I can’t in good conscience blame Trump

By Clarice M. McKenney 
Reader Contributor

For more than 50 years I have voted Democrat, and most of those years I was unable to be an activist, be involved in protests or actively support candidates because of my work in journalism. My favorite journalism teacher at Eastern Washington State College, Sandpoint-born writer Patrick McManus, was among the professors who drilled into us that journalists must remain neutral.

In retirement, though, I write only as an unpaid volunteer so I am free to be active in local, state and national politics. Let me take advantage of that during what I think is our country’s biggest political crisis.

I’m only one of millions of people angry about President Donald Trump’s lawlessness; his preempting of the other two branches of government; defunding of vital services and research; mass firing of federal personnel; deportation of individuals and whole groups without due process; threatening law firms, public broadcasting and radio, public schools and universities; breaking laws enshrined in the U.S. Constitution; and ending protections for our citizens.

Although I did not vote for him, millions of Americans voted him into office knowing exactly who the man is. For more than 50 years — and he’s now my age — he has been breaking laws while I’ve been living within the law. I remember weeping in grief the morning after the first election he won because I knew at that moment that our country was in mortal danger with the election result.

After his first term and the two impeachments did not remove him from office, I was furious at his attorneys who bullied the senators into letting him off, stating that the legal system would remove him from the streets if he were guilty (or words to that effect). I’ve never studied law, but I knew he and the Republicans who backed him were too powerful already to let that happen.

But I cannot, in good conscience, blame Trump for winning the presidency — twice. Here’s who I blame: Congress, businesses that have been too intimidated and frightened to stand up to him, and powerful law firms that are too interested in the bottom line to stand up to him. 

Most of all, though, as a former journalist from the ’70s taught to get both sides of controversies but not to overemphasize one side, I blame most of the media. Through his first campaign, they magnified his every word or gesture. I remember the shock of seeing an empty podium time and again as the media trained their cameras on nothing for up to half an hour in one case because he is chronically late.

Because of that one-sided media coverage of all things Trump over the past decade and, worst of all, not truthfully covering his assaults on democracy, a huge percentage of voters continue to have little information about Trump and his minions’ assault on our democracy. 

But I do not let voters off the hook. During years of phone banking, speaking with Republican, Democratic and Independent voters all over the country, countless voters shared with me the biased accounts they read. So many pay attention only to media that “agree with” their own political viewpoint. And they got their political viewpoint from the same media.

Worst of all, I’ve lost track of the many times in this era of Trump that someone has said they “don’t care about politics.” The word “politics” is from the Greek politikos, which means “of a citizen.” As famed Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis stated, “The most important political office is Private Citizen.”

Yet too many citizens do not do solid research for themselves before voting. Either they vote based on social media posts and biased media or they vote by which names are most familiar to them. With Trump’s name the most prominent every day for 10 years, of course a lot of voting was done by name familiarity. That’s a terrible reason to vote for someone.

Being an eternal optimist by nature, though, I’m hoping that voters wake up and do actual research before voting. Meanwhile, I hope more join the recent millions of protesters in the streets of our country.

But if millions do not, they will have themselves to blame when their health insurance goes up in smoke, someone they love is deported without due cause, their incomes drop significantly, their retirement savings disappear, then their Social Security checks stop coming. 

Forget the benefits citizens are entitled to; we’ll all be lucky soon if we can just scrape by.

Clarice M. McKenney is a Bonners Ferry resident.