What if Donald Trump were _______________?

Let’s face it, we have a president that might not be qualified to do most of our jobs. The last couple days I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like if Donald Trump had my job, or yours. It got me to filling in the blank of the question I used to title this piece: What if Donald Trump were ____________?

What if Donald Trump were a teacher?

I’m not at all sure he could even be hired as a teacher. I have my doubts about whether he would pass the background check process. I can’t imagine that his long list of accusers of sexual assault and rape–including at least one underaged case–wouldn’t show up somewhere on his record and preclude him from being considered for a teaching position. If you found out your child’s teacher had a bevy of women who have claimed that he raped or assaulted them sexually, how would you react? It’s not just the many accusations that are troublesome, it’s his own words. If I, as a teacher, had been caught on tape making the statements Trump made bragging about grabbing women by the pu**y, I would probably lose my teaching job in disgrace. Trump was caught making those statements and was elected leader of the Free World.

What if Donald Trump were a policeman?

Donald Trump has a long history of playing judge, jury, and executioner in the press. This is not something I would want from a police officer. Police are charged with protecting and serving, not condemning. Most police do a great job of this, but those cops who have their minds made up about a person’s guilt based upon stereotypes and profiling are exactly why we have some NFL players kneeling for the National Anthem. Donald Trump’s record of public statements about crime and punishment would–or at least should–eliminate him from consideration were he to apply to become a police officer. For that matter, he shouldn’t even be able to serve on a jury. This goes back at least 3 decades to when Trump called for the execution of five young black men who were, as it turned out, wrongly accused of raping a woman jogger. The so called Central Park Five case caused great racial upheaval in New York City and was just the beginning of Donald Trump’s sketchy record of bigotry and racial insensitivity. As president, Donald Trump has continued to divide the nation along racial lines, insensitively calling out Mexican immigrants as rapists and continually short-changing the cause of millions Americans concerned with racial injustice by blowing his dog whistle to stir up his minions against respectful and peaceful protests. And who could forget that, as hundreds of angry white supremacists demonstrated in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump lauded the many “very good people” among them, winning the undying respect of the likes of David Duke in the process. Would this be the kind of candidate you’d be looking to add to your police department?

What if Donald Trump were a pastor?

Obviously, the things I listed in the two examples above could be added to this entry, as well, to eliminate Donald Trump from consideration as a pastor, but let’s focus on still more things. First of all, any pastoral candidate would raise many an eyebrow if they quoted a scripture as “Two Corinthians” instead of Second Corinthians, would they not? But perhaps, you might claim, I’m just being petty with that one–so be it, let’s explore further. Besides the almost daily hateful tweets the president sends out–what pastor could keep their job by constantly engaging in hate-filled online dialogue with their perceived enemies–another deal breaker would be the fact that Trump can’t even bring himself to say that he has ever actually asked for God’s forgiveness. In a not-famous-enough interview, Trump was asked multiple times if he’d ever asked for God’s forgiveness and he said he couldn’t recall ever having done so. If your pastoral candidate had no recollection of asking God’s forgiveness, would you hire him? Yet, millions of right-wing evangelicals helped elect Trump on the basis that he was God’s chosen instrument.

I could go on here, but I think I’ve made my point. It doesn’t make it any easier to understand how we’ve gotten to this point, I know. But at least it something to think about.

Maybe next time we elect a president, we should ask ourselves if they’d be qualified to do our jobs first.

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