Trump's Vilest Legacy: A Comment on Professor Reich's "broken window"

Trump's Vilest Legacy: A Comment on Professor Reich's "broken window"

Professor Reich's "broken window" metaphor is an apt one for what has happened to our nation over the last four years. Donald John Trump (DJT) is a cheap wannabe gangster. However, all he sees in the mirror each day is an incompetent loser.

So, yes he is your quintessential "window breaker." Except for one not so minor point: DJT is not the problem. He is the symptom of a much larger American problem. The nearly 75 million who voted for him are the real problem. They are his, and our, legacy.

I believe an equally apt metaphor is that they have been drugged by a very potent narcotic, one richly cultivated in uniquely American soil. Without this gateway drug, DJT would not now be a world-class window breaker, but the scared, childish, self-absorbed loser he has always been.

That narcotic we all know is white supremacy, the kind that survived the Civil War as the "lost cause." That cause has now been rediscovered and redefined in DJT: a vulgar reaction inspired by a half black President.

All DJT proves is that the North only won the military battles of the Civil War; the ghosts of the Confederacy are still winning the culture war.

America is now Alabama from sea to shining sea.

We Americans knew this even as it was happening, both in the 1850s and now.

We all knew about John Brown and we all saw the Billy Bush tape? But each time, we chose to look the other way as we always do when race is the issue.

Now it is too late to kick the racist soapbox from beneath the Carnival Barker's feet. It, and the snake oil he is selling, have now acquired a life of their own.

Yes, the window has been broken, the barn door has been breached, the flood gates have been opened, the capitol has been stormed, and America once again has been exposed for what it is: a second-rate polity still living in denial about race and thus still living on moral credit.

Dr King's promissory note has yet to be paid. With the election of DJT, the American moral currency has lost all its value.

If you don't believe it, then answer me this: Could DJT have sold his vulgar racist venom to an awake, morally-self-conscious, upstanding, honorable, truly Democratic nation?

Eighty-five percent of Christians can be counted among DJT's 85 million Twitter followers. Here is another question for you: Is their a Trump legacy more vile than that?