“I was mistaken.”
This was Moscow Mitch McConnell’s
explanation for having said President Obama did not provide a 69-page pandemic
playbook for the incoming Trump administration.
Admitting mistakes, while sometimes
embarrassing, is always a good thing. Realizing we’ve made mistakes is how we
learn, admitting them is how we grow.
Because he is unwilling or incapable
of doing either, Donald Trump remains an intellectual five-year-old. He is a
250 pound man-child who happens to be president of the United States because
sixty million Americans made the mistake of voting for him in 2016.
Not everyone would agree with that
statement. They don’t have to. How we vote isn’t necessarily a mistake
regardless of the outcome, or whether the winner turns out to be good or bad, competent
or incompetent.
In Trump’s case, we know he can’t
speak intelligently, he doesn’t read, and is so thin-skinned that those around
him must baby him to keep him from flying off the handle. When was the last
time the leader of the free world had to be babied?
He also is incapable of making
decisions. He simply thinks out loud, tells us what people—real or imagined—are
telling him, or what he heard on T.V., or what he concocted in his own “brilliant”
mind.
These are all observations from the
last three and a half years of his presidency, but these facts were all true
and in plain sight when he was running in 2016. That’s why voting for him was a
mistake of massive proportion. We are not seeing a new or different Trump. He’s
the same man-child, intellectual idiot now that he’s always been.
His presidency began with a mistake
and the mistakes continue to mount.
He puts people in positions of
authority only to have to remove them because he made a mistake.
Sometimes people remove themselves
because they realized joining his team was a mistake.
Every encounter with Speaker Pelosi has
turned into a mistake for Trump.
Making that “perfect” phone call was
a mistake.
Promoting bleach as a cure for COVID-19
was a mistake. It certainly wasn’t an example of sarcasm.
Every day of his administration, from
the estimate of the Inauguration Day crowd size to opening up America without
adequate testing, has produced new mistakes by him or his accomplices like McConnell,
Barr, Giuliani, Rep. Nunes, Pence and just about everyone else in his inner
circle. Until now, few have admitted to making a mistake.
McConnell’s admission
that “he was mistaken” is something—if he was, in fact, merely mistaken.
What exactly is a mistake? The
dictionary defines mistake as an action or judgement that is misguided or wrong—like
giving the wrong answer to a test question. Most people don’t give the wrong
answer intentionally.
So, what is a mistake not?
