Donald Trump’s America: helpless, sad losers

And now we begin 105 days of rants about “egregious crime ... poverty and violence at home, war and destruction abroad ... worse than it has ever been ... disasters unfolding. ”

If the America of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech were the real America, then we might as well shut up, sit down and let him have at it.

But Trump’s desperate, doomed America is a figment of his unhinged imagination, a specter created to justify an authoritarian presidency unrestricted by the Constitution or comity.

“Chaos in our communities.” “Horrible and unfair.” “Families ripped apart.” “Helpless to die at the hands of savage killers.”

Those were among dozens of dark phrases in a speech of unrelieved grimness. All of it the fault of Hillary Clinton, he declared, and, “I alone can fix it.”

His will be a campaign devoid of details about how “I alone” could fix it – 105 days of avoiding inconvenient facts (i.e., U.S. crime has been on a downward trend for years) and inventing useful ones (i.e., “pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map”).

By Nov. 8, he assumes, voters staggering to the polls under such a burden of danger and anger may be ready to do almost anything to make the pain go away. “I alone can fix it.”

Those people knew before Trump told them that America has problems. Many of them have been victims, directly and indirectly, of the woes on Trump’s inexhaustible list. Many of them have seen their incomes stagnate while the wealth of the top 1 percent of the nation’s families has grown exponentially. Many of them have had to change jobs because their former ones were moved offshore. They have lost family members in combat and on U.S. streets and campuses. They are worried – even frightened – about terrorist attacks here and abroad.

And they, understandably, are angry, sick of political deadlock, and yearning for effective leadership to improve their lives.

But they knew pre-Trump – and still know – that the existence of those problems is not the totality of American existence. They know that, despite all the racial, religious and philosophical division, America is an ongoing, often successful experiment in cultural adaptation. They know that for every criminal act by an immigrant there are millions of ordinary and extraordinary peaceful and productive acts by people new to this country.

They know that a planned Black Lives Matter anti-police protest can be turned, through goodwill, into a community food-and-talk fest involving almost 2,000 people. And if they Google “happy news,” they can turn up dozens of websites specializing in news just like that, reflecting a country unwilling to surrender to despair.

Trump leveraged the negative aspects of our psyche into the Republican nomination. He can continue his messianic charade only by insisting that Americans are helpless, hapless losers. That’s an incorrect and likely fatal deception on his part, because, deep down, we know better.

This story was originally published July 26, 2016 at 12:04 AM with the headline "Donald Trump’s America: helpless, sad losers."