By Jeff Orvis
At first it seemed like just another
publicity stunt. It had been a few minutes since Donald Trump had
been the center of attention on a TV show, voting people off with a
robust “You're fired!” But when he announced he would be a
candidate for president, I doubt few took him very seriously.
From the outset, the Trump candidacy
was anything but normal. As the richest person vying for the nation's
top office, he vowed that he would not need to solicit campaign
funds, that he was his own man and would fully fund his own campaign.
On the plus side, he would not have to answer to any big campaign
contributor. On the down side, he would apparently not have to answer
on any of the voting public.
Many of us thought this must be a
joke, that we would wake up one morning and he would say, “April
fool!” There would be plenty of time to turn our attention to more
traditional candidates to decide who would be the leader of the free
world. So far, we haven't heard those words and as the weeks and
months continue to dwindle before the November election, Trump
continues to jet around the country on his own plane, telling it like
it is, at least how he thinks it is. He continues to draw media
attention with more and more outrageous statements each day.
Many of us are far from happy with the
way we elect our president and other public officials. The little guy
seems less and less important and thanks to Supreme Court rulings and
the failure of Congress to pass any meaningful election spending
reform, money means more than votes when it comes to winning an
election.
So after months of growing weary of
constant campaign commercials and appearances by dozens of
candidates, I suspect that some people are drawn to Trump as a sort
of anti-candidate, as some kind of a joke.
The thing is, there are a growing
number of voters who aren't laughing anymore. They are being won over
by his campaign style, his bluntness and unfortunately aren't
considering just what four years of a Trump presidency might be like.
And I'm beginning to wonder if even Trump himself has stopped to
realize what at least four years in the White House might really be
like.
Being the President is much more than
brokering a business deal, or building a Manhattan high rise or an
Atlantic City casino. It is not a monarchy. You have to know how to
compromise with 535 other men and women in Congress. And as much as
we might like, it's tough to fire them if you can't get them to act
as you think they should.
Despite how we might not agree with
some of the decisions our Presidents have made, we have grown to
expect them to know how to rejoice in national accomplishments as
well as know how to lend a sympathetic ear to people grieving from
the loss of soldiers or innocent people in the line of fire during
domestic massacres.
A former president said, “The buck
stops here.” We expect our president to know more than how to
invest that buck. In fact, one of the things Trump would have to do
if he was elected would be to surrender all of his financial dealings
to a blind trust until he left office. For someone who has spent
years playing with vast amounts of money, can we really expect him to
turn over the keys to someone else while he motorcades to Andrews Air
Force Base to meet a military transport with the bodies of dead
soldiers?
I guess I'm not fully convinced Trump
will see this campaign through until November. As the Republican
party scrambles to find someone who can sideline him, he continues to
laugh all the way to the ballot box in one primary after another.
It's clear that Trump is a guy who
likes to be in charge. When he suddenly realizes that even as
president, he can't fully be in charge, he might decide to end his
candidacy and throw his support behind someone else. Of course, he
has alienated virtually every other candidate of both parties. But
maybe that's what he wants. The next few months will be very
interesting.
