bullyA President

A PRESIDENT BULLY - Elizabeth K. (opinion)

On the 20th of January 2017, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. An outcry of protests followed, citing the president’s record of sexual harassment allegations, tax fraud, racial discrimination, and his, quite frankly, impressive record of bankruptcies. But it seems that even being elected President hasn’t stopped Trump from using his powers to intimidate, abuse or insult, whether it be through crepusculary, grammatically incorrect tweets or, more recently, malicious falsehoods regarding voter election fraud.

As a kid, I was always told that we were all equal. That insulting someone was rude and disrespectful, and that girls are equal to boys. Yet it seems like America has been led by a man that did not have that moral education. Childish insults coming from a 74-year-old are now considered normal, and people fighting for racial justice are “THUGS”. Groping women is acceptable, even praised, behavior, and so is publicly tweeting that a woman is “unattractive inside and out”, something I would have been sent to the headmistress for back in primary school.

And what about the lies? It is a basic principle that lying is bad and we are all taught at a young age to think before we talk. But it would seem that the President has not had the privilege of receiving this piece of advice. He has repeatedly made disputed claims that are widely considered to be false and regularly retweets dangerous conspiracies, the most famous one being the calls for Barack Obama to release his birth certificate and raising doubts as to its credibility (claims he later refuted). According to data from The Washington Post last updated on September 11th, Trump has made more than 23000 false or misleading claims over a period of 1331 days. This equals to around 17 lies a day. The average person is awake for around 17 hours a day. Trump makes one false statement per hour.

‘Don’t pull your friend’s hair’, ‘Don't touch somebody that doesn’t want to be touched’, not according to Donald Trump. The American People elected a President that has an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to his sexual misconduct allegations. In total, about 55 women have come forward with sexual misconduct claims, varying from non-consensual kissing to rape. He has denied all of these allegations, baselessly claiming they are an effort from the Clinton campaign to make him look bad. Lying and harassment? Hats off to you, Mr President.

Does anyone really like losing? The obvious answer is no, but no-one seems to hate it quite as much as Donald Trump. The 2020 presidential elections were called by CNN on November 7th for Joe Biden. A month later, the incumbent has (image from pixabay.com) still refused to concede. Trump’s Twitter feed is now an endless sea of extremist retweets, uncorroborated ‘evidence’, and bad-mouthing of the election results. Lawsuits are pending in nearly all the states he has lost (obviously, poor Rudy hasn’t had time to fix his hair dye in a long time), and it’s quite a challenge to find a tweet that doesn’t have a Twitter warning for misleading or disputed claims.

How can we overlook the blatant abuse of power, harassment, and bullying he has been serving on a silver platter for decades? Donald Trump is a bully, and nothing more.