Tighten your seat belts

“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately — especially by the media. No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.” – Donald Trump speaking to graduates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy 5-17-17

I got back from my bicycle ride last night, plopped down in my chair with my salad and turned on MSNBC to see what our President had done now. To call Trump’s last seven days a media feeding frenzy would be an understatement. What we are witnessing is a man who has had little to no regard for anyone else self destruct under the largest microscope imaginable and honestly it is simply hard to watch at times.

When I was in the advertising business we had a saying, “Those that live by the ratings die by the ratings” which means if you are just selling good ratings rather than something else like brand loyalty what will you sell when your ratings are bad? Trump sold a segment of the American citizens on how smart he is, that he alone knows what is good for this country and he did it when his ratings were good and he had momentum. He stepped on the necks of the media, the intelligence community, Democrats, President Obama and Hillary Clinton in the process. And he telegraphed all of his insanity for the world to see and share in perpetuity on Twitter. I guess we could say “Those that live by the Twitter die by the Twitter”.

As I was watching Rachel Maddow last night parade one expert after another on to her show I began thinking about Donald Trump, not the President but the man. Despite what I think of him, despite the fact the way he acts and reacts makes him, at least for me, hard to love he is a human being that deserves our compassion. He has spent his whole life in power with the belief that money and bullshit can fix most everything. Maybe deep down his motivations to be President of the United States were good and true but his appearances on The Apprentice could never prepare him for this world stage. There are simply to many moving parts that he CAN’T control and Donald Trump has built his career, his wealth, and his dynasty on control.

There were 128,823, 833 votes cast in the 2016 Presidential election while roughly 100,000,000 eligible voters didn’t vote for whatever reason. Hillary Clinton received 48% of the popular vote to Donald Trumps 46%. Depending on which poll you believe those 46% that supported Trump has slid somewhere in the 35 to 40% range. I thought about those people last night too, the ones who wish they could get their vote back and the ones who are determined to go down with the ship. At some point this country needs to come together but I don’t know how or if that will happen anytime soon.

Trump had ample opportunity over the last 100 days to try to bring this country together, to heal some wounds. Trump supporters will say there was no way in hell that the other side would ever support our President, but Trump never gave it a chance. He piled on, he employed a scorched earth policy slamming everyone that he perceived stood in his way. Rather than simply winning and moving on he had to remind us everyday that he won. He is a winner and if you didn’t vote for him you are a loser. I guess people just got tired of being called a loser.

Trump loves to say that he “inherited a mess” well guess what, he has created a mess and this country has come to a screeching halt until his mess can be unraveled. I don’t have a crystal ball, I wish I did. I would love to know how this story ends today rather later. I have never wished that he would fail but at this point I do wish all this would just go away. How that happens is any ones guess at this point. Buckle-up, I don’t think we have even hit the rough parts of this ride yet.