#45 - More Bees With Honey

There have been times in my life when I have been stubborn, pig headed, hard-nosed, confrontational, lacking in empathy, basically times where I am ashamed to say, I have summoned my inner-Trump (Bless me Father, for I have sinned).  There have not been many, but I remember them clearly.   Happily, I can say that in all those instances, my wife was there to pull me back from the brink before any real damage was done.  Inevitably she would calmly speak to me and gently remind me that… “you get more bees with honey”. 

Now this was always a bit confusing to me, because I always thought the bees made the honey, so why do we have to give it to them if they make it? But for the sake of marital harmony, I would skip past this disconnect and jump to the important moral of her story, that perhaps I should consider a different, more thoughtful approach to solving the problem at hand. More importantly, she was trying to pull me back from going in with guns blazing  She was trying to teach me that there was a better way, a more diplomatic way. 

Over time, her message began to sink in and, I got better at it.   Over the years, I could actually predict the precise moment when she was going to hit me over the head and the “more bees with honey” words were actually going to come out of her mouth.    I like to think it proves, that despite what others may think, I am capable of evolving after all.

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Not all of us can be lucky enough to have a life partner, strong enough, smart enough, and diplomatic enough to mold us and shape us into being a better person as I have had, and in my opinion, I don't think Donald Trump has had this with any of his three wives.  In fairness to the three of them, they may have tried, and maybe they had some success, but by outright appearance, it has not been enough to make a discernable difference. In fairness to them, it may just be that he was too far gone, he may be that on this singular trait, he was, as they say, a lost cause. 

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump employed a brand new strategy on his way to the top of heap, using a rifle shot of insults at all of his opponents, taking them out quickly and efficiently and doing it under the larger umbrella of Making America Great Again.  It had the effect of sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, completely disrupting his opponents and distracting them so their messages were drowned out.   He gained his own relevancy, in large part, by making them irrelevant.

We all remember the insults and the name calling: Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Lying Ted.  He dissed John McCain for being captured, despite the fact that Trump never served.  He gave out Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number. He referenced Carly Fiorini’s looks.  Mitt Romney was a loser.   And he told us something that we never knew, that Ted Cruz, as a young child had single handedly planned the assassination of JFK.  And those were just the insults directed at the members of his own party.  It was hard to believe, and while the lack of respect was telling, coming from Trump, it was not surprising

It continued with the Democrats as we were introduced to Pocahontas, formerly known as Elizabeth Warren and Crooked Hillary.  There must have been a name for Bernie, but I am doing this piece off of my aging and deteriorating memory, so I just can't remember them all.

And so the when the dust cleared the morning after the election, the country woke up to discover that American Leadership had been redefined and that American Exceptionalism seemed anything but exceptional.

Trump’s real entry in politics had begun years earlier where he felt compelled to spread rumors about the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, an insult that he eventually had to acknowledge as false.  We also saw his lack of respect for women in the Access Hollywood Tape with Billy Bush, and the several complaints of women who have claimed they were groped by the man.

But this wasn't enough.   Along the way he felt compelled to insult both the intelligence community and of course the liberal press, whom he now attacks on a regular basis. Now, he’s upset by the fact that there are leaks in HIS government, leaks from the intelligence community to the liberal press.  And he’s shocked and surprised by this? Really?  My dog could have seen this one coming.

Then he goes on to make an enemy of the man who some say caused Hillary Clinton to lose the election (not me, mind you).  Giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, and assuming there was no collusion with the Russians (as I maintain) he incompetently acted as if there was.  And so the newest villain for Trump World, the former director of the FBI, who found out he was fired from news reports on TV, goes for payback and produces documents and testimony that leads to Trump's own justice department naming a special independent prosecutor, Robert Mueller, to investigate the matter.  Deputy Attorney General Rod Rodenstein, a highly regarded Justice Department careerist, appointed Mueller, infuriating Trump, notably we must observe, coincidently perhaps….after Trump’s White House tried to pin the firing of Comey on him.  And so we are left to just chalk all of this up to another one our president’s incredibly brilliant tactical maneuvers.

By all accounts, Trump denigrates just about everyone at one time or another, and there are many in the Republican party who fully expect to use him for their own devices, so they accept his insults, his style, his chaos, because they concluded long ago that their own ends justify any means.

While Hillary Clinton failed to endear herself to Trump Supporters, with one single collective reference to them as deplorables, President Trump  has surgically disrespected everyone else, be they Republicans of the Grand Ol’ Party, women, minorities, foreigners, Muslims, the disabled, the judiciary and Democrats with a repertoire of different insults and messages, each one more disturbing than the next.

As time passes, the perspective of history will reveal Trump to be just another one of history’s egomaniacs who motivated his supporters by declaring other groups evil.   Even now, he continues to tweet about Hillary Clinton, who is so irrelevant to the future of the country, you have to wonder why he does it.  Except we know, that is how he motivates, that is how he sells himself.  If he stops, his Ponzi scheme will be revealed, and even his own ardent supporters may come to find that this emperor has no clothes.  At a precarious time for our country when polarization of ideas has expanded beyond their customary norm, we need our leaders to be sane and civil to all Americans.  We need our leaders to set the standards for all of us to follow.  Unfortunately, this president acts as the childhood bully and has chosen to double down on all the nasty rhetoric.  It was no different when he was Citizen Trump, but he conned enough good Americans into believing that this approach represented strength, and we voted for him, we chose him to be the most powerful person on the planet.

During Trump’s recent visit at the G7 summit, he was at it again.  Appalled that some of our European allies have not paid their fair share for the defense of their own nations and for the support of NATO (there are conflicting reports on this) on his first visit on their soil, he chose to lecture to them, embarrass them, and anger them, and rather than twist their arms in private, he did it publically.  In the process he made it more difficult for them to do what he wants.  It's no secret that most Europeans are less than enchanted with Trump’s behavior, and now that their countries have been called out in front of the world, does anyone think that they are now going to willingly support their leaders and do what Trump desires?  

There may be a time when Trump wants greater cooperation from Europe on battling ISIS or North Korea or Iran or  China or Russia (OK, maybe this last one is a stretch), but if I had to guess, they are now going to be a lot more reluctant to giving this President any assistance.   And by recent accounts, the Prime Minister of Australia is working on his late night stand –up routine, all based on none other than, the Donald.  So it would appear that President Trump of America First is in danger of becoming America Alone.  If all of America’s allies were in a room, while he would receive a few positive votes, mostly from card carrying members of the Bully of the Month Club, he would still be the first one voted off the island.

Many hoped there would be a pivot, we would see a more thoughtful, more strategic Donald Trump when he became President.  Many hoped that he would hire talented advisors who would help guide and chart a more balanced approach. After all, the thinking was, this would be the only way he was going to win friends and influence enemies.

None of this would come to be.   It was clear several months into his new administration that, sadly, this dog was completely incapable of learning new tricks.  His vision of making America great again would prove too myopic to be sustainable.  He hit his ceiling for popularity on November 8, 2016, when he legitimately won the presidency, by losing the popular vote.  From that moment forward, there was only one direction for this man, and that was down. The handwriting was on the wall when it was clear, there would be no honeymoon for this President, not because of the left leaning press or the Never-Trumpers, but because he had difficulty getting out of his own way, because he thought he could govern the way he campaigned, and most importantly because his talents as a salesman and his skills in managing his real estate company represented the ceiling of this man’s leadership potential.

Oh, let me be clear, only a very small percentage of those good people, who truly believed that Trump would offer a different way, a better way, of governing, of leading our country, agree with what I have said, and that’s understandable, today, but it's only a matter of time.  There will be an occasional win over the next few years, the laws of statistics will see to that, but there will be no upsurge in support.

There will be no more bees to gather for his hive.  A few more springs will come and go, but no new bees will wish to visit this President’s Rose Garden. None of them want in. None of them buy this beekeeper's vision for America.  

Provided that Republicans don’t willingly try to replace Donald with a good old fashioned Republican who actually has some innate skills and common sense, the Democrats need only put forth an average candidate who can actually string a couple of sentences together in 2020, and they will own the White House again.

It’s a shame really.  It could have been extremely interesting, having a businessman, and not a politician as president.  Maybe we would have learned some new ways, some better ways we might govern ourselves. And maybe we would have been able to build on it and improve our imperfect democracy.  But sadly, the country picked the wrong businessman for this experiment.  Four years will have been wasted and we will have to go back to the drawing board in our quest to find new ways to move the country forward

It might have been different, if he just wasn't perversely compelled to piss off everyone. If he just tried to treat those who disagreed with him with a modicum of civility, maybe they would have been willing to give him more of a chance. But his constant disrespect of them, of all of them eventually shut the door to that possibility.

This is solely his doing  This is solely because of the path he chose, because the path that Salesmen Trump sold us on to Make America Great Again was just oh so small.