A Painful New Lesson In American History

Late into the early morning hours, I was wide awake trying to solve an ongoing conundrum: Why do I care so much about what Donald Trump is doing to this country? Why should it matter to me?

More than questioning “why,” I was chastising myself for wasting too many everlasting hours over the last year trying to untangle the countless reasons he makes my blood boil—god knows I want it to stop.

Then, upon awaking this morning, a song, long forgotten, began to play in my mind out of the blue. It was a song my father sang often while my siblings and I were in our formative years.

The song’s title, “Oh! My Papa,” referred to a father who was long gone, but my father sang it altering the word “was” to “is,” imagining the papa was himself: “Oh my pa-pa, to me he IS so wonderful, oh my pa-pa, to me he IS so good.” It may well be the first song I ever learned to sing, though I did not share its sentiment.

As the song lyrics ran through my head, it finally hit me. Donald Trump viscerally reminds me of my father.

My father was a flawed man. Like Donald Trump, he needed to rule his world unimpeded. He was narcissistic and dictatorial. Challenge or question him, and you’d face his wrath. He was punitive as well, delivering harsh disciplinary actions for innocent childhood offenses.

Like Donald Trump, my father was obsessed with looking good. This obsession spilled into every area of his life. At home, it meant my siblings and I dwelled on pins and needles, cognizant of how we enunciated words, held cutlery at the dinner table, or placed it on the plate once finished. We were extensions of his personal brand in how we dressed, laughed, coughed, or sneezed. We did our best, but it wasn’t comfortable being around him. The perennial pressure of being under his thumb and watchful eye made me dislike him very much.

Like Donald Trump, my father fixated on people’s looks, objecting to social relationships with unattractive couples. And like Mr. Trump, he enjoyed taunting people with cruel remarks, entertaining himself and expecting his targets to roll with the punches. Sometimes my mother would insist I show him a work of art I’d created, but for him, it was an opportunity to belittle me with unkind, unwarranted, uninvited critiques. Praise was beneath him, but when others praised us, he’d step in to claim full credit.

Like Donald Trump, my father demanded our obedience and gratitude. Anything less infuriated him. Growing up, I didn’t know this was not normal. I didn’t know he was incapable of love and compassion. I only knew he was unjust and wrong, just as I know with certainty that Donald Trump is also unjust and wrong.

I never hated my father, but I struggled to respect him for all the hurt he inflicted. Like Donald Trump, he was impervious to anyone’s feelings but his own, imagining himself instead to be wonderful.

My father frequently said a superiority complex was a cover for an inferiority complex. He might as well have been talking about himself and Donald Trump. It takes a great man to uplift a nation. Trump lacks the humility and skill to do so. His personal weakness, revealed grandly during his Oval Office meeting with Zelensky is proof. Where in history has any American president demanded gratitude from another head of state while shoving and belittling him in front of the world? The spectacle was anything but a show of strength. It was a child not getting his way. The world knows this. For me, it was my father all over again, refusing to give anyone an inch while taking a mile. Do we really want a child ruling our world?

As Americans continue to witness and tolerate their President’s outsized ego dominate and rupture our lives, I can assure you he will leave a legacy of painful sorrows on our country—just as my father, drunk with his own limited power, inflicted pain and sorrows on my family that we still live with today. For all of us, fans and foes alike, this will be a painful new lesson in American history.

Image: My father with President Carter in Paraguay, leading a symposium on human rights.