Every time we get a new president, somebody puts up a billboard with the previous president’s picture with the words, “miss me yet?” W when Obama took office…. Bill Clinton when W took office, etc.  We may be seeing these even before Donald J. Trump becomes the 45th president.

Good news. Still more than 40 days before taking office, Donald Trump has reassured a world that is worried he’ll send out an errant, thoughtless, provocative tweet…. that he’s more than capable of creating an international incident the old-fashioned way…. with an old-style, 20th century phone call!

China Warns Trump After His Controversial Call With Taiwan

I look forward to Kellyanne and Kaleigh and Jeffrey and Sean and Reince and Pence and the rest of the Excuse Squad trying to tell us this was not Trump thoughtlessly and ignorantly thrilled to get an attentive, ego-boosting phone call that had nothing to do with any commercial conflicts of interest he has in Taiwan. To those of you too young to have lived through the Cold War and the Sixties and hiding under your desk to protect yourself from nuclear fallout (yea that was gonna help!)….

I think those days will be back, in a sense. Trump is so impulsive, so thoughtless, and so ignorant of the world that we may be finding ourselves continuously on the brink of disaster. Are you not tired of this guy ALREADY, and he’s more than 45 days from taking office?

His “victory tour” (really an “FU If You Didn’t Vote For Me” tour) which features continued attacks on a free press, much to the delight of the followers, is reminiscent of authoritarian dictator rallies that none of us thought we’d ever see or live through in our own country.  

No, everything Trump does that is unprecedented and flagrarantly obnoxious, ethically/legally indefensible and self-serving, will not succeed because Trump is some kind of magical, transformative figure sent by God to Drain the Swamp (possibly the most tedious call and response chant, right after “lock her up.”)

With one major takeaway from the 2016 election being demagoguery works, one has to write this stuff with a foreboding sense of humility that any facts may be deflected like bullets off of Superman.  Facts did not matter in the campaign, and Trump’s full embrace of George Orwell “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it” and Machiavelli “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived” sets us up for a future that we thought just couldn’t happen here.  Vigilance and a Never Again resolve move to the forefront in a way that we haven’t seen in the United States for generations.

I believe that Donald Trump is such a shallow, ignorant, transactional, whatever-it-takes to grab the world’s consciousness 24-7, regardless of the consequences, that we’re entering a time of dangerous unpredictability analogous to the obvious pivot points of the past: the Cuban Missile Crisis, World War II, the Great Depression.  And we voted for it.  With a little help from our friends, the Russians.