The world is a different place than it was five years ago. I'm a different person than I was five years ago, as I'm sure we all are. I see the world differently. My views and perspectives, once fresh and open to possibility, have been hardened and jaded with the cold, ugly truth of reality.
I had a faith in our government -- that the United States would be better than the worst of its people in the overall grand scheme of things.
Then the 2016 election happened. Donald Trump won handily. It doesn't matter whether there was foreign interference in the election. It doesn't matter that he now faces an impeachment inquiry. It doesn't matter that his approval ratings have never really broken 50% in national polls. Hillary Clinton's emails don't matter.
He is in office. He is President of the United States. Enough people decided he deserved that position that they voted for him.
Every year, every day, every hour since, I've seen our country descend into the absolute depths of what I can only describe to be Hell. Or at least the gates of Tartarus.
I've seen Donald Trump commit offense out of offense. I've seen him slur, insult and malign every conceivable person or group that the nation almost indisputably holds to high regard -- or any regard, for that matter. He has decided to enrich himself and his allies at the wealthy and political top of the ladder by finding new, inventive harmful ways to kick everyone beneath it to the bottom. We no longer have a free Internet because of him. The effects of climate change are undoubtedly getting worse thanks to his inaction at best and at worst with his willing or ignorant help. Our students can no longer trust that they'll be protected. Our environment risks being poisoned and damaged beyond saving. White supremacists can march freely, knowing that Trump will use the weight of the government to prop them up.
The one certainty I've seen is that, reliably, Trump has an entire section of government -- the Senate -- and a sizeable chunk of voters -- roughly a third in every poll -- that will stand up and declare he's the Second Coming (and yes, Trump has even called himself such). These are people who have lowered their standards (provided they had any to begin with) so far, so deeply, that anything Trump does is as American as the stars and stripes.
What Donald Trump demonstrates each day is that he has no interest in America. He'll grope a flag, but he has no real true love, or appreciation, or even a basic level of understanding of what it truly means to be an American. He claims to have a 9/11 story, having been in New York on that day eighteen years ago, but within barely a day, went on to proudly declare he now had the tallest building in the city.
He's a man that operates purely to benefit himself. It isn't simply that he seeks to benefit himself, because it's a basic instinct of human survival. No -- for Donald Trump, the only way he can benefit himself, or even exist day to day, is to find some new way to hurt others, as casually and as viciously as possible.
We saw that this week, when Trump basically turned America's back on our Kurdish allies and gave Turkey free reign to massacre them. The Kurds played a pivotal role in fighting ISIS over the past five years. We raged when then President Obama even raised the possibility of sending any kind of aid to the Middle East to fight another terror group. With our help largely being strategic in nature -- the brains of the operation, essentially -- the Kurds fought for us. They fought and sacrificed so we wouldn't have to.
And Trump's response to their fight and sacrifices can be boiled down to, "See ya, wouldn't want to be ya."
Ordinarily, I have something to distract myself from the chaos our government seems intent on inflicting on us on a daily, or sometimes hourly basis. But I can't today. Today's different. People die of different causes every day. They're shot, they're in car accidents, some might even have the dignity of having lived a full life and dying in peace. But not today. Because Trump, in his greed, callousness, apathy, and desire to hurt people, decided to let the people seen as pivotal allies be ruthlessly killed. And for what?
The answer, of course, is rhetorical. Of course he stands to benefit from it somehow. Of course he respects dictators like Erdogan. Of course he doesn't care about any of America's allies overseas, NATO or otherwise.
Every day, when I wake up and prepare to view the news, I have a pang of dread over what I'm about to see. I have to brace myself for the possibility -- no, the certainty -- that Trump will have, predictably, found a new metaphorical dog to kick. And reliably, the former Republican Party will stand almost totally behind him.
Trump is running for President again in 2020. That much we saw coming.
But the difference now is that Trump has power behind him. He has an entire government at his disposal to defend and support him. He no longer has to truly prove himself to the voters that voted him in, or the hostile nations that intervened on his behalf.
Trump is as brazen as he ever was. But this time, he has everything to lose. And, combined with his nature, as I've described above, that makes him truly dangerous.
An impeachment inquiry can only take this so far. And with Senate Majority Leader and reliable Trump ally Mitch McConnell announcing that any effort to impeach him, even with regards to the impeachment inquiry, will be dead on his desk, we can't trust that Trump will be removed from power by a Republican Party that thrives based on him. The only tried and true way to remove Trump from office, to hold off the bleeding he's inflicted on our country, is to vote him out of office in 2020.
It's truly an uphill battle. The past three presidents -- Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton -- all won re-election. For 24 years, we've had only three presidents. And, much like his conduct during the 2016 election, Trump has maintained his strategy of insulting and demeaning his prospective opponents and even openly seeking further foreign interference. And to further the stakes, McConnell has refused to vote on election security bills -- particularly when reports have surfaced that some systems are so vulnerable that hackers can actively change the numbers. Republicans have even taken steps to keep potential voters from making it to the polls.
Against all this darkness, there is hope. Democrats managed to take the House during the 2018 midterm elections, providing a much-needed barrier to Trump. They pulled this off despite desperate bids in many reliably Republican communities. They managed this feat despite uncertainty they could gain even a simple majority.
The point to all this is that the stakes have never been higher. The 2020 election is truly the war for America's soul. We lost that fight in 2016. We can't afford to lose it again.
Next year, Trump will have had a full first term as president. People know what kind of person he is, and what kind of president he's been. That is the key difference between next year and 2016.
We showed in 2018 we were willing to fight for our country when it came to protecting it from Trump's party.
One year from now, we'll have to have to save our country from Donald Trump.
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