A Year of President Trump and Our Five Stages of Grief
You know the drill. Denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. We’ve all been there. As much as we love to hate him and hate to love him, he’s our president for better or worse, and let’s hope it doesn’t get much worse as we turn the corner in 2018.
Actually, we shouldn’t let Trump’s pernicious persona as televised and portrayed by the news media cloud our thinking about his effectiveness as a president and CEO. Notice that I didn’t say, as a ‘world leader’. He may be gruff and arrogant, he may have small hands, and he may be a womanizer. But that all makes sense. He’s still The Donald, and no amount of denial is going to change that. However, it’s okay to be angry about the fact that he has managed to isolate himself and America from the aggregate world community. It’s good to make a stand, but sometimes it’s not good to stand out, and Trump stands out like a sore thumb.
America’s sore thumb. A clinker. A “clinker” is a turn-of-the-century euphemism that refers to fused coal, or a rock or stone that get’s inadvertently mixed in with a load of coal. It can wreak havoc on an old coal furnace, much like the clunky, black smoking furnace that was the bane of Ralphie’s old man’s existence in ‘The Christmas Story’. I have an old fashioned stick match holder that was distributed by a coal company years ago with their slogan written on the front, “Not a Clinker in a Carload!”
Is Donald Trump the clinker in our carload of past presidents? Seemingly, yes, so far.
But let’s give him his first year to settle in to the job and get his sea legs. He’s coming from such a different background than most past presidents, he’ll need some time to figure out where he is on the court, and that he’s not holding court on the world stage ...that he’s not our “king”. Let’s optimistically bargain with fate and bet on the guy to grow up and put on his big boy pants ...lay off the tweets, sweets and the junk food.
I’ve said it once and I‘ll say it again, I don’t think he’s a bad man, or has a bad heart, he may just simply be an a***ole. But that’s reason enough to encourage change. He keeps up with that junk food and he will have a bad heart!
Depression. There’s a lot to be depressed about, as we all know. Prejudice, injustice, disease, race inequality, homelessness, crime, the NRA, social media. CNN. And that’s not just America, it’s worldwide! But there’s a lot to be thankful and hopeful for as well.
Be thankful for hope.
My hope regarding President Trump is that the widespread acceptance of his presidency settling in across America is not just a national placebo for a headache, and heartache, yet to come.
We’ve all done things in our lives that we are ashamed of or feel guilty about. Worse, is that others may know and what they may think. We suck it up and do what we need to do. Live it down ...or not. Bad things happen, and the silent majority rules, silently. Sometimes we are our own silent majority because only we know the truth. A good reputation is money in the bank, a bad reputation can ruin a life. It’s all perception, however, and perception is its own form of reality.
Let’s not forget that President Trump is a “Reality Star”.
Yet still, we go through the stages ...denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
Sometimes when we think something is really bad, or we are convinced that it’s bad, we often find out that it’s not so bad after all, not as bad in retrospect as we thought. Sometimes, it’s worse than we thought.
Numbing perception ...reality.
It’s been well over a year now that President Trump has been suspected of running a dishonest campaign for president. However, we can accept that. They all do, every one of them. Dishonesty seems to be a qualification to be a political force, not just in America but anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, a sad reality.
The suspicion of “Russian collusion”, however, and the “obstruction of justice” charges, are an ongoing concern from a legal perspective, unlike the ‘Access Hollywood‘ tape recording, the womanizing, the braggadocio, the arrogance and posturing which we seem to have all accepted even forgiven over time from the personal perspective.
Is there a separate statute of limitations for personal forgiveness relative to legal exoneration?
Trump and his team are working overtime to “make the bad stuff go away”, i.e. Russia and obstruction of justice charges, by first discrediting Robert Mueller and his investigation, then praising Mueller and his team for “doing the right thing”, now saying the investigation is “hurting the country.” This flip-flopping would make Mitt Romney cringe, and, like Mitt’s gaff, is in itself dishonest and incriminating, in my opinion. The personal stuff, shamelessly, doesn’t seem to matter to either Trump or most of America. We have our own lives and self-incriminations to worry about. Our own “clinkers”.
But in the end, if “acceptance” is the last stage of the grieving process, we must reflect on just what we are willing to accept.
John Kushma is a communication consultant and lives in Logan, Utah.
