The Joke’s On Us

So the joke’s on us. Yup, we thought that there was more than enough intelligence in the American electorate to ward off the illusory attacks of Donald Trump and his violators of the truth, but we were dead wrong. Maybe there’s a reason all those Trump backers are out of work. We’ll see.

Now the problem is that we don’t want to make the same problems that the Republicans did when they lost the last two elections. Proving that you are a sore loser by bringing the government to a halt just to show how much you dislike the new president is not a viable strategy or a winning formula. Frankly the Republicans didn’t deserve to win this time simply because of the way they acted when they lost last time. Let’s not make the same mistakes. I don’t have one iota of faith that Trump will make the country better but I also know that the Democrats acting the way Mitch McConnell and his sleazy gang did towards Obama will definitely make the country worse. We have to give Trump a chance to fulfill his slogans. Let’s see if he really can create jobs. Let’s see if he can come up with a better health plan than the ACA. The latter shouldn’t be too difficult. We all know what the problems with the ACA are. Discovery is not the problem. Greedy agendas are the problem and it remains to be seen if Trump can accumulate the clout to batter those greedy scumbags into submission and come up with with something better. This writer still thinks that the ACA can be fixed and turned into a very viable healthcare plan, but to do so, someone has to have the balls to stop the drug industry, the insurance industry and the medical device industry, along with a number of giant hospital corporations., There are too many greedy industries feeding off the aliments of the American people for this to be an easy job. Let’s see if a Republican congress has the stones and the intelligence to fix what they have been bitching about for the last six years.

Trump’s credo is lower taxes and less regulation for business. We all saw how well that worked in 2007. If you are currently involved with any bank, investment institution of major industry like phone or TV service, expect to be screwed. If you are currently standing outside Trump Tower protesting the election of Donald Trump maybe you should have voted for Hillary instead of a moron like Johnson. Protest votes are stupid and futile; as has been proven over and over through the years. If you are too dumb to read history you are too dumb to vote.

There are certain things we can count on from a Trump presidency and many of them we won’t like. The fossil fuel industry will blossom again as Trump’s ignorance of the climate and the environment crushes any attempt to mitigate the effects of the greedy and dangerous oil-igarchs. Trump will probably, as he has sworn to do, try to cancel all our trade policies but he is sure to run into opposition from the GOP establishment on that one. It’s anybody’s guess what he will try to do about the immigration problem. The wall is a joke that he might try to sell just so he doesn’t have to back down but it looks from here like a bad bet. As far as collecting illegal immigrants and their families goes; that looks like a non-starter, although if he appoints Rudy Giuliani as his Attorney General, (A tragic disaster) they might try to do something like it. If he tries to pursue this policy it wouldn’t be surprising to see armed insurrection as a result. This is the most inhuman, most anti-American policy that Trump has proposed in his; sell the morons, pitch for the presidency. His Muslim policy is probably unconstitutional but it won’t rattle the troops simply because it will be dealing with foreigners not American residents.

The most interesting and least understood area of Trump’s potential presidency will come in the area of foreign policy. How will he deal with nations that mostly look on him as a joke or a totalitarian threat? The only nation that seems to look favorably on the Trump presidency is Russia, which, in itself, brings up a lot of dirty linen. Yes, there are innumerable threads that connect Trump to Russia and Putin, even as our intelligence agencies swear that it was Russia that hacked the DNC and fed info to WikiLeaks. But the big problem for Trump the same as it was for Bush and Obama is the Middle East. Trump has made a lot of noise about what Obama and Hillary have done wrong in that God-forsaken area but he has, thus far, had nothing to say about solutions. “I’ll end the war in the Middle East” is not a solution, only a faint hope. It seems pretty obvious that Trump has no strategy about that mess. This is not surprising when one realizes that there is no reasonable strategy available to anyone and that went for Obama and Clinton.

The only hope of stopping the slaughter in Syria and driving the terrorists out of places like Yemen and Libya is a massive infusion of American troops and who wants to see our kids get killed to help people who want nothing to do with us. We have to learn that we can’t always save the world from itself. Thankfully, despite all his bluster, Trump doesn’t look like he has the stomach for a real war.

There might be one good piece of fallout from all this. Maybe the nations of the European Union and Britain will finally learn that they can’t just sit back and wait for us to save their bacon all over the world. Maybe, just maybe, they will start taking some responsibility for the world they colonized, messed up and then abandoned.

Look, we have just finished a catastrophic election. It’s time for all of us to take a deep breath and let things settle. No, Trump will not accomplish the things that we expected Hillary to accomplish and yes he will do a certain amount of damage to the country partly because he doesn’t know the difference between running a company and running a country. He can’t just fire congress, although there have been many times in the last decade or so when that it seemed like a wonderful idea.

Right now the big obstacle to Trump is the Supreme Court but there are a couple of justices that may not last through the next four years and there is already one vacancy to fill. How he fills that vacancy will be very revealing. There are pet projects on both sides of the aisle in congress that each party is dying to get on the court’s calendar. Trump was elected as a Republican but he has been a Democrat most of his life and while he will follow the instincts that he will have us believe led to his business success, he has shown a propensity to liberal thinking in many social areas. That has, of course, been true only when it didn’t interfere with his personal bottom line.

And then there is the concept that the job defines the man. Let’s hope It’s true here because there is a hell of a lot of defining to do. But if that is in any way true, there could be hope that in some areas, Trump will prove to at least appear presidential. We can only wait and hope.