More proof that the Donald Trump presidency, just one year old, is already working the last nerves of over-sensitive liberals: The New York Times is putting pieces in its high-profile Sunday Review section that may be better handled by a qualified counselor.
“A Trump-Size Hole in Our Relationship” by Gina-Abercrombie Winstanley, former US ambassador to Malta, was undiplomatic both to Trump and to a close friend, while using a dubious metaphor to characterize the result of a free election.
This must be what it feels like to be the victim of a random attack: shock, disbelief, disorientation, confusion, distress. But I’m aware that I was not a target. I’m just in the wrong time in America.
This president has disrupted my life -- professionally and personally.
Professionally, after more than 30 years in the Foreign Service, rising to serve as an ambassador, I found myself working for someone who appeared not to understand or value the importance of diplomacy as an effective means of reducing violence in the world....And so, because I didn’t feel I could make a difference at the State Department, I decided to join the large number of my valued colleagues who left.
Her anger and disappointment in her personal and professional life? Trump’s fault.
At home, however, the president has seriously disrupted my personal life. I learned shortly before the election that the woman nearest and dearest to me in life is a Trump supporter. The situation is so divisive that I cannot name her here....I was driven by two conflicting needs: One, to understand how someone who I knew to epitomize integrity, nation before self and commitment to public service could support this president. Two, to ensure she stayed informed so that she did not spend one single day feeling good about her choice. I opened all our conversations with that reminder as a joke -- but I wasn’t kidding.
The lead story in the section credited Trump for altering the space-time continuum: “It’s Been a Year of This? – Trump’s presidency has flown by – and felt interminable,” by Alan Burdick. The online title: “Is Trump Warping Our Sense of Time?”
In his first year in office President Trump gave himself credit for numerous accomplishments that he had little or nothing to do with: the passage of the Republican tax bill; Walmart’s creating 10,000 jobs in the United States....
Burdick listed highlights of the busy year and concluded, “It has been a 12-month-long emotional roller coaster, even for Mr. Trump’s supporters. And those bursts of emotion have surely translated into warps in time. Every thought of nuclear annihilation, every glimpse of Mr. Trump’s angry visage, cracks open a door in the fourth dimension....Under Mr. Trump, did 2017 fly by or did it feel interminable?"
The only cure: Throwing oneself into anti-Trump political action.
If Mr. Trump’s presidency has spurred you into committed political action, the year was perhaps a quick one.....But if you’ve been wringing your hands and waiting for it all to be over, the year may have felt very long indeed.
