Unpresidential

 "If you go after me, I'm coming after you."

          - Donald Trump, August 4, 2023

The above quote sounds a whole lot like something a Mafia Don would say.

Instead, this was posted on former president Donald Trump's oxymoronic Truth Social platform. It sounds like a threat. I think it was meant to be a threat. I think the clearly unhinged ex-POTUS was aiming this threat at potential jurors, prosecutors, judges, potential witnesses, bailiffs, court stenographers, court custodians and anyone else connected to any of his three – and no doubt soon to be four – indictments that so far are totaling more than 70 charges of illegalities against him.

You know, things like obstruction, conspiracy to fraud, battery, defamation, violation of the Espionage Act and making false statements. Among others.

Just what you want from a president.

"If you go after me, I'm coming after you."

There has been a plethora of inspiring moments from other presidents worthy of our consideration: 

• "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." – John F. Kennedy

• "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right..." – Abraham Lincoln

• "A house divided against itself cannot stand." – Abraham Lincoln

• "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." – Franklin Delano Roosevelt 

•  "Believe you can and you're halfway there." – Theodore Roosevelt

• "Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care." – Theodore Roosevelt

• "It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one." – George Washington

• "Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light." – George Washington

Those are just a few incredible presidential moments designed, in part, to help unite the country in its times of travail. It's what presidents do. It's in their job description, especially the part that says "... will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

And then we have this:

"If you go after me, I'm coming after you."

Sweet Jesus, how did this man ever get to the presidential podium? He reeks of privilege, of arrogance, of malignant malevolence, of insipid ignorance, of consciousness of guilt, of cognitive dissonance, of anything but the humane American character found in the shared DNA of our national history (both good and bad) and experience.

And now he's running for a second term, determined to complete the damage he's already inflicted upon us, determined to replace our democracy with autocracy, to divide us further with his hypocrisy and lies.

Mafia Don's first term as president was an American anomaly. A second term would be suicide. This cannot happen to us again. It cannot.