Donald Trump is Guilty (of Being Exactly Who He Said He Was)

The verdict is in.

Donald Trump (the unstable, unhinged, decade-long cult leader of the current Republican Party and its likely presidential candidate in a few months) is a convicted felon, found guilty on all 34 counts in a trial that is but one of four that he faces and would already have been tried on had his infiltration of our justice system not slowed the process this long.

For anyone who truly loves this nation and respects the rule of Law, it is not a day of celebration or strident “I told you so’s,” but a moment to mark with profound sadness how deeply, perhaps irreparably wounded we are as a collective to have ever allowed someone so bereft of character to ascend to the highest seat of power in the world.

And for someone like myself, who has spent the last eight years trying to alert people here to the dangers and to appeal to their humanity and to invite their better angels and to ask them to step across lines of politics and religion in order to prevent a national disaster—it is simply the grievous, though expected outcome.

Good people saw this coming. For anyone not completely addled by tribalism, this was always going to play out this way.

Of course he was going to disregard the rule of law.

He is a career criminal: a professional financial predator who has left a trail of multiple bankruptcies, broke unpaid vendors, crooked business dealings, and tax records he has fought tooth and nail to keep concealed. He was publicly amorous toward Vladimir Putin for a year before his first election. What story did his supporters tell themselves about why that was? 

Of course he was going to legislatively assault women.

He was a professed predator and serial adulterer with a storied history of sexist behavior and spousal mistreatment, accused by dozens of women of violence, long before anyone stepped into the polls on that Tuesday in November of 2016. Since then, he has been found in a court of law to be a sexual abuser. And for someone who said he could grab women by the genitalia, it isn’t a surprise that he has since taken away their body autonomy.

Of course he was going to vilify immigrants.

He spent his entire campaign stoking the white fears of people of color; leveraging every lazy FoxNews stereotype designed to emotionally arouse nationalists and supremacists. He showed us all his hostility toward Muslims and his resentment of migrants in rambling stump speeches and spectacularly ignorant social media tantrums.

Of course he was going to try and repeal LGBTQ rights.

He grew beholden to the phobic religious extremists of the Evangelical Right, and his Vice President has advocated for reparative therapy to help people pray away their gender identity and sexual orientation. Did him wrapping himself in a rainbow flag for a thirty second photo op really make anyone think he was going to evolve beyond his draconian party?

Of course he was going to ignore school shootings and mass murders committed with semi-automatic weapons, largely by hateful, homegrown white men.

He has been in bed with the NRA and the gun lobby since day one, never once sending any other signal—than promising he will choose money over lives every single time and that the only violence he will ever respond to is from dark-skinned or foreign people.

Of course he was going to be malicious toward the planet.

He spent his campaign denying climate change and targeting native American lands for drilling and cozying up to corporate polluters and mocking Science. Why would anyone have ever imagined he'd give a damn about melting glaciers and dying honeybees and vanishing coral reefs? 

And of course, he was always going to reject every shred of our Constitution, ignore every law of this land, and assault our longtime systems of protection in order to hold onto a power he never deserved in the first place. January 6th should have been the dealbreaker for all but the most completely indoctrinated.

None of this malevolence should be shocking and no one really has any right to claim ignorance at this point, if they were paying attention—but I suppose many weren't paying attention otherwise they’d have heard the warnings and heeded the red flags.

Hillary Clinton tried to warn America about Donald Trump.
Barack Obama tried to.
Joe Biden tried to.
The Free Press tried to.
81 million Americans tried to.

Most of all, Donald Trump tried to warn America.

He’s spent the last eight years inciting violence and degrading women, showing his intellectual ignorance, and broadcasting his hostility toward vulnerable people groups. He often seemed to be going out of his way to intentionally be so incendiary and vile and lawless, that he'd guarantee his failure by disqualifying himself in the eyes of reasonable people.

But even he couldn't convince tens of millions of Americans to see him clearly.

Even he couldn't penetrate their hatred of Hillary or their adoration of celebrity or their inherited racism or their apathy about the process or their laziness regarding the issues —or whatever kept so many from seeing what seemed so obvious to so many of us, and what they still refuse to see.

Donald Trump showed us all who he was for decades before he descended a golden escalator. He let us know with sickening eloquence from the beginning what he was planning, the kind of violence and cruelty and malice he was capable of and prone to dispense.

As ugly as he is in this moment, he comes as advertised.

He prophesied this full-blown kleptocracy with absolute clarity.

He foreshadowed every abuse of power and every act of treason.

He predicted the to-the-death devotion of his sycophantic disciples.

And to anyone paying attention, he prepared us long ago for the verdict in New York City.

The real surprise to so many of us who saw this disaster coming, is how so many refused to.

Donald Trump is guilty of being who he told us he was from the beginning.

I hope more people are now listening.