Trump’s failed first year
Last night, I was on a Zoom with a woman who could not get a delivery of propane to heat her home in upstate New York during a severe cold spell because of a late payment. The woman, who works full time and has done for almost four decades, had had a car repair expense and had to choose what bills to pay and got behind on a propane payment, so the company would not send a new shipment out. She was subsequently suffering with no heat during the severe cold.
Trump has failed the first year of his presidency. On the single most important issue that he won the election on last year, to fix the economy and make life more affordable, he has utterly failed to deliver, and can barely be bothered to pay attention.
As Trump flies off to Davos, Switzerland, tonight to hobnob with the billionaires at the alpine ski resort, he has invited Russia’s murderous dictator Vladimir Putin and his Belarussian sidekick Alexander Lukashenko to join his “Board of Peace,” which is selling permanent board memberships for one billion dollars cash, and which has, naturally, named Trump chair for life.
Meanwhile, he is threatening to tariff NATO allies for not supporting his threat to seize Greenland, while justifying his belligerence to the Norwegian prime minister as sour grapes for not receiving the Nobel peace prize (whose medal he took from the actual recipient, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, last week).
Trump may also bomb Iran in the coming days or weeks.
Many voters consider these foreign escapades as costly and unwelcome. At some level, they seem to be distractions, perhaps primarily for Trump himself, from his utter failure at home to improve the economy, and his unprecedented, deep unpopularity.
“Public opinion on nearly every aspect of Trump’s first year back in the White House is negative, a new CNN poll …finds, with a majority of Americans saying Trump is focused on the wrong priorities and doing too little to address the cost of living,” CNN reported on a new CNN poll last week.
Some 58% of Americans call “the first year of Trump’s term a failure,” the report continued.
“Much of the public doubts that Trump is prioritizing their interests. Just 36% now say he has had the right priorities, down from 45% near the beginning of his term. Only one-third of Americans now say they believe that Trump cares about people like them, down from 40% last year and the worst rating of his political career.”
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Trump’s sending of thousands of ICE agents to persecute the residents of Minnesota, and his threat to use the US military against Americans, is an even more dreadful manifestation of his psychological pathology. Now his banana republic Justice Department has reportedly opened criminal investigations of Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, while refusing to investigate the ICE agent who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good.
“Instead of deporting ‘the worst of the worst,’ Donald Trump is targeting communities that didn’t vote for him, like Chicago and Minneapolis, rounding up… people who look like immigrants, with no criminal history, and attacking peaceful protestors exercising their First Amendment rights,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), said in a statement today.
“Last time I checked, Governor Walz, Mayor Frey, and AG Ellison had the right to free speech as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution—a document President Trump and AG Bondi swore to protect and defend.”
On Sunday, ICE agents bashed in the door and detained a U.S. citizen, ChongLy Thao, “at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions,” the Associated Press reported.
“Thao, who has been a U.S. citizen for decades, said… agents drove him ‘to the middle of nowhere’ and made him get out of the car in the frigid weather so they could photograph him,” the AP report continued. “Agents eventually realized that he was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record….and an hour or two later, they brought him back to his house…and then left without apologizing for detaining him or breaking his door.”
“We have become a country whose federal government deploys military and paramilitary forces in the streets of its major cities, terrorizing the residents in the guise of protecting them,” M. Gessen wrote in the New York Times Sunday. “A foreign observer taking stock of the United States could describe us as a nation on the brink of civil war. …The number of armed federal agents deployed to Minneapolis may now be five times the size of the city’s police force.”
Now is the time “to learn from the ways other countries have cracked down on protest, eviscerated their electoral systems, limited their media freedom and built concentration camps,” Gessen, who has lived and reported from Russia, continued. “The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do—right now, while we still can.”
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