President Donald J. Trump


Imagine you're in a fight with someone unreasonable. Perhaps a teenager or someone prone letting emotions override rationality.

It's likely futile to win them over via oral argument. You can't make someone see sense when their focus is to BEAT YOU.

Imagine you win because the two of you agree to let someone else decide and that person takes your side. Now, because your opponent is unreasonable, he/she is unlikely to take it well.

Instead, he/she is likely to double down and sabotage and passive-aggressively undermine you along the way.

Oh, also imagine you're generally better off than this person. You have more education, earnings power, net worth, etc. But you look like him/her and have similar ancestry.

This person, he/she has a lot of energy. He/she is fueled by dissatisfaction and you've generally not done a lot to help him/her out. In fact, you often feel a bit disgusted and sometimes do a bad job masking your disdain.

Now imagine a time has come for him/her to even the score.

Of course, this person will tell you to fuck off.

Now imagine that the difference this time is that this person wins. Your third party arbitrator says so.

What will you do? Will you double down and sabotage and passive-aggresively undermine him/her as well?

What if you, instead, get a straw and suck it up?

What if you, instead, react with kindness?

What if you, instead, be who you consider yourself to be--an adult--and humbly share why you feel the way you feel and why your view is so different and why you're so dedicated to what you're dedicated to?

If all you care about is to make progress, then you shouldn't care about "getting even".

Does that mean you're weak? Or does that just mean you're willing to give it a shot?

Is it fair? Probably not. You were not treated with grace when the tables were flipped. So why should you do so now?

Because we are not them. We cannot complain about uncooperativeness and then not cooperate when the situation doesn't conform to our agenda.

So yes.

This is an elaborate metaphor for: I'm willing to give Trump a shot. I'm willing to have an open mind. I'm willing to be proven wrong.

As a matter of fact, I hope I'm wrong.

I hope Trump becomes a great President. I hope he does NONE of the horrible things he's promised to do. I hope he manages to bust apart the deadlock in Congress because Democrats decide they are willing to be adults and reach across the aisle and in the process of doing so flip/shame/inspire the obstructionist Republicans who reflexively took the other side of anything Obama stood for.

And in doing so, progress returns.

Is it likely? It's hard for me to believe so. But then again, it didn't seem likely we would live to see Donald Trump become the most powerful man in the free world.

We're all wrong a lot. Being wrong in this context can be a good thing.

So I'm going to root for it. I'm going to do what President Obama has urged me to do now that this is over: make peace. Unite.

Otherwise I'm no better than those I deplore.

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