Game Over! It's Time to Step Out of the Darkness and Into the Light

Game over. 

Despite all of Donald Trump's threats to expose rampant voter fraud, he has no evidence. With all respect to my friends who still defend this malignant man, you, and he, are clinging to a greased rope. It's time to come out of the darkness and into the light. 

Trump is defective. Zero character or empathy or compassion. He’s a raging narcissist and pathological liar who does not care about you. Let me say that again: He. Does. Not. Care. About. You. 

Never did. Never will.

Trump mocks you in private. He disses our troops and veterans. He's a failed businessman. He really only has one skill, and that is his ability to bullshit his way through life. He's an opportunist with no core values who worships thugs and losers. 

But his 15 minutes are up.

Trump's house-of-cards presidency was built on an ugly foundation. He was pretty good at tapping into the fears and prejudices of increasingly angry, older white Americans who fear they are losing control of this country and do not want to see America change. 

Trump is an empty suit who stands for nothing. He was a pro-choice moderate most of his adult life. Then he recognized that there was an audience of mostly white voters who would respond to him if he suddenly joined the GOP and became a right-wing culture warrior. 

He was Pat Buchanan meets reality TV star. A combination from hell for anyone with a brain or a conscience. 

To get what he wanted, Trump threw anyone in his White House circle, as well as those outside of it, under the bus. He's a slick Yankee canoodling with rustic confederates. It's been an odd, dysfunctional and despicable courtship from day one.

Trump claims to put America first. But he's outsourced virtually all manufacturing jobs at his various now-defunct companies to other nations because of the cheap labor. He's never given a damn about America's working men and women. He has in fact bankrupted multiple businesses and walked away unscathed while thousands lost their jobs.

While Trump has railed these last four years against illegal immigrants, most of whom are simply coming here for a better life for their families, he's always hired them in large numbers at his hotels and other properties. He made them work long, extra hours for criminally little pay, then fired them when it was revealed that they worked for him. 

Before the election last month, some of my friends who voted for Trump in 2016 said they could not vote for him again because of his lack of morals or decency or character. But some of those friends reneged. 

It’s tough to see a friend vociferously and inaccurately defend Trump and the crooks, goons, loons and buffoons who make up his inner circle, which is the most corrupt administration in modern American history. It just isn't cute or funny or entertaining any more. 

And Now It's Really Over 

Trump will go down in history as the closest thing to a fascist that America has produced. These past four years, Trump has brought out the worst in America and Americans. And as you read this, he is still trying to do something that is the most un-American thing any politician can do: cancel the votes of his fellow Americans. 

Trump has been exposed as a fraud. He is not a master deal-maker. Far from it. He's a grifter. He didn't even write "The Art of the Deal," his alleged book. Trump is a cowardly thug whose policies are hurting America even more than his cruelty, ignorance and Mussolini-like pomposity.  

I get the disruption. I understand the appeal and power of someone who is really outspoken and doesn't play by the typical political rules by which so many pols have played. But Trump's so-called "disruption" was a sham. A misnomer. 

It has never been about disruption, it is in fact about a dangerously destructive chaos theory built on his innate ability to bring our darkest demons to the surface. He's Nero, but with no musical abilities whatsoever.

Trump has tried hard to systematically destroy our institutions and our culture. He sought anarchy. He begged his justice department to throw his political opponents in jail and urged Republicans to cancel millions of Americans' votes. 

In case you didn't pay attention to what Trump was doing when he wasn't Tweeting paranoid, grammatically challenged rants and absurdities at 4 a.m., he was strategically destroying our natural environment. He was the greatest enemy of the environment that has ever sat in the Oval Office. 

Under Trump, our air and water were sullied in the name of cutting regulations, most of which were reasonable safeguards against corporate pollution running rampant. He reversed Obama's efforts to preserve our oceans and lakes and rivers. He wanted to see new oil drilling off the California coastline, in the Gulf of Mexico, along the eastern seaboard and pretty much anywhere and everywhere. 

During his presidency, Trump spread hate and intolerance across this land like an evil Johnny Appleseed. He never attended church, and he has never read the Bible in his life. 

Race relations in this country are the worst they've been since the civil rights riots in the 1960s. Hate crimes based on race, religion and sexual orientation are at their highest level in modern American history. There are reportedly more insults, attacks and hate crimes against Muslims and Jews and gays than ever before.

Trump supporters, it's time you take some responsibility for the hate spread every day by your outgoing president, who constantly lied and relentlessly focused on people’s differences, prejudices and fears. 

He is not only the most divisive president in my lifetime, he's arguably the most divisive public figure in modern American history. He wanted to divide and conquer. It almost worked. 

The Trump Illusion

He isn't going away, for sure. But Trumpism will inevitably fail and fall. As my colleague and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham writes in "The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels,"  this country has faced profoundly deep divisions before, and has gotten through each of them to come together. 

Meacham is an eternal optimist, but he's no Pollyanna. He's a historian who understands the pivotal moments of the United States. His optimism is informed by an understanding of the real stories behind the events that have shaped and defined this country. 

Meacham predicted that we would eventually tire of Trump's empty bravado because, in the long run, Americans have always embraced our better angels. 

Biden won this election in a landslide. He got 7 million more votes than Trump. And that is good news for this country and for the world. As Americans, we will again find common ground and eventually move beyond Trumpism. 

No political cycle lasts forever in this nation, good or bad. If we don't discard Trumpism, America the Grand Experiment will blow up in the lab.  

I love America and Americans. I have friends on all sides of the aisle and I have always been part liberal and part conservative. I am a capitalist who believes in competition and cares about the environment. You can be both. 

And I've spent the last 25 years proudly covering our military and our veterans. Trump, who lied about having bone spurs to get out of serving his country, never gave a damn about our warriors until he decided to run for president. He calls them names in private. 

The real last straw for me with Trump came while I was on assignment for Yahoo News  with my former Newsweek colleague Mike Isikoff just after the 2016 election. Sitting in a lounge area inside a federal court room in San Diego during the Trump University fraud trial, I heard, off the record, several stories of students who were ripped off by Trump. Many had lost their life savings. It was sickening.

Trump University was a bogus school. A scam. Trump took millions from these students without any cares or conscience. He said he would never settle that case, that he wanted to see justice served, but that was of course total bull. 

For $25 million, Trump walked away from this open-and-shut case of fraud on a massive scale. He should be behind bars for that alone.

I am mostly civil in my debates, but you can't fight fire with cloth. People who deny trump's abuse of power and incompetence these last four years and his almost daily dog whistles (and sometimes bullhorns) to the racists in his base are worthy of counter rage by any sane, decent, compassionate American. 

Trump is a deeply insecure and vicious man. He's incompetent and tells lies almost every time he opens his mouth or tweets.  I have close friends who support Trump. But debating them now is shooting fish in a barrel. 

Trump is a variety-pack of Shakespeareanesque villains -- from King Lear, who craved power and was wildly insecure and needed constant praise, to Falstaff, the fat, arrogant chicken-shit who spent all his time with sleazy third-rate criminals and constantly tried to sleep with married women.

Like so many Shakespearean bad guys, Trump is a mentally unstable would-be king who lied, cheated, manipulated and caused his own downfall. The one thing, though, that Trump lacks that most Shakespearean villains possess is intelligence. Trump is actually not interesting or complex or smart enough to rise to the Bard's level. 

I hope that my friends who still support Trump as he goes down in flames will eventually see who this guy really is and what he tried to do to this great country. It's time to step out of the darkness and into the light. Seek and find your better angels. 

Game Over.