Boring! Tuesday’s Presidential Primaries

As Spring reaches the American landscape with “March Madness”, Opening Days for the National Pastime, and primary contests for the Election in November: April 1, 2024

Presidential candidate Donald Trump commented of his most effective primary opponent, describing former Ambassador Nikki Haley, a South Carolina Republican, as not “having Presidential timber,” whatever he understood that to mean. Possibly he was claiming that her “wooden” values, or such properties as “presidential timber” relative to his, or other candidates for the office, were lacking somehow.

But since he fails to talk about specific values, properties, or characteristics positively or with any frequency, we are left in doubt. Were he to describe what he means by “timber” would he likely include the potential enormous size of a tree, such as a redwood reaching to the sky, or, in contrast, a swamp willow with tendrils hanging to the ground? That might be helpful to us, since ‘size’ is a frequent emphasis in his comparisons. Or strengths of an organism might be useful: “widely knowledgeable” as to intellect or “even or empathic” as to temperament and not “subject to every breeze that blows.” “Sustainable,” enduring for centuries, might be references, but frankly we do not know.

So, Trump noting the “presidential timber” of a Republican adversary and calling it to attention while he never ‘planted’ himself in any serious run for office previous to 2016, ‘bares his shallow roots’ in partisan politics and American history. In fact, his actual ‘grain’ appears incredibly young, at age 77, in terms of integrity or wisdom. He is “deciduous” without doubt by nature, “leaving” the landscape littered with words, phrases, and feelings unattractive to a majority of his neighbors and beyond “seasonal” historic norms.
Bearing a “multi-branched” and long-troubled business financial history and failed or corrupt governance behavior facing current civil and criminal court actions, reveals that below his “bark” he is truly “rotted?” How does anyone credibly listen to his many statements, often crossing each other or confusing, as he attempts to reach for power once again?? Does he ever respond to questions posed to him, using actual facts as evidence or in rebuttal? Or are his written communications merely plain “nuts,” and salted? What does Trump’s “timber” analysis proclaim that is similar in nature to the known greatness of individuals in America’s line of Presidents?

What are his economic values? What is the sour fruit born by this tree that gets dropped on others? Survival and increasing personal wealth are the “sunlight” he seeks to grow. Why do donors trust him to serve all of the public when the narrow “shade” his “foliage” provides is so limited? Is personal sympathy for his reported troubles and victimization stories so strong? Why are the genuinely wealthy so disproportionately rewarded by tax policy that make long term debtors of the grandchildren of the governed remainder?
And with the redolence created by the words he uses in failing to tell the truth, can’t more folks smell the rot? With his natural weeping calling for self-attention so familiar, the benefits he promotes for others so limited, and with a common suspicion that his actual wood is already corrupt, why not cut him down in November voting by creating “Trump stumps?” Why not restrict the continuing harm he projects by infecting other organisms in the governance “nursery?” Do we recognize this danger to the health of our representative democracy? And what consequences are due when we are tolerant of and support such full rights of free speech, but permit “dark money” and the “deep state” to operate freely but out of sight and regulation? Time will tell. JOHN MARSHALL LEE