Bearing Witness to Trump Week 7

Week of March 5 – 11, 2017

AG Sessions has asked 46 US attorneys to resign en masse or be fired. What type of a country allows the President, especially someone like Trump, to hire and fire at will the attorneys who are to enforce federal laws of the land? How despots and dictators, alive or dead, around the world must be dancing to see how un-exceptional America has truly become.

Trump is reported to be staying in Washington this weekend, the first in several weekends. With as much damage the man is doing to our government institutions, we may actually wish he spent more time in Florida playing golf and staying off Twitter.

The new Republican health care plan is best known as TrumpCareLess. I see nothing in it that makes it better for anyone. It does the opposite for most. Trump says it is going along just great, as his own party is torn apart by it.

What makes me the maddest and saddest is that this administration takes advantage of the exact people they claim to be taking care of. Mostly, they exploit ignorance of some and take others as uninformed suckers that they can say one thing, lie to, and then do often the opposite.

The list of countries where we have military operations or troops fighting just keeps growing. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and who knows where else. I fear that Trump will not let the recent North Korean challenge go without a Trumponian size reaction, as if they were personally attacking him his fragile ego.

Trump’s appointee for the head of the SEC, Jay Clayton, of course is another millionaire that comes from the industry he is supposed to regulate. Drain that swamp alright.

The head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, double downs saying man-made climate change is still unproven science and subject to debate.  To ensure that he has hired a staff full of climate change deniers and skeptics. It may not matter who he hires after they slash the budget by an expected 25%. Pruitt kicks into high gear on dismantling Obama-era regulations to protect rivers, streams and wetlands.

The nation is reeling over another set of accusations without basis that Trump made over the weekend when he claimed that former President Obama was behind the wiretapping of Trump Tower.  Even Trump’s pick for FBI has asked the justice department to reject that false accusation. This type of behavior is used by authoritarian regimes, usually in their last days of life. We can only hope.

Immigration agents around the country are arresting and deporting anyone they basically want to and think is a risk, without due process or the protection afforded by the courts. Innocent bystanders are being swept up. A young woman publicly denouncing and protesting the deportations was picked up by ICE shortly after her protest. Not surprising, Canada continues to see more asylum seekers cross their borders to escape persecution from all places, the US.

A recent report disputed the administrations claim that most of the recent acts of ISIS-fueled terrorism came from immigrants from the 7 targeted Muslim countries. In fact, most of the terrorists were US citizens!

More damage is being done to the public lands owned by the people of the US. The GOP wants Trump to undo many of the national monument designations made by Obama.

I can now see why one of the first actions of the Trump administration was to restrict lobbying and the revolving door between government and lobbying. First, Trump demands total loyalty to himself now and forever, not to some future employer as a lobbyist might offer. Second, when business has taken over government from the public, those firms who use to lobby are now embedded into or run the government and its many agencies. So why do you need lobbyists from the outside when you are already on and own the inside?

The above news items have been taken from a number of international, national, regional, and local news media sources, both print and digital. Additional editorial opinions and comments about these news items are those of this author.