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.