Here we are, 11 days into a new president and his administration and you would think the world has been knocked off its axis. Things we thought we knew and things we took for granted like a certain level of civility among the professional political crowd has been disappearing for some time...and now seems to be totally gone.
Did the sun rise in the East this morning? I do not know; I have not seen the sun in several days.
We used to welcome immigrants because we are a country of immigrants. We now have a president that has banned immigrants of one religion from seven countries, none of which, by the way, among those with whom he does business.
None of their residents or citizens have inflicted terrorist acts on the United States, but they are on the list, anyway. On the other hand, the one country that was proven to have 11 of 19 hijackers on that fateful day, September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia, is not on the infamous List of Seven.
Of course, the reason that country is not on the list is that the president has business relations with them and they still produce a whole lot of our oil. Bad idea to piss them off.
Yet no matter how violent their citizens, no matter how extremist and antiquated their legal system, no matter how much they ignore basic human rights - things we used to support back when - no matter how far their efforts go to fund and push extremist Muslim beliefs worldwide go, irritating the Saudi royal family is not a good thing for Trump. He is all about Trump and would stand to lose a lot of money. He does not care about what happens to the American middle class or the cost of gas we pour into our gas-guzzling vehicles or even his own family. He does not care about Melania or Barron or being president.
He only cares about Donald J. Trump.
He now has more power than any one man in the world, in addition to his money. He has stacked his own National Security Council with his insiders as he has stacked his incoming Cabinet with professional billionaires, Wall Street insiders, military generals, and others with no governmental experience at any level.
He says he want to "drain the swamp."
But instead of depending on the counsel of his appointed department heads to do anything like "drain the swamp," he relies, as he always has, on a very small, very tight group of insiders, including his own son-in-law, to do what he wants. He sees himself as the CEO of a large company called the United States and he expects his underlings to do his bidding, right or wrong, legal or illegal, factual or alternative factual. Without question or delay. Or hesitation.
That got him into a bit of heat - which he loves and attention he craves - when he fired an acting head of the Justice Department, a former Obama Administration appointee who was kept on, after she failed to tow his line on a Draconian immigration prohibition policy that was written by his insiders and, strangely enough, senior staff of congressional representatives, without having the new ban vetted by experts who know what they're doing.
If there was ever an indication of the need for spiritual rebirth, this is going to be yet another one for us. We lived through the 1960's, when people in the United States rebelled against war and the politicians who created them and we survived - barely - a president who committed criminal acts and became the only president in United States history to resign in disgrace.
Much of what Trump is doing is now being compared to three people in history: Andrew Jackson, a president very much like Trump; Richard Nixon, a president who was a paranoid and distrustful as Trump; and Adolph Hitler, a man who seized power through a one-man coup and who, in my view, committed acts and came to power in ways very akin to the actions that Trump is taking.
I think it is a time to be afraid.
No comments:
Post a Comment