cancer. Oblivious to the fact that somebody else was speaking, Trump shouted out insults about Biden’s other son, Hunter. It reminded me of the time back in the 1950s when the lawyer Joseph Welch, after watching McCarthy recklessly attack a young man’s reputation, asked a simple question, “Have you no decency?” It was the end of McCarthy’s reign of terror.
Trump’s callous insensitivity to a father’s grief compels us to ask him, “Have you no decency?” The answer, of course, is Trump has no decency, and hopefully in a few weeks he will go down in history like Joe McCarthy did, an evil human being who tried but did not destroy our democracy.
Burt Ross