Overpromising & Underdelivering. The Trump Presidency 90 Days In.
But this moment is one I have to milk a bit.
For the past two years, Donald Trump has been one of my favourite targets, albeit an easy one. Before he decided to run for king and supreme ruler I thought of him a just another smug prick, with more inherited money than brains, who attracted the media and the late night talk shows because he was such a novelty.
I never thought of him as any kind of great American success story, only a rich twerpy trust fund baby with all the attendant arrogance, swagger and opinions.
When he decided to run for president the first time, I thought it was just another Trump publicity stunt, which was really one of his very few talents. And that’s what it turned out to be.
On his second run, which started a good 18 months ago now. I joined the rather huge chorus of writers who did not believe that he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere near the nomination.
The Overpromise(s)
Trump’s campaign started with a genuine shot heard around the world. A huge exaggeration about Mexicans who were in the US illegally. He called them murderers and rapists, and then he made a promise to build a wall. All the way along the 2000 mile stretch of the US Mexico border.
This was the first is a long series of uninformed and poorly thought out promises that he made.
In short, he promised to eliminate terrorism, make it close to impossible for anyone from a Muslim country to emigrate to America, prove that Barack Obama was not born in America, punish women for having abortions, immediately repeal and replace Obama care, drop out of NATO etc etc.
He promised and promised and promised. And woven within those promises were a long series of lies, which actually formed the basis of his campaign strategy.
He also hired people to lie for him, because all this lying was too big a job for one man.
Armed with these outrageous promises and an endless stream of lies, he jumped into the primaries and used these tactics to systematically re-position every single one of his competitors.
Permission to Hate
And as these people released their inner frustrations (all based in ignorance, racism, sexism, narrow-mindedness and bible thumping bullshit), they came to see Trump as their savior. He talked to them in their own language, although he had nothing in common with them, and they adopted him, the way a golddigger adopts a Sugar Daddy.
These poor fools honestly believed that his rhetoric about how he was going to make their lives great again was something they could actually put their faith in.
The Anatomy Of The Brain Dead
The most fascinating aspect of the entire campaign right up to the elections is how easily duped millions of Americans actually were.
Every time I wrote about it, I invariably attracted comments from Americans, (obviously Trump supporters), who told me that I should go back into my igloo and mind my own business.
I had to keep reminding them that my country’s largest trading partner was the US (to the tune of about 70% of our exports), and it was my fucking business and the business of every Canadian.
But the bottom line is that thanks to all the major news networks, Trump’s exposure and the constant barrage of lies he spewed got into the psyche of the brain dead and eventually flowed into the hearts and minds of the not so brain dead.
And before long he was left with only one person to re-position. Lyin’ Hillary Clinton.
And Lo It Came To Pass
By the time Trump took office, his narcissism had inflated to the point where he could actually have floated away on it.
And what you saw with the barrage of Executive Orders he issued was a man who had no need for congress or the senate. It was all about him, and the small band of advisors and sycophants he had appointed including the country’s best-known anarchist and white supremacist.
I was personally in shock for the better part of a week. Most of that time was spent issuing apologies of one kind or another to my Facebook friends that my fearless forecast of a Clinton landslide had not come to pass.
The rest of the time was spent predicting various aspects of the presidency to come and the beginning of the Great American Nightmare.
Everybody and their uncle with Internet access and a liberal leaning have come up with theories about how Trump managed to do this.
But the most valid of those tend to revolve around the notion of political ignorance or, in the case of the brighter Trump supporters, a failure to educate themselves properly.
These people mainly bought into the argument that the Democratic government was totally ineffectual, interfered too much in the lives of the people and was basically corrupt from top to bottom.
This rhetoric, which spewed from the Trump Pie Hole on daily basis failed to take into account the modern day miracle that the Obama administration had pulled off, essentially taking the country from the worst recession in decades (remember the mortgage scam of 2008?), all the way back to its present shape, which before Trump started filling the airways with bullshit, was, all things considered, pretty damn good. Without the obstructionism of the Republican-dominated congress, it would have been even better.
But let’s face it, America has always been pretty good at shooting itself in the foot.
The Politics Of Distraction
There really has never been a president in America like Trump. There has never been a con of this magnitude played on so many people so successfully.
But once the con had been played, Trump was then forced to deliver some results. Nothing more than some of the main things he promised he would do in his first 30 Days
Here’s a small Checklist.
1. Destroy Isis: Oops. There’s not even a plan for that yet.
2. Build a wall along the Mexico border and make Mexico pay for it. No wall, despite the fact that Trump insists its being designed as we speak. And no pesos. In fact, he has just put a request into congress for $25 billion for construction (guess who will be raking off about 20% of that if it happens, which it probably won’t)
3. Ban all Muslim immigration. Yeah, that went over like a lead fart…twice it has been blocked by the courts as unconstitutional.
4. Repeal and replace Obamacare with something better and more affordable. This bill was Trump’s first major test and his first epic fail as president.
This was also historic in that it will go down as the linchpin for a serious fracture in the already tenuous structure of the Republican party. A substantial group of moderates and a couple of hard-liners whose states would be hit the hardest by the ludicrous and poorly thought out Obamacare alternative decided that getting re-elected was preferable to toeing the party line and supporting a true piece of shit proposal.
In the meantime, Trump continues to pump out tweets and lie about all the things he was actually recorded as saying before he was elected. Business as unusual.
The Big Kahuna
Trump’s completely fabricated allegation that Barack Obama tapped the phones in Trump Tower before the election were proven to be false by the FBI.
But Trump and his huuuuge ego made a big mistake by doing this because, during the course of their investigation of this spurious allegation, the FBI, NSA, and CIA all started to look really hard at communications between Trump, his entourage and the Russian government.
This investigation is ongoing at the moment, but since Trump went out of his way to alienate and degrade the US intelligence community after his inauguration, you can bet your ass that they will be looking for any excuse to hang him and his people out to dry.
There’s no reason to assume that anything will happen here. But it certainly won’t be for lack of trying because the (fake) news media, who has also been slammed by Trump, is all over this like a dog with a bone.
Ironically the tools he used to gain power could very well be the same tools that bring him down.
What Should Happen
Trump should have realized by now that he has split his party or at least fragmented it to the point where he no longer has an effective majority he can count on.
So he needs to clean up his act, stop being a total asswipe, and start doing his job more diplomatically.
This split in the congress has (or at least should have) empowered the congress to engage in a little self-reflection, and realize that this President and his axe murderer pal Paul Ryan can be controlled by the simple act of voting your conscience, and not letting the ego- maniacal and fanatical leadership of your party dictate the rules.
Net Net
And all I can think of when I see all this shit going down is the stump speech he gave almost a year ago where he said. “There’s gonna be so much winning that you’ll get sick of winning.”
Replace “winning’ with ‘bullshit’ in that pronouncement and you’ll have a pretty good picture of where the Trump presidency stands at three months in.
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