Donald Trump

An acquaintance opined on Facebook recently that Donald Trump’s presidency would bring about compliance with the Constitution, a stronger economy, a repeal of Obamacare as one of the factors causing “our worst financial crisis,” and pay down our debt. This is a good person, demonstrating that not all of his supporters are deplorables. Some, in fact, are nice folks. They’re just ideologically brainwashed and woefully deluded.

“Trump is far greater than a creation of the media,” she wrote. To start with, the media created a false equivalency of Trump and Hillary Clinton. She was unethical, dishonest, politically opportunistic, a money monger, and not always kind to those around her. Those faults, while egregious, pale beside those of Trump: a racist, bully, misogynist, outright crook, narcissist, vengeful retaliator, consummate liar, political ignoramus, inept businessman – I’m sure I’ve left out some of the character traits.

This guy’s an expert?

Stephen Bannon

Trump will be educated by “expert advisors.” It is hard to see how his advisers will carry out the Constitution as it was written when one considers that it forbids racial, ethnic and religious discrimination, elements that its champions continually and conveniently ignore. Trump’s pick of advisers speaks to his respect – or I should say, disrespect – of the Constitution, which the Facebook writer reveres so highly. One of his first two choices is Stephen Bannon, a top executive at ultra-right-wing Breitbart News Network, who has ties to the white nationalist movement. That choice is in line with Donald Trump’s history of racism, from his refusal of black tenants for his New York rental properties, to his denial that Barack Obama was born in the United States, to his hemming and hawing before finally saying, grudgingly, that he disavowed the support of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Holocaust denier, and anti-Semite.

David Duke

“Paying down our national debt is fiscal wisdom.” Paying down our national debt may be fiscal wisdom, but will you please explain, Ms. Acquaintance, how he can do that with an economic policy which will, the vast majority of economists say, plunge the country into far greater debt? The estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is $5.3 trillion added to the debt, 26 times more than the $200 billion by Hillary Clinton. But it doesn’t take an economist to see that will happen by cutting the top tax rate from the current, modest 39 percent to 33 percent in a country where, already, 90 percent of the wealth is owned by 1 percent of the people. That action, combined with cutting taxes across the board, spending a trillion dollars on much needed infrastructure building, construction of a wall on the Mexican border, deporting droves of people (tremendously expensive), increased defense spending, and a plethora of other items, does not seem like an entirely feasible way of bringing the debt down.

Dirty fuels

Hillary Clinton

Using “clean coal and oil will make us economically strong.”  I never knew that oil was a clean fuel, and furthering its use will hasten the day when this planet no longer is habitable – unless, of course, you deny, in the interest of accumulating more material wealth, the findings of 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists and evidence all around us that climate change is caused by man. Rather than reducing taxes to make the rich richer, it occurs to anyone with a logical mind that it would be better spent on developing fossil-free fuels, which will create jobs as well as save the planet.

“He will repeal Obamacare and laws that have caused our worst financial crisis.” Obamacare has contributed to our “worst financial crisis”? I didn’t know Obamacare was in effect under George W. Bush’s tenure, when we experienced a financial crisis that threatened to become as serious as the 1930s Great Depression before Obama rescued us. As I recall, health-care costs were skyrocketing before Obamacare, and the rate of increase still isn’t as high as before, while easy fixes, Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, would be possible with a Congress that was cooperative instead of obstructionist.

Love and taxes

“When you have a President who loves this country with all of his heart, he will do the things to make us great again.” It strikes me that a president who loves this country with all of his heart would not be one who searched in every nook and cranny to avoid paying federal income tax for 19 years while his wealth grew to an estimated $1.6 billion (far lower than his $10 billion assertion). That’s the kind of country he loves – one that let him get by with it so he could grow his wealth to the detriment of taxpayers and the many people he cheated out of wages for services.

It is a sad measure of one’s self-worth to vicariously live the lives of the wealthy, especially those who attained that status on the backs of their worshippers.