which demonstrates clearly that Blow was wrong when yesterday he offered this tweet:
Blow remains one of the most gifted and powerful writers for any publication in the United States, as this column demonstrates once again.
I am going to take a different approach than usual to this column. It is very tightly written, and not easy to summarize in the fashion I normally use.
Instead allow me to offer a few snippets to demonstrate its power and pointedness, and then simply urge you to go read the original.
So let me begin:
Here is the beginning:
What befalls a country rived by a dynasty of deception and disrepute? What comes of a country being forced by it puerile “president” to retreat from its world leadership, set to a soundtrack of world mockery? What to make of an enterprise of corruption that Trump calls a family when they abandon any semblance of propriety and all things we once found appropriate?
The America that I know and love is hanging by a thread, and Trump’s scandalous camarilla is playing with the shears.
For the record camarilla has a very relevant meaning. Here is the first definition that comes up on a search:
a small group of people, especially a group of advisers to a ruler or politician, with a shared, typically nefarious, purpose.
or if you prefer the lead of the Wikipedia piece:
a group of courtiers or favourites who surround a king or ruler. Usually, they do not hold any office or have any official authority at the royal court but influence their ruler behind the scenes.
After reminding us of the email chain shared by Donald Trump Jr., Blow write
This is clear evidence of collusion and pushing disturbingly close to the possibility of other crimes including treason, although not quite there yet, from what is publicly known at this point.
Two paragraphs that summarize how we arrived at this situation:
Trump is president by a combination of the most despicable factors: a Russian cyberattack, voter suppression, racial anxiety and rampant sexism. People will struggle to explain it in other terms, and some will do so with dazzling language that apes the tone and tenor of intellectualism, but at its base an explanation that ignores those factors is a lie. It is a lie that covers a cyst. It is a lie that shields a sickness. It is a lie that excuses the inexcusable.
Donald Trump is president because a multiethnic, forward-thinking coalition twice elected a black man president and in so doing sent pulsing waves of fear down the spine of the traditional power structure in America. Barack Obama represented a fast-approaching future in which whiteness is not synonymous with power, in which power is more widely shared.
I am already pushing fair use, although I hope the author won’t mind. I needed to provide the context before emphasizing the ends of each of those paragraphs. For the first
It is a lie that shields a sickness. It is a lie that excuses the inexcusable.
Methinks as the various investigations and breaking news stories are starting to make clear, Trump may well have not only benefited from the Russian intervention, but actively through his campaign and especially his sons and son-in-law directly participated in it.
And for the second:
Barack Obama represented a fast-approaching future in which whiteness is not synonymous with power, in which power is more widely shared.
That requires a bit more clarification — it is not just whiteness, but it is male whiteness. We see that clearly in this administration, including the Secretary of Education meeting with “Men’s Rights” groups to discuss issues surrounding campus rapes and one of her minions claiming that 90% of claims of same involve two people who were drunk — as if mutual inebriation would somehow mean a woman’s no is no longer relevant, something that it took a long time to get courts to reject.
There is much more in this column.
One might well be despondent at what is happening to our country. One might very much consider that Charles M. Blow, who focuses on the horrors as well as anyone currently writing, with as much righteous anger as one can imagine, would be despondent.
So let me cheat and as my last attempt to get you to go read this magnificent peace, offer his conclusion:
Run everything that you hear from the White House through this filter: The “presidency” is a blasphemy and Trump is not only a disgrace but also an assault on the culture and the country.
And take comfort in this eternal truth: For all things, there comes an end.
It is up to all of us to hasten the arrival of that end.
Now go read this magnificent column.