Donald Trump’s anger might not take him any further

When I was a kid, I had a bad temper. I suppose in today’s psychobabble, they would say I had an “anger-management issue” and perhaps they would give me drugs, a handicapped parking pass, and special privileges. But back in the day, I was just a kid with a temper.

One summer day when I was about 11, when my parents weren’t home, my brother and sister locked me out of the house for reasons I don’t remember (but they were probably good ones).

A back door to the house was sliding glass. This was before modern safety glass or double-pane windows. It was a simple un-tempered sliding glass door.

In a fit of anger, I kicked it. Not just with my toe, but with a big round-house kick. It felt good to see it tremble and shake, so I did it again, harder.

It broke. Sheets of jagged glass fell straight across my extended leg. I was wearing shorts.

I was lucky the glass didn’t cut my leg off. As it was, a big razor-sharp glass sheet penetrated well over an inch into my calf through a four-inch incision. In the gaping wound, I could see the fat layer and, beneath it, the red muscle tissue. I screamed in horror and pain.

My sister grabbed a towel, and we threw it around my leg. She ran across the street to ask a neighbor for help. I limped to his car and he casually chatted as he drove me to the ER. When I emerged from surgery an hour later, the neighbor was white, for he’d been told in the meantime about the severity of my injury.

Fortunately, the glass missed the artery, though there was plenty of blood. It did cut a nerve to my foot and left me without feeling on one side of my foot for a few months. To this day, that side of my foot has a funky sensation.

That evening, my father came home from work as usual.

Father: “I hear your temper got the best of you today.”

Me: “Yeah.”

That was it, and we never spoke of it again. I still lose my cool occasionally – most men do – but that’s the last time I can remember that my anger drove me into doing something dangerously stupid.

Anger is a powerful force. Channeled strategically by high-testosterone men storming the beaches of Normandy, it can save the world. Used less-strategically, it can destroy it – and them.

There’s a place for anger in politics. Like a lot of people today, I’m angry. Like a lot of people today, I want to kick the glass doors of our government, media, universities, and big businesses for their censorship, their racial discrimination, their wokeness, their antisemitism, and their incompetence.

Like a lot of people today, I like a candidate who feels similar anger. That’s why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016, again in 2020, and will again in 2024. He’s angry about the right things for the right reasons.

But anger has its limits. The boys storming Normandy had anger, and they sure as hell kicked in the glass door of Hitler’s house, but they weren’t just kicking a glass door.

Those boys also had a careful plan that was devised over months of thought, analysis and discussion by brilliant professionals like General Dwight D. Eisenhower. There were plans, counterplans, contingency plans, a retreat plan, and even a failure plan. Eisenhower himself drafted a mea culpa taking complete responsibility for the effort in case it failed.

Donald Trump has done a ton of good for America, but his anger is reaching the limits of its effectiveness. On Tuesday, he seemed to be kicking glass doors that weren’t even locked.

That appeals to a lot of people, including me in some circumstances. But it turns off women, who are often frightened by a man’s anger. And it turns off unengaged independent and moderate voters. You may despise such people, but they’re the ones who decide elections.

I’ll vote for Trump again, as I’ve already said. But I don’t expect him to win, and I don’t expect any Eisenhower-type mea culpa from him when he loses. Anger has its limits.