Make America what again?

            Can he interest you in some statuary?

 

            We're talking fully functional statues here – Confederate heroes, conquerors, all the best. And at low, low flea-market prices.

            Donald Trump, whose cracked lips will never utter the "Black" in "Black Lives Matter," is your man if your interest is gray – the eminence of people long dead in a losing cause.

            What is it with Trump and statues? He says this is about history. But statues aren't history.

            If you want history, read about Harriet Tubman, the gash on her forehead and the people she saved from horrors wrought by entitled people.

            Trump isn't about history. He's about relics. And if the polls are any indication, he's four months shy of being one.

            But this is not just about racist totems. It's also about policy borrowed from another era.

Trump is Richard Nixon in his appeals to the aggrieved white voters, Bull Connor in his approach to peaceful protest, Joe Arpaio in his career of harassing the brown-skinned. Donald Trump is certifiably not of his era.

            Every item he offers has a layer of dust on it, sitting on shelves held over from when Dixie and when night-sticks were what made America great.

            Don't challenge him. He'll roll out the fire hoses from behind the shed.

            Right now someone in MAGA headquarters is trying to convince the man to offer something new to voters. "New" is not in this man's repertoire.

            Joe Biden is 77, but he is not too addled to think about America's future. He is drawing up a plan to refocus federal industrial strategy on the supply chains so lacking in the pandemic.

            Among those plans is restoring federal investment on clean energy.

            Remember the visionary energy policy of candidate Trump? If you don't, here are two words: "clean coal."

            Sorry to break it to you, folks, but the market heard Trump and went about its business of burying coal.

            Market demands, driven by technology and the understanding even among utilities that carbon-heavy industries are killing the planet, have consigned coal to less than 20 percent of the nation's mix in generating electricity, surpassed this year by renewables.

            Over the last decade, renewables' share of the nation's generation mix has more than doubled. This despite Trump's diatribes against wind generators, his war against environmental regulations, and his barking for Big Energy.

            "Fighting the transition (to renewables) is not going to stop the transition," Dennis Wamsted of the Institution for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told the New York Times. "Economically, it will happen inevitably."

            Just one of many areas in which this president is completely out of touch with the times.

            At this moment when visionary leadership is demanded, we have a leader who can only look backward to the "again" part of his MAGA slogan.

            He has no idea how to serve the nation's health care needs beyond carrying out his vendetta against his predecessor's signature achievement.

            He has no idea how to improve schools or lessen the suffocating burdens facing college students and graduates.

            His only ideas seem to be coming from the inheritors of fundamentalist empires, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr., and the ghosts of racists past.

            His enablers on Capitol Hill are statuary themselves. Mitch McConnell's epitaph will be one of having crabgrass grow around his feet.

            Then there are Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz, both of whom once stood up to the man whose shoes they now shine. And you thought slavery had been abolished.

            The Republican Party is in a pickle because all it has to offer is Donald Trump and his statues.

            Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.