What a
mad, magically horrifying carpet ride it’s been so far. Trump might very well
be insane, is certainly showing himself to ill-prepared to lead the country,
more interested in watching TV and his own “ratings” than actually helping the
people who got him elected and is in the process of installing the most
right-wing government in the history of the nation. What more general
conclusions can we glean from the first 19 days of Trump-in-Charge?
With the Senate confirmation of Jeff Sessions (The
Hill), it appears Conservative America is even more racist than it was in
the 1986 and the Republicans plan to capitalize on racial animus among the
white working class, and maybe middle class, to levels not fully seen since the
Reagan years, if not earlier.
With the confirmation of Betsy Devos yesterday (NYT),
they appear to be replacing NCLB with MCLB (many children left behind) and
accelerating the insinuation of business interests and market forces into every
aspect of our lives.
With the seven-nation immigration ban (Doc
Cloud), they are scrapping the very heart of what America stands for - the
melting pot moving toward the clam chowder pot – and fulfilling a promise to
make America whiter, more Christian and less free.
With the constant lying and ceaseless attacks on
media, judges and really anyone who challenges their newfound power, including
protesters in Minnesota (WP,
NYT,
BBC, Daily
Kos), they are condemning not only the first amendment but democracy itself
to the dustbin of history. As David Frum argued in the new issue of The
Atlantic, the pieces are falling into place for a future American autocracy
led by a reality-star billionaire whose sole interests appear to be power,
wealth and popularity.
With many of his other cabinet picks, we are being
pushed even beyond the radical laissez-faire governance of libertarian-leaning
Tea Party apparatchik to one that is only interested in serving the interests
of corporations - a further step toward a Russian-style kleptocracy (Vanity
Fair). We have the potential to have a labor secretary who hates labor, an
EPA head who hates the environment, an Energy secretary who doesn’t believe his
department should exist, a head of HUD who knows nothing about housing or urban
development and a Secretary of State who has consistently chosen his corporate
interests over those of the country, to name but a few.
With the nominations of two architects of the 2008
financial crisis and recent executive order to set the stage for dismantling the
Dodd-Frank financial oversight bill (Fortune),
they appear to be poised to reward those who got us into that mess and set us
on a path toward another financial meltdown. As a reminder, during the
campaign, Trump said "I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with
murder." But now, he's working to gut the very rules that prevent that
from happening and, even more offensively, Trump signed a presidential
memorandum last Friday that instructs the Labor Department to delay
implementing an Obama-era rule that requires financial professionals who charge
commissions to put their clients' best interests first when giving advice on retirement
investments. God forbid!
With the sum total of the racist, sexist, Islamophobic,
heteronormative, fact-challenged rhetoric and rulings of Trump and the
Republican Congress, they are essentially attempting to mainstream the
alt-right as a new white-nationalist movement led by the white working class,
who will not benefit under this administration's policies, but can express
their rage openly and violently. They are attempting to instill fear and
hate as the path away from democracy and toward a permanent corporate state.
But that's not it. The Republican-led Congress are poised
to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission (Tech
Crunch), the very commission charged with protecting voting machines from
hacking, by say Russians ... or, I don't know, the GOP itself. They have already made corporate and
individual money easier to siphon to candidates through Citizens United and facilitated voter
suppression by stripping the Voting Rights Act of most of its power. Now
they are saying "hack us, I dare you." With Session in charge of the
Justice Department, gerrymandering set to become even more pronounced with
their majority control of state governance, voter suppression
on the rise and a firm commitment to avoiding a repeat of the 2012 Presidential
Election, where Obama won largely by getting out the minority vote, they can
continue to repeat results like 2016 – where Democrats won the majority of
votes for the presidency, the Senate and Congress, but lost all three.
These are dangerous times indeed and those who
voted for Trump must now answer for the choice they made, and those who didn’t
vote at all, for the choice they failed to make. Yet it must be remembered in
these dark times, that it was less than one in four Americans who selected
these men to lead us and that many more have taken to the streets, the air
waves and other channels of dissent to again have their voices heard and their
will enacted. The cornerstone of a representative democracy is that the
representatives in fact represent the interests of those who have chosen them
to rule, a tenet lost in the current, confused maelstrom in which we find
ourselves.
P.S. A few other tidbits are worth at least
touching on, as they provided further insight into our Commander-and-Thief.
Trump broke his own promise of less than a month ago by tweeting an attack on Nordstrom
for dropping his daughter's line (NYT),
right after a defense briefing he might want to pay attention to after the
debacle that was his failed offensive in Yemen (Yahoo).
This was a day after he called his defense secretary, of all people, at 3 a.m. to
ask an economics question (on a strong versus weak dollar) one assumed he would
know, given he made the argument that China has been manipulating our currency
for years a centerpiece of his campaign (The
Atlantic). And, finally, in maybe the most bizarre of stories within the spectacle-infused,
alternate-reality world we have inhabited for 19 days, the USDA quietly took
down all of its online information on animal abuse, including puppy breeders
that mistreat their dogs (WP). Yeah,
why should those upstanding Americans be harassed by government officials … or
future dog owners have any sense of where the animals they care for came from?
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