Trump wants to erase President Obama rule by rule by rule

Another day, another Obama-era regulation erased.

This time it’s federal guidance that says a transgender student in a public school should be able to use the restroom of his or her own gender identity and not what the religious right says he or she must pretend to be.

Before that it was the Interior Department’s clean streams rule that prevented mining companies from dumping coal waste into waterways that run down the mountains they are exploding to get at the coal.

Trump also wants to roll back “the fiduciary rule” that requires brokers to act in a client’s best interest, rather than seek the highest profits for themselves, when providing retirement advice. Word is his Staff of Deplorables is preparing two more executive orders that would wipe out Obama-era policies on climate change and water pollution.

There may have been others and there are bound to be more. The eraser dust is flying off Trump’s desk so fast it’s hard to keep track of it all.

The big one, of course, is Obamacare, which the GOP has been trying to repeal since before it was even signed into law, even though all of the great minds of the Republican Party, when wired together, still can’t generate a spark of a better idea.

That’s because the original concept of the Affordable Care Act was once promoted unsuccessfully by Richard Nixon, was reimagined by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and turned out to be such a good idea that Republican Governor Mitt Romney sold it to the people of Massachusetts.

Before many more days, weeks or months pass by, the administration of Alternative President Donald J. Trump is determined to wipe from the books any progress this country made during the eight years that Barack Obama was president.

I don’t know if Trump still believes Obama is a Kenyan, is still embarrassed by the public whipping he took from the president at the 2011 Correspondents’ Dinner or is just too busy tweeting to prevent Steve Bannon and the boys from running roughshod over anything good that has happened since 2008.

Or (d) all of the above.

The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter why Trump is doing what he’s doing, because history tells us this is just what Republicans do – get into office every eight years or so and roll the country backward until we return to the primordial ooze.

Under Junior Bush, for example, we started trillion-dollar wars (off the books) for all the wrong reasons, our standing in the world took a major hit and terrorist recruiting flourished while at home, the economy tanked so badly we fell into a recession, hemorrhaged 80,000 jobs a month and everyday people like me lost 40% of our retirement income in a matter of weeks. Oh, sure, it came back again, eventually, but not until Obama had been elected and had enough time in office to scrape the Bush residue out of the nooks and crannies of the West Wing.

Once he got the country cleaned up, Obama led us to unprecedented gains in human rights, civil rights, religious rights, environmental protection, financial security and international prestige. He did it with a dignity that gained respect around the globe and against the overwhelming odds presented by the GOP (Greedy Obstructionist Party) that did its best to block anything he wanted to do.  

Now, with the Twittler in charge – so to speak – they’re going after everything they missed the first time around, and there’s little that can be done to stop them until 2018, when the Democrats get a chance to come back around and start the country rolling forward again.

Damage. Repair. Repeat.

It reminds me of dancing the box step – left, left, forward, right, right, back.