“I never heard of a president like you …”
In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, an embattled farmer wrote to President Roosevelt:
“Dear Mr. President: This is just to tell you that everything is all right now. The man you sent found our house all right, and we went down to the bank with him and the mortgage can go on for a while longer. You remember I wrote you about losing the furniture too. Well, your man got it back for us. I never heard of a President like you.”
Sadly, that was 88 years ago.
And it has been a very long time since we had a president like Franklin D. Roosevelt. I’m not sure there has been anyone before him or since who had such unabashed joy at the thought of being president.
We certainly don’t have one now.
We might have someone at least a little like FDR in 13 days. In at least one respect, we are waiting for Joe Biden in 2021 the same way people were waiting for FDR in 1933.
In that past year, the economy was getting worse day by day. Banks were failing and the money supply was drying up as people were pretty much afraid to do anything. President Hoover sat in the White House and basically did nothing.
This year, the global pandemic seems to be getting worse by the day. We’re seeing nearly 4,000 deaths a day recently, and as of today the death toll in the U.S. is now above 363,000.
Several months ago, the prediction was that the death toll would reach 400,000 by the end of January. Now we will reach that number before Biden is inaugurated in 13 days.
And Trump, instead of doing nothing, is making things worse. Instead of providing any leadership on the pandemic, instead of working toward a peaceful transition at a crucial time in our history, he goes around ranting and raving that he actually won the election by a landslide and Democrats stole the election.
Wednesday was the worst of all. He had been urging the hardest of the hard core of his supporters — the true Trumpanzees — to come to Washington for a rally that would intimidate Congress on the day they were supposed to certify Biden’s victory over Trump.
Then he instigated a riot.
He told them to march to the capitol. His “lawyer,” Rudy Giuliani, said it was time for “trial by combat.”
Both men basically instigated an act of domestic terrorism.
You don’t need me to tell you the details of that. Trump got what he wanted in the riot, but the domestic terrorists failed to keep Congress from officially certifying the election. I was particularly creeped out by the photo of what at first looked like spiders climbing the wall at the Capitol.
Will he be president for 13 more days?
Probably, but then four years of blustering, lies and invective will lose their official imprimatur and Trump will beecome just another angry old guy cheating at golf and talking back to the television.
If I had the chance to say one thing to him, I might go back to that comment from 1933.
“I never heard of a president like you.”
God willing, I never will again.