Those of us who have studied, researched and written of JFK the past 57 years know his history, his legacy. What he stood for; what he represented. Perhaps, no politician of the 20th century considering he served as POTUS for only a thousand days has received the attention John Kennedy has. He was a man of principle. He was a man of integrity. He served during world war 2. He had a vision for America. “We go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard”. Leadership.
What has Donald Trump achieved in his first term? Every day, there are new outrages, to be sure. We would need a list of more than twenty-seven complaints if we were to enumerate a lifetime of Trump’s misdeeds, from defrauding US tax authorities and obstructing justice to violating the Constitution. He has invited our enemies to interfere with our elections to help him win, then sought to do it again. He has misused federal resources, inappropriately elevated his own family members, and enriched his own businesses. He has repeatedly attacked the First and the Fourteenth Amendments. He has had infants thrown in cages and denied relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria at the cost of thousands of lives. He has gutted environmental protections and attacked alliances that the US spent decades building and maintaining. And now he has mismanaged the worst public health crisis in a hundred years, overseen the greatest economic crisis since the Depression, and attempted to use the US military to crush legitimate protests on the streets of the capital.
Lately, in the space of just a few days, he was revealed to have endorsed concentration camps in China and to have again sought the assistance of a foreign adversary in winning a US election, was quoted as calling for the deaths and imprisonment of US journalists, defended the slave power traitors of the Confederacy, admitted that he suppressed testing during the pandemic because true data about the rate of infections would harm him politically, sought to fire more truthtellers in the administration and had his attorney general remove an official in charge of investigations into him and his supporters. He was reportedly briefed about a Russian scheme to place bounties on American and allied troops in Afghanistan, and not only did nothing about it but continued to act as an advocate for Putin. And so it goes on… before we even consider the many complaints about his character—his racism and misogyny, his ignorance and contempt for science and history, his lies, his narcissism, his vulgarity, his demagoguery. Has there ever been a president in US history so unable to relate to others, show an emotion besides anger, or view the world through any means but his own self-interest? Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?
