Grudge Hollow

   The address formerly known as 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington D.C. may now be known as Grudge Hollow, a place where people contract a condition where they forget everything but their grudges.
   When a president suffers from this condition, the result can be a hollowing out of the government he leads, so chaos will reign over what should be a smoothly running system that benefits all the people and not just the few cloistering for the president's favors.
   Moreover, the number of high level government officials who have been fired and not replaced, plus the many others who have rejected offers of positions in the Trump administration now exceeds one hundred. This decimates the management of the nation's actions and responsibilities, leaving a hollow shell dominated by a single person who insists the system is broken and "Only I can fix it."
   The reality is that he broke it, and has shown no ability to repair what he himself has broken. Unless he has some longer term plan to run the government by himself, with the help of a few devoted flunkies.
   As for holding grudges, whether real or imagined, here are some recent examples:
   Some 30 years ago, the National Football League foiled a bid by Donald Trump to buy a team franchise after his own startup league went under. This may explain why he has criticized players for kneeling during the National Anthem. As a result of this criticism, most of the players on the championship Philadelphia Eagles team turned down an invitation to visit the White House. It turns out that none of the Philly players took a kneel all season. And those players on other NFL teams did so as protest against police bias and mistreatment of minority people. Patriotism, or a lack of it,  had nothing to do with the protest movement.
   And in a telephone conversation with the prime minister of Canada, the president defended his tariffs on Canadian steel by saying, "Didn't you burn down the White House in 1812?" Those with a little knowledge of history know that it was troops of the British army that burned the building, not Canadians. In fact, Canada did not exist as a separate country until 1867. Incidentally, the burning was in 1814.
   Finally, Donald Trump's attacks on Amazon, with his threat to order the U.S. Postal Service to sharply increase the company's shipping costs, can be traced to the idea that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post, a frequent critic of the president's policies.
   Ignorance may be bliss in some circumstances, but when the leader of a powerful nation regularly shows a monumental ignorance of history, politics, economics and many other issues, it's time to question his competence and fitness for office.