After spending eight years peddling a conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president, we are now awash in exhortations from Republicans to join together in unity behind their super-hero of the age, Donald Trump.
Sky High Approval Rating – in Russia
Trying to predict the future of this new regime is as impossible as predicting the future of anything else. (Sorry. That’s the reality.) But the fact that Trump trusts and admires the blood-caked fascist dictator of Russia more than his own American intelligence services presents the most dismal tip-off we have, going in. The situation could become as bleak as is depicted in this recent article in Rolling Stone. However, it could play out in any number of ways.
Trump enters office with just about the lowest approval rating in American history. He could turn out to be such an undeniable screw-up in his first hundred days that he becomes an instant lame duck, awarded with a Democratic Congress in 2018. Then again, the only thing that would motivate Democrats to leave the soft sofa and show up to vote in a mid-term election would likely be something so catastrophic that life on earth would not survive it anyway.
Popcorn Time in Moscow
We get our clearest warnings about President Trump based on the people he is putting in his cabinet. Goldman Sachs is well represented. He has drained the swamp – into his cabinet. At least three honchos are apparently there only to derail the missions of the agencies they are heading.
This fits in with the desire to “blow up” the government, which so many of our fellow citizens turned out to support in November. They said they wanted a “bull in the china shop” to fully “bust things up” in Washington. Trump’s chief advisor Steve Bannon said he was like Russia’s Lenin:
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
That’s not entirely true, of course. He definitely doesn’t want to bring all of the establishment crashing down. Certainly not the plutocracy of the United States. That he will shore up to the very best of his ability.
The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has numerous lawsuits against the agency he will be heading. So, he will be defending the agency against lawsuits that he himself filed against it. He is a climate change denier, of course, as is Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO who will be Secretary of State.
Betsy DeVos, billionaire heiress of the pyramid scheme, Amway, will be a Secretary of Education who bitterly opposes public education and has zero experience in it. She wants education to be in the mode of a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. (See Pence, Mike, Vice President of the United States.)
Tom Price, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is a member of a medical group that espouses widely debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines being dangerous, among other unfounded, tin-foil hat craziness. This article on Price in New York Magazine must be read.
My own favorite Trump madness is still The Great Wall.
A Token Wall
Just after the election, Newt Gingrich, who was on the short list to be Secretary of State in this junta, said that Trump “probably won’t be able” to make Mexico pay for The Wall, and that he “won’t spend much time” trying to get them to.
He went on to say that all the talk about Trump forcing Mexico to pay for The Wall was just “a great campaign device.”
We have already seen elsewhere on this blog that The Wall as it has always been described is an infeasible boondoggle, from an engineering standpoint.
Only the most token, superficial construction will be attempted, especially now that it is the American tax-payer footing the bill. Even at this late date, no firm specifications have ever been put forward for The Wall.
As I am just a dumb Lib, I hope that someone from the Trump intelligentsia can answer a couple of quick questions for me about this Great Wall. I realize Mexico is going to pay for it, but as Trump recently tweeted, they will only do so – “Later.” As in, “Later, baby.” Or maybe, “See ya later, alligator.” But as to the cost of this project, which would rank among the largest constructions ever built in all of human history, do you really think it will only cost $25 Billion?
The Boston Big Dig was $22 Billion. Granted, Boston’s Big Dig was a project plagued with corruption, and we can certainly take comfort in knowing that nothing of that sort would ever besmirch anything bearing the name of Trump. However, let’s say that The Great Wall is finally completed, for $XXX Billion . . .
What if somebody in Mexico walks up and leans a ladder against it?
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