He’s still at it, isn’t he?
I mean former President Donald Trump, the man who lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes, yet continued over the weekend to claim that he won.
I mean Trump, whose claims contradict all known arithmetic.
I mean Trump, who apparently lacks the ability of any reasonable third-grader to count.
I mean Trump, who went to Greenville, N.C., on Saturday night, June 5, and told a crowd of Republican diehards that his election loss was somehow “the crime of the century,” and no matter that dozens of judges, Republican governors and top officials from his own administration have declared he lost, the election was fair and he should let the country move on.
I mean Trump, who told that North Carolina crowd, “Our country is being destroyed before our very eyes,” even as America emerges from a viral plague with the return of jobs and children back in classrooms and people who huddled in their homes for more than a year filling the streets, happy to finally come out of their isolation.
But Trump, for all his delusions, is right about one thing: there is a destruction going on in this country.
And it’s Trump who’s championing it.
We saw this last Jan. 6 when his diehard supporters listened to his mad ranting and stormed the U.S. Capitol, and we see it with these congressional boot-lickers too cowardly to contradict Trump’s obvious lies, and we see it in these polls that show more than half of Republican voters buying into his insane claims about the 2020 election.
The great baseball manager Casey Stengel once said, “The secret of successful managing is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the four guys who haven’t made up their minds.”
It’s that way with America, too.
We’re a nation built upon our differences, with the confidence that we can make them work for all. We count on our fundamental beliefs in common goals, in our democratic ideals and in our common humanity, getting us past the things that divide us.
Instead, Trump focuses on the things calculated to enrage us, and tells us lies to reinforce his skewed, self-serving claims.
America hasn’t seen such public, in-your-face lying in two-thirds of a century — since Sen. Joseph McCarthy was claiming the government was riddled with communists.
You want a comparison between McCarthy and Trump? Here’s Eric Sevareid, the great CBS News commentator, in January of 1954 when McCarthy was still riding pretty high but beginning to come undone:
“The capacity for others’ feelings is simply not there. He cannot help it. The personal tragedy of McCarthy is that the nerve or chord or cluster of cells that produce what men call conscience was not granted to him.”
Tell me you couldn’t substitute Trump’s name for McCarthy’s and find that it fits.
Here’s Sevareid again, when McCarthy died in 1957 and historians were looking not only at the senator but at those around him too timid to speak the truth.
“Never once did he uncover a person in government proved to be a communist,” Sevareid said. “Yet millions believed with him that ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ … Washington believes in power and power alone. When McCarthy had power, the highest officials attended his wedding. When his power was gone, though the human being was the same, he was cut dead socially.
“If history finds that McCarthy used his strength in a wrongful manner, it will find that the weakness of others was part of the fault.”
McCarthy was guided by attorney Roy Cohn, who later became Donald Trump’s advisor and mentor. Cohn told Trump, Never give up, no matter the circumstances. The longer Trump thinks he’s winning, the longer the country keeps losing.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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