Dear America,
Here's the problem with the prospect of Donald Trump as a president, and it is the quintessence of the man. Yesterday, Trump took time off from campaigning for the presidency of the United States--mind you, he is behind in all of the credible polls and is slipping all the while, but he claims that he wants the office because he wants to serve the people of the country, whom he says are not being served now--so that he could promote his Doral Golf Resort and his new Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. That is a problem in itself, but it isn't the problem of which I speak. While at Doral, he brought some of his employees from the club up to the microphone to tout him, and as the last of them left the stage he said that a great many of them were having real problems with Obamacare, the premiums for which are going to be rising by an average of 25% or so next year according to Obama administration officials. He was seizing on the news of the morning, but after he left the stage, the manager of the facility got up. Actually, he told the crowd, 95% of the personnel at the club were covered by insurance that the club provided as their employer. In other words, at most 5% of Trump's Doral employees could be having problems of any kind with Obamacare, but even that would be a stretch. Most likely, the people who got up to speak, if they were among that 5% to which the manager referred, were hourly workers: food preparers and servers, dish washers, grounds keepers and the like...all hourly workers. And those people--people who earn by the hour and tend to be among the working poor--get subsidies from the federal government under the Affordable Care Act...Obamacare...and thus pay no more than $75 per month, if that.
Just in case the facts don't speak for themselves, this was another instance of what could be called Trump's political hyperbole if you were inclined to be kind to him, but are actually bald-faced misrepresentations predicated on myths that he is trying to proliferate for personal gain, that is, so that he can put "President of the United States of America" on his resume. If you are reading this, you probably aren't among the people who have fallen for Trump's peremptory claims, but millions of people have, just because they refuse to hear anything that is the adverse of what they chose to believe, and I understand that to a large extent. When I hear that some supply-side shill is refusing to pay his employees because they are illegal just because they can't do anything about it or he is declaring his company bankrupt so that it can expunge debt incurred by paying him a big lump sum for using his name, I want to believe it too, and it is usually with reluctance that I go to the internet to research it. But I do research it, and I do it thoroughly, that is, I don't rely on Breitbart or Shawn Hannity type sources. I look for information from neutral sources that are generally reputable, not just reputable among the partisan elite. Just as I don't accept the pro-Trump panegyrics of the reactionary media like Drudge, I don't accept the contrived screeds of the radical media, like Rachel Maddow, either. No Rachel Maddow. No Ann Coulter either. But Trump supporters don't really care about confirming the truth because after all, if Trump says, "believe me, folks," they have an obligation to believe. If he says it, it must be true.
I compared Trump to Hitler and Stalin a couple of days ago, so there's no point in doing so again, but I think it is important to be sure that everyone knows who everyone else is. There are those of us who want to know the truth and those of us who only want to know what we want the truth to be. Commensurately, there are those among our political class who want you to believe that they speak the truth, even if they don't, and there are those who at least make the effort to be truthful in the hope that you'll believe them. I didn't like a good bit of what Barrack Obama did as president, mostly because he didn't do enough of it. But I always believed that he was telling me the truth as best he could. George W. Bush however, I liked almost none of what he did, and I often thought he was just telling us what he wanted to be the truth for his own purposes. Remember the WMD's in Iraq? And there's the rub. There's the problem with Donald Trump as president as indicated by his false statement at Doral. This guy is willing to say anything, and to exaggerate it too if it serves him. As to whether he knows what he says to be truthful or not, he is less than cavalier about that...about as cavalier as he was to those women he groped, if you'll excuse a metaphor switched in mid-stream...twice now.
Let me put it this way. There are liars and then there are liars. Some liars point to others and say, "he did it." That's just self-serving, misguided and illicit self-preservation. But others say that a great many of their employees are having enormous trouble with a program that has reduced the number of the uninsured to the lowest number on record. That's self-serving, devious and dastardly: a whole different ball of...wax.
Your friend,
Mike
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