<strong>By DAVID TAUB</strong>


For the past 15 years, my wife Pam and I have hosted a July 4 celebration cookout at our home.

Each year, we begin our little soiree with a reading of the Declaration of Independence. I have divided it into nine sections, so that nine of the 20 or more dear friends present are invited to read a part.

Then we have a raucous discussion of it and how it impacts us today, lubricated with prodigious amounts of adult libations.

Regrettably, this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we sadly canceled our patriotic observance. But what took its place?

By now, everyone has seen enough of Donald John Trump to know what he is (and isn’t). He cannot change; he won’t change; he has no desire to change.

In my opinion, what we saw and heard from him at Mt. Rushmore celebrating our Republic’s birth on July 3, and again on July 4 at the Smithsonian mall, reached an all-time degenerative low.

On July 4, 1966, I was privileged to attend the July 4 celebration on the National Mall. It was an incredible day spent honoring the best our nation had to offer.

In nearly identical, almost incoherent ramblings, POTUS celebrated this year by attacking our nation with unvarnished loathing and vicious race-baiting. He spewed toxic words of racial hatred while choosing to honor the statues of dead men who attacked the Republic in the 1860s.

Standing below the iconic figures of four of our greatest Presidents, proud faces carved out of a mountain side sacred to Native American tribes, he showed us the worst possible face of America.

I could easily imagine those honorable stoic stone faces shedding tears of shame.

POTUS offered no words to honor the 135,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19 in the past four months. Those “silent warriors” gave their all in a battle against an invisible enemy that POTUS has tragically failed to address; a criminal dereliction of duty.

He persists in the bald-faced lie that the deadly virus will disappear magically, falsely claiming “we are doing okay.” What a delusional make-believe Wizard of Odd world he lives in, metaphorically surrounded by the silent graves of those American dead, lost because of his felonious malfeasance.

The unabashed reality of his disgusting failure is clear: We lead the world in numbers of infections and deaths; four times greater than the next country inscribed on this horrid scroll. A disgusting commentary of a man profoundly unfit to hold the honored post as Commander-in-Chief.

All across America today, there is deep displeasure and discontent with Trump: numbers tell the story. Current polls show that fully 58 percent disapprove of him (the highest of his presidency), while 46 percent of our kinsmen say they “strongly disapprove” of him.

And a staggering 87 percent say POTUS is taking the country in the wrong direction. And fully two-thirds of Americans say POTUS is making racial tensions worse.

Even a Fox News poll taken a few weeks ago found that only 39 percent of Americans approve of his handling of health care, while 53 percent disapprove.

As of July 10, fully two-thirds of ALL Americans disapprove of POTUS’s inept, almost criminal, handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his inexcusable refusal to accept any responsibility for more than 135,000 American dead.

Justifiably so, most Americans are tired of his repellent personal misbehavior, his pathological lying, his fundamental corruption, his foolish fantasies. He’s the perpetrator, not the blameless “victim” that he piteously claims.

Them are scary numbers pardner! And POTUS is running scared, so the coward that he be embraces the most demagogic, polarizing and blatantly racist campaign in modern American history.

I tire of writing about him, but DJT’s insanity leaves me little choice. If we needed any more evidence, just last Friday, July 10, he commuted the 40-month sentence for the convicted felon Roger Stone, who was found guilty by a jury of his peers for obstructing justice, jury tampering and covering up for POTUS’s corruption.

For God’s sake, we are a far better country than this. An awful blindness affects some of our kinsmen who cannot see the depressing truth of the leader who will not/cannot lead; of a Captain who does not guide the Ship of State; of the nation’s preacher who can only lie; of the nation’s healer who takes pride, not in comforting or uniting, but only in dividing; of a Commander in Chief who commands nothing but contempt.

Enough is enough already. We the PEOPLE must retire this malevolent POTUS on Nov. 3. We owe it to our nation’s fragile future.

Thereafter, I shall speak no more of him.

“Well, all I know is what I read in the newspapers.” – Will Rogers.<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp;</span>

<em>David M. Taub was Mayor of Beaufort from 1990 through 1999 and served as a Beaufort County Magistrate from 2010 to 2015. You can reach him at david.m.taub42@gmail.com.</em>