On the impossibility of summing this stuff up

If you’re anything like me, hardly a day goes by that you are not struck dumb by who and what Kamala Harris faces in this presidential election contest.  The other night, I found myself using a phrase that I have come to hate.  I said, “I have trouble wrapping my head around this.”  But I said it, and to my horror, I realized that I meant it.  There are times that I simply cannot comprehend how it is that we find ourselves as a nation facing the politics we must witness every day. 

It is hard to imagine that the candidate of one of our political parties made himself famous by claiming that if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, he wouldn’t lose any voters.  It is even harder to imagine that what he said way back in January of 2016 may be the truest thing he ever said.

The horrors of this man and what he has said and done over the last nine years are equally hard to comprehend.  Where do you start?  With the fact that he promised to get Roe v. Wade overturned and did it, denying women in half our states the right to control their own reproductive health and causing the deaths of multiple women who were unable to receive emergency care when they miscarried or suffered ectopic pregnancies or other life-threatening complications?  With the fact that he tried to launch a coup that would have overtaken the seat of our government, its Congress, and reversed the outcome of the last election?  With the enormous damage he has done to our government, including our military, with his aggressively sloppy appointments and governance?  With what passes for his ideology, consisting mainly of contempt for our government and our democracy and our way of life? 

How about the fact that he has, by word and deed, polluted our politics and our sense of national morality?  How about his contempt for the disabled, for those who must endure chronic illness, for entire classes of people such as women, Blacks, Latinos, the poor, immigrants, and even citizens who are from a rival political party and did not vote for him?

What is going on that we must confront and discuss matters that are clearly un-American, and in fact deal with a man who acts as if he is an enemy of this country?

What he has done to the country which welcomed his grandparents as immigrants and gave his father and mother and him and his children a chance to not only make a living but to become enormously wealthy is not just wrong, or ignorant, or callous, or even criminal, although what he has done is all those things.

I have been covering this man for nine years, and I have spent more than a tenth of my lifetime cataloging his misdeeds and cruelty and crimes, so I don’t say this lightly.  What he represents, what he stands for, and what he has done is evil.