Who Wants To Be an American?

This July 4, how can Americans celebrate the independence that they so dearly won from Great Britain, when they hold the sad record of having the largest number of citizens infected with COVID-19?

Donald Trump is the biggest polluter of his country. He has contaminated both the office he holds and the institutions that made this nation, the foremost power of the free world, great. Today, the United States is shredded, and its president has not yet finished dishonoring its history. This brutal, deceitful, ignorant man has, in a grand sweep, succeeded in insulting all the leaders of Western democracies and in holding all the historic allies of his country in contempt.

Eye-Openers

Since the tragic events in Atlanta, Trump has even gone so far as to push away his groveling collaborators who are jumping ship before it sinks. In August, his own niece, a professional psychologist, will publish a book about the Trump family that, by revealing a few family secrets, will undoubtedly shed light on the president’s muddled and disturbing personality for us — a president who destabilizes the United States with his contradictory and partisan policies, his erratic behavior and remarks that are as incoherent as they are intellectually destitute.

The polls that currently show he is losing popularity must be taken cautiously. His hardcore support pivots at about 40%. An important portion of his followers are blindly loyal to him. They drink in his words, worship him and seize every opportunity to defend him at all costs.

Some of these “angry whites” don’t shy away from conspiracy theories. The current pandemic has brought out militant dissenters who, to be up there with their idol Trump, scorn masks – a “girly” symbol – get into manly fistfights and encourage dozens, possibly hundreds of thousands, of harebrained young people to thumb their noses at social distancing.

Trump’s followers are gun lovers. Some wear their holsters, which is causing people to fear the worst during an election campaign, especially if the voting results on the evening of Nov. 3 are very close.

Who wants to be an American in this kind of situation? A majority of honest Americans – open, respectful of institutions and aware of the need to protect individual liberty, the foundations of the greatness and progress of the United States – are shaking in their boots today and aren’t in a partying mood.

Shame

They have become ashamed of their country and their president, who is impressed only by the tyrants of the world. They also feel guilty; complacent about the elite progressives who have not lived up to the hopes that they had in them.

Who wants to be an American today? Happily, the country is still able to separate the naïve, and honest people, arrogant in spite of themselves, but likely to make the world dream and to protect individual liberty, from the “Trumpers,” who cling to a perverse and rude ideology that weakens the very foundations of democracy.

Let’s hope the pessimists are wrong and that the majority of Americans will have the courage to make reason, justice and dignity triumph.