As a student of the presidency for most of my life, I cannot ignore what I just watched, a sh*tshow as one of my favorite DC reporters exclaimed after it ended.

But make no mistake, that is exactly what an abusive leader when faced with an opponent who wants to follow a set of rules and norms wants you to think.  A total sh*tshow.  He hopes the blame will be apportioned equally.  Perhaps the only concept of equality Trump understands.

Trump is diabolical.

Trump entered the debate with a plan, so stop thinking he is demented and crazy, living life off the cuff.

“At least he is authentic.”  I have heard that many times.  The best indictment frankly of our “just be your authentic self” 21st century.

If he makes us angry and makes us feel uneasy, or frankly makes us want to vomit . . . that’s the goal, the point.

The powerful abhor the power vacuum, they literally use up all the oxygen in the room for fear of losing control no matter how nuts the process seems.  Or how nuts it makes us feel.

Trump is an abuser.

Anyone who has faced an abuser knows this to be true.  It is why we hate to admit he is scary af.

He makes us question our own sanity.  But no one is crazy here, not him, not you.   The abuser creates the very conditions of mayhem we deplore yet then claims to have all the solutions.

One of my favorite American thinkers of the 20th century is Abraham Maslow.  He reminds us in a brilliant new book by Scott Barry Kaufman . . .

“The average child and, less obviously, the average adult in our society generally prefers a safe, orderly, predictable, lawful, organized world which [they] can count on and in which unexpected, unmanageable, chaotic, or other dangerous things do not happen, and in which, in any case, [they] have powerful parents or protectors [italics mine] who shield them from harm.”

Worth repeating: Abusers manifest and foster harm then tell us they can fix it.  We laughed when he told us in 2016 that he alone can fix it.  Not so funny now.

Trump is a bully.

My mother would often remind her precocious and impatient son that kindness is harder than anger, harder than judgment, harder than forgiveness, harder than just about any other human choice . . . yet so many people choose kindness because it works!  Good-will rooted in kind acts creates exponential growth for all.  It is best for all.  Bullies are best for them.

Trump is a manipulator.

Go ahead and blame others for your failures, blame it all on them, whomever they may be.  Easy right?  Lazy too especially when born into a privileged race, gender, orientation or religious faith.

Trump is a liar.

All the time, period. No! George Costanza is wrong, it is still a lie even if you believe it to be true.

Don’t you dare play the “lesser of two evils card” here.  Politics is about the possible; at its best it is about the pursuit of a better world for all, and a candid acknowledgment of failures in the past and present.

You see, I have abused, I have bullied, I have manipulated, and I have lied . . . recently too!  Let’s call these my bizarro-strengths, and unlike my actual strengths, my bizarro ones are rooted in fear and anger, not virtue.  In 2020 there is so much to fear.  So easy to exploit it too.

Yet I have seen countless examples of people stepping it up this year.  Fearful yes, but in spite of the fear choosing to help, to listen, to engage with an open heart . . . to act for the greater good.  These people make me a better man.  Average folks are inspiring when we look for them when not staring at our phones.

I coach and counsel clients every single day who are interested in making better choices for themselves and their families, teams, and communities.  I rarely prescribe though.

But I will now . . . donate money, donate time, and vote, and then look in the mirror and learn from this archetype of vice we elected in 2016.

We created him, he is the George Wallace of our age, just one who is now totally out of the closet (cloak?) beyond the boundaries of the Confederate 11.  I had a prescient professor in 1990 ask me to read a little known book then (or now) called “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.  Boy did we ever in those intervening 30 years.  Look at all we missed. Right under my nose, ugh.  It stinks!

If you say, “omg we are headed for a dictatorship, how will we survive it?”  Read about the women (RBG perhaps) who fought and are fighting for equality, Black people (perhaps John Lewis) in the South before the 1960s and until now (and not just in the South to be candid) rejecting bigotry, LGBTQ people (perhaps, Larry Kramer) in most places and in most time periods wanting the freedom to be exactly who they were meant to be.

The three leaders mentioned above all died in 2020.  They would be angry with us if we mourned and then did nothing.  RBG would probably not even want the mourning!

Hope is not enough, stop wishing.  Get to work.  We are the panacea we seek.  Will it be clean and concise and perfect?  Not even close.  Not a panacea in fact.  The good news is he set the bar so so so low.  So low that hundreds of thousands of people will be too sick or dead to vote on November 3rd.

Raise that bar!