October 18, 2020: President Trump Declares "Character Counts Week."

 

10/18/20: President Trump announced that Sunday would mark the start of “Character Counts Week.” 

Really. 

This is not a parody.

 

If you’re an elementary school teacher, you can find ideas online to celebrate the “Six Pillars of Character.” You can do readings related to character too. For example: Is There Really a Human Race? You can look up what the pillars are, and discuss one each day in class. 

As a middle school or high school teacher, perhaps you could ask students to write an essay, “How Does President Trump Exemplify the Six Pillars of Character?” I think that might be fun.

  

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“Inspiring and incentivizing and inciting…domestic terrorism.” 

One person who might argue that the president has zero pillars of character, would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Having heard Trump stir a crowd on Saturday to lock her up, she was rightly upset. “It’s incredibly disturbing,” she said on Meet the Press Sunday, “that the president of the United States, ten days after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial and execute me – ten days after that was uncovered – the president is at it again and inspiring and incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism.”

 

If you follow the news closely, you might understand why Whitmer was spooked. In a separate but similar incident, Meredith Dowty, a retired firefighter in Wichita, Kansas, heard the president’s siren song. 

Dowty is alleged to have hatched a plan to fight “masks and tyranny” by kidnapping Mayor Brandon Whipple. 

Having seen some of the threatening messages Dowty allegedly sent, the mayor summed up his foe’s plan: “He said he was going to kidnap me and slash my throat and he needed my address because I needed to see the hangman – me and everyone who…” Whipple trailed off. 

“Something about tyranny.” 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Trump had a busy weekend campaigning and burnishing his fascist cred. On Friday, he told a Florida crowd that Rep. Ilhan Omar, another nemesis, had entered the country illegally at age 12, as a refugee. In an effort to stir the hate, he attacked her Muslim faith, saying – with zero proof – that she “married her brother or something.” 

At a rally in Wisconsin he brought her up again. He beamed, like Mussolini, when the crowd began chanting, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

 

Call me old-fashioned, I guess. Before we lock anyone up, I would prefer we observe all the protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, regarding safeguards for the accused. (See: Amendments IV, VI, VII, VIII and XIV.)