Has Donald Trump ‘no sense of decency’ | Column

Do you suppose we’re entering that moment leading up to the November elections where you throw up your hands and utter, “Enough is enough!” Or perhaps put another way, let’s think of Donald Trump as the lay-about brother-in-law who keeps showing up uninvited and drinks all your liquor.

Really now, hasn’t this incessant mash-up of “The Gong Show” meets “The Squid Game” gone on far, far too long?

In recent days, Trump has gone on a marathon of fibs, lies, dissembling and downright gibberish on the stump, unleashing a cavalcade of calumny that envy Charles Ponzi. The Florida fabulist has claimed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp couldn’t get President Joe Biden on the phone to discuss disaster relief. Whopper! Even Kemp acknowledged that he and Biden were working closely together.

Trump pivoted to the pitiful, claiming money for hurricane help had been diverted from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide housing to illegal immigrants. That was a huge steaming pile of balderdash, too, as were claims Trump vomited into the public discourse that Biden and Kamala Harris were plotting to allow illegal immigrants to vote, that hurricane disaster victims would only receive $750 (a lie advanced across the blabber-sphere of right-wing talk radio), and that the audience went crazy in support of him during his debate with Harris. Ahem, there was no studio audience.

And the MAGA sheep think Biden is too addled to serve as president?

But the Eddie Haskell of the Electoral College was only getting warmed up — or perhaps better put, even more unhinged than “The Joker.”

Trump already has called for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution and promised if elected he would be a dictator on the first day back in the Oval Office, as well as ordering the Justice Department to prosecute a host of perceived political opponents.

Will “Deutschland Uber Alles” replacing “What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming” be far behind?

But the candidate to become the President of Dystopia wasn’t finished. During one of his marathon campaign speeches — sort of like Mussolini meets Castro — Trump floated the notion of allowing police officers to get “nasty” with criminal suspects during what he hinted would become a national “violent day.”

What would this Macy’s parade look like? Floats of Trump’s hero Hannibal Lecter? Marching bands from the Hells Angels? The Jan. 6 “choir” warbling, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?

This had to be a first, a once great political party’s candidate for president promoting a national day of mayhem.

Enter Trump flunky and apologist Steven Cheung, who insisted Trump wanting to turn the country into “Reservoir Dogs” was merely a comedic riff made completely in jest. There are just a few problems with this befuddled stream of consciousness.

First, Trump has zero sense of humor, unless, of course, you regard belittling fallen U.S. service members as “suckers and losers,” demeaning Gold Star families, mocking a disabled reporter, bragging about sexually assaulting women and plotting to overthrow the country as worthy of comedy club hilarity. Indeed Trump’s brand of schtick practically makes the dour late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini come off a “Saturday Night Live” guest host.

On June 9, 1954, some history was made. A bumptious bully was finally toppled. Words uttered by a fed-up lawyer were forever etched into history. Words that are even more prescient and needed today.

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy had embarked on a fruitless, cruel and baseless campaign to ferret out non-existent communists in government. Lives were ruined, careers destroyed as many public figures declined to challenge McCarthy’s bombast for fear they, too, might be targeted. Then McCarthy went a smear too far.

The senator accused a young lawyer who worked for attorney Joseph Welch, who was representing the Army during the televised hearings, a communist.

Welch had had enough of McCarthy’s brutishness.

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch calmly said to McCarthy. Soon he added: “Let’s not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

And with that the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s irrational grip on power and influence quickly waned.

Haven’t we had enough? Very simply, Mr. Trump, have you no sense of decency? Have we, as a democracy, no sense of decency?