Once upon a time, a seemingly long 40 or so years ago, I was a big fan of Donald Trump as he entered the public domain as an incredibly wealthy man. Why was I a fan? Well, I owned a couple of small businesses and thought I could glean information about taking good care of my customers while making a tidy profit. So I bought Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” and began reading it. After only a couple of chapters, I realized this was a person who only cared about making money, didn’t care at all about fellow human beings in that process and was ruthless and heartless in getting it. I stopped reading it immediately because respectfully treating fellow human beings are a big part of who I am. I continued to follow his career, though, and I slowly began to just hate his lack of morality and his use and extreme abuse of people in getting what he was taught as his birthright. As far as I was and am concerned, he's the ultimate con man who will say whatever it takes to get his way because he believes it’s the “right way.”

In March 2017, directly after his inauguration into the presidency, 28,000 highly trained, professional members of the American Psychiatric Association signed off on their belief that Trump showed all the classic signs of severe mental illness. They had not said a word about a presidential candidate since they said the same thing about Barry “Let’s Just Nuke ‘Em All” Goldwater as he ran for the presidency in 1963. They were right but got into big legal trouble over it and had kept their mouths shut for over 50 years — until Trump that is. I now say, and my opinion is held by millions of Americans, is that he not only shows the signs of severe mental illness but that he is, in fact and in truth, very mentally ill and has no business being the president. His tactics of bamboozling and manipulating the American people with his words while doing something entirely differently are symbolic of what Hitler did to the German people beginning 80-plus years ago.

If you Trumpites out there are willing to believe his daily, psychopathic lies while he selfishly enriches himself, his richer-than-rich cronies and as he totally violates many tenets of what we know as the American way of life, then shame on you. You either aren’t paying attention or haven’t done your homework about who he is, what he stands for and is actually doing, not saying, or finding the truth and the facts about who Trump is, what he stands for or what he apparently wants to do with creating an autocracy or, at the very least, an oligarchy of nobody but the very rich. There are plenty of reliable sources out there or on the internet that will tell you the facts and the truth about this despicable sub-human being but you must get over whatever anger and frustration you personally feel toward the government and the governing done in order to digest those facts and the truth. If you can’t or won’t do that, we are in or will be in even more serious trouble and separation than we already are as Trump continues his Hitleresque mode of divide, conquer and make the media look like the "bad guy" and him as the good guy." The vast majority of Americans already know or are learning what a cruel and evil egotist Donald Trump actually is.

Lately, his responses to the coronavirus are pathetic and life-ending for many, many people. To ignore warnings almost three months ago from experts in the field about how dangerous this virus is or could be is incredibly tragic. To turn down foreign countries who offered testing kits and other medical supplies to America with a “well this isn’t going to hit America very hard” attitude is unconscionable. Any reasonable president would immediately take something like the inspector general’s report from the factual data supplied by well over 300 hospitals about their lack of medical supplies and would have either acted on them previously or would do so in a nanosecond now. Instead he attacks that inspector general personally, virtually ignores the cries for help in the report and will take no responsibility for any mistakes he’s made because his mental illness will not apparently allow him to admit to any mistake. It’s always somebody else and he’s still pounding on people like Barack Obama instead of standing up, being a man, being an American and doing every little thing he can to right the ship.

Of course, he’s always "right" in his mentally ill brain so if you dare to stand up to him and work for him, you will be summarily fired. If you challenge him but don’t work for him, he will attack you personally through Twitter or in other ways. The one that really, really got me in the heart was his disrespect for a dying patriot John McCain, but he’s done and continues to do the same kinds of things to many others. And oh, he’s taken out bankruptcy six times, left tens of thousands of people, families and businesses in his wake and laughed in many of their faces with a “go ahead and sue me and I’ll beat you in court” attitude. Do you really believe that six bankruptcies are the sign of a “successful businessperson”? If a book were to be written about the tens of thousands of people he’s used, abused and then just thrown away were to be written, it would be a thicker book than “War and Peace”! He told we commoners about this great tax cut that he said we’re going to "love" but he failed to tell us that big corporations were getting arguably the largest tax cut in America’s history. Did you know that? The list just goes on and on and nauseatingly long.

Please think for yourself. Please do your own research and back it up by double or triple checking what you find. You owe it to yourself and to America to do so. If you then still believe in the Trump myth, I have one question: Why?

George Coutis is a former Pocatello City Council member and retired teacher at New Horizon High School in Pocatello. He also opened the first all-natural food store in Pocatello in 1972.