Dear America,
I'm so sick of hearing about Donald Trump that I haven't been able to sit down to write about him too, thus polluting the public conscious even further. But what he has said and done over the past couple of weeks has been so outrageous as to defy my effort to keep mum. There have been so many instances of his outrageous conceit, his self-serving vindictiveness, his grandiosity, his boastfulness, his paranoia and his generally despicable nature that I hardly know where to begin.
Working backwards chronologically, as best as I can recall, let's start with his rebuke of the WHO. I don't know if there is any reason to give credence to the claim Trump has made that the World Health Organization has been deferential to China regarding the Corona virus pandemic--one never knows because Trump just pontificates, he doesn't prove--but I seriously doubt it. It seems to me that the WHO has been cautionary since the pandemic started, warning the world about it's menace and danger. And then there's Trump's claim that Obama was an incompetent president. Obama handed over to Trump eight years worth of economic expansion, and unemployment rate that he had presided over reducing from close to 10% to about 4.5%, and a standing in the world that hasn't been equaled since Trump took office and started spewing his disdain for anyone who isn't him. We weren't fueling the Saudi war in Yemen with billions of dollars worth of weapons, there was a nuclear weapons agreement in place in Iran and we were committed to the worldwide effort to curtailing global warming. The Affordable Care Act was being used more and more frequently by people without other insurance options and the ranks of the uninsured were being reduced in every open season for the ACA exchanges. In fact, had it not been for Republican litigation to destroy the ACA--"ObamaCare" as it's known--Medicaid would have been expanded in every state too. But despite nearly a decade of promises from Republicans, no alternative to Obamacare has ever passed even a Republican controlled house of our congress.
Trump on the other hand, who has now compared himself to Lincoln, gave us a tax cut that did more for the haves than it did for the have-nots, he presided over deregulating business with regard to the pollutants that it can pour into our atmosphere, degraded our standing in the world, withdrew us from both the Paris Accords regarding climate change and the Iran nuclear deal, the latter still adhered to by the other six powers that prevailed upon Iran to restrain itself in the development of a nuclear weapon, and to top it all off, he insisted that Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel Corona virus was no worse than the flu and would burn itself out so no serious measures were merited. And he didn't remit until the entire world, including all of the scientists in it, pointed out to him that he was so wrong that he looked like an idiot...which he is despite his claims that he is a "stable genius" (no actual stable genius ever felt the need to proclaim such to the world). Now, despite doctors' warnings that it is dangerous, he is profylacticly taking a medicine that can cause serious, if not lethal, heart problems and implying to the world that it should follow suit. As usual, science be damned; let superstition rule. And on top of it all, setting aside the deficit represented by the economic relief bills passed by congress, he has run up a national deficit that was around $400 billion when he took office and would have exceeded $1 trillion for the 2019-20 fiscal year with his tax cut, which he insisted would pay for itself. It didn't and won't.
Yet, with all these counter-indications of not just incompetence and deceit but outright lying--despite his and his party's constant dissembling and inept rationalization toward the end of perpetuating the trickle down theory by which they excuse avarice and callousness toward all those who actually do the work that makes our country rich--about 30% of our electorate still actually plan to vote for Trump again. Southern politicians are often saying what sounds like profundity to them: "You can't fix stupid." Someone should ask them, who are the stupid ones.
Your friend,
Mike
