101 Year Old Historian looks at Trump, with disgust and dismay.

 History didn't prepare him for Trump. Has it really come to this?

"I’m sick to death of mediocrity, of posturing, of pretense, of lies told with a straight face.  What did I do to deserve this?"

                       Vaughn Davis Bornet, historian

Vaughn Bornet

Vaughn Davis Bornet is an historian who looked closely at the presidencies of Herbert Hoover and the history of the 20th Century. At age 101 he is active, sharp, and still observing and writing about the America he sees. 

Vaugh Bornet lives in Ashland, Oregon, studied at Emory and Stanford Universities, and then became an independent historian working for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Rand Corporation, and then at Southern Oregon University.

His life and study didn't prepare him for Trump. He had seen and expected controversy. He had experienced and studied difficult times and understood those.  He had been a conservative in the face of student agitation in the 1960s and 1970s, so he had become accustomed to political unrest. 

But now he is seeing disfunction at the top. 

He had seen better and expected better. 

Guest Post by Vaughn Davis Bornet

         By now, many of you are familiar with the outcries of Ashland, Oregon’s elderly scholar. Living on (now past 101), he can’t help noticing what’s happening to the Executive Branch of the government of the United States. He’s not happy! Nothing at Emory, Georgia, or Stanford, apparently, prepared him for today’s spectacle of government by guesswork.  So here he is again, this time close to fulminating….in summary: that occupant of the Oval Office has to go—and soon. 

             So it has come to this:  Our free press is subject to ridicule; actually, it is undergoing threat. Presidential antagonism is approaching entirely too close to action. 

         Not too long ago, political opposition to “the Press” was quietly endured  as “well meaning, but wrong.” Now, the expression “lock her up” has spread from a candidate’s lips to an office-holder’s lips. It has become a slogan. Worse, Donald J. Trump’s favorite outcry “Fake News” is no longer exotic; it is commonplace, or close enough. It is regarded in some places as a normal way to refer to America’s daily news headlines. 

Vaughn Bornet, from Facebook.

         Political rallies have long occupied partisans as election day approached. Now, it does seem, instead of governing, the White House occupant campaigns around the calendar—instead of concentrating on Congress or the passing scene. 

        At one time, high  office holders in D. C.  took an assigned position and went to work for “the duration.”  Now, many top officials simply quit in mid-stream, and proceed to walk out.  Maybe they are told to go, and “hurry up about it.” (Goodness knows what kind of instructions our Attorney General Sessions has gotten from his “boss.”)  

       In this Administration, reputations fade, so much so that individuals have to leave!  It is “one jump ahead of the sheriff,” so to speak.  Or, “Go while the going’s good.” 

         Let’s say there is an Event. Our president misrepresents it.  That happening was only a few weeks or months ago, but we cannot trust our president to tell the truth about it. What actually happened, back then?  Well, the Truth is something you are not going to hear from today’s occupant of Air Force One. 

         In life it has long been a truism that there are “the good guys” and there are the “bad guys.”  In statecraft, however,  it is no longer easy to tell our allies from our enemies!  Once, we made permanent friends of nations far away and tied them to us with Alliances.  Today, you can’t tell any ally without checking first with the White House to make sure which nation is a friend and which an enemy. Indeed, they may well have switched overnight!         

          This is serious stuff.  The ship of state has no helmsman, it seems; or maybe he just doesn’t think it important for us to know the differences between a true friend and a dangerous enemy. 

         All of these things that are happening to us from within our American Government  in 2018 are important.  But the travails of The Press are damaging to the point they simply cannot be laughed off, ridiculed, treated as “no more than a joke, really.” 

         There is indeed a field of endeavor called “journalism.”  It has standards, and concepts, and principles.  All are taught in college classrooms. Our present political leader ridicules any such idea and barges ahead—to the point where his expression “lock ‘em up” or whatever it is, sounds suspiciously like a proclamation of jail time back in Nazi  or Fascist days. 

         What I want at this point is an end to high school games that masquerade in the guise of proper conduct for Leaders!  In government the stakes are much too high to “play around” with them.   I must have a return to sense and sensibility to be happy at rest every day. 

       I really want, if the truth be known, the removal of Donald J. Trump from the presidential office.  If I can’t have that, I want powerful individuals in named offices  (Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, etc.) who will keep that one from running things until his term has limped to its end. 

         I feel, overall, as though my Country has been borrowed away from me. Totally without my permission, mind you.  And somebody owes me for time spent playing at the fair grounds.    

        Now and then I feel like washing my hands.  I want to Do Something Dramatic.  Maybe yell a little.  Read another book with a title like Fury, or maybe Fire, or Unhinged—and coast for a few hours or a day or so until the revelations and the prose in the new book’s pages wear off. What I am saying, I guess, is that I don’t want to be alone in my antagonism against this amateur (that’s right: amateur) in the Oval Office. 

      How to end this, well, has it really become a diatribe?  Promise me this madman with the simple habits and all that spare money will go away. Soonest.  Bring in somebody who has read in depth of the lifetime of Herbert Hoover’s dedication; the comprehensive love of Life of Theodore Roosevelt; Lincoln’s use of language to elevate national spirits; Jefferson’s ability to raise my comprehension of self-government by framing a document that’s good for me. 

         For Hell’s sake:  I’m sick to death of mediocrity, of posturing, of pretense, of lies told with a straight face.  What did I do to deserve THIS?  Bring in somebody as president  who can shame Congress into doing what is right! Figure out some way this TV star can’t pick somebody else to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with all that is bound to entail. Most of all, please:    

      Bring dignity back to my White House. Don’t let this fellow salute one more time; it gives me the willies to think of a general or admiral kowtowing to this guy, even if he does, probably, get a kick out of the winks and nudges at home later on. 

         I want my Country back.  Is it too much to ask?