NO SURPRISE

President Trump's advisor Kellyanne Conway recently gave an interview in which she defended him by coining an interesting term:"alternative facts," as in, you have your reality with your set of truths, and we have ours. Alternative facts could be the perfect term for Trump's entire political career.  While anyone who thinks they can be president has to have a sizable ego, It's clear that Trump's is so big that when he believes something to be real, he honestly thinks it must be, evidence be damned.  So if his inauguration had less people than Obama's, he can just say that the media is lying about it and leave it at that.   This  worldview has some frightening ramifications; in his inauguration address he painted a view of America in "carnage", wracked with violence and unemployment.  Even though violent crime is mostly down in this country, and unemployment is also low, his unrealistic,  almost apocalyptic view of the country means we may be in for an increase in tough on crime laws that could swell our already bloated prison population, combined with roll backs of "job killing" environmental  regulations that will make our air and water less clean and contribute to climate change.
And that's just of the tip of the iceberg that he could be steering us into; Trump clearly intends to be the same kind of president that he was a candidate.  Which means he will lie, insult and boast constantly, which was bad enough before, but now that he has the biggest military in the world behind him, could bring disaster on a global scale (his apocalyptic world view could become a reality!). Honestly, the best thing we can hope for with him is that his well documented short attention span will keep him from focusing too much on one thing, and that he will spend most of his time giving speeches in front of adoring crowds or engaging in pointless twitter wars with celebrities, while his more mature cabinet members (extreme conservatives  though they may be) actually engage in running the country.    It's depressing to think that former Exxon CEO and soon to be secretary of state Rex Tillerson may be all that stands between America and World War III, but here we are.

If anything positive can come from Trump's victory, it's that he has united and enraged the world against him; last weekend saw the women's march against Trump bring in what might have been the biggest protest in American history, with thousands more marching in cities like London, Paris and Berlin.  Let's hope this anger doesn't dissipate; really, what the left needs to do is what the Tea Party group did so effectively against Obama back in 2010: outspoken protest combined with electing congressional candidates who pledge to keep the president in check.  If they can somehow claim a mandate against a president who won the popular vote, then certainly the left can against one who didn't!