(1) Do you have a 401(k) or a portfolio of other assets?
(2) What has an immigrant ever done to you?
As we all know, Donald Trump came to power by campaigning on
two fundamental issues: the economy and immigration. He appealed to the
angriest people among us by telling them they were getting screwed by their
government with high taxes and bad trade deals and blah-blah-blah while being threatened
by immigrants who come swarming over our borders every day to take away their
jobs and their livelihoods while raping and murdering their wives and children.
He told them who and what they needed to fear, and promised that he alone—the greatest
businessman of all time—could fix all of their problems and Make America Great
Again.
Of course, he lied on all counts, and I think I can prove it
by taking each of these two issues one at a time.
First off, if you do have a 401(k) or some other kind of
retirement plan based on the rise and fall of the stock market, you probably
think Trump’s economy is making your life better. I know that the last time I
looked, my IRA was a little bit higher than it was before Trump took office.
But I also notice that yesterday, the Dow dropped by more than 130 points after
being down more than 400 earlier in the day, and it has continued to fall all
week long, so any gains I may have acquired the week before have disappeared over
the past few days. That’s the nature of Wall Street—it climbs and it falls and it
climbs again and it falls again—and that’s never going to change.
What I’m saying is, if my ability to retire was based solely
on fluctuations in the stock market, I wouldn’t feel all that secure,
especially after my 401(k) lost roughly 40% of its value during the last year of
the Bush administration, and that could easily happen again at any time. Now,
if you asked me how my monthly income is doing, I’d tell you that it’s flat, and
when I saw my tax returns this year, I suffered a net loss from the year before
Trump’s tax cuts took effect, so despite some temporary gains in market
activity, the Trump economy isn’t doing anything to improve my life.
How about you, Mr. or Ms. Average Trumpaloon? How are you
doing, really? If you’re a coal miner, did Trump bring back your job like he
promised? No? Did he re-energize the steel industry as he claims? No. That was
a lie. Are his tariffs killing American farmers? Yes, yes they are. Did the deficit
skyrocket in the last two years? It did. Did his new trade deals put money in
your pocket? Probably not. And did you benefit from the big tax cut that made
millionaires richer and poor people poorer? My guess is, you did not.
So if you voted for Trump’s economy and you’re not better
off, you lose.
Second, I don’t know any immigrant from any country who has
done anything to change my life in a negative way. No immigrant has taken my
job, killed or raped a family member, stolen my car, cost me money or taken
something I thought should belong to me. In other words, unless I was a
racist—which I’m not—I can’t think of a single reason why I should be
anti-immigrant. What about you, Trumpaloon? Are you a racist? Are their
Confederate flags and tiki torches in your closet at home? Are you one of the
very fine people who want an all-white America? Do you think the Nazis had the
right idea? What exactly is your
excuse for hating all immigrants?
If that’s why you voted for Trump, you’re not just a loser.
You’re a loser who flies the flags and displays the symbols of the armies of
white supremacists who lost every war they ever fought. You’re on the wrong side of
history…and in a very big way.
As I have said numerous times before, Donald Trump is a
shallow, childish, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con
man tax evading sexual predator who’s also a pathological liar with dangerous,
Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness. He has admitted to sexual
assault and is under investigation for fraud, bribery, campaign finance
violations and at least 10 counts of obstruction of justice.
Trump may not have been indicted (yet) for colluding with a
foreign adversary, but he and his family have an unhealthy relationship with
the Russian government and other dictatorial regimes around the globe that
would send him to prison if not for a dubious memo from the Justice
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
And yet, 35 or more percent of the American population would
lie down in front of an oncoming train if Trump asked them to do it, and I
still can’t figure out why. Some people actually believe that he was sent here
by God to be the president, even after we learned this week that at least one
of the evangelical leaders who preach this nonsense only endorsed Trump after
paying his fixer to cover up dirty photos of him and his wife. (I can’t prove
it, but I suspect that if the whole truth were known, many of the other
fundamentalist pastors who support Trump have some embarrassing laundry hanging
on their clotheslines at home as well.)
So as I said, I’d like to sit down with one or two of my Trumpaloon
friends and ask these questions and hear their responses. I’d like to hear them
tell me how their lives have improved under Trump and what they expect to gain
by voting for him again. I’d like to hear actual face-to-face conversation and
not just Fox News talking points and I’d like to do it sooner rather than later.
I’d be willing to do it right now, in fact, but
unfortunately there’s one problem I can’t seem to overcome: I don’t have any Trumpaloon
friends.
I used to have some before I unfriended them all on Facebook
or otherwise stopped communicating with them in any way whatsoever. Some of
them were friends from high school or college, some were former neighbors, at
least one was a girl I dated for a fairly long time and some were even
relatives…first cousins and the like. I cut them out of my life because I
couldn’t take their shameless, brainless, fact-free support for a man who
conned his way into the White House on a pathway of lies and deceit and
continues to lie and deceive the American people every single day.
Not only does he violate his oath to protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States on an almost daily basis, but he has now set
a course to completely bypass the Constitutional authority of Congress and the
courts and establish the executive branch of government as all powerful, independent
of any oversight and beyond accountability, with him as the ruler and the rest
of us as his serfs. If I recall correctly, we had a king once and we fought a
war to escape his rule and establish a constitutional republic. I, for one, am
not interested in sliding back into a monarchy, especially if it’s the Trump
family sitting on the throne.
How about you, Trumpaloon? Oh, wait...
How about you, Trumpaloon? Oh, wait...
