I don't remember exactly how old I was when I first become aware of who Donald Trump was. It was probably sometime when I was a kid in the late '80s, watching him being interviewed for Entertainment Tonight or some other fluff TV program. Even then, I sensed there was something shifty and untrustworthy about him. I learned a little more in my pre-teens when I read a collection of Bloom County comics entitled Happy Trails! in which creator Berkeley Breathed decided to send off Opus and friends with a story line in which Trump bought up the titular town which he intended to turn into parking lots. A few years earlier, the same strip ridiculed him by having him injured by a falling anchor from his yacht and transplanting his brain into the body of the insane Bill D. Cat. It was these early strips that cemented in my mind my early opinion of Trump as an obnoxious rich idiot from New York who owned a lot of crap and inexplicably managed to attract beautiful women. He was, by and large, a joke and a horse's ass and aside from a few cameo appearances in movies and TV shows --like Home Alone 2, which I thought was the funniest film of all time when I was twelve. Hey, give me a break. Your tastes weren't that refined back then, either.-- fairly easy to ignore. As long as he remained holed up in one of his towers in Manhattan and didn't intrude on my life in any way, he was completely insignificant to me. He was a clown and a buffoon and not worth giving a second though to.
I don't recall the exact moment when I started to actively hate him, but it was probably sometime around 2004, when his TV show The Apprentice first aired. I'm not a fan of reality TV, so I didn't watch any episodes, but I knew the premise well enough. A group of prospective employees perform menial tasks for him and throughout the course of a season, each one is fired until a winner is chosen and gets to be the Donald's personal apprentice. Each episode ended with him giving someone the ax and declaring, in his inimitable Queens accent, "You're fired". It was pretty much the same premise as Survivor, but in a corporate office setting. I couldn't for the life of me understand why anyone would compete to work for such a megalomaniac asshole, and I still don't. I didn't see the appeal of a grotesquely rich prick abusing and humiliating those in a lower economic bracket each week. I imagine that firing employees at most jobs is a difficult task for the employer who has to do so, and that they struggle with the ethics of putting a human being out of work. Not so for the Donald. For him, it was a simple as ordering coffee at your local Starbucks. It was then that I realized that he was a complete sociopath with no empathy for his fellow man and no concern with anything other than his own greed and colossal ego. But again, he was someone I could ignore just by not watching his stupid TV program. I mean, it wasn't like he was ever going to be elected President of the United States or anything like that, right?
Fast forward to present day. The man who was once just an annoying TV star is now the leader of the free world. And how does he represent his country on the world stage? By alienating our allies and appeasing our enemies. By calling benign Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau "weak and dishonest" and praising murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un as "strong" and " a good negotiator". (I guess negotiations are pretty easy when all you have to do is kill those who oppose your policies). By separating immigrant children from their parents and caging them up like animals. (Whether they're here legally or not, no child deserves to be treated that way. I wouldn't treat a dog that way, much less a human child.) And the ones who support this kind of behavior are the same ones who have the gall to call themselves "pro-life Christians" and not see a single trace of irony in those words. And if you call them out on it, they'll bring up Benghazi or Hillary's e-mails or how "Obummer" was gonna take all their precious, precious guns away (which is something he never actually did, nor was he ever intending to do). They can't find any way to defend their president because they know he's indefensible, so they just bring up the ones who aren't currently in charge, because that's the only ammunition they have.
"But, Eric", you think, "why do you have to be so negative? Why can't you focus on all the good that is happening? Why can't you just keep singing and dancing at the Kit-Kat Klub, and ignore that silly little man with the thin mustache? He's not affecting you personally in any way. Why can't you just be a good German and keep on having a good time?"
Because these are dire times we're living in and I refuse to stay silent. I refuse to be complacent when I see cruelty and injustice all around me. I refuse to normalize the abnormal. I refuse to believe that just because something doesn't affect me on a personal level that it's not worth speaking out against.
I refuse to be a good German.
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