Why Donald Trump Will Never Be President

by Laughlin Artz
Editor, Context News

Donald Trump will never be President of the United States because Donald Trump will never stop being Donald Trump.  His whole campaign was built on Donald the Personality, Donald the Outsider, Donald the Winner, Donald the Billionaire, Donald the Savior.  This is a drum that the Trump folks beat loud and often, most notably when Candidate Trump got into trouble at various points and his advisers reminded us as he reminded them:  "You have to let Trump be Trump.”  

We were all simply wide-eyed spectators, watching in amazement and disbelief this phenomenon of “Trump being Trump.”  And with each subsequent disaster, we were reminded that this is the way he is, and nothing or no one is going to change that.

If there is one lesson of real value that America might learn from that train-wreck of a campaign, that careening dumpster fire that people just couldn’t stop watching, that seemingly endless barrage of bizarre instances of  “Trump being Trump,” it is that Trump can’t stop being Trump.  Not only can’t this man stop being Trump, but even more problematic, he has assigned the root of his power to just that – “being Trump.” That alone, without all the other more obvious horrors of this election, should scare the shit out of us.

What got elected was not a man humbled and hungry to be reinvented into the distinct and unique entity that is President of the United States of America; what got elected was a personality vindicated by the screaming crowds and righteous voters, more steadfast than ever to being exactly what he already was: Donald Trump. 

This man sees his election as a mandate for “being Trump,” not as the Constitutionally-designed opportunity to be our President. 

His whole existence - his name on the buildings and airplanes and steaks and clothing lines, the TV shows, the casinos and beauty pageants - all of that feeds his insatiable appetite for “being Trump” and keeps his existence as Trump in place for himself and for the world.  His election to President of the United States was the ultimate bump, the global fix, the electoral shooting up of Trump junk.  The heart of democracy has been mainlined by this man’s addiction to “being Trump.”     

What makes someone the President of the United States is not qualities or characteristics or engenderings of liberalism or conservatism.  And no, not even the act of being elected.  That will get you the title, and title alone doth not a President make. What has the President be the President is one thing – the sacred honor of the promise, the oath, the word that is the Oath of Office of President of the United States:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

There is no Donald Trump in that oath.  There is no individual, no personality, no morality, ideology or anything of the sort in that promise.  There is only the promise. 

With that oath and its honor comes a distinct way of seeing the world that is the worldview of the President.  The deal made as a matter of that oath is that from the moment of its taking, that oath, that promise will be the determining factor in how the promiser acts, lives, thinks and “be’s.”  The honoring of that oath is what gives one that unique way of being which is “being the President of the United States.”   

The problem here is not Donald Trump as Donald Trump him/itself, as abhorrent and disgusting as that/he might be.  The problem is the insistence on the part of this man to keep being Donald Trump.  

It is impossible to be Donald Trump and be the President.  That is the point of the oath - not to give that man or woman an additional promise to keep, but that in the making of that promise, in the taking of that oath, to retire that which one has been and become that which the oath requires for its fulfillment.

How much time do you think Donald Trump has spent really dealing with what it actually takes to honor, to uphold that promise which is the Oath of Office of President of the United States?  Predictably about the same amount of time he has taken dealing with the oaths of his marriages or the commitments of his business contracts.

In looking over the history of Trump’s relationship with his promises, it is clear that when push comes to shove, what gets honored in his world is not the promises he makes, but the “Trump” that he is.  The big difference now is that the promise he will be making in January is to us. 

We should not kid ourselves, we should be very clear that what will walk up to that podium on Inauguration Day will be Donald Trump (what in his world got elected), and that what will walk down will be that same entity, fully intact.

The Inauguration will not deliver to us a President of the United States, but rather the antithesis of the Constitution and the democracy it holds sacred: Trump being Trump.

That is the real unconstitutionality of the Presidency of Donald Trump.