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Photo credit: Harry Welty

It’s coming! The biggest case of overdue Karma in America’s history. The only question will be whether Donald Trump leaves the Oval Office like Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy left his Senate soap box with 36 percent of American’s still approving of him. Or, will President Trump’s lock on 30% of America (80% of Republicans) evaporate?

The Republican Party never saw Donald Trump coming. He earned so many eye rolls for a quarter century of big talk and bankruptcies that when he challenged a field of Republican duds for the Presidential nomination in 2016 few took his braggadocio seriously. But the Republicans had been feeding their blue-collar voters hot air for twenty years as they shipped their jobs to Mexico and China for Walmart’s low prices. This down and out constituency was left empty-handed with an Unreality Show intent on convincing them that Donald Trump was the opposite of what establishment Republicans knew him to be – a fraud.

As President, Trump ratcheted up his disasters into to “national emergencies” I find myself growing less anxious about his threat. I could be fooling myself but I’m beginning to suspect that America might steel itself to do what Donald’s doting Father Fred could never bring himself to do. Give him a good spanking. In fact, one way or another Donald has been getting it from day one when a mere dribble of his supporters showed up to watch him sworn in on the National Mall.

I always look for silver linings and Donald has provided several. The most important one is this. Unlike a couple of earlier potential American dictators, among them Aaron Burr and Huey Long, and a whole raft of them elsewhere, Donald Trump never had designs on our Democracy. He only wanted to be the richest kid on the block. I think we will eventually learn that he never expected to get elected. That seemed obvious to me watching his tongue-tied shock on election night, 2016. His whole campaign was a romp to stoke his ego and hype his gold leaf thin empire of Trump buildings belonging to other people. Even his gut instinct didn’t prepare him for the weakness of all the other candidates.

For the last three decades one newspaper has watched him clown around and reported his curiousities. Its Trump’s hometown paper, the New York Times. No one else had a better view of the rubble field left in Trump’s wake. The “Grey Lady” has been my go-to source from the inauguration on. Sometimes their depth of knowledge overwhelms readers as did their coverage of Trump’s dependence on his Dad to buy him out of one disaster after another. 

Today there are arm chair detectives everywhere uncovering Trump’s secrets. Among them, David Frum, a former George Bush speech writer who did something I couldn’t stomach. He reviewed all those old episodes of the Apprentice that burnished the Trump brand. And he got to know the creators who found Trump to captain their Minnow. What the producers found was a man whose business failures had left him with tacky, chipped office furniture. Their job was to camouflage his failures and make him sparkle like a super star.  They succeeded beyond Donald Trump’s wildest dreams.

Now as President Donald Trump has discovered that our porous border with Mexico which has given America millions of cheap fruit pickers, hotel cleaning ladies and black-market carpenters for a hundred years is, in fact, a “crisis” so desperate that he has to shut down our government.

But the real crisis for Trump is that his early promoters, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and even Fox and Friends don’t want to be associated with a loser. Coulter and Limbaugh have backed him and all of America into a corner demanding that he build a wall no one much wants unless its paid for by the Mexican government. If Coulter, Limbaugh and even Fox turn have turned against Trump they may be the beginning of an avalanche. They might persuade the viewers of the Apprentice that Trump’s lies are not so much shrewd salesmanship as self-delusion. It won’t be easy. People hate to acknowledge buyer’s remorse even after their lemon starts rotting their teeth. 

For the time being the President holds one trump card. Half of all Republicans are really Trump voters. Without them the Republicans only have 25 percent of America’s voters. Trump has the Party by the short hairs. 

All this furor could have been avoided had Fred Trump simply spanked Donny. He didn’t and on his death bed he discovered that son Donny was working overtime to wrest control of his Father’s empire away from him. I wonder if all those Apprentice fans will suffer the same fate.

Harry Welty is a local eccentric and perennial candidate for office in Duluth who also pontificates on his blog: www.lincolndemocrat.com.