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Bernard Campbell is a semi-retired businessman who lives in Deer Isle.
Donald Trump has been a millionaire since he was 8 years old. He eventually inherited more than $400 million in today’s dollars. Incredibly, he seemingly single-handedly captured the working man and saved the Republican Party, which owes him a great debt.
How did he accomplish this? I think the Democrats screwed up for a really long time. I believe they became the party of elites and know-it-alls, and lots of regular people didn’t like them. Trump was no everyman, but he sounded like one. He was different, and people were ready for different. He was angry, and he channeled the anger of the people who had been ignored for too long.
But here is the thing: It takes a carpenter to build a house, but all it takes is a drunk with a sledgehammer to knock one down. Criticizing others is easy. You need to be competent to actually do a job right. And we now know something is really wrong.
People know what gas costs, and what heating oil costs, and what health care costs, and what food costs, and what mortgages cost, and nothing is making much sense.
Our tax dollars may fund a $200 billion exercise in futility in the Middle East. Is it possible we are actually losing a war with Iran?!
ICE is a $75 billion clown show.
The East Wing ballroom project looks like a $400 million investment to support the narcissism of a reality show host, playing at being president.
Combined with tax cuts disproportionately favoring the rich, the federal government has become a financial basket case, like an adolescent who believes that as long as there is still room on the credit card, everything is fine.
Economically, everything is not fine. And yes, competence does matter. But that might not even be the hard part. We were a great country, but we aren’t one any more.
No decline this dramatic happens overnight. Our loss of community has been happening for decades. The wealth difference between the haves and have-nots has grown immensely, and government, no matter who was in power, did essentially nothing, leaving a lot of angry, scared people.
Elon Musk spent close to $500 million on the election, apparently to protect the billionaire class and keep the working class in their place, and it did not move the needle. At all.
The Trump fever has broken. Maybe we have tired of being angry.
This could be a turning point. Republican elected officials were in the unenviable position of supporting an unsupportable president. Many of them have now been put out of their misery, and the remainder can rebuild their party in the spirit of a group that truly cares about the many, not the few.
In a similar way, Democrats have a real chance to fix decades of mistakes; to reconnect with their FDR roots, and remember one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most famous quotes: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Only then can we return to the intention of our founding fathers, and start rebuilding our collective will. Maybe this will come to matter more than Democrats versus Republicans.
We aren’t called the United States of America for nothing.