A three month time sample of a presidential administration can provide perspective on its success, or failure. Nowadays, a persistent GOP talking point tells us that President Donald Trump promotes good policies, despite his crude behavior. But that is to shut one’s eyes to reality, as the nation takes on more water. Everything below happened in May, June and July 2018.
Mr. Trump initiated a border policy under which babies were torn from the arms of their mothers. First he blamed the cruelty on Barack Obama, then he claimed we were witnessing “phony stories of sadness and grief,” then he said the ghastly plan couldn’t be un-done by executive order only to prove himself a liar by un-doing it.
When he wasn’t inducing trauma in toddlers, his administration smashed the Affordable Care Act’s protection for people with pre-existing conditions and un-did the individual mandate, which caused Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price to notice that the latter is causing insurance premiums to skyrocket.
The president trekked to Canada for the G-7 trade meeting but departed early in a huff because the others wouldn’t re-admit Russia to the club. Then Mr. Art-of-the-Deal met with North Korea’s dictator, thus elevating the murderous Mr. Kim from pariah to recognized world leader. He announced that Kim’s nuclear threat was over, which Flat-Earthers found convincing.
Trump leveed tariffs on steel and aluminum coming from Canada, Mexico and the European Union. The conservative-to-the-core U. S. Chamber of Commerce announced that the tariffs could cost 2.5 million U.S.jobs. The offended nations quickly served Americans a knuckle sandwich of counter-tariffs so that our farmers are hurting and Harley-Davidson is moving jobs overseas. And those were just round one of a bruising bout in which Americans who are not named Donald Trump are getting badly bloodied.
May, June and July also saw the president demonstrate to the world that America’s word means nothing as he knocked America out of the Iran nuclear deal. As a result, Iran upped its stock of uranium and worked on building more centrifuges to enrich the stuff. That gut punch to Uncle Sam thus weakened our ability to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, ceded the moral high ground to the world’s leading exporter of terror and snubbed the other five allied nations who had signed the agreement.
Then there was the president’s July swing through Europe. He dissed NATO which drew a 97-2 rebuke from the Senate, followed a day later by a unanimous vote in the House as those bodies reaffirmed our commitment to the longstanding mutual defense pact. He termed the European Union a “foe,” then went to Helsinki where he canoodled with Vladimir Putin, and said the U.S “has been foolish” and is “to blame” for the current U.S.-Russia situation. Worst of all, regarding whether Russia hacked the 2016 election and, thus, had thrown a wet dog into the living room of our democracy, he said, “I don’t see any reason why it would be (Russia).” His wooden effort to walk that back could not have been less believable, mainly because he added, “It could be a lot of other people also…” There you have it. The combined wisdom of the intelligence arms of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, the CIA, FBI, Treasury Department, Immigration & Naturalization, and other agencies and departments have said point blank that it was Russia, yet our president believes Vladimir Putin instead of them. There is only one conclusion that those over the age of ten can reach – we are in serious trouble.
But what about the good? What about the economy and Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, for example? First, we are riding the Obama economy which pulled us back from the brink of global disaster and cut the jobless rate in half. Next, the President’s tax cuts added $1.5 trillion to the national debt which soon will become the GOP’s rationale for cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Thank God that Dems’ now control the House. Regardless, warning to old folks and those who aspire to get old, get used to the taste of cat food.
The president did some crowing in late July as the GDP was up to 4.1percent, but that was heavily influenced by the rush in May to sell products (such as soybeans) so that farmers could beat the tariff backlash, rather than due to increased production of products. And, contrary to the president’s claim, there were several quarters under Obama when the GDP was greater.
Our president replaced competent National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster with John “Bombs Away” Bolton who still thinks the invasion of Iraq was a peach of an idea. Trump also took time out to save jobs – if only they hadn’t been in China! And not just any jobs, but jobs at Chinese telecom ZTE, a company that our intelligence agencies say is a security threat and whose phones, thus, are banned from our military bases.
Then the president placed his signature on a bill that dismantles the Dodd-Frank law’s constraints on banks which, for nearly ten years, protected us from another economic meltdown like the one in 2008.
During May, June and July we also learned that, after he had lied about it for months, Trump actually did dictate the response to inquiries about the Trump Tower meeting in which a self-described Kremlin informant, Natalia Veselnitskya, and other Russians, met with a gaggle of Trump campaign officials. And we learned more about the president and his kids using Trump Foundation cash to pay their own debts, rather than giving the money to charity as the law requires.
Those were a disastrous three months under President Trump. Three months that signal the crumbling of the American ideal. Three months that were followed by the August guilty pleas of ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohan and the successful prosecution of Trump’s one-time campaign chief Paul Manafort.
This is not a game. We are in serious trouble and neither chants of “Lock her up” nor bizarre midnight tweet storms nor claims that his policies are beneficial will save us.
Joseph Wyatt’s recently published book is The Iraq War, 1998-2018: Quagmire in Babylon. It is available on Amazon, or for $19.95 plus $5 shipping and handling from BPK Press, PO Box 844, Hurricane, WV 25526.