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By Jack Bernard

Bernard is a retired corporate executive.

In May, Rob Reiner said, “Donald Trump is a failure. He has failed at everything he’s ever done. Now his failure is literally killing US.” 

Reiner is mostly correct, as is illustrated both by Trump losing the 2020 election to Biden by 5 million votes and by him standing by as hundreds of thousands die of COVID-19, including many Georgians. Whether he ever concedes or not, Trump undisputedly lost, and the Electoral College has finalized the election results.

And even with the outrageous Ted Cruz stunt at the Congressional rubber stamp meeting to certify those results… for the sake of our nation thank the heavens he did lose.

But we will never forget that there’s one major exception to “Trump the loser” — the 2016 election. In a fluke of historic proportions, enough Americans were angry with politics as usual to vote for a NYC con man, liar and reality TV show buffoon.

When Trump first took office in 2017, I was optimistic, hoping Reiner was wrong. I wrote more than one op-ed about how Trump, formerly a Democrat, had supported Medicare for All and might just surprise people.

I also reasoned that Trump, the wild-card maverick and opportunist, would be pragmatic and try to bridge the two parties as the easiest way to stay in office.

But I was 100% wrong. Trump decided to take the low road. As the moderate, now-former Senator Doug Jones of Alabama said, Trump “divide(s) people along racial lines, along economic lines, any number of things that he really doesn’t have to do.”

Trump only appealed to his base… the scared, uneducated, mostly rural masses who attended his wild Third Reich-like rallies and beat up any opposition who dared to show up.

In times of crisis, as with the COVID-19 pandemic, our nation needed (and still needs) a bipartisan leader who will bring together all Americans.

However, we have had the exact opposite. Trump’s often nonsensical tweets are simply designed to divide our nation into warring factions.

Jones also correctly stated, “The biggest problem … is that the president simply uses his Twitter account and says things that are simply not true. And he uses that as a weapon for political reasons. And he’s really divided this country a lot.”

Often, Trump’s tweets are internally inconsistent with prior statements or future administration positions. For example, his “liberation” tweets about restarting state economies. Specifically, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”; “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA and save your great 2nd Amendment, it is under siege.” But during the latter part of the first wave of COVID, he also said, here is my administration’s plan for a three-phase restarting of state economies.

Constructed by healthcare experts, the plan provided for a reasonable (if conservative) path to move forward in the age of COVID-19. Then, for no particular reason, Trump followed it up with the above partisan attacks on the Democratic Governors of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia for following the Trump administration’s own guidelines.

And he encouraged his followers to bring weapons to their protest rallies, which they proceeded to do. No wonder some of these brainwashed fools decided to try to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

In another well-known instance, the Governor of Georgia (Brian Kemp, a strong Trump supporter) took Trump’s advice and prematurely opened up his state, causing an immediate rise in cases and deaths.

Then, Trump started criticizing him for doing exactly what Trump said every Governor should do.

Talk about being inconsistent and disloyal, Trump takes the grand prize.

Now, we are in the midst of the second wave of COVID-19, which has hit both Georgia and the nation hard. So far, Trump’s response has been to incorrectly state that “we have turned the corner,” ignoring the crisis.

And to praise himself for private pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines that will not be readily available until sometime in 2021 due to the Trump administration’s supply chain failures.

In the meantime, Trump completely ignores the fact that we are 4% of the world’s population and account for over 20% of cases and deaths, saying it’s because we test too much. And he refuses to get the vaccine himself.

The truth is that Trump has had no idea about how to deal with the pandemic and will not listen to those who do.

So, he has done what he has always done — blame others. In this case, China, Governors, healthcare experts and so on.

Trump’s unstated motto is “During my term, the buck never stopped here.” Americans of both parties should be glad to see him leave and get a moderate, normal, responsible person in office.