President Donald Trump came to political significance questioning the birth place of former President Barack Obama. I think few media outlets focused on this enough during the campaigns and, now that he is our president, it is only more sickening. His rise to prominence in our political atmosphere was racism and continues to be. Trump shows no shame or empathy and it may lead to an early impeachment.
President Trump has had a bad first week. The worst approval ratings for a week one commander in chief in modern American history, and it continues to plummet. He signs the Republican agenda into law, smiles, and rejects the fact that Obama had a bigger inauguration attendance. What should only concern a narcissistic fool concerns our president.
The man who, with a push of a button, could blow this country and world to dust, is more worried about his crowd size than leading the nation. During an interview with David Muir, who challenged him on the question of the inauguration and the wild accusations by Trump of mass voter fraud, Trump continued to lie boldly and without any hesitation.
His cronies go on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC to lie for him. Kellyanne Conway coined the Orwellian term “alternative facts” over the question of Sean Spicer’s disastrous press conference. Trump, who is at the head of the most powerful military force, most important economy and the power to turn around climate change, is simply so self-involved that we are becoming more infatuated with him as a character than we are the deadly plans the GOP wishes to implement.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced we are 30 seconds closer to the end of our species. The clock hasn’t been changed in over 60 years. There are reasons, aside from reproductive rights, that the Women’s March gathered together more than two million people to march against the raging totalitarianism of the right wing: this is life or death.
The Republican agenda has never been about freedom or liberty, it is about white rage and business elites propagating working and middle class citizens to hate change, to fear the potential good of government and to ignore the warnings of scientists. The war on science, women, the social safety net and minorities has been a long war, but the conservatives are now primed to win it. They hold all the branches of government and don’t have any intention of stopping the real threats we face as both a nation and a species.
President Trump is using executive power like most past presidents have done. The same orders Mitt Romney would’ve signed had he won in 2012, arrived onto Trump’s desk. The Republican donors usually don’t care who sits in the White House. It can be a B-list movie star, a mediocre one-term president, a C student out of Yale, or what we have now: a celebrity billionaire. Grover Norquist, a tax reform activist and influential voice in Washington said a few years ago, “We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it.”
This stuff will fundamentally change the operations of government. Paul Ryan’s budget plan is to destroy Social Security (possibly privatize), Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps. Ryan wants to further cut taxes on the wealthy and that burden will land on us. The Ryan plan will surely repeal Obamacare and they’ve had years to come up with a replacement. Where is it? Yeah Obamacare isn’t perfect, but it saves lives. End of story. We need to improve it, not voucherize it or do the risk pool scheme which doesn’t work.
Look at Trump’s nominees for the Department’s most powerful in government. We have billionaire Betsy Devos, who has spent her empire of money on charter schools in Michigan, spreading Christian extremism and funding gay conversion therapy. Sounds like a nice lady.
Next we have Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon Mobil. I thought we were at least supposed to pretend that exploiting other countries natural resources wasn’t our main foreign policy goal. From purely a climate change scenario this is worst case. Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change and Republicans, for the most part, support that.
Do we really need a Secretary of State who worked at the largest oil company in the world and is at the behest of someone like Trump? This spells disaster for many climate change initiatives, but not for the Koch Brothers and other billionaires.
Trump has shown little hesitance in supporting the Republican agenda or draining the swamp. He hired them as his cabinet and White House staff. The other nominees for Treasury and the EPA are there to destroy the department’s basic functions, not help it. It’s end of week one. The Women’s March is the best thing to happen for American politics in some time and Saturday night’s protests against the Muslim ban prove we are not reflective of our leaders. We are a decent country. We will carry on.