Maureen Dowd is right. In her Times February 10 op ed piece, Trump Shows Us the Way, she writes that we had somehow forgotten who we were resulting in a confusion of identity which in turn allowed Donald Trump to ride the wave of that confusion right into the Oval Office where, helas! he still is, as he never tires of telling us.

What may have been some of our country’s inadequacies and imperfections became in Trump’s telling “carnage” and “swamp,” with it being his job to undo the one and lead us out of the other. It did seem that we were no longer winning wars, that our institutions, the Congress, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the courts et al. were subject to breaches of trust, continual ineptitude, perhaps in need of a Trump remake?

Trump spoke particularly to older Americans who evidently felt like strangers in a strange land as the white and male dominated country they had known had become multi-colored and multi-cultured, with the result that their long-held beliefs had become detached from what had been an underlying bedrock of comfort and certainty.

Trump spoke as well to those both young and old threatened with the loss of their jobs and livelihoods from what Trump saw as the influx of millions of legal and illegal immigrants who never seemed to stop coming, bringing with them other languages, other cultures, other beliefs (the very thing which had always been the country’s greatest strength now seen as its greatest weakness by Trump and the Republicans who follow him). The immigrants were now taking away what had been the country’s whiteness and greatness. And from this beginning Trump with great assurance tells us that he would “make the country great again,” would restore, what those Americans who first turned to him, believed they had lost.

Here below is Maureen Down who says that “now, thanks to our barmy president and his staff meltdown, we are finding out fast who we are and whom we don’t want to be.” In other words Trump is helping us to understand now, after 200 plus years, what we really don’t ever want again for the country. We won’t know until the next national election, in 2108, whether we’re in the majority, and whether Trump has succeeded by his very barminess in bringing us back from his untruths to a world of truth.

— We don’t want to countenance abusive behavior. And we certainly don’t want men like Rob Porter who have punched, kicked, choked and terrorized their wives to be in the president’s inner circle, helping decide which policies, including those that affect women, get emphasized.
— We don’t want the White House chief of staff to be the sort of person who shields and defends abusers — and then dissembles about it — simply because the abuser is a rare competent staffer. Or a man who labels Dreamers “too lazy to get off their asses” simply because they didn’t apply for legal protections in time.
— We don’t want our president to be a ratings-obsessed id, but a moral beacon. We want a president who understands that sexual and physical abuse are wrong.
— We don’t want a president who bends over backward to give the benefit of the doubt to neo-Nazis, wife beaters, pedophiles and sexual predators — or who is a sexual predator himself. We don’t want a president who thinks #me is more important than #metoo.
— We don’t want a president who flips the ordinary equation, out of some puerile sense of grievance, to honor Russia and dishonor the F.B.I.
— We don’t want a president who believes that vile behavior is justified by a Vesuvial stock market.
— We don’t want a president who is too shallow to read his daily intelligence report and too obsessed with the deep state to deal fairly with our intelligence agencies.
— We don’t want a president who is on a sugar high of ego, whose demented tweets about nukes and crowd size scare even Omarosa.
— We don’t want a president who redecorates the Oval as an infinity mirror.
— We don’t want a president who suggests that Democrats who don’t clap for him are treasonous and who seems more enthralled by authoritarian ways than democratic ones.
— We don’t want a president who promises an A team but surrounds himself with dreckitude, a president who vows to pass “the best” bills but then doesn’t care whether he’s selling steak, wine, condos or garbage policies on matters of life and death that he hasn’t even bothered to read.
— We don’t want a president who goes to military school but never leaves; who loves generals but trashes Gold Star parents; who wants the sort of chesty military parade that we mock Kim Jong-un for, a phallic demonstration of overcompensation that would only put more potholes in the D.C. boulevards.
— We don’t want a president who makes his version of make-believe real, and who looks with favor on deceit, hypocrisy, conflict of interest and nepotism.
— We don’t want a president who merits a special prosecutor, let alone one who could be so easily trapped in lies that he can’t even be allowed to talk to an investigator.
— We don’t want a president who treats the hallowed house where Abraham Lincoln once wrote the nation’s most sacred texts as the set of a cheesy reality show.
— We don’t want a president who treats the presidency as just another personal business franchise or family employment program.
— We don’t want a president who glides through the chaos he craves and conjures, while everyone around him immolates and shivers…

I don’t know about you but I don’t know where to turn. The political parties that might have impeached the man don’t seem to want to do so. How could they not want to do that? How could we have, millions of us anyway, elected this man? Where dear reader is the fault, in the electoral system or in ourselves?