With the election only one week away I can support 75% of Trump’s signature slogan

Mr. Trump made his political career on four very simple words: “Make America Great Again.” (Sorry “Build the Wall” but you finish second.)

Everyone who cares about our country can enthusiastically endorse the first three words – after all, who doesn’t want America to be great? The problem is the last word.

Many are offended by the implication in the slogan that we weren’t a great nation before Mr. Trump vaulted onto the political scene and came to our “rescue.” After all, what has made America most exceptional is its commitment (at least in theory) to fairness, justice and democracy. We have principles that (if followed) represent the foundation of a great civilization: from the many freedoms we enjoy as U.S. citizens (to speak freely, practice any religion we choose or no religion at all and vote and, at least theoretically, choose our elected officials) to the protections afforded every citizen accused of a crime (the right to an attorney and to a jury trial of peers, and the preclusion against self-incrimination, illegal searches, and cruel and unusual punishment) to the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses of our Constitution. Of course, all of these things existed well before Donald Trump lumbered into the White House.

The same can be said for the great talent and diversity of our citizens. This wasn’t an accident or a by-product of some God-ordained manifest destiny. Rather it was a direct function of our nation’s emphasis on education as well as our unique acceptance of immigrants over the past centuries. By bringing together people from divergent backgrounds, experiences, and abilities the United States has been able to produce some of the greatest technological and scientific achievements the world has ever seen while simultaneously enormously enriching our cultural experiences.

There are those who cannot talk about the “greatness” of the United States without mentioning that we are the biggest, baddest and best economy in the world. That has also been true for a long time – and well before the Donald arrived on the scene. I suppose that if you judge a country’s economic success solely by measures like the value of the stock market and which country has the most billionaires, then the United States economy has no doubt “improved” in the last four years. The counter argument naturally is that in the insatiable thirst for larger company profits and higher stock market values for our wealthiest citizens, we have neglected millions of other citizens. Many hard-working folks fail to make enough to afford a reasonable standard of living, creating the largest income disparity between haves and have-nots in the history of the World – not exactly a benchmark worthy of “great nation” status.

And this gets to MY criticism of the MAGA phrase – the assumption embedded in Trump’s slogan that America has ever been truly “great.” I know that’s blasphemy to many red-blooded Americans who love their country dearly and view any criticism of the Motherland as disloyalty or downright treason. But loving and being proud of your country is different from proclaiming its greatness. (By the way, even if you believe we are a great country it’s bad form and contrary to what good parents, coaches and religions teach to tell others how great we are – if you are great, people will know it without you having to tell them. While this may be a mantra that Mr. Trump repeats every day when he looks in the mirror or assesses his performance as President, it is unworthy of a truly great person or nation.)

Greatness should be reserved for the truly extraordinary – an extremely high standard. It’s a worthy goal and we should absolutely aspire to be wiser, fairer, more empathetic and better, both individually and as a nation. But despite all of our strengths as a country we have a plethora of shortcomings and there is a lot of room for improvement before we can be declared “great” in my view.

For starters, we have to overcome our very checkered history – from wiping out most of the Native American population and putting the remainder on reservations to enslaving millions of Africans to rounding up Japanese Americans and placing them in internment camps. While we may not be directly responsible for these atrocities, many of our ancestors were. Thus, we have to own it and make at least some kind of amends for it – just as today’s Germans who had nothing to do with gassing 6 million Jews have to reconcile the fact that their parents and grandparents – the people who gave them life and treated them so well- treated others so horrifically.

We also can’t ignore our atrocious civil rights record as a nation that still exists: the systemic racial inequality in policing, prosecuting and imprisoning suspected criminals along with our nations’ woeful record in providing equality in education and economic opportunity.

And then there’s our Constitution and government structure – often held up as model and praised as responsible for the greatest democracy the World has ever seen. And yet our “electoral college” system has produced a result in two of our last five elections where our “elected” President is not someone who the majority of Americans even voted for – and it could very well happen again.

Another byproduct of this “great” system established by our forefathers (and they were all men) absurdly confers widely disproportionate power to citizens from lightly populated states like Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska and both Dakotas over other citizens. Indeed these five minuscule states (who collectively represent a mere 1% of the population) have more Senators combined than California, Texas, Florida and New York (who collectively represent 33% of our people). Defenders of this outrageous affront to democracy point out that this was designed to give small states a fair voice. But giving a small group of citizens from remote places 10 times the power of other citizens was surely not the intention of the framers at a time when there were only 13 states and no state had less than 1.5% of the population. Nor is this inequity balanced out by the House of Representatives’ proportional representation when the Senate holds the most important power for preserving our democracy and maintaining a check on a dictatorial president – approving the judges that serve on the Supreme Court and throughout the entire federal court system for a lifetime.

Perhaps most dangerous of all to our democracy is that our system is overrun by lobbyists and the power of large financial interests (on both the left and the right). Thanks to the Citizens United case wealthy and powerful citizens and corporations largely dictate who the candidates are and have enormous influence over who wins the election. By contrast Canada, our wise democratic neighbor to the North, limits individual contributions to political candidates to a $1600 per person and forbids all contributions from corporations. Which country has the “greater” democratic system there?

Americans lack of exceptionalism goes far beyond these things if we are truly willing to conduct an honest self-examination:

While we are privileged to live on some of the most beautiful land on earth we make little effort to protect it or the planet in general, polluting the ground and air like no other country (save possibly China) and destroying its bounty for our children and future generations.

While we are privileged to live in the richest country on Earth we can’t seem to find enough money to help the millions of folks who are starving and have no place to live.

While we are privileged to have some of the brightest educators in the world and the World’s best universities, we’ve been unable to provide a decent education to millions of children, especially in inner city schools.

While we are privileged to have the best medical care in the world for some, we provide virtually no medical care for others.

And then there are some other less than flattering statistics:

Our citizens own more guns that any other nation on earth and it aint even close. Many folks say they have a right to as many guns as they want and that they need them to protect themselves and their families. Even if that were true, is that sentiment reflective of a “great” nation?

What has all that firepower gotten us? We have more crime than any developed nation on earth. We’re also in first place when it comes to incarceration. How can we proclaim ourselves to be the “land of the free” when we (a nation that represents only 4% of the World’s population) has 22% of the World’s prisoners?

And thanks largely to our lawmakers’ refusal to place restrictions on assault weapons, we are the undisputed leaders of the world when it comes to massacres. Our citizens get slaughtered in mass like no other country — at movie theaters, concerts, places of worship and even schools.

We are also graduating summa cum laude when it comes to our futility in stopping the spread of the Covid virus. Despite having the most money, resources and health care expertise, the United States leads the world in the number of infections and the number of deaths by a landslide.

Finally – and I’m sorry there is no polite way to say it – our country has the largest collection of stupid people on the planet. If the above examples were not sufficient, nothing quite shouts stupidity for me than the failure of Americans to exercise their right to vote. (Just ask people who live in places with a dictator where they have no say in matters.) In the most recent Presidential election, more than 40% of eligible voters incredibly chose not to vote.

But perhaps the best evidence of our collective ignorance as a nation is the fact that roughly 46% of the folks who did bother to vote in 2016 (nearly 62 Million Americans) voted for Donald J. Trump to lead this country and represent US and OUR VALUES as a nation! Worse, the majority of these folks actually believed him when he said that HE would “Make America Great Again” – a man who had never done anything great in his entire life. He got into a top college by cheating (according to his own niece), avoided serving the country he claims he loves so much by fabricating a medical condition, failed in multiple marriages through infidelity and ran numerous companies into bankruptcy, ruining the lives of thousands of employees and other businesses by his incompetency, fraud and greed.

For four excruciatingly long years he has demonstrated what an abysmal leader and human being he is, divided this country like never before and proved time and time again that he is an incompetent, immoral, vindictive, corrupt and arrogant liar. And yet, I expect that just about the same number of Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 will enthusiastically vote for him AGAIN (perhaps minus a few souls who’ve actually come to Jesus – recognizing that Jesus would never have voted for Donald Trump).

Hopefully a lot more folks will vote this time to dwarf the delusional. And hopefully the judges Trump has appointed – no doubt designed to improve his chances at remaining King for awhile longer – won’t just hand him the reigns of power as part of the “pledge of loyalty” he typically demands from his subjects. But I can’t imagine a more compelling case for lack of greatness on our nation’s part that a man like Trump could ever be our President.

There is some good news. We still have a chance to make America great IF we put in the hard work. We have a lot of highly intelligent and genuinely caring people and we have enormous resources to tackle the many perplexing problems that we face. There is a LOT to do regardless of the outcome of this election. But what happens a week from today is very important. Ironically, the best chance we have to “Make America Great” is to remove the single largest impediment to this country’s greatness.

VOTE – however long it takes!

(And to my Republican friends who have conceded to me that Trump is a trainwreck of a human being and President but that they felt compelled to vote for him “because of the Supreme Court,” that excuse is no longer valid. With the installation of super conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett, you now have the super majority of conservatives on the highest court you have craved and will most assuredly have that for the next several decades.)