Murder is A Steppingstone

MURDER IS A STEPPINGSTONE
By
Richard Davis

The murder of Iranian general Soleimani was a reminder that there are no moral or ethical boundaries that Trump will not cross. While politicians and the news media dance around the motive for the killing because they want to be fair until they have concrete proof, the rest of the world knows that the execution was a move calculated to divert attention away from impeachment.

As I was reading the New York Times last Sunday I could not find one story that had anything to do with impeachment. Trump successfully used murder to control the news cycle. He is not a complicated man. He acts impulsively and it was clear that he was becoming increasingly irritated at being trashed and constantly scrutinized for behavior that justified his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives.

If we had a president that was not mentally unstable and if we had a president who was able to develop a plan based on a few of the basic principles of diplomacy, a meeting would have been convened to discuss how to dampen potential threats from the government of Iran.

Instead of a president who exercises good judgement and restraint and who considers the consequences of his actions, we have a world leader who only takes actions that bolster his ego and that pander to a political base that believes that bombs and bullets are the best method for solving problems.

What he have witnessed over the past week or so is the actions of an ignorant narcissistic bully who thinks that he is still the star of a television reality show. Trump has no sense of what it means to ruin other people’s lives because he has never cultivated even a shred of empathy for other people. He has spent his entire adult life stepping all over others and using money as a personal weapon.

Now that he has access to weapons of mass destruction, the narcissist is able to have his pathology play out on a world stage and that is about as good as it gets for a person who is so troubled and so mentally unstable.

We hear American politicians proclaim that no one is above the law, including the President of the United States. But Trump proves them wrong at every turn. Democrats and Republicans have enabled Trump to become increasingly lawless.

When the Senate eventually finds Trump not guilty for the offenses that led to his impeachment he will feel even more empowered to run a rogue government that is accountable to no one.

When unethical, immoral leaders are not held to account for actions that result in suffering, death and destruction they continue to push the limits because no one stops them.

The only hope we have for ending the horrific mark on history left by the Trump administration is to elect a new president in November. If he is capable of murder to change a news cycle, who knows what he will do to influence the outcome of the November election. The thought of those possibilities scares the hell out of me.

If the murderer-in-chief is not able to influence the outcome of the election and he loses, he may become even more unhinged and resort to actions that we do not even want to think about.

The world became much more unstable last week and it may only be a preview of what is to come. The U.S. Senate could end the madness and think about the safety of all of the world’s citizens, but they will never do anything to jeopardize their own petty interests.