Unable to stop the decline and fall of the American empire, I have chosen instead to document it in the hopes that you, some future reader, may gain understanding in what went wrong after 241 years.
Forged of independence, of high-minded ideals, of egalitarianism and free enterprise, of warfare and civil strife, the end of our great experiment in democracy came, perhaps surprisingly, with a tweet.
For those of you hazy in U.S. history, Twitter was an electronic forum in which anyone could say pretty much anything, so long as it was confined to 140 alpha-numeric characters.
That our president chose that as his preferred medium perhaps speaks to his attention span, knowledge of civics and disdain for complex thought — or for average Americans — but one message spelled the end: “So long, suckers. #losers”
How we got here is open to some debate. I’ll leave it to the true historians to describe the arc of conservatism from 1950s-era pragmatism through Richard Nixon’s race-baiting Southern Strategy and the eventual unholy alliance with evangelical Christians and, finally, to the Tea Party, whose members argued that government doesn’t work, then got elected and set about proving it, culminating in the election of Donald Trump as president.
From the outset, numerous reasonably qualified bureaucrats refused the vastly underqualified Trump’s invitation to join his cabinet. So he resorted to some loyal political lackeys and a few of his fellow “reality television” stars to staff key positions, which is why when he fled the country with billions of dollars plus all of the White House silverware, it was left to Treasury Secretary Snooki to explain what went wrong.
Interior Secretary Sarah Palin, fresh from opening the Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park and the city of San Francisco to exploratory drilling and mining, created a bit of stir when she sold off chunks of the Westap federal lands to Chinese investors and Saudi sheiks for development of Trump-branded resorts and casinos.
(Because it voted blue, Colorado fared particularly poorly under the vindictive president; thatap why Garden of the Gods was renamed Garden of Trump. And for someone whose idea of “roughing it” was 750-thread-count sheets at the Ritz-Carlton and who never once in his life spent a night camping nor even walking on a hiking trail, Trump sure took a keen personal interest in “preserving nature” by closing off access to the federal lands here for everyone except energy companies.)
Although the women in the country learned they had “better keep their traps shut” after losing the right to abortion and equal pay for equal work, things really fell apart after Supreme Court Justice Ted Cruz cast the deciding vote to overturn gay marriage because it was “icky” and after Health and Human Services Secretary Kim Kardashian oversaw the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, stripping many Trump supporters of their health insurance.
Because Trump claimed to know more about foreign policy than anyone else — he cited his international “relations” with several foreign contestants in his Miss Universe contest; interestingly, eight more of them accused him of improprieties and being a bit too handsy — he did away with the entire State Department and, instead, resorted to his unique brand of “Twitter diplomacy.”
Predictably — for someone who filled two full pages of The New York Times when it listed the people Trump had insulted during the presidential campaign — the president managed to create international incidents with Beijing, Paris, Nairobi and, improbably, the island-nation of St. Lucia.
The last straw may have been calling German Chancellor Angela Merkel “frumpy,” although his relationship with English Prime Minister Theresa May also was described as icy when he was overheard rating her “a six, maybe a seven on a good night.”
But in the end, it was the Russian oligarchs — to whom the president was in debt for many failed Trump business ventures, including steaks, airlines, a purported “institution of higher education,” and, the ironic kicker, Trump vodka — that forced him into exile.
Sad.
Steve Lipsher (slipsher@comcast.net) of Silverthorne writes a monthly column for The Denver Post.
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