Do you ever wonder what makes Donald Trump tick? I am six months younger than he, so we viewed much of our country’s history as current events. Consider the Russian tanker carrying nearly three-quarters of a million oil barrels that passed through Trump’s blockade to arrive in Cuban waters. It effectively undid what might have been President Kennedy’s greatest foreign policy success. In October 1962, Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba-backed USSR leader, Nikita Khrushchev, into removing Soviet offensive weapons from Cuba. As then Secretary of State Dean Rusk said of the Cuban Missile Crisis: “We were eyeball to eyeball, and somebody blinked.” This time, it was definitely the American president who blinked.
I believe the tale that led to Trump caving to Putin began in the 1960s, during our early teen years. Kennedy’s Camelot must have been a constant reminder of his distinctly less-than-aristocratic status. JFK’s father was a rumrunner (actually a Scotch whisky runner) in the 1920s when Prohibition made many bootleggers folk heroes. He went on to become an ambassador and confidante of presidents. Kennedy matron Rose was the daughter of beloved Boston mayor and congressman, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. By comparison, Trump was the son of an outer-boroughs landlord who could never break into the holy-of-holies of New York real estate — Manhattan.
Could that disparity have made Trump feel so inadequate, so resentful, that it has driven him for over six decades? Could it be that burned into his mind is a desperate attempt to tear down the memory of JFK and replace it with his own? It explains the vandalism of the White House, including Melania’s senseless destruction of Jacqueline Kennedy’s rose garden. Or Trump slapping his name on the Kennedy Center, and his plan to impose his own chintzy tastes on it. On a deeper level, Trump and his toadies in Congress and the courts are like termites, busily at work undermining two signature bills of the Kennedy era. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were shepherded through and signed by Lyndon Johnson, but hovering over the entire process was the spirit of the recently martyred JFK.
Perhaps this is a good time to examine the events in Butler, Penn., on Sept. 13, 2024. Was it an innocent mistake on the part of Trump’s security detail that allowed Thomas Crooks to position himself with a highly accurate, high-power rifle on a rooftop a mere 140 yards from Trump? Or were they in on the plot? Can one claim that no bullet hit his ear, and that a concealed blood packet was all the drama needed? I believe so. Were the real casualties unwitting actors in the play? If any of those are valid, is there any doubt that the shooter could not be permitted to leave the scene alive? If the objective is to displace a hated rival whose legend grew greater after his assassination, how better than to be struck by an assassin’s bullet and to rise again, bloodied but defiant? Fight, fight, fight, eh?
And now we come to the ultimate, though hardly final, assault: RFK, Jr. How better to erase the Kennedy legend from the public mind than to make the very name utterly toxic? How long will it take before Junior’s cockamamie utterances and his wanton destruction of the country’s public health institutions cease to be what come to mind when one hears “Kennedy”? I fear it will take longer than we 79 year olds, Donald and I, will live to see. Form your own conclusions.
William Politt lives in Weare.