Donald Trump is proposing once again to pay for
his tax giveaway to the rich by taking it to the low and middle-income, to education,
healthcare and environmental protection. Among other things, he is proposing to
slash the EPA budget by 31 percent, HUD by 18 percent, HHS, Agriculture and
Education by 12 percent each, and ditto the National Science Foundation (Trump sees
no use for science, at least not the real kind). He is “only” cutting the Labor
Department by 10 percent, and NASA by 2 percent (he still thinks this will get
someone back on the moon by 2024). DOD will get a slight increase, but the DHS,
the Border Patrol and ICE will get 15 percent increases in their budget, which
basically shows where Trump’s “priorities” are. His recent banning of legal
immigration from Nigeria on fraudulent rationalizations (it is still OK for
Nigerians to just “visit”) is clearly a reflection of his and Stephen Miller’s
personal bigotry.
There is of course little chance that Trump’s
steep cuts in social safety net programs will pass; he probably doesn’t
actually “want” them to pass because the cuts will be red meat for Democrats in
this election year, but it plays “well” with fiscal conservatives whose credibility
is at an all-time low. Some people just never learn; “trickle-down economics”
didn’t work when Reagan was president, it didn’t work when George W. Bush was
president, and it ain’t going to work under Trump—he’s going to see to it that
it at least works for him and his friends.
Now, let us remind ourselves why someone who lost
$1 billion from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties, had a dozen of consumer
products with his “brand name” that were embarrassing busts, and his businesses
went into bankruptcy court a half-dozen times shouldn’t be president of
anything, let alone of the country. We
all know that Trump has been using his properties to host government functions
at taxpayer expense, which is illegal but he does it anyways and no one has the
gonads to stop him, not even the courts (let alone the U.S. Supreme Court). We
all should know by now that his rollback on various regulations has nothing to
do with “principle”—Trump has no “principles”—but everything to do with how it
helps him financially. Ditto with the business tax cuts; why should he do
anything for you if there is nothing
in it for him? That’s the way it is
with Trump, if he does anything at all there has to be something in for him,
whether filling his own pockets, inflating his Hindenburg airship of an ego, or
using the DHS as his personal “pest control” company to rid from his sight all those
“vermin” from “shithole” countries.
Trump’s actually boasts about his many
bankruptcies, claiming that his use of various loopholes to escape
accountability—thanks more to tax lawyers than to anything he actually knows—are
evidence of his “genius.” In fact, today most of Trump’s money comes from
properties and investments in which he is paid a fee for licensing his “brand”
name. That is all: he is no longer trusted by anyone to actually “run” anything,
except into the ground. Even in the “best” of times, as the New York Times reported, he put up “little
of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions
of dollars in salary, bonuses, and other payments…The burden of his failures fell
on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen”—wrongly in almost
every case.
Trump avoided personal bankruptcy in part because
investors were dumb enough to trust him with their money, and because he successfully gamed the “system” by keeping
his own income out of his own failing businesses. Why were his casinos such colossal
failures compared to others? Partly because they had to take on Trump’s
personal debts, which made them more unprofitable than they already were. When
Trump’s businesses went into bankruptcy, his own money was not touched—but his
personal debts were wiped out, along with the investments of his “partners.” But
not without a little help from family, of course. As the New Yorker noted, his father repeatedly gave him money, helping
Trump to “escape the humiliation of personal bankruptcy.” Remember that Trump “wrote”
the Art of the Deal back in the
Eighties. It seems as if his “art” was at least for him nothing more than a
forged painting, worthless even for him as he faded away as a legitimate “entrepreneur.”
As George Conway pointed out, Trump is unfit to even run a lemonade stand.
Today, Trump is clearly using the power the
presidency affords him for his own personal profit—he knows it, and that is why
he wants to hold on to the presidency for another four years. Unfortunately there
is much to overcome to stop this maniacal monstrosity of greed. Andrew Sullivan
in NY Magazine observed that there are
many, many people still willing to be conned by Trump who actually think he is
a greater president than Abraham Lincoln, FDR and George Washington, and
nothing Trump does that is clearly illegal and self-serving moves them to doubt
one centimeter. He feeds into their racism and xenophobia, and that makes them
feel “great again.” We can’t allow blind allegiance to such a man rule the day.
In every way Trump is the most personally corrupt president this country has
ever seen, and like his many business ventures he is running this country into
the ground.
Trump is precisely the kind of person who should
never be allowed to be the most powerful man in America. It’s a zero sum game
for him, there is no room for “compromise.” He wins, everyone who is not “loyal”
loses. If anyone actually does benefit from his winning, it’s from pure chance;
maybe some of the chips fell off the table and someone found them before he
found out they were missing. His vindictiveness surpasses that of even Hillary Clinton, and what is worse, he has the power to actually do great harm. Why so many people still haven’t figured him out
at this late date is maybe not so surprising: as usual in this country, too
often people stand on tracks too long before deciding whether or not to get out
of the way of a slow-moving train, believing it will never hit them.
No comments:
Post a Comment