Trump, widely designated ‘a fucking moron’, still standing tall on his hind legs
Of all the images, cartoons, and photos of Trump in his first year, this wins the Gropers of the World first prize. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and Melania and Donald Trump, with a globe in the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in Riyadh, May 2017.
After Trump’s first year on the job, actually most of it on the golf course, a fair percentage of the world’s 7.6 billion people now see that neither knowledge, understanding, compassion, nor concern for the planet press his buttons. We can only hope that he doesn’t press the button, and kill untold millions of us, which he’s odds on to do.
This crooked real estate moocher entered the White House with no plan other than to undo every socially useful thing President Obama did, and be his bullying self. He gave top jobs in his administration to people who’d given him campaign money, also to people who promised to demolish the agencies he hired them to manage (eg climate change denier Scott Pruitt to run the EPA, into the ground), and to fellow business alpha-males like ex-boss of Exxon-Mobil Rex Tillerson who knew jack shit about affairs of state, to be Secretary of State.
Numerous Trump first round picks soon quit or were fired or indicted, and to take their places in marched a clutch of retired generals from the mad dog end of the military spectrum. Trump likes these shoot-first guys but they know as little about politics and policy as Trump does. So now the void in planning and policy has been filled by a club of multi-billionaires who share a devotion to replacing government for the people with government for corporations and very wealthy individuals. Trump’s happy to let them wreck the social system and cut his and their taxes.
How nuts are his mates?
Trump’s cohort are on a mission not just to end America’s experiment with incorporating liberal values into their political and legal systems, but to shut down most of the ideas of the Enlightenment: secularism, egalitarianism, inherent rights, and universal anything. And now, in this post-Harvey Weinstein era, comes the ultimate threat, the apotheosis of political correctness, it’s name is “ending the patriarchy”. This must be slain with monstrous lances of the hottest steel by a mighty warrior, and buffoon Trump is their man.
“He’s tough! He’s a killer! I want a killer as president!” shouted Corey Lewandowski, the President’s ex-campaign manager, on US ABC network talk show The View last week. “You do?” said the interviewer, Joy Behar. “Absolutely!” Lewandowski roared, “I want to make sure that we are the toughest, greatest in the world and that we are safe,”
The breadth and depth of disillusionment and disgust with these bozos is almost at the tipping point, where Washington’s warring factions will find a way to tip Trump out of town. But then what?
What is to be done?
“The Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history.” – Ralph Nader, lifelong defender of American citizens against persecution by corporations and government.*
The Democratic Party is divided between the Clintonites and the ‘left’. The Clinton party is pro-mega-corporations, but also more generous than Republicans are toward the poor, women, ethnic and racial minorities, and immigrants. This branch of the Dems backed away from labor unions, peace-seekers, and serious environmentalists and gender reformers in the 1980s, because they figured that their only way they could get enough money to win elections was if they took donations from corporations – whom they would have to be generous to once in government.
Now the Clintonites are reeling from Hillary’s defeat and Bill’s no-longer-defendable sex history, but the ‘left’ or progressive side of the Dems is fractured – and frozen out of the corporate media. Progressives don’t have the numbers or a strategy to take over the Party.
All this is obscured by more immediate news-magnets like sexual predation, same sex marriage, and Russians hacking Hillary’s emails, and by Trump himself, a useful idiot distracting the media and the masses with his rants about trade – “You foreigners will pay now that I’m America’s dealmaker” (they won’t; he’s not) -- and his wall.
Even if special prosecutor Robert Mueller assembles enough charges to dump Trump, the “resistance” still has to get Americans to register and vote to end Republican rule.
Bob Borosage, who has been fighting for The People since I first met him in the 70s, names a handful of Democrats who are on the ball: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, Keith Ellison, and Pramila Jayapal, and movement groups Our Revolution, People’s Action, Black Lives Matter, Indivisible, MoveOn, plus a “tide of energized women voters” — all of whom might help the Dems win one or both houses of Congress next November.
But both the Clinton Dems and indefatigable lefties like Borosage are unable to see what the problem is, so they can’t find a solution, let alone craft a mission.
I suggest that no country, not the USA nor Australia, nor any other nation, should be run by a bunch of businessmen, and yet they are – we are. Yes most elite politicians and government managers have law degrees but their habitat is the skyscrapers and white papers of big business. They need to be replaced by nurses, teachers, tradies, geeks, shopkeepers and shoplifters. There’s a mission for us all – how do we make it happen?
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* Disclosure statement: Phillip Frazer was a consultant on Ralph Nader’s Green Party presidential campaign in 2000 so his political judgments should be seen in that light. Read more of them here at coorabellridge.com