No 'draining of the swamp' yet

Those who thought that a new era would take place in Washington under our new soon-to-be Commander-in-Chief are surely starting to feel some trepidation.

Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign, he mocked his opponent’s reliance on large donors and championed the cause that he would not be owing allegiance to anyone because he was self-funding his campaign.

While the self-funding part was true for his primary campaign, that notion was thrown out once he ran for president.

 

With his recent choice for Labor Secretary, fast food entrepreneur Andrew Puzder, President-elect Donald Trump has now rewarded six big donors and fundraisers by selecting them to serve in his administration.  Together, with their families, Trump’s six choices gave $11.6 million to support his presidential run. 

One of his latest appointees, Linda McMahon, wife of World Wrestling Entertainment magnet Vince McMahon, gave $7.5 million to his campaign.  She was rewarded with the job of head of the Small Business Administration.  She and her husband were also the largest donors to Trump’s private foundation to the tune of $5 million.

Sorry to say this but apparently reward patronage is still alive and well in Washington for Mr. Trump continues the practice of filling  administrative positions based upon the size of one’s donation rather than qualifications. So far there is little evidence of “the draining of the swamp.”

If it looks like a politician, acts like a politician, and walks like a politician, we should all just accept the fact that after winning the election Donald Trump is now just a “good ole” establishment politician.  How disappointing!

Trump's first bailout

Thursday, President–elect Trump held a photo-op at the Carrier plant, in Indiana, where his Vice President-elect served as governor.  He announced that he had convinced Carrier not to move 1100 jobs to Mexico and keep its Indiana facility open; in reality it’s only 800 jobs because some are still going to Mexico.

On the surface this appears to be a great achievement.  However, like most of what Trump has recently done, it doesn’t jive with what he claimed he was going to do to get companies to stay.

Trump’s campaign rhetoric was very clear about how he would stop companies from leaving; punishment, by tariffs and border taxes. 

“Companies are not going to leave the U.S. any more without consequences,” he stated throughout his run for president and reiterated again at the Carrier plant.  This was one of Trump’s major focal points during his election bid. 

However, the deal to save jobs at Carrier involved donating $7 million of Indianan tax payers’ money to the company.  This is certainly not a consequence or punishment for Carrier, and in fact is more like a state funded bailout.

Trump, throughout his campaign mocked politicians who advocated low-interest loans and tax abatements to keep factories in the United States.  He ridiculed Obama for his financial bailout of the auto industry with taxpayers’ money.

Additionally, Trumps’ initial use of incentives to keep these jobs from going overseas causes major problems for Republicans with their emphasis on free-market economics.

 

The other confusing and somewhat hypocritical nature of Trump’s rhetoric is the fact that Trump’s anti-outsourcing stance is completely the opposite of what actually occurs with his family businesses which rely on low-wage laborers around the globe to produce most of its branded merchandise.

Even his daughter, Ivanka, has her own separate brand of jewelry, shoes and clothing produced in China.

Maybe this entire hypocritical confusion can best be summarized by Bernie Sanders, the former contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, when he states, “Trump had said he would force the company to ‘pay a damn tax’ if it closed the plant.  Instead of a ‘damn tax,’ the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut.”

Guess that pretty-well sums it up, for one never knows what the ‘shoot from the hip’ President-elect will do next.  Hopefully Trump has not created a dangerous precedent.

Let the Game Begin

You’ve got to give it to President-elect Trump.  He has cleverly convinced the public that his conflicts of interest, his coziness with Putin and anti-Semite white supremacists, his self-admission of using Trump Foundation’s charitable funds for personal expenses, the systematic destruction of emails during legal proceedings involving some of his businesses, and his defrauding of students with the bogus Trump University to a court settlement amount of $25 million are non-issues in assuming the highest office in this nation. 

Recently, he has set his sights on bigger game, the press.  In the media’s quest to quell the uprising among the populous that most of the fourth estate were too hard on Trump during campaigning, they stupidly agreed to an off-the-record meeting with Trump at his castle, Trump Towers, in N.Y.  Trump cleverly used this event to correctly portray the press as groveling wimps and systematically berated them in the meeting. 

 I guess he figured he was successful in getting them to back off because now he is focused upon yet another challenge, the fact that he was not the favorite of the majority of Americans nation-wide.  Trump trails Hillary Clinton by over two million votes.  In actuality this figure is irrelevant because Electoral College votes are the final say.  However, Trump’s narcissism just can’t let it go.  He always has to be the winner.  Consequently, his latest social media endeavor is to convince the public that over three million voted illegally for Hillary Clinton, and that if you subtract those out, he wins the popular vote.

Apparently, not one of Trump’s manufactured three million illegal voters voted illegally for him.  Additionally,  there are no facts to substantiate his claim.

These recent behaviors only further serve to reinforce the notion, “It’s Trump’s way or the highway” which I’m sure that many applaud and considered instrumental in their voting choice.
 

However, fortunately, these dictator qualities will not flourish in our present system of government.  Ironically, many accused President Obama of such behavior by his implementation of executive orders to circumvent Congress. He was accused of ignoring our Constitutional process.  I predict that Trump will make Obama look like a neophyte in the number of executive orders he implements simply because he has the CEO mantra.

Naively many of our citizens assume that Trump will have an easy ride because Congress is majority red.  Not true, because Trump has no ideology, and he is certainly not a Republican.  He has already changed his pre-election positions on protecting Medicare from privatization,“draining the establishment swamp”, immigration, jailing Hillary, and the complete repeal of Obamacare. 

He, like every other establishment politician, including Hillary Clinton, told the voters what they wanted to hear.  He is the king of social media and reality TV, but running this nation as a world leader is far more complicated than that.

I’m going to give him a chance for it’s going to be an interesting four years.  Hopefully, the unfulfilled promises won’t disappoint his supporters too much.

Gullibility or Laziness

While the majority of the populous is still reeling from the outcome of the presidential election, a somewhat startling statistic has emerged from this circus.

The Pew Research Center’s latest study of news use on the internet indicated that 62% of the adults in the U.S. get their news from social media; not on-line newspapers or TV.  Not surprisingly, Pew also reported that Facebook emerged as the largest source of false news among the social media groups. 

I can’t quite figure out whether this recent revelation is due to an increase in the gullibility of our population or just outright laziness.

A further analysis of the use of social media in supplying information during the recent presidential campaign indicated that, while 38% of the information posted and shared by the Republican campaign was incorrect, Democrats also rose to the occasion with 19% of incorrect information.

Two recent examples of the distortion of news reporting by social media include the Facebook item that Trump is leading in the popular vote and that Donald Trump had convinced Ford Motor Company to closed its heavy duty truck production in Mexico and bring it back to the U.S.  Both of these reportings have been shared by thousands on Facebook and are blatantly false.  Clinton is leading in the popular vote by almost one million, and CNN reported in August, 2015, that Ford had made the decision to close its Mexico plant and return heavy truck production to the U.S.   It happened under Obama’s watch.

Apparently, the extent of social media falsehoods leading up to election day became so widespread that it led to Oxford dictionary’s recent selection of “post-truth” as its word of the year.  It was often used in the phrase “post-truth politics,” and means “belonging to a time in which truth has become irrelevant.”

Hopefully, Americans will get a grip, stop being stupid, curb their social media addiction and stop using it to get their news.  If not, they will be easy prey for any type of blissful ignorance which their chosen leaders have decided to create for them.

Finally It's Over

The election dust has settled and thankfully the 2016 presidential election is over.  I chose not to vote for either unworthy candidate because I was reminded of a quote by the author, Joseph Heller.  In his book Catch 22 he writes, “It was miraculous.  It was almost no trick at all. He saw to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.  Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all.  It merely required no character.”

This aptly  sums up this presidential election outcome.  Even though the winner was not the choice of the majority of Americans, hopefully we can unite as a country and move forward. God help America.