For those of you still able to communicate with supporters of Agent Orange and his party, here’s the case against him based on the very security – health, economic, domestic, national – he promised he alone could provide.
Trump and his party have put Americans’ health at risk in ways that go far beyond the strange White House efforts to support SARS coronavirus 2 at every turn. In taking their fight against the Affordable Care Act to the Supreme Court, Trump and his party are making tens of millions of Americans with preexisting conditions uninsurable at the very time they’re rolling back mercury, methane, and pesticide regulations and greenhouse gas commitments in the Paris agreement that will reveal preexisting conditions in tens of millions more Americans who feel perfectly healthy right now. And in politicizing practical steps to control the covid-19 pandemic, they have given tin-pot dictators around the world every incentive to experiment with bat viruses on the theory that while the rest of the world is learning public health basics from South Korea and Germany, US freedom fighters can be counted on to attack mask rules and elected officials who try to protect their constituents next time around.
Trump and his party have trashed Americans’ economic security for what could be a whole generation. Who thought the pigeons would come home to roost so soon from running a 5% budget deficit just to give Trump’s 0.1%er owners an outlandish tax holiday – but sure enough, the pandemic has forced the deficit up to 15%, normally the point where economic officials start singing Wagner and numbers from Evita.
Trump has wrecked our domestic (use “homeland” when talking to believers) security even beyond encouraging goons to go to Portland and Dearborn. By encouraging white domestic terrorists, he has planted a crop of threats to neighborhoods throughout the country even as his politicization of the Department of Justice has hogtied future administrations that may want to address them.
And Trump and his party have permanently reduced our national security. Iran is half way around the world from California, but it’s on the doorstep of European allies – so it will take those allies many years to forgive us for undermining them by pulling out of the Iran agreement and letting that awkward country restart its uranium centrifuges. By betraying Syrian Kurds, easily the most steadfast local battle allies the US has ever had in the Middle East, Agent Orange has made sure no one will support us on the ground anywhere in the world for a decade. And by showing the world how Americans are capable of caging refugee children on our border, Trump and his party have torched the soft power that has always been a more important pillar of US strength than our economy.