Characters so bad you wouldn’t make them up

I have written four mystery novels that are lined up to be published in the months ahead, and in those books, I’ve created some really bad characters who do some really bad things, but my characters pale in comparison to the ones Donald Trump has cast in his reality show presidency – people who are so bad, I’m not sure a fiction writer would think to make them up.

Let’s take a look at a couple of them:

Betsy DeVos

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos went to Capitol Hill recently to defend the Trump Administration’s proposal to slash $7 billion from education programs, including $18 million in federal funding for the Special Olympics. Let me say that again. The Trump Administration wants to defund the Special Olympics, the program that gives hundreds of thousands of children who suffer from intellectual disabilities the opportunity to compete in and enjoy the kind of activities that the rest of us take for granted every day. 

Asked by a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee how many children would be affected by this budget cut, DeVos admitted she didn’t know. Her solution is to expect “the philanthropic sector” to pick up the tab for an amount of money that Donald Trump spends every five times he flies to Florida to play golf.

Passing this off to philanthropists should be easy enough, right? I mean, after his tax cuts went into effect, the nation’s uber-rich got even uber-richer, so there ought to be plenty of “philanthropic” money to throw around. (Wink wink, nod nod.) Maybe Betsy herself could plug in $18 million to help out, considering she owns a fleet of yachts and a “summer home” that looks bigger than the hotel from “The Shining.”

Mike Pompeo

After Trump lifted new sanctions against North Korea last week because he said he “likes” its murderous dictator Kim Jong Un, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked how a man responsible for years of human rights violations – including starving his own people and killing his enemies – could be likeable.

Pompeo replied, “He's the leader of the country.”

That’s right, Mike. Kim is the leader of his country. Adolph Hitler was the leader of his country, too. So were Stalin, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Mao Zedong, Muammar Gaddafi, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Ferdinand Marcos, Franco, Tojo, Duvalier, Pinochet and now Putin, Assad, Erdogan, Duterte, Mohammed bin Salman and Chairman Xi. Shall I go on?

 

When reminded that Kim’s North Korea arrested, detained and tortured American college student Otto Warmbier for 17 months before releasing him to come home when he had reached death's door, Pompeo fell in line behind the president who refused to hold Kim responsible for Warmbier's death. Sycophant much, Mike?

Stephen Miller

I admit I don’t know anything that presidential policy adviser Stephen Miller has done recently to merit inclusion on this list, but I mention him anyway because I believe he’s the voice behind every evil thing Trump tries to do. If I were a lawyer, I’d like to get Miller in court and ask him to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he is not the spawn of Satan. After all, if Robert Mueller couldn’t conclude that Trump obstructed justice, then nothing is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Trump himself

And finally, there’s Trump himself, who is still trying to kill Obamacare after two years of failed attempts by Republicans in Congress, punctuated by the thumb of John McCain. Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with the health care of millions of Americans and everything to do with two acts of vengeance that must burn within Trump every day of his life.

The seed for Trump’s health care obsession came on April 30, 2011, when President Barack Obama mocked the Donald at a Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., and took full bloom on July 27, 2017, when McCain cast the deciding vote against the last Republican plan to overhaul the Affordable Care Act.

Since his election, Trump has set a course to undo everything Obama ever did and to erase the 44^th president from history if he can. I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to declare the Obamas’ marriage to be null and void and their children to be illegitimate orphans. Lately, Trump’s target has been McCain, the American war hero and long-time public servant who didn’t call from the grave to thank the president for his lovely funeral last year.

Now, in advance of 2020, Trump is trying to co-opt the Democrats’ main campaign issue by declaring that the GOP “will become the party of health care,” even though he doesn’t have any semblance of a plan to do that, assuming that the courts concur with his administration and vote to throw Obamacare away. That’s why he’s busy calling Republicans in Congress and ordering them to whip up something fast that he can use in his upcoming campaign rallies.

(And I always thought the plan came first, then the promotion. Silly me.)

There are so many more Trumpaloons I could write about and many more examples of their seemingly unexplainable behavior, but I think I’ve made my point. Could I have created characters this bad? Sure, I could have done that. After all, I created three murderers, one crazy serial killer and a disgusting sexual predator. But it never crossed my mind to invent a cabinet secretary so cold she would take away funding from the Special Olympics, or a president who would tell 30 million sick Americans that their health insurance is going away and he doesn't care if they die, all because he got embarrassed in public eight years ago.

The difference is, my characters are fictitious. It’s easy enough to imagine a killer if you’ve watched enough movies or TV or read other people’s books. Besides, when you finish reading my books, these characters go away. Trump’s characters do things I never would have imagined in a million years, or if I had written a million books. They’re the kinds of people the average person would never think could exist…until they do.

Obstructing in plain sight

For the past two years, we have watched Donald Trump attempt to interfere with, derail, degrade, demean and destroy Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible connections between his administration and Russia to sway the 2016 election.

He has done it in plain sight of Mueller and the entire world through his speeches, his rallies, his tweets, his rants in the White House driveway and in television interviews where he has admitted to firing FBI Director James Comey to make “that Russia thing” go away, among other things.

All along, he has threatened potential witnesses, called those who have cooperated with Mueller “rats,” used his house media outlet Fox News to paint Mueller and his team as “17 angry Democrats” out to tarnish his sterling reputation and sent out lawyers like Rudy Giuliani to tell us they would write their own report to counter whatever Mueller said in his.

   

In other words, we have watched the president obstruct justice on multiple occasions in real time and in full view of anyone with a television set, an iPhone or any other device capable of receiving Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media while waiting hopefully for the Mueller report to fix everything and send our first crime boss president to prison for the rest of his life.

And now we know it’s probably not going to happen.

I said some time ago, most likely in this blog but at least to my wife and friends, that I wouldn’t be surprised if Mueller could not find evidence of collusion beyond a reasonable doubt, noting that when you go up against the president of the United States—when you aim that high—you had better not shoot and miss.

But I also said this: Wouldn’t it be ironic if Mueller didn’t find evidence of collusion, but did find Trump guilty of obstructing an investigation that would have cleared him if he had only kept his mouth shut and waited for the result. That’s what I thought was going to happen when the report came out with no further indictments, but sadly I was wrong.

I also said that if Mueller’s team could not see evidence of obstruction, they weren’t looking very hard. In fact, their report did not say Trump was exonerated of obstruction charges, but handing the report over to his hand-picked attorney general to tell us what they found is the next best thing. I hope that eventually, we’ll get to the truth somehow.

           

I don’t have any Washington sources or inside information so obviously I don’t know what’s going to happen next, and I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more about Trump’s obstruction when Democrats in Congress start dragging witnesses in to answer tough questions in committee hearings. I’m pretty sure, however, that Trump will never be formally charged with obstruction of justice and will never be impeached by a Congress that generally has neither a backbone nor a set of balls.

And that’s too bad, because the crimes we watched Trump commit against the United States of America are monumentally worse than anything Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton did, and both of those men had impeachment charges drafted against them. Now I’m not defending either one of them for what they did, but Nixon’s motivation was just to get himself re-elected, not to drag the country into authoritarian rule, while Clinton was motivated to protect his reputation by lying about sex in the Oval Office. For those misdeeds, Clinton actually was impeached and Nixon would have been had he not resigned.

Looking back now, I’d have gladly taken four more years of Tricky Dick Nixon and a hundred more White House escapades by Clinton and his interns as far more acceptable than living through two or maybe six more years of governance by a man who lacks every identifiable quality we expect in our president, a man who doesn’t care about anybody but himself and believes down deep inside that he should be anointed “President for Life” before handing the job over to a daughter or a son.

We as a nation recovered fairly quickly from the Nixon years and the Clinton scandal, and America kept rolling along. I’m afraid it will take decades to recover from the damage Trump is doing to America—if we ever do—and that I won’t live long enough to see it.

And the worst part is…it’s all happening to us before our very eyes. Our country is being destroyed a little bit at a time, and it’s happening in plain sight.

The moving finger writes…and writes…and writes…

“Dear sir or madam will you read my book?

It took me years to write, will you take a look?”

--The Beatles, “Paperback Writer”

When I was about 10 years old—give or take a year or two—I started a neighborhood newspaper. Well, I use the term loosely. I wrote out the neighborhood “news” in pencil on notebook paper, made a couple of copies and handed it out to family and friends. I may have sold it for a few cents, but more likely I just gave it away.

The one-page flat sheet probably included such breaking news as who got what for his or her birthday and who won the day’s baseball game in the Hawkins’s side yard. I think the number of editions topped out at…let me think…one.

It wasn’t much, I’ll admit, but it started me on a writing career that has spanned more than 40 years, including 13 as a newspaper reporter, sports writer and editor; 20 years writing public relations materials; 10 years as a freelance communications consultant; and three years as a blogger. During all of that time, I had one thought residing deep in the back of my mind:

“So you think you’re a writer? Then why don’t you write a book?”

That idea started to become a reality about 20 years ago when I was mowing the lawn at our new house in Hagerstown, Maryland, and my mind began to wander. A day or so earlier, if I recall correctly, I had struggled to plant an eight-foot pear tree in our barren back yard, which was hard as concrete and full of rocks, and I wondered, “What if a man was digging in his yard and found something he didn’t expect?”

Spoiler alert: It was a time capsule.

I started thinking about writing such a story and in 2004 began to commit the book to paper—or rather to a keyboard. I began by writing down the first thoughts that popped into my mind, then began to develop the story and eventually incorporated some short stories I had written previously by linking them into the main thread. I thought it was a good secondary plot line and also a sneaky way to make the book get longer.

In the intervening years between then and now, I finished the first draft of the book, edited it, didn’t like it much, rewrote parts of it, shared it with my wife and a friend, accepted their constructive criticism, made more changes, set it aside, wrote some more, realized it didn’t make sense chronologically and put it away for several years until recently, when I decided to give it one more look. I fixed all the parts I didn’t like, straightened out the timeline and improved some of the characters…and sent it off to a publisher for an editorial review.

When word came back that the publisher liked my work, we began the process of turning my Time Capsule manuscript into a novel.

Not only that, but Beth and Tim Rowland at High Peaks Publishing liked my first effort well enough to encourage me to keep writing, and asked if I had anything else to show them. I had started a second book several years ago but had only written all of three pages, so I set out to make a book out of them and in three weeks had completed a second novel. I have since written a third one and have started to write a fourth.

So today as I write this, the finished draft of Time Capsule—after one last round of edits—is in the pipeline for publication and work will begin soon to design a cover and format the manuscript into paperback and e-book form. Actual publication is still weeks away, but it occurs to me that before long, I’ll be able to hold in my hands a book that I wrote from out of my own head, and that nearly 60 years after scribbling out the first and only neighborhood newspaper, I have finally done what actual writers do—I have written a book…or three.

Eventually, all three will be published and maybe even more. At least, I hope that will be the case. I will be able to call myself an author and you can carve that on my tombstone when I die. I only wish I had started all of this 30 years ago, but I guess it’s better to have started late in life than never to have started at all.

Did someone important say that? As a writer, I feel like I should know.