What does Trump failing mean? Failing at what exactly? It would be good to make distinctions between wishing for Trump to fail & praying for America to succeed even under Trump. In far too many ways, Trump has already succeeded, at least by the criteria suggested by this essay. We are a coarser society today than we were a decade ago. Words like racial epithets, never before acceptable in polite society in my lifetime but common during my dad’s, are now acceptable again. Behaviors that would have been disqualifying for high office like blatant corruption & sexual predation are now ignored. Guard rails that once protected our system from arbitrary power, like an independent DoJ, are obliterated. I know of no historical prcedent of a society-wide taboo reasserting itself once broken & discarded. Unless we either completely reform the primary system in America or we somehow get most Americans to vote in primaries, the people parties nominate for office will tend, as they have been for a decade or more, to be the more extreme ideologues in their respective parties. Even when Trump is an ugly memory, his legacy of corruption, greed, inhumanity & meanness will infect our political culture.

The irony is that locally, my life is filled with love & kindness, as are the lives of almost everyone I know. I just wonder how long the preponmderance of gentle & nurturing relationships can survive in a culture where politics are anything but…

I’m not optimistic.