So, I hear you voted for Trump, eh? Well, there’s no way I can possibly fathom why you made that choice – I’m sure you had your reasons. But I just wanted you to stop for a moment and consider what you accomplished in voting for Donald J. Trump. Look at what he’s done in just the first 50 days of his presidency:
- Trump has pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, an international group vital in monitoring and preventing outbreaks of disease worldwide (not that that ever happens, right?)
- Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, making it almost certain that the planet will not reach its target of less than 1.5 C warming by 2030 and thus plummeting the world into a non-stop global warming pattern and an ever increasing number of environmental catastrophes in the coming years. My advice, get one of those little nomad vehicles and plan on moving around a lot in the future.
- Trump has pardoned criminals who attacked the Capitol Building, assaulted police officers, destroyed property, and threatened the orderly transfer of presidential power. Nothing like a convicted felon pardoning other criminals!
- Trump has appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a vaccine-skeptic, to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. He has proposed using cod liver oil to treat a measles epidemic in Texas. See my blog post on this.
- Trump has appointed Pete Hegseth, a former co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend, as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth faced allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and alcohol issues leading up to his committee confirmation. Sure, just the person we want to have in close proximity to our nuclear arsenals.
- Trump has abolished DEI programs (Diversity-Equity-Inclusion) in all governmental programs. This will have untold effects on government employees who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, or who otherwise don’t fit the ”normal white heterosexual” template that Trump uses as a default for his model of humanity. He’s proposed eliminating or limiting hundreds of words in government documents such as: ”antiracist” ”biased” ”indigenous community” ”Native America” ”multicultural” ”disability””victims” ”climate science” and many more. It would be nice if someone would take all these words and create an epic poem on the dystopia that Trump is in the process of creating.
- Trump has established a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and assigned a neophyte non-U.S. citizen with no experience in governmental policy, [Elon Musk], to gut agency budgets and fire employees in a wide range of governmental offices. Today it was announced that Musk was being given access to secret plans on a potential war with China in the future. Maybe that’s why those Tesla trucks look like armored tanks (though I hear that they’re falling apart!).
- Trump has announced plans to eliminate the Department of Education and leave all education decisions to the states, who vary widely in their commitment to children’s learning. Plan to see taxpayer dollars flow into schools that teach Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
- Trump has frozen foreign aid to fifty countries around the world, pausing deliveries of life-saving medicines to remote rural clinics, and abruptly cutting off support for thousands of HIV patients and sexual violence survivors. Trump is killing these people even as we speak!
- Trump has repealed a task force aimed at reuniting migrant families split apart by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcemennt (ICE). Just as the Nazi’s split apart families at the entrance to Auschwitz, we’ve been doing the same thing (without the mass slaughter) to our immigrant kids.
- Trump has sought to revoke birthright citizenship for immigrant children born in the U.S. They were born on U.S. land, so they have to go? Is that right? Elon Musk wasn’t born on American soil. So why does he get to stay (and despoil the land)?
- Trump has proposed annexing territory belonging to other sovereign nations, including the Panama Canal, Greenland, the Gaza Strip, and even the entire country of Canada. The entire country of Canada? You’ve got to be kidding! Hey, this isn’t funny anymore (it never was). I was a landed immigrant myself in Canada at one time.
- Trump has declared that the U.S. will not participate in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and instructed the secretary of state to terminate the office of the U.S. representative to the UNHRC and other related positions. Participate in a Human Rights Council? Oh no, you wouldn’t want to do that! Human rights might interfere with your priorities in arming savage nations to attack defenseless communities (no names, please).
- Trump has ended aid to South Africa as long as it continues “unjust and immoral practices” against Afrikaners Weren’t these Afrikaners the same white people responsible for apartheid and the harsh repression of its black citizens from 1948 to 1994? Elon Musk [a South African with British and Afrikaner roots] must be happy about this one!
- Trump has paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American individuals and companies from bribing foreign governments to obtain or retain business. I guess this means that Trump will have a little more leeway in his business dealings (of which I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot about in the next few years).
- Trump plans to enact huge tariffs on our neighboring countries (Mexico and Canada), China, and other nations, thereby endangering the free trade policies that have led to an unparalleled financial surge across the globe since WWII. ”Four thousand dollars for that sculpture of Quetzalcoatl to celebrate our wedding anniversary? No way, Jose!”
- Trump has established a ”reserve” of ”bitcoins” to help protect the U.S. against financial turbulence. Oh yah, recession hits the country and let’s all troupe over to the Dollar Store and crank out some invisible coins from the empty money machine there!
- Trump has suspended federal payments of hundreds of millions of dollars to Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and other major research institutions who fail to follow his prejudices concerning Palestinian activism, transgender athletes, and who knows what else. The cuts to Johns Hopkins alone (eight hundred million dollars) will have an untold negative impact on the health programs and medical research for which it has served as a world leader. Sorry, Joe, but Trump just put the kybosh on that heart transplant you’ve got scheduled at the Johns Hopkins hospital. But here’s a Valentine’s candy heart as a personal gift from Trump himself!
- Trump has sided with Putin, Russia’s harsh autocrat, in the Ukraine war, seeking to undermine the efforts of the Ukraine army to win a long and painful war so as to profit from the country’s resources in minerals. He publically humiliated Volodymyr Zelenskyy on national TV in the U.S. as part of his efforts to achieve his aims. That send a message to our NATO friends that don’t have their back in any future Putin military adventures.
- Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in an order to remove unauthorized immigrants with little due process of the law. Look for more of these ‘little used laws” to gradually take our freedoms away, right by right, until there’s nothing left.
And this is just the start. Take some time to contemplate these actions, and then ask yourself, ”am I happy that I voted for Trump? Did I do the right thing? Is the world a better place now that Donald John Trump is the president of the United States once again?”
I agree with what you said Trump did. However, elections have consequences. Moreover, the American public has a different opinion:
The national NBC News poll shows Trump’s approval rating at 47% with more registered voters seeing the US as heading in the right direction than at any point since early 2004.
Among the American public overall, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29% – a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021, when Trump exited his first term under the shadow of the January 6 attack at on Capitol.
Yes, those figures are alarming to me, and I plan to address them in a future blog post.
I agree with most of your suggested negatives about Trump. However, I believe the Democratic Party acted as a Trump enabler. By sticking with an inadequate challenger so long without even an encouraging primary choice, they finally settled on a possibly weaker candidate at the last moment in what was effectively a smoke-filled-room decision. I also believe that many Democrats (I am one albeit disgruntled) were troubled by the party’s pursuit of questionable boutique issues, such as overbearing DEI, justifying transgender surgery for minors, allowing unvetted immigration, and the stated desire to “weaken Russia” with the unwinnable proxy Ukraine war to support a Nazi-infested corrupt regime, with no consideration for Russia’s security interests relevant to an ever expanding NATO military alliance. The Democratic Party was blind to logistics and morals and fell down on the job. I might add that since both Biden and Trump are also blind to Israeli genocidal actions and even aiding them, I would up voting for the Green party out of frustration.
Dr. Armstrong – to the Democratic Party, I would echo Laural & Hardy – “another nice mess you have gotten us into”. How do you propose we get out of it? I think the Democratic Party has been shown up; riddled with war-bent neocons and serving its plutocratic supporters rather than the working people. IMHO we need a rebirth of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, but probably not get it. BTW typo in the last sentence of my previous comment – it should be “wound” not “would”.