So much whining…

We really are sick of it.

We all have one of those people in our lives, right? Someone who seems to have everything — a nice house, a big car, expensive jewelry, fancy clothes, that big riding mower we wish we had, they go out to eat a lot, they take a lot of vacations, their husband does the grocery shopping, their mom and dad take the kids all the time… they’ve seemingly got it made by every available metric, and yet… and yet, whenever you see them you know, you just know to brace for what’s coming because all they ever fucking do… is complain.

They whine. They bellyache. They blame. They open an industrial size bottle of self-pity and they bathe in it. Something is always “wrong.” Something has been “done to them.” Something is “unfair.” Something so upsetting, so disconcerting, so tragically life-altering, they need to stop you in the laundry aisle at the ShopRite despite your best efforts to dodge them by turning around and briskly walking the other way. They still manage to catch you JUST as you’re about to round that end-cap display of on sale Newman’s Own salad dressing, and you think you’re free until… you hear your name beckon from all the way back by the the goddamn Tide pens.

Maybe today it’s that their husband left for a business trip and they had to skip the 523rd episode of whatever the fuck Hulu show they’ve been binge watching to do the grocery shopping. Maybe it’s that the “brow technician” (whatever the fuck that is) used the mahogany brown when it was supposed to be the dark saddle. Maybe it’s their son’s ELA teacher audaciously finding fault with their child calling fellow sixth grader Susie a “slut.” Whatever the fuck it is, there are two things you know out of the gate: that it’s not grounded in reality, and that they’re gonna tell you about it, over and over and OVER again, because they physically have to. They HAAAAAVE to.

And it’s fucking exhausting, isn’t it?

Well, America has that person too.

And it’s Donald Trump.

Has there ever been a bigger whiner in the history of the world? Have we ever seen anyone so perpetually “put upon”, so constantly “mistreated”, so eternally victimized as that “man”? That man born to immense wealth. That man who has for the entirety of his existence benefitted from being able to fail upwards. That idiotic, unattractive, incurious, charmless fuck who landed in our Oval Office not on the basis of merit, but because of the depths of his depravity.

The convicted felon who gets to walk around a free man, evading his sentencing while inciting violence and promoting intolerance and lying about literally everything, because as a whole lot of people in this country have long since known, the justice system is not in fact even the slightest bit blind, has the nerve to cry about how “unfair” everyone is to him?

Has there ever been anyone in our collective memory who has complained MORE about what HE didn’t get than him? We’re talking about someone who could literally shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it.

But my God, he really thinks he has it worse than anyone has ever had it in the history of time. And he tells us every single motherfucking day.

He whines about the election he lost, about the coverage he gets or doesn’t get, about his poll numbers and about being fact checked. He whines about being shot, about not being shot, about how we don’t talk enough about him being shot and not being shot. He whines about his crowd sizes, about paying overtime, about his magazine covers, his lack of Nobel prizes, and about the Emmys he didn’t get. He whines about jobs reports, the stock market and the GDP, about shower pressure, batteries, lightbulbs and toilets. He whines about wind mills and hurricanes, about who worked or didn’t work at McDonalds and when. He whines about being indicted for the crimes he’s committed and being convicted of the crimes he’s committed. He whined about sitting in a cold courtroom for a couple of hours a couple days a week while grownups talked about the crimes he’d committed. He whines about women, and whines about men, he whines about the world leaders who laughed at him. He whines about Biden stepping out of the race and about Kamala winning the debate. He whines about the fact that no one talks about the things he didn’t do, despite the fact that he keeps telling them he did. He whines about celebrities who won’t bend the knee. He whines about his many assault victims wanting accountability.

He’s a whine-a-saurus Rex, the master of moanology. He has a PhD in pouting and a Masters in complaining. He didn’t pen the “Art of the Deal”, it’s more like “The Art of Why Meeee”.

He is detached from reality. That we well know. But this is all about much more than his incessant bellyaching. Grievance is essential to his hold on society. He’s a self-obsessed, thin-skinned, sociopathic narcissist who really does believe he’s the single most persecuted man in the history of the world. But the idea he’s planting in so doing is that everyone else should embrace a culture in which something bad is being done “to them”.

Real or not, he needs Americans to feel as though they are being “abused” or treated “unfairly” because some of other entity, some “they”, be that a peaceful, hard-working Haitian immigrant who is “eating your pets”, or a transgender athlete beating your daughter at swimming.

Someone or something out there is taking from us. And they, them, those people, that “institution”, elected official, societal norm, “political correctness”, is to “blame.” There is no rational fix for a manufactured crisis of course, so what you end up with is a helluva lot of folks who are mad as hell, but not really sure why, so they pick someone, or they’re directed towards someone, to blame.

We also have to remember that Donald Trump doesn’t have a goddamn clue what real struggle looks like. What being hungry feels like. What losing everything feels like. What being generationally shutout of a world where other people at least get the chance to change their lot in life feels like. And he doesn’t care to know who we really are. But as is true of everything he does, he so often gives us a chance to decide who we want to be.

We are not Donald Trump and he is not us.

We’re better than that. We have to practice at being better than that. We aren’t all a bunch of put upon whiners. We don’t want to be. We’re proud. We’re strong. We’re resilient. We’re accountable. And we’re self-determining. That’s the spirit of who we are. He doesn’t know who we are or what we’re capable of, because he’s never seen it, he’s never lived it, he does not embody it, and he never will.

He’s a 78-year old inherently bankrupt man who has known a life of failing followed by escalator rides back to the top.

That’s not who WE are.

Michelle Obama put it best:

“We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead. No. We don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We get to work.”

That is who WE are.

And we need a president who wants to work towards building a country that works for all of us, not one who just sits there and whines about himself before he gets back on that damn escalator.

Whiney McWhataboutme can cry all day long on his golden, powerfully flushing “throne”, the grownups have work to do making sure he gets to whine about losing yet ANOTHER presidential election.