The America We Are

It’s finally happened. Robert Mueller has turned in the report on his investigation into the 2016 election and Russian interference. As I write this, a summary has been released by the Attorney General but the complete report has still not been seen outside the Justice Department. Now, the full report should be made public and we can make a further assessment with all the details. But taking the Attorney General at his word for now, the summary concludes that Trump’s team did not knowingly collude with the Russians.

Which is about what I expected. Did I believe it was possible? Sure. Trump did everything he could to convince me of that. Private meetings with Putin that even his staff can’t partake in. Firing Comey. Alienating NATO while getting chummy with Russia. Calling the investigation, which started long before he became president, a political witch hunt. Almost every action he took looked exactly like what a guilty person would do. Even if he wasn’t guilty of colluding with the Russians, he sure looked like he was guilty of something and certainly appeared to be obstructing the investigation.

At least to those of us that wanted it to be true. Now, some of those things are objectively suspicious. Firing the FBI Director while there’s an ongoing investigation into you, after he refuses to give you a personal loyalty pledge, rather than being loyal to the country, is damn suspicious. But for most of it, things are colored strongly by your own bias.

While deep down, I didn’t actually think Trump’s campaign knowingly colluded or was being blackmailed by the Russians, I wanted that to be true. Why would I want a US president to be a pawn of another country? Well, if Trump worked with Russia to get elected then everything that he’s done has been at the behest of a foreign power, rather than something we’ve done to ourselves.

Yes, Russia did manipulate the election. There’s definite proof about it. Reigning in false information spread online is something that needs to be addressed. Russia may have sown some seeds of discord but the seeds were there. They didn’t create them.

Donald Trump is a wholly American president. There’s no way to avoid that truth anymore. He represents the America we are. Not the America we want to be, but the America we are.

He’s greedy. He’s a cheat. He’s self-obsessed. He’ll exploit any opportunity to benefit himself, others be damned. He doesn’t like non-whites. The only indicator of how much value anyone has is how much money they have. He thinks that you have to look tough regardless of anything else. He thinks women exist for his benefit. He thinks every situation has to have winners and losers. He lies about everything.

And he’s not the only one.

America is all of those things. Not every American all the time but the country as a whole. We don’t have to be that way. Hell, most of us don’t want to be that way. Most of us aren’t all of those things. But even, those that aren’t, some of them still voted for and support Trump.

Good people voted for Trump. People who, asked objectively, would take fault with everything Trump is. But they voted for Trump. They support his decisions. Because he’s the president. Because he’s a member of their party. Because his skin is the same color as theirs. Because he says the words they like to hear, even when you know, deep down, that he doesn’t mean them. He doesn’t mean anything he says.

It’s not what we’re taught America is. We’re taught America is a bastion of freedom against a dark world. We’re taught that America cares about her people. We’re taught America does the right thing. Trump says we’re these things. Because we want to hear that. We want to be a good country.

That’s why we wanted Mueller to find that Trump was a pawn of the Russians. Because then the bad things that we all know Trump represents aren’t us. They’re manipulations. But we can’t deny it anymore. It’s a truth we can no longer avoid. Trump is America.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can change. We can be everything Trump is not. We can be kind. We can think of others. We can work with each other rather than against each other.

It starts with us. If we look this ugly truth in the eye we can face it. We can change. Then, come Nov. 2020 we can elect someone who represents the America we want to be, rather than the America we are. Or, hopefully, were.