Trump’s Poisonous Pen: Its Attempt To Destroy Obama’s Legacy and Our Basic American Values...

Americans are truly impacted by the political environment in which they live.  If we have a government that is felt to care about meeting the needs of people… our children, our seniors, those who are ill, our veterans, those who live in poverty, those in the work force, we live in an atmosphere of trust, hope and security.

If, on the other hand we live in a political environment that does not seem to care about meeting the needs of people, we become uncomfortable, we feel stress, on alert and wondering what is coming down the road next that we will have to deal with?

For the past year, we have had a man in the White House who has systematically destroyed everything he has touched with a pen. His obsession with reversing every Obama proposal is exactly that, an obsession.  Whether it is due to policy considerations or to get back at Obama for the way that Obama roasted Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondences’ Dinner, the result of Trumps slashing pen has been to destroy, not create attempts to meet the needs of citizens. 

His administration, in general, seems to be predicated on destroying everything that has been created over the past 80 years to protect and defend American Citizens.  He is functioning as Steve Bannon’s proxy to destroy our democratic structures with no constructive alternative in mind. What do we gain by removing over time pay requirements for those who are working over time, who still have a hard time making ends meet? What do we gain by removing Social Security, Medicare and other safety net provisions that were created to protect citizens from another 1929 Stock Market Crash?

What do we gain by having people in Cabinet positions who oppose the work that their very agencies perform on behalf of our citizens?  The Secretary of Education who is against public education.  We have a Secretary of Labor who is against unions and minimum wages and overtime pay. We have a Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Interior and an EPA Administrator who refute the impact of human induced climate change on our planet.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has been ordered to not use seven words—diversity, fetus, transgender, vulnerable, entitlement, evidence-based and scientific-based, in documents used to create next years budget. The elimination of these words negatively impact those who are transgender, abortion funding, and using science and evidence as a basis for funding. This new directive from Trump brings back the Orwellian 1984 assertion “it’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”  Without words, things, issues and people just go away. Is this more delusional thinking on the part of Trump?
 

We have lies becoming the new normal for a President. His position is that if the news media disagrees with him, or criticizes him, it is “fake news.” He admonishes us to listen to him, because he will give us the real news. He has also said that he “knows more than the generals and that he is the only one who can fix our economy.” It has been documented that fifty percent of what he says is not true.

We have collusion charges levelled against Trump and ongoing investigations that are looking in on what has actually transpired in relation to Russian interference in our 2016 Presidential election process.  We have Trump reportedly readying to “fire” the very person who is charged with a Special Investigation that is looking into those charges. And, there is mounting evidence that suggests that the Trump campaign was, in fact, being aided by the Russians in his attempt to defeat Hillary Clinton. How is it possible for the very person who has allegedly done something wrong to fire the person who is investigating the various allegations of his involvement in doing something wrong?  This is the kind of crazy behavior that, left unchecked, makes citizens uncomfortable and discouraged about their political leaders.

We have had efforts made, by this President and the GOP, to destroy health care legislation that the Obama Administration had passed into law. The Trump supported legislative process itself was an example of hastily slapping together proposals that were decided upon behind closed doors. Their's was a rush job to get something passed, regardless who was hurt in the process. Thankfully, it did not pass.  

One of the goals of the Obama effort was to ensure that millions of people would be able to gain affordable health care.  This was felt to be important because the biggest cause for bankruptcy in the United States was the inability for citizens to pay for catastrophic health care costs.

With the Trump/GOP plan, millions of citizens would have been taken off of the rolls for medical care. One of the convoluted reasons the GOP wanted to replace the Obama Affordable Care Act was because the GOP felt that people needed the right to choose not to be insured, or for people to be able to choose substandard health care options. 

Obama’s ACA required a minimum level of coverage that would protect everyone one from going without health care and would ensure that the public would not have to pay for emergency room visits that others needed and could not afford.

This was viewed by Trump and his supporters as being too ‘socialistic’ and not democratic enough. 

With that in mind, how ‘democratic’ is it for Trump to outlaw the use of specific words that relate to certain groups of people and situations in the creation of the the Federal budget? Or, what about denying First Amendment rights to people for using certain words in the creation of a Federal Budget?

Now the same process has been repeated with the Trump/G.O.P Tax Bill.  It has been hastily slapped together proposals that were decided behind closed doors. The plan to vote on it was set before anyone has had the opportunity to read what was being voted on.  Not only is the Congress in the dark about what was being proposed, so is the public.  The Congressional Budget Office has not even had the time to review the bills implications and costs. 

The review of what is presently known about the bill suggests that it is filled with untruths about what good it is suppose to be doing for the average citizen, who it is really going to help and what are its real goals.  

So far what has been discussed has only had to do with domestic issues that reflect Trump’s destructive tendencies and practices.  Internationally, his first week in office, he caused conflict between himself and the President of Mexico and with the Prime Minister of Australia. He is verbally setting the stage for another Korean War, by provocatively taking on ‘little rocket man’.  And he has caused upheaval in the Near East as a result of his Jerusalem- Israeli-Capital speech. In effect, he has taken the United States our of having a role in participating in a peace settlement in the area.

As was said at the outset, we are impacted by the political environment that is created by our elected officials.  In the past year much of that atmosphere has been fed by actions on the part of Trump and the G.O.P that have been created by a feeling that the needs of citizens and their welfare are not his administration’s focus.  As a result, we are living in stressful times of uncertainty and threat. This is not the America that our fore fathers have fought for and given their lives to defend.  It is the world that has been created by delusional and deceptive thinking by the likes of Bannon, Trump and those who enable such people in their abuse of position and power.