Sure, it’s easy to hate Trump for tear-gassing peaceful protestors, locking brown children in cages, attempting to shred the Constitution, or just being incredibly stupid and callous, but let’s expand our horizons a little. There are thousands of reasons to hate this guy.
1) He’s taken all of the fun out of Conspiracy Theories. I used to love Conspiracy Theorizing. It used to be a game. A potentially real and possibly terrifying game, but so’s “Chutes and Ladders” if you play it with actual chutes and ladders.
Conspiracy theories once were the domain of fringe thinkers, free-spirits who refused to listen to the Official Story and instead searched for the underlying truth, the real story, the straight dope. Now that Trump has claimed this territory for himself and his gang of angry, poorly-informed, white trash followers, it’s no longer fun to dabble in conspiracy like it once was. Conspiracy theories aren’t fun to mentally play with if they’re being spouted by the president. They’re no longer even really conspiracy theories, they’re just more chunks of random bile that our belligerent toddler president spews.
2) By being such an incredible douche-bag, Trump has set back the, good, idea of the Outsider President a lot. Clearly, I didn’t vote for the man, but once he won, I comforted myself with the thought that maybe someone who isn’t a career politician would be a refreshing change of pace. I like the abstract notion of electing people who aren’t professional politicians to high office. In an America closer to what the Founding Fathers had in mind, there really would be no such thing as professional politicians, just people doing their civic duty. It’s a good idea. Sadly, this moron has put that good idea on the backburner for at least a few election cycles.
3) He even tried to politicize sports, that bastard. Recall the tale of Colin Kaepernick, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback. That guy led his team to the Super Bowl and almost won, in one of the actually decent Super Bowls to watch (the Baltimore Ravens won a close one). Then Colin kept playing. Then he decided to nod slightly in the direction of activism, but not too far. All he did was kneel during the pre-game singing of the National Anthem in order to use his celebrity to highlight police brutality against black Americans. That’s it. He knelt down. He didn’t piss on the flag. He didn’t say anything in favor of al-qaeda. He just assumed a different bodily position before games during the opening song. That’s all he did. A few other players followed suit. A few others condemned him for it a little. The NFL mildly reprimanded him. Then this disappeared from the news…until Trump threw his two cents in.
Trump tweeted about how bad it was that the 49ers quarterback was not assuming the full, upright position during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Trump made it clear that he thought this was traitorous behavior (ironic, since Trump was, at the time, engaging in actual traitorous behavior), and that his legion of rabid followers should now notice and notice BIGLY this awful act of kneeling treason.
This, predictably, made it political, a wedge issue, something that America should care about. Of course, Colin Kaepernick, despite being very good, not great, but definitely very good, at his job, has been unemployed ever since. Sports team owners didn’t especially want to offend their black fans, but they REALLY didn’t want to offend their white fans, so instead of ignoring Trump, since his legion of followers would probably still watch football anyway, no matter what Trump said, since football is great and they, like most of us, love it, those owners just pretended not to notice poor Colin and treated him like we do when grandma poops on the sofa, pretending to ignore the obvious. Kaepernick will be all right even if he never plays football again. The NFL will be fine eventually too.
But here’s the horrendous part of it. Sports used to be the place we went to get away from politics, something conservatives and liberals could enjoy while they drank their PBR, or locally-brewed craft beer, ate their chicken wings, or tofu wings molded into vaguely chickeny shapes, something we could all agree was awesome. Sports is a refuge. Sports does better when it is a refuge.
And what gets lost in the fog of this nonsense is the real reason Trump pushed politics into the former refuge that was the NFL. He once tried to buy an NFL team. Ownership of a professional sports team is essentially the American version of the queen’s making you a Knight of the Garter. It’s our version of true royalty. But our royals didn’t want this New York redneck in their exclusive little club, and Trump does nothing as well as he holds a grudge. So now we get a politically-polluted National Football League.
Nobody wants that.
4) He has even failed at the one, and only, thing I thought he could actually do well, scare the crap out of dictators. Here’s the thought process: This guy is unpredictable and has access to the nuclear codes. Surely North Korea and Russia will be scared of what an unpredictable, slightly-crazy president could do to them. And then, he turns out to be a guy who fawns over dictators. He likes their cool faux-military uniforms, their absolute power, their cool stuff, their on-call hookers, everything. He’s trashed our traditional alliances with democratically-elected leaders routinely, but he’s sucked up to dictators. Kim Jong Il simply “owned” him…and when that guy is smarter than your leader, it’s time for a new leader.
Trump has also turned the idea of Presidential Proclamations into Mad Libs for Bully Wannabes, made a lot of people who were already pissed off even more pissed off, given tax breaks to the wrong people, appointed a Supreme Court Justice less qualified for the job than an alcoholic sommelier or a vegetarian meat packer, and just generally made America look stupid in the eyes of the rest of the world, all while calling himself the greatest president ever, and with a straight face.
I’m as terrified he’ll get re-elected as the rest of you, but mostly, I want politics back out of my football.