An Alternate Reality

Living in your own head is fun. Everyone does it. It is the place where you can experience the power and prestige that most of us don’t enjoy in real life. The place where you can live out your own delusions of grandeur and engage in your utmost fantasies. The place where you can say an do just about anything and everyone likes and respects you. Eventually though, reality sets in again and a modicum of objectivity takes over and you realize that the world is a complicated place and your actions do indeed have consequences and based on what you say and do not everyone does like and respect you. I worry about the people in this world who never seem to have that objectivity and don’t seem to realize their actual place in it. I am sure there is a clinical term for those people but this is not a scientific treatise.

Sadly, the Republican nominee for President seems to suffer from this malady whatever clinical term you wish to ascribe to it. I am constantly amazed at how out of touch he seems to be between his own view of himself and the view of the population at large. This is a man who claims and I think really believes that he won all three of the Presidential debates despite every scientific poll telling him the contrary.

I have been thinking a lot about why Donald Trump seems so out of touch with the American electorate and why he seems determined to spit on our democracy and why he constantly goes against the good advice he gets from his campaign staff. I have no rational explanation for it but suspect it has a lot to do with the person he is. Trump has never really lived in the world that most of us inhabit. He is the epitome of entitlement and believes that everyone looks up to him and depends on him to save this country. He has convinced himself of this and anything that does not feed into the narrative must be “rigged” against him. I wonder how he rationalizes the growing number of conservative newspapers that have not endorsed a Democrat for decades or have never endorsed a Democrat but are standing firmly behind Hillary Clinton. Do we believe that these papers think that Hillary is that good of a candidate or could it be the fact that people who know things realize that Donald Trump is the worst, most dangerous candidate ever to have run for the Presidency. I suppose in Trump’s world, those beacons of conservative thought are also “in the bag” for Hillary. (Give me a break).

The mainstream media, which I admit has a liberal bias, keeps banging the drum on Trump’s most recent comments about the election being rigged and  his evident refusal to accept the election results. For me, this reporting is a bit disingenuous. The fact is the American people will vote on November 8th and a winner will be declared shortly after the final polls close out west and it won’t matter if Trump makes the customary concession speech or not. I suspect there is a certain aspect of schadenfreude entering into their reporting and commentary. The press wants to see Trump humbled but honestly, I just want him to go away and mercifully never to return to public prominence. That is the only concession we ought need from Donald Trump.