Donald Trump has never once cleared the bar of dignity, and he has never been someone deserving of the office of the President of the United States of America. He has never shown compassion or care, nor respect for a single person. Not for a single moment.
He has called reporters pigs. He has mocked disabled people. He has smeared Gold Star families. He has attacked a prisoner of war for being captured. He has called women dogs. He has used the full weight of the American presidency to humiliate, threaten, and destroy anyone who does not serve his ego. And his followers went with him, post by post, rally by rally, until cruelty became their identity too, and dignity became something to mock.
Nearly everything Donald Trump does, he seems to take a lead from past strongmen, always glossing over the part about how none of them won in the end. And I think about how Mussolini kept scrapbooks of his own press clippings even as his regime was unraveling.
He needed to see himself celebrated, needed it the way other men need air, because the alternative was confronting the reality that the adoration had stopped being real. The Apprentice post is that scrapbook.
It is a man reaching backward for proof that he once mattered, because the present keeps telling him something he cannot accept. The votes keep not going his way. The people keep not doing what he tells them.
The walls keep showing cracks that he cannot plaster over fast enough.