TRUMP SUPPORTERS VOTED AGAINST THEIR OWN INTERESTS

Yesterday, the Republican party proved something: they are a party that is great at opposing Democratic policies, but terrible at actually creating policies of their own.  Yes, after eight years of demonizing Obamacare and sending literally dozens of repeal bills to Barack Obama's desk for him to veto, the Republican party couldn't even get their own healthcare bill out of the House of Representatives.   The cracks in the party were readily apparent: the moderates didn't want to support a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would take healthcare away from over twenty million people, and that was opposed by every major health providing organization in the country, and the conservatives didn't feel that the bill went far enough(!).
 On the campaign trail, Donald Trump  said that the healthcare plan he would replace Obamacare with would cover everyone, let you choose your doctor and lower premiums (somehow he forgot to promise free unicorn rides to the doctor's office!).  Not surprisingly, just how he planned to pay for such a plan was not mentioned: his healthcare promises were about as vague as his promises to get Mexico to pay for a border wall.  It was also not surprising that the healthcare bill that Paul Ryan created in the house fell short of Trump's lofty goals, even as he openly supported it.
While I'm certainly glad that the bill went down to defeat, the contents of the bill say much about the party and the man who leads it.  Along with giving an enormous tax cut for the rich (the Republican solution to all of life's problems), the bill would make it harder for the old, the sick and the poor to afford healthcare.  A study by the Bloomberg political group found that most of the people who would benefit from the tax cut resided in cities that voted for Clinton, and that many of the people who would lose out the most from the bill  resided in counties that went for Trump.  This fact was brought up by conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson in an interview with Trump, who agreed that it was true, and then shrugged it off by saying "this is going to be negotiated."
Now let's compare the healthcare bill to the recently released Trump federal budget; while it takes a meat axe to the usual Republican targets like public broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts, it also included eliminating the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), an independent agency set up in 1965 “to address the persistent poverty and growing economic despair of the Appalachian Region.”  The same Appalachian region that turned out to vote for him in large numbers.  He also wants to get rid of the Economic Development Administration, an organization that in recent years has been trying to help out communities devastated by the closing of coal mines.  Again, the same communities that turned out to vote for him. Now to be fair, those two programs are a minuscule part of the budget, and he probably had no idea what they were of why they got cut (I'm going to assume that the actual writing of the budget was accomplished with very little input from him), but when the budget is combined with the healthcare bill, it looks like a double backstab aimed at the very people who voted for him.  Oddly, the president's biggest supporters should all be glad that the healthcare bill failed and that his budget will be altered by congress.
So what gives?  Why do so many poor and middle class white voters vote for candidates who try to pass legislation that doesn't benefit them, and may actually harm them?  Sadly, this tradition has long roots that reach to the days of slavery; back then, most white people who lived in the South did not  actually own slaves, and most of them were laborers who were forced to compete with slave labor; they would have actually benefited from slavery being abolished.  And yet, when the civil war began, those poor white Southerners were willing to fight and die for the right of the rich to have slaves because they were sold a bill of racial superiority; as free white men, they would always have more rights than slaves.  And what Trump said on the campaign trail, demonizing Mexican immigrants and Muslims, falls into that same tradition of racial superiority.  In fact,  I would argue that this racist theme is what pushed Trump over the top to victory in November.

Jared Taylor, Trump supporter, white supremacist, asshole

Consider that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are now 130 Klu Klux Klan groups, 100 White Nationalist groups, and 99 Neo Nazi groups, scattered around the US, mostly in the red states.  Now while these groups usually abstain from politics and abhor politicians, the Trump campaign absolutely energized them.  Just listen to Jared Taylor, a prominent white supremacist, talking to the New York Times: "I've never met him, and I cannot read his mind any better than you can.  But someone who wants to send home all illegal immigrants and at least temporarily ban Muslim immigrants is acting in the interest of whites, whether consciously or not."  Trump, naturally, repeatedly denies that he's racist, but that's hard to believe given the level of his campaign rhetoric and his appointment of Steve Bannon, a former editor of a white nationalist website, as a chief White House strategist.  It's undeniable that the Trump presidency is popular with most hate groups.  This popularity may explain why so many pollsters got the election wrong; polls are done with likely voters, not  with white supremacists who rarely show up to vote.  Now, am I saying that all sixty three million Trump voters are Klan members?  Of course not. But consider that  Taylor claims that his white supremacist website American Renaissance gets 300,000 unique views a month, and Stormfront, a similar site, claims to get the same number.  In an election as close as the last one, people in those kind of numbers, especially ones that don't normally show up to vote , may very well have lifted Trump to a win.  Much to our nation's disgrace.

DON'T GIVE EX PRESIDENTS A PASS

When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, the public pushed the song "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" to number two on the UK singles chart, and many people who opposed her reign were open in their lack of remorse.  Comparatively,  when disgraced former president Richard Nixon died in 1994, most Americans were either remorseful or silent; the fact that he committed crimes and resigned in disgrace was whitewashed to the point that he was simply called "controversial".  It appears that while America may never have had royalty, we are expected to respect the office of the president so much that ex presidents are treated that way, even criminal ones like Nixon.  Just look at how Ronald Reagan has been held up as some paragon of presidential greatness, with the fact that his administration  illegally sold weapons to Iran and then used the profits of those sales to fund an equally illegal war in Nicaragua almost never mentioned.  And Bill Clinton's near impeachment was mostly forgotten and ignored by the press until his wife started running for president, and even then it was hardly seen as an issue.
This is manifesting itself right now in the rehabilitation tour that former president George W Bush has been going on; in the past few weeks he's been popping up on talk shows, showing off his paintings (which really are awful looking), and laughing and joking around, promoting himself as some kind of lovable grandpa figure.  I find his self serving attempt to improve his image as utterly disgusting.
Has America forgotten that Bush led us into a an utterly disastrous war in Iraq based on charges of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda?  And how that war lead to the death of thousands of American soldiers, ten of thousands of Iraqi civilians and threw the region into such chaos that over ten years later the world is still dealing with the fall out from what was one of the worst foreign policy decisions in modern history? And what about the illegal wire tapping of Americans his administration carried out?  Not to mention water boarding and other torture techniques being used on terror suspects?  Is all that supposed to be forgotten because he's been out of office for awhile?  How short is the American memory?
The image that bothers me the most is of Bush visiting the Ellen DeGeneres show and clowning around with the host.  Has she forgotten that in 2004, Bush waged the most openly homophobic presidential campaign ever?  Why would an out lesbian who has pushed for gay marriage do a friendly, outright fawning interview with a president who repeatedly stated that he wanted an amendment barring gay marriage enshrined in the constitution?  And who packed the supreme court and the judiciary who judges who agreed with him?  She couldn't summon up the strength to ask him one tough question about all this?  Imagine Arsenio Hall giving a cute interview with David Duke!

History must not forget: when George W Bush left office, his approval ratings were lower than Nixon's during Watergate, in fact, his low ratings lasted longer than any other president ever.  We must remember not just the Iraq war and his opposition to gay rights, but also his pathetic response to hurricane Katrina, and, of course, the economic policies he supported that laid the groundwork for the biggest economic crisis since the depression.  When Trump haters look back on Bush's regime with nostalgia, they seem to forget all these things.  While I think Trump has all the potential to be an even worse president than Bush was,  he hasn't gotten there yet.  Bush wants to improve his image as a terrible president and somehow absolve himself from stumbling into a horrific war.  Let's not let him.

A BRIEF MOMENT OF SANITY

Last Tuesday President Donald Trump made his first official address to Congress, and the fact that he got through  a mostly positive speech without complaining about illegal voters or bragging incessantly was greeted with rapturous praise from much of the media: "he has pushed reset on his presidency", they exclaimed, "for the first time he seemed presidential" they gushed.  Amazingly, some of this praise came from the very media outlets that Trump had earlier described as enemies of the people!
Honestly, the reaction to him getting through a teleprompter speech that he probably didn't even write any of is very similar to first time parents gushing with praise as a toddler learns to walk.  Are the media so dispirited about the chaos and disorder surrounding the leader of the free world that they feel that any movement towards normalcy must be praised to the hills?  Has this country really sunk to the level of giving glowing media coverage to the president just for showing up?
The sad answer to that seems to be a resounding yes.  And just how long did Trump's reset of the presidency last?  Less than a week.  Yes, just  after giving a speech in which he said that it was time for the country to move beyond petty squabbles,  Trump entered into yet another one by embracing a conspiracy theory without proof on twitter, reverting to the same childish, whiny, bratty behavior he's shown since he first announced his candidacy.  At 4 AM this morning, Trump tweeted this:

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

Yes, the same man who held on to the idea that Barack Obama was not born in America for years, even after Obama's long form birth certificate was released, and who later accused Obama of being "the founder of ISIS", is now saying that the former president had Trump's  phones tapped during the election.  Just like his claim that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the last election, he offers no proof of this claim.  And once again, his official spokespeople are silent, scrambling to come up with some kind of reason for why the president would claim to believe something so crazy without evidence.
So why is he saying this?  Well, it's a conspiracy theory making the rounds in the conservative media that Trump is so fond of following, but like most conspiracy theories, it make little sense.  Sadly, we are now living in a country where its chief executive believes whatever he wants to believe and spreads absurd rumors to his followers without any verification.   And like we saw a few weeks ago when a lunatic shot up a pizza parlor because he believed a different conspiracy, they can have dangerous consequences.
And just for the record, it should be pointed out that the president is not just allowed to wire tap whomever he wants.  If Obama's justice department  did indeed wiretap Trump's phones, it could have only have been because they were able to obtain a warrant to do so by a judge.  Which means that there would have to be a compelling belief that criminal behavior was being conducted on those phones.  If Trump really thinks all of that happened, then is he admitting that there was reason for the government to believe that his campaign was up to something illegal.  So his childish attempt to lash out at Obama may just wind up drawing attention to the fact that his campaign may very well have been up to something, like, say, coordinating email leaks with the Russians during the campaign.  Will this latest crazy tweet wind up turning around and biting him?  Well, Trump seems to be a man who can't shoot himself in the foot no matter how much he tries; sadly, it will probably fade into the fog of crazy that he has been projecting now for months. Somehow,  time and time again, he gets away with saying and doing things that would sink any other politician.  Hopefully, someday his lies will stick to him.

Two sides of the Same Coin?

A new president comes into power, marking a definite change from the previous one, sparking protests nationwide, that spill over into loud, almost violent town hall meetings with members of congress.  Am I talking about the Trump administration?  Yes, but I could also be talking about what happened in 2009 when the so called Tea Party movement targeted President Obama and the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Above are two pictures: one of the Tea Party in 2009, the other taken less that a month ago.  Although the signs may be different, the anger is the same.  In fact, the similarities are striking: in 2009, rumors were spread by Democrats saying that the Tea Party was funded mostly by the conservative billionaire Koke Brothers, now Republicans are saying that Anti-Trump protestors are being paid by progressive billionaire George Soros.   Both sides embrace the expression "not my president", as if a president they disagree with is somehow invalid.  Both sides often not so subtly use Nazi imagery in making their point against whomever they disagree with.   And just as some people in Texas flirted with the idea of seceding from the country during the Obama years, now California is considering the same thing under Trump.
As a progressive myself, I know which side my sympathies lie with, but the anger both sides express reveals a sad, bitter truth about just how divided this country is.  Progressives and conservatives now live in not only separate red and blue states, but separate communities within those states.  And the media they consume only echoes their own feelings about the world.  It is entirely possible in the US to encase oneself in a cocoon in which only people you agree with ever enter, except for a few angry holiday dinners.
Americans have to accept one undeniable fact: however you voted in the last presidential election, over sixty million of your fellow countrymen voted in the opposite  direction.  It's become a cliche for news reporters to say this, but it's true: we are a deeply divided nation, in fact the divide right now has not been this strong since the Civil War.  While clearly the notions of outright warfare or California succeeding are extreme, it does often seem that red states and blue states contain people with such radically different world views that nation wide unification on many important issues is almost impossible.
So what can we do?  Well,  part of the reason Trump won is the fear of white Americans of the demographic changes the country is going through, which will eventually result in white people no longer making up over fifty percent of the country.  (Yes, even if Trump gets his wall and deports eleven million people, it will still happen).    What is going on now in the US  may be a repeat of what happened in the state of California in 1995, when Governor Pete Wilson strongly ran against immigration, running race baiting political TV ads about undocumented immigrants that Trump echoed in his campaign.  While Wilson won his reelection, the backlash against the Republican party was so strong in the state that now Democrats run almost all the wheels of power.  So, it appears that time is on the side of progressives, with America slowly but surely turning to the left as older white conservatives die off, to be replaced by a more diverse and progressive generation.  Looked at this way, the Trump victory will probably be remembered as the last gasp of the older white Americans fighting the inevitable.

THE WHEELS ARE FLYING OFF

While I intensely disagree with almost everything Donald Trump stands for as both a political figure and a human being, I will give him his due and admit that he was right about one thing in his campaign: his unlikely march to the White House is a lot like the recent English vote on Brexit.  Like that vote, Trump went into election day an underdog and came out an unlikely winner, surprising the world and making many voters wonder what kind of country they were living in the next day.  Sadly, there are even more similarities: both campaigns were full of exaggerations, and outright lies, and both won out  on the votes of working class whites and their fear of immigrants and refugees.  And just like how many pro Brexit voters are admitting to now having buyer's remorse, many pro Trump voters are realizing that an unexperienced man who promised to "shake things up" in Washington may not be the best person to run this, or any country.
Yep, Trump has now been president for less than a month, and it feels like years to many of us.  While any presidential transition can expect some turbulence, especially when it involves a switch in party affiliation, Trump's transition has resulted in chaos.  It's so jolting to move from the cool, professional Obama administration to this drunken herd of elephants led by a lying narcissist! From the craziness of his foreign travel ban, to spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway violating ethics laws by openly advertising for his daughter's product line on television, to him still maintaining that somehow millions of illegal immigrants voted in the election, it's hard to believe he's barely into his first term.

 Today Andrew Puzder, his controversial choice for Labor Secretary, withdrew his name from nomination due to serious questions about his hiring of an undocumented immigrant as a maid, among other things.  And that's not even a big deal; the big deal is that Micheal Flynn, who had been appointed to be National Security Advisor, had to step down after only days in the post due to a possibly illegal phone call he made to Russia before he was a member of the Trump administration. The fact that Flynn, who led chants of "lock her up" about Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention, may himself be locked up, could be a delicious piece of irony.  And it  may just be the tip of the iceberg; new evidence has arisen showing that members of the Trump campaign were communicating with Russia during the campaign, although it is uncertain what that communication was about.  Could the Trump people have been conspiring with Russia on the release of embarrassing emails that Russian hackers obtained from the Democratic National Committee?   It's possible that we have a president who won by coordinating his campaign with a foreign power to give it an electoral advantage.  It may even be possible that Russia is pushing Trump to end sanctions that the Obama administration put in place by blackmailing him with wire tapped recordings of his recent trips to Russia, which may be  embarrassing, or even criminal.  Or it may just  be that his still unreleased tax returns would reveal  enormous economic dealings with Russia, dealings that would be put in jeopardy if he didn't end the sanctions.
Although getting a Republican majority congress to open investigations into what could be impeachable (and outright treasonous!) actions by Trump may not be easy, some are getting the message, like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.  Remember, when Trump started winning primary victories at the start of his campaign, there was a general belief that he would do irreparable harm to the Republican party.  Once he surprisingly won, the party generally seemed pleased to have one of their own in the White House, but  given his insane first month,  he still may destroy the party.  Sadly, now he could take the whole damn country with it!

WELL, THAT WAS FAST

It is generally believed that the first 100 days of a new presidency  is a real make or break period, in which a generally positive feeling from the public combines with new cabinet members to make some real changes in both the country and the world.  If that's true, the next 90 days are going to be hellish.
Donald Trump spent the first week of his presidency lying about the size of his inauguration, attacking the media, and lying about how he would have won the popular vote if millions of  undocumented  immigrants hadn't illegally voted.  (While defending that last claim, Sean Spicer, the president's press secretary, was reduced to saying the president "believes what he believes", without any proof whatsoever.)
He also signed a number of executive orders (while Republicans who once attacked Obama for signing such orders were strangely silent).  Most of them passed with some debate in the media but there was not a lot of outcry; and then came last Friday when the president signed an  order entitled "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States".   And with that, ten days into his presidency, with all the dignity of a hippopotamus trying to tap dance, Trump  hit his first Constitutional crisis.
The order indefinitely suspends the resettlement of Syrian refugees, and temporarily bans all people from seven mostly Muslim countries from entering the US.  One of the worst of many lies that Trump stated on the campaign trail was the notion that refugees from Syria were not being vetted before entering the country; they are, in fact, heavily vetted in a process that lasts over a year.  And now many of them, who are literally fleeing for their lives, are having the door to safety shut in their face. Just how far this ban extends has already become debatable, with green card holders initially shut out, and then later allowed.  Trump has said it not about religion, but the fact that it makes exceptions for Christians from those banned countries shows what a lie that is.  It's also mysterious that of the seven countries that are banned, none of them have any ties to Trump's economic empire, but countries that do have such ties  are not on the list.  Saudi Arabia, for example, where 18 of the 19  terrorists that attacked us on 9/11 came from, is not  on the list; according to the New York Times, recent financial disclosures showed that Trump had several limited liability corporations there.  What could possibly be worse about this order?  How about that it was signed at the behest of White House Advisor Steve Bannon, the former editor of Breitbart News, an "alt right" white supremacist web site.
It should also be pointed out that this order is terrible even when the war on terror is considered: this kind of divisive, America against all Muslims move plays into the very West Vs. Middle East ideas promoted by ISIS and other terrorist groups, aiding their recruitment.  If America is ever going to win the war or terror, it can only be done with the help of Muslims standing up to terrorism with us.  This order alienates many potential allies.
On Saturday, a federal judge ruled that people already in airports in the US  could not be deported, but the ruling stopped short of taking on the very Constitutionality of the order.  Legal challenges will inevitably continue, and hopefully the whole thing will be thrown out.  Also, the chaos of the order has lead to enormous protests taking place in airports nationwide; this marks the second massive protest against President Trump only ten days into his first term.  And I say, keep up the pressure America.   Let the world know that our president does not speak for all of us.

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!