Trump as nominee is scary, sad

Well, it happened. Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz dropped out of the race Tuesday night, and while — for some reason —John Kasich remains in,  Donald Trump has emerged the presumed Republican nominee. 

That means we are one Clinton scandal away from electing a lying, cheating, ignorant, misogynistic, narcissistic, bigoted, fat-headed racist to the White House. And I say that objectively and with love. 

America has bought the Kool-Aid. We’ve been duped by his populist ideas, his intolerance toward everything we fear and the echo chamber of ideas off which his candidacy feeds. 

In consequence, the most powerful office in the world could well go to a man who called all Mexicans rapists. Who wants to ban Muslims. Who refers to women as second-class citizens. Who doesn’t support gay marriage and doesn’t believe in global warming.  And who once summarized his foreign policy in the Middle East to a crowd in Iowa as: “I would bomb the sh-t out of them ... There would be nothing left.”

Fantastic.

It’s kind of like a nightmare, where my racist uncle whom I can’t stand is on the verge of driving the country into the ground and there’s nothing to be done.

But to be sure Trump isn’t my racist uncle. Trump is a “respected” businessman. And that’s what this country needs, to be run like a business, right? 

Sure. That’s what the people of Michigan also thought when they elected Governor Rick Snyder. And it didn’t work out too well for them. In an effort to cut costs, Snyder changed the town of Flint’s water source, effectively poisoning the entire community. He then did nothing about it for months. 

Ahhh. The spoils of business leadership. Nothing like it. 

No matter your political party, though, that Trump has come this close to the presidency — even if he doesn’t go any further — is discouraging. It’s saddening. It’s scary. It says a tremendous amount about the country, the state of our politics, and stresses the necessity of change so long as that change doesn’t come  by way of an ignorant reality TV star who wants to blow up the world.