Trump won this election because the suckers believed that he would rescue them from the fate bestowed on them by the current Republican Party. None of those voters seemed to realize that Trump was running as a Republican or maybe, in their zeal, they just didn’t care. Maybe in their hatred of Hillary Clinton they really believed that eight years of a Democratic President were what had caused their lack of work. But that just doesn’t jibe with the facts.
From 1935 until 1980 the US economy was on a straight-line ascent. GDP went up each year, middle class America was born and raised and America generally got richer. 70% of income growth went to the middle and poorer classes. We had all kinds of business and industry regulation, we had the GI Bill to help get people educated, we had in the CCC and WPA the greatest programs of government financed infrastructure ever created, programs whose accomplishments built a great infrastructure that fed industry with all the connectivity it needed and we had a progressive tax code.
Then in1980 Ronald Reagan brought it all to a screeching halt when he eliminated regulation and changed the tax code to benefit millionaires. The GDP kept going up but that 70% of income growth that had gone to the middle class became zero percent and all new income growth went to the top 1%.
That is the problem with this country right now. That is what we have to reverse. That is why his base is sticking by Trump. They are about to be screwed again. Trump has no interest in helping those unemployed voters unless he can turn that help into headlines. Trump is a crooked businessman who spent most of his life screwing the kinds of people he conned into voting for him. Just look at what he is doing with his Presidential orders. He cuts regulation on big business, says it will help small business but all it will do is enable big business to crush small business and the unions, while creating an unsafe workplace.
He has already signed orders cutting regulations that prevent fossil fuel companies from polluting our planet. He has allowed the coal industry to pollute the rivers of West Virginia and Kentucky and for what? The coal industry doesn’t employ anyone any more. So a few already rich greedy pigs get a little richer and the people of those states are poisoned by the crap being dumped into their rivers.
In my last blog I spoke to the reasons why the Democrats lost not only the Presidency but also everything except their underwear in the last election. I spoke to the fact that they refused to acknowledge the lack of cognition in a certain demographic in the American electorate and that until they do and until they understand the need to manipulate that demographic, they are destined to be losers.
Needless to say, I got a lot of negative feedback in actually calling out Hillary’s deplorables, but let’s look at what I was talking about with a closer lens.
Trump is only 100 days into his Presidency so no one should expect monumental achievement in that time but what we have gotten and what we should not be expected to accept with this almost complete lack of achievement are his continuing announcements about how great a job he is doing and how he is outperforming every other president in our history. I mean, come on! Writing Presidential orders is not passing laws. So far Trump’s legislative agenda has shown zero results. The only thing he can possibly lay claim to having accomplished is the appointment of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and that accomplishment actually sits in the trophy case of Mitch McConnell, not Trump. What is even worse is the almost universal acceptance of the awful job he is doing by that same base of which I spoke in the previous blog.
When polled, Trump’s base is behind him 96%. They see no fault in the failure of his healthcare bill, no problem with his one page grammar school tax proposal, recognize no incompetence in the fact that his biggest job proposal, infrastructure, has yet to be addressed at all.
I watched Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist talk to Trump’s accomplishments and the base’s acknowledgement and I was at best bemused. Rick did a truly amazing job of proving my point. Among Trump’s best moves, according to Tyler were the reinstatement of two pipelines and the signing of a lot of Presidential orders about the relaxing of environmental controls and business regulations. He also mentioned the appointment of a Supreme Court judge but as stated, that was actually the work of McConnell not Trump.
So, let’s look at the above-mentioned accomplishments. First the two pipelines. Is this really the kind of success that Trump’s voters are looking for or is it just more proof that they are too dumb to understand that the beneficiaries of the two pipeline reinstatements are big oil not any working stiff? And this big oil is Canadian big oil, not even American big oil. But more important is the fact that almost no American jobs will result from the pipelines. What will result, as has already in the last few days been proven, is that the pipelines will leak poison all over the American landscape. Yeah, that’s right, Tans Canada hasn’t even gone back to work on these two new pipelines and already their other pipelines are spilling death all over the water table of those who won’t benefit, in any way, from the pipelines. But Trump has sold the idea that by pushing his own investments in big oil he is somehow helping his, dumber than a post, constituents.
Then there’s clean coal. There’s a concept to curdle the genes of even the most naïve supporter. Coal has been around warming our bones and poisoning our lungs for centuries. We kept it because there was no substitute except oil and gas, which are almost as bad. Now, however, we have all kinds of replacements so there is no reason for our President to be promoting an industry that is finally, almost dead, an industry that only employs about 65,000 people nationwide. Oh yeah, and if he does save it most of the jobs, truck drivers and dragline operators will be replaced by robots. But do the unemployed miners of Western Kentucky and Virginia see this? Hell no! But what do you expect from a bunch of people dumb enough to walk into a collapsing hole in the ground on a daily basis and to do it for wages so low they never get out of debt to the company store? These are people who have maintained their hold on the worst job since the abolition of slavery and now that it is finally fading into posterity they want to fight to keep it. Just the fact that they think it’s worth saving proves my point about the Trump base.
Of course, a large percent of these people have never been in business so when they hear Tump bellow about cutting regulation so there will be more jobs they believe him. If they had ever been in business, especially small business, they would know that cutting regulation allows big business to screw small business, just the way Trump did when he refused to pay small contractors on his jobs even when they had completed the work. Oh, his base didn’t hear about that? Maybe if they learned to read they’d be better informed.
And those banking regulations Trump is busy getting rid of are the ones instituted to try and keep people like his base from getting screwed by big real estate and big banking, the thieves that caused the crash of 2007. If Trump gets his way we’ll have another crash in a couple of years because the scum that feeds on the likes of his base will be free to do so at will. Still the base backs him at a rate of 96%. You get what you deserve.
Trump’s base have chosen a hero who has absolutely no concept of any reality except his own desires at any specific moment. Watch Trump. Watch him change his mind minute by minute. It doesn’t matter to him that he said he wanted to dump NAFTA in the morning and only a couple of hours later he is supporting NAFTA and is meeting with the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada about redoing it. He’s not lying. You can’t lie if you have no concept of the truth. The problem is that he has no general concept about anything. No overall plan of how to get anything done. He can’t seem to absorb the idea that he can’t get stuff done just because he wants to, that he must generate some kind of following, other than his base, that will agree with him. All he has is what he is thinking about at any given moment. He stands before the nation and tells the people that the healthcare bill will absolutely support the concept that pre-existing conditions will be a right for everyone, when his Freedom Caucus absolutely demands that this provision will be left to the will of the individual states. These are mutually opposed points of view but Trump doesn’t see that. He only sees what he wants to see and that’s not reality.
And this pathetic egomaniac is still carrying on about winning he election. It’s bad enough that he actually won but to have to watch him strum his ego to reinforce what can only be a complete lack of self-esteem is beyond belief.
The basis of our American government is the choice between efficiency, the way of the dictator and freedom the series of checks and balances that our founding fathers understood when they created a government in opposition to the King of England. This is a concept that Herr Trump has failed to grasp. Neither his lack of knowledge of how this nation was formed, nor his inability to read anything has served him well in this endeavor but the result is his complete ignorance of how our government works.
Trump goes on national TV and threatens to change the way the government works, attacking anything that gets in the way of him forcing his will on the country. He has no understanding of the fact that it is this slow inefficient form of government that has preserved our nation as the cradle of freedom on a planet beset with dictators and tyranny. He has no clue that our system of checks and balances is there to protect us from him. This past week, our nations congressmen put together a bi-partisan bill to fund the government until September. Not a big deal you may say but it’s the first evidence of the parties being able to work together since 2008. Unfortunately for Trump’s ego the Democrats felt it necessary to brag about what they got out of this example of bi-partisanship and among the items they crowed about were that there was no money for a wall. This along with the help given to the arts, humanities and Planned Parenthood really burned Trump’s ass and he immediately came out with a Twitter attack on our governmental system. Sure he would like to be a dictator, it’s the only way he will ever get anyone to go along with his wild, hair brained schemes, but it just doesn’t work that way. Not in the United States anyway.