Donald Trump has been President of the United States for about two weeks now, and it appears that most Americans’ fears about him were correct. He’s way out of his league, doesn’t understand his job, doesn’t know how to behave as an adult, and is disrespecting democracy and the rule of law. Other than that, he looks nice in his ubiquitous blue suit and red tie.
President Trump has been a busy guy, firing off executive orders right and left, several of them of dubious constitutionality. He’s going to keep the courts busy for years. Of course, Mr. Trump has little regard for judges. Recall the nasty remarks he made about the “Mexican” federal judge who was handling the Trump University scam case…the one who turned out to have been born, raised, and educated in America? (By the way, Trump has since quietly settled that case out of court) The new President has recently insulted another judge, a Federal District Court Judge (!), who issued a stay against Trump’s executive order banning travel to U.S. by resident of seven Muslim countries. It is blatant religious discrimination, and has been loudly denounced by just about everyone (except the Christian Right). Nevertheless, President Trump raged about the stay issued by the “so-called judge”.
(It’s interesting that he used that phrase. Since he lost the popular vote (by about 3 million votes), and some 90 million of the Nation’s citizens eligible to vote did not vote at all, Mr. Trump garnered only about a 25 percent “approval rating” on Election Day. One might call him a so-called President.)
Trump has protested that he targeted those seven Middle Eastern countries because of potential terrorists coming into the U.S. from those specific countries. It was quickly pointed out that there is no evidence of any terrorist acts committed in America by any immigrants from those seven countries. On the other hand, the new President specifically omitted Saudi Arabia from his “enemies list”, which is curious, because most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis. And, many of the terrorist organizations in the Middle East are know to be funded by the Saudi royal family. What was he thinking? Or, was he?
Speaking of thinking, how can one explain President Trump’s actions to “drain the swamp” in Washington? During the campaign, the candidate relentlessly hammered Hillary Clinton for her “close ties to Wall Street”, implying that she was a stooge of Big Money, and repeatedly criticized her friendship with Goldman Sachs’ bigwigs. So, what does our new President do once in office? He appoints three Goldman Sachs’ guys to be his closest economic advisors and another Wall Street bigshot as Secretary of the Treasury. And, just to make sure that our foreign policy is not contaminated by Big Oil lobbyists, President Trump selected the current CEO of Exxon Mobil to be our new Secretary of State.
And, just so that no one can mistake what is going on in the new Republican administration, Mr. Trump quickly initiated efforts to repeal Dodd-Frank (the regulations designed to keep Wall Street from repeating the 2008 financial meltdown), and also throw out regulations prohibiting Wall Street from purposely giving clients information that might benefit the broker more than his client.
Meanwhile, the new President continues his barrage of Twitter tweets against any and all critics of his actions, whether they be foreign leaders, Democrats, entertainment celebrities (“Meryl Streep is over-rated”), or the media. In fact, he has declared the news media (with the exception of Fox New, of course) to be “The Opposition”. Reminds me of ex-President Nixon, somehow.
It’s scary to think of such a narcissistic, juvenile individual running The Greatest Nation on Earth. As hard as it is to envision, Mr. Trump is probably going to make the George W. Bush presidency look good when everything is done and said. Unfortunately for Americans, the damage that this totally unqualified amateur could do in just four years may take decades to undo.
Our ancestors may look back to the first two weeks of the Trump presidency and say, “And, those were the good days…before everything went to shit.”