Um, Yeah, what he said.
Since Donald Trump landed with a giant, orange thud on my radar two-ish years ago, I have watched him traverse the political landscape with a mix of slack-jawed awe and mild nausea.
Who is this guy and how in the hell did this happen?
Previous to running for the office of President of The United States he was just another self-aggrandizing blowhard who lived in a golden tower, cheated on his wives, called himself a billionaire, starred in a cheesy reality show and had something to say about everyone and everything.
Not necessarily an educated opinion—just something to say.
He assumed he had an audience. I guess he thought people cared…Right? Someone must have said that to him once, “Hey, Don, I’d love to hear what you have to say about Roe V Wade!”
He slithered his way through his preferred method of communication—a Howard Stern interview, waffling back and forth on his opinions of the Clintons, Barack Obama, abortion, and the Iraq war on a regular basis.
It was all in good fun back then.
Just a couple of douches talking nonsense.
New Yorkers couldn’t stand the guy and yet, without ever holding public office or participating in any kind of community organizing besides building skyscrapers with his name emblazoned on them in thirty-foot high gold lettering—he gained some traction.
And in 2015 after some consideration (I can’t write that it was careful because that word can never be used in the same sentence as his name), Trump decided to you know, run for Leader of the Free World.
After the most wtf campaign on record and the most wtf win in the history of winning—he now sits behind the big desk in the Oval Office.
“Nothing like this has remotely happened!” has been echoing around the globe since November and I for one have just GOT to put some kind of positive spin on this…this…this anomaly.
What is an anomaly anyway?
Webster defines it as “something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected.”
An oddity. A peculiarity.
A quirk. A rarity.
Something inconsistent with the norm.
Yes, yup, uh huh and bingo.
It seems to me we are now living in the Age of Absurdity. I can resist (which believe me, on the things that matter I am) but on one point in particular, I say, if you can’t beat ‘um—join ‘um. Do you wanna know what the tipping point was for me?
One word. Oprah.
She voiced in a recent interview exactly what I’ve been thinking.
When asked if she was interested in running for President she responded saying that Mr. Trump’s election had made her re-evaluate her previous skepticism about running for President.
“I never considered the question even a possibility,” she told David Rubenstein on his Bloomberg Television program when pressed about whether she might consider running in 2020. “I just thought, ‘Oh… oh?'”
Referring to Mr. Trump, Mr. Rubenstein said: “It’s clear you don’t need government experience to be elected president of the United States”.
“That’s what I thought,” she continued. “I thought, ‘Oh, gee, I don’t have the experience, I don’t know enough.’ And now I’m thinking, ‘Oh.'”
That’s crazy, right? …CRAZY GOOD!
Will Oprah run? Probably not. But that’s not the point.
How many of us think we’re “unqualified” for a promotion because of the way things have always been done?
How many of us never even try things we know nothing about like writing books, screenplays or musicals?
What if we could accept this new normal and have the kind of faith in ourselves that Trump apparently has? We don’t have to go all dark and twisty narcissistic. What about supremely, peculiarly and unexpectedly confident?
You know what I mean.
If you’re like me you reconsider opportunities because of your age (too young or too old), your inexperience, the fact that you’re unfamiliar with the “system”, and the knowledge that certain things Just aren’t done that way.
I think we can all agree that time is over.
All bets are off.
The rules have all been broken. They are scattered at our feet. That can either be a bad thing—or a good thing.
I say if the idea occurs to you and you think you’d be good at it—go for it!
Who knows, you may end up President of The United States.
Carry on
xox
