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What if Donald Trump was your son’s football coach, or worse, your daughter’s basketball coach? Is Trump the sort of man you’d want in the locker room, on the bus with your kids?
Probably not.
It’s hard for me to get my mind around how we expect professional athletes to behave in a certain manner because they garner so much attention from our youth, but somehow we’ve let the American presidency become a melting pot for debauchery.
The deal with Trump is, he’s right in our face. It’s tweet after tweet, a blitzkrieg of the senses. It’s hard to stomach. If a high school principal, or even a football coach, were to conduct business in the same manner as President Trump, the school board would have his resignation come sundown.
Not Trump though, he’s sticking around, paying off adult-film stars, bashing his rivals on social media, and slowly but surely, lowering the bar of our country’s collective conscience. If we’re not careful, three years from now that sort of behavior will be the norm—and that’s what scares me.
I’m not alone. Former FBI Director James Comey gave a groundbreaking interview to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last week prior to the release of his book, “A Higher Loyalty”. In the interview, Comey is quoted as saying, “A person who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it—that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds.”
I’ll concede that Comey seems to have his own political (and possibly even financial) agenda, but many of the assertions he made hit home with me. At one point he even compared President Trump to a “mob boss.”
Which brings me back to the image of Trump as a coach.
Imagine you really wanted your kid’s team to win. Maybe your son’s in high school. Senior year. He might even be good enough to get a scholarship to play for the Hogs. So you need a coach, right? A really, really good coach.
Enter Donald Trump, or any of the other “mob boss” figures of the world. The win-at-all-cost headhunters who put success and power above everything else. A few years back, we got to know a man like that very well here in Arkansas—Bobby Petrino.
And we all know what happened to Bobby.
But my question is, how has Trump escaped the same defacement? When will Trump take his Harley out for a joy ride and go skidding into the ditch? Was Stormy Daniels not enough?
The point I’m trying to make is this: Maybe the country needed a shakeup. Maybe America needed to be “Great” again—but at what cost? It’s the same question I asked you above, the same decision any sports program has to make when they’re selecting their next head coach: What are you willing to sacrifice to win?
After last year’s firing of Bret Bielema, I heard my fellow Arkansans say we should, “Bring Bobby back.” I probably laughed at the joke (at least I hope they were joking), but there’s a scary truth hiding just beneath the surface: America loves a winner, no matter what the cost. Case in point, Coach Petrino. He’s been back in action over at Louisville since 2014, racking up wins with his Heisman-winning quarterback.
Football is just a game. Bobby Petrino doesn’t hold the fate of our nation in his hands. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is the President of the United States of America, and though he hasn’t fallen off his Harley yet, he’s taken us all for a wild ride over the last year and a half.
The question is, are we—the men and women who voted him into office—willing to make sure that “President” remains a title that still means something?
I hope so.
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This post was originally published on couriernews.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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