By all rights, Donald Trump should be a one-term president.
Save for the hate fanatics, described in a recent The Guardian story about “Fox News Brain” and how some families are
not even on speaking terms due to the “awful shit” people hear their parents repeating after their daily
dose of Fox News. They here Trump continuing to insist as “good people” those
who may not be members of white nationalist groups technically, but support
their “causes” full-throat nonetheless. It is no surprise, then that it is
being reported that 80 percent of “terrorist” attacks in the US last year were
hate crimes committed by white perpetrators. Trump’s hate is mostly aimed at
Hispanics, although the media hypocritically continues to simplify it as an
“immigration” issue when we know that it is really about people who just don’t
like Hispanics viscerally and don’t want them around; Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter
and Lou Dobbs have many “fans” for their hysterical, paranoid belief that
Hispanics are “out to destroy America.”
But Hispanics have no real “power” to “destroy” America, and
in the minds of the extremists, Jews apparently have the power to provide
“assistance” in the matter. In San Diego yesterday, a synagogue was attacked by
a white 19-year-old from a “respectable Christian” family, in which one person
died and several injured. The irony is that this occurred in a city that is a
Republican bastion, and likely many people in the synagogue were Trump
supporters like, say, Stephen Miller. But that didn’t protect them. The
question of why this “boy” decided to stage this attack was again “simplified”
by saying he was “suspiciously” reserved and read some white supremacist
screeds on-line. But I don’t buy that this was only reason. Is it possible that
he came home every night to that trilogy of hate—Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham
and Sean Hannity—that his parents may be fans of?
If this isn’t enough to turn people off to Trump, what about
the fact that he continues to act like a man with something terrible to hide?
It turns out after careful reading that the Mueller report didn’t exactly
“exonerate” Trump of serious moral or ethical lapses, let alone crimes. The
report shows that Trump and his aiders and abettors worked frantically to
prevent Trump’s fear that an investigation would mean the “end” of his
presidency would become reality. And today, because Trump’s most fanatical aiders
and abettors were largely uncooperative in the Mueller investigation, Democrats
have been demanding that they appear before them to “explain” themselves, but
Trump has declared all-out war on the Constitution and Congress’ prerogative of
oversight. No one would be so strenuous in their attempt to deny that Congress
hear not Fox News talking points but the actually “rationalizations” for some
truly heinous policies in regard to health care, immigration, handing out top
secret security clearances to family members for potential “insider trading”
for “business” purposes in the future, and of course Trump’s tax returns if
there was no truth to the allegations of wrongdoing. If Trump has nothing to
hide then why is he obviously so desperate?
But there are still those who believe that Trump will not
only win in 2020, but it is only a question of by how much. Trump is like Larry
“Lonesome” Rhodes in the 1957 film A Face
in the Crowd, in which a pre-Mayberry Andy Griffith puts in a tour-de-force
performance as a drunken vagrant with a violent disposition who is transformed into a
television superstar spouting homespun “wisdom,” whose every bigoted pronouncement is taken as gospel by the provincial
“forgotten” people. Seeing how he moves the masses, Rhodes becomes drunk on the
notion of political power, until his actual belief in the stupidity of the
people he “moves” is “accidentally” exposed to millions of television viewers. The
question in regard to Trump is just how much of the hate and bigotry he
inspires will be simply too much to take for any person who still supports him who
has any shred of human decency left.
And there are those, like commentator Hugh Hewitt, who is
another one of those “conservatives” who once opposed Trump but now fully
endorse him, who insist that “it’s the economy, stupid” that will insure his
reelection. Democrats are going to have pound on certain realities that may
dull some people’s enthusiasm about what the eventual recession might look
like, thanks to Trump and the Republicans. While the 3.2 percent increase in the GDP
reported for the last quarter sounds great, it hasn’t done anything to improve revenues
and the national debt, in fact is part of the “problem.”
In its report this past March, the Treasury Department stated
that in the first quarter of the current fiscal year there was a budget
shortfall of $310 billion, a 77 percent increase over last year. Revenues,
thanks largely to the Republican corporate tax cut law, went down 2 percent to
$1.1 trillion, while spending rose 9 percent to $1.4 trillion. 86 percent of
revenues came from individual taxes and Social Security taxes, while 93 percent
of spending was on Social Security, Defense, Medicare, health, SSI, and
interest payment on the debt. Despite profits and dividends totaling over $2
trillion in the same period, corporate taxes were practically a drop in the
bucket at $60 billion, just over 5 percent of total revenues. Why some people
believe that corporate taxes are “too high”—especially when some corporations
like Exxon “famously” don’t pay any taxes—just doesn’t jibe with reality. Furthermore,
corporations are bringing back money from overseas by the trickle, leaving most
of it behind untouched by taxation. While revenues are likely to rise by the
April tax deadlines, revenues will again just bottom out and deficits will again
rise to record levels.
Just before the Great Depression, there was a lot of
optimism, despite some warning signs, that the stock market would continue to
rise “forever” even as late as Sept., 1929, when what was the first sign of the
Great Depression was merely called a market “correction”—before the “fall” of
October. The Dow Jones would eventually fall from nearly 400 points to 41 in
1932. During that time, the Hoover administration was miserly in its efforts to
curb the suffering of the quarter of the population that was unemployed, with
many more barely making ends meet, while the those at the tippy top continued
to live as if nothing had ever happened, like Prince Prospero and his nobles
hidden in their castle away from all the suffering from the Red Death. The
record rise in the budget deficits thanks to Trump’s and Republicans so-called
tax reform bill has made it even more likely that when the fall comes, there
will be little left to control the ill winds that will befall the country.
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