What A Trump Presidency Means

The unthinkable has happened.  Donald J. Trump has been elected our 45^th president.  Like most, I shudder at what this means for the future of our country, our world, and our species.  I have, on MANY occasions, stated exactly what I thought of this man, but I don’t want to just write another essay or post dedicated to bashing him.  There’s been too much of that already.  Instead, I want to address those who voted for him.

I understand why so many of you voted for Trump, believe it or not.  You see, as I do, that Clinton is an evil, heartless woman who isn’t any more fit to be president than Trump.  I get that, and, unlike many, I won’t bash you for it.  Frankly, I voted Clinton for the same reason that you voted Trump.  But I want you to understand what you have done by giving this man the most powerful office in our country.  I want you to understand the danger you have placed our country in.

1.     You wanted an outsider because you’re fed up with the establishment.  I’m fed up too, but Trump isn’t an outsider.  He’s the face of Washington corruption, and is every bit as buyable as anyone else.  As of this writing, he is already selecting lobbyists and his own children for positions on his transition team.  Moreover, unless he extricates himself from ALL of his business ventures (which he may yet do; he has called a press conference on the subject for December 15), he will be in violation of Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution, also called the Emoluments Clause.

2.     You wanted someone to “Make America Great Again”.  Trump is not that person.  His policies will only take us backwards to a time when only the rich had money and only white males had any true power.

3.     You wanted someone to be tough on terrorism.  Trump has no concept of how to fight terrorism, and he has simply been playing on your fears.  The few details he has mentioned in his plans will in fact only make things worse.  Attacking families of terrorists will only drum up more enemies, as will restarting our blatantly illegal torture program.  Moreover, these things make us as bad as those we are fighting against.

4.     You wanted someone with proven leadership abilities.  This is not Trump.  He is a child who throws tantrums whenever he doesn’t get his way.   Many cited Trump’s career as a businessman as proof of his leadership, but it actually proves the opposite.  Nearly every one of his business ventures has failed, and he has only survived thanks to multiple bailouts amounting to tens of millions of dollars from his late father.  But he has never taken responsibility for any of these, which is what a true leader would do.

5.     You wanted to fight against political correctness run amok.  While I concur that it is problematic, Trump is in fact in favor of political correctness.  He is one of the most thin-skinned people ever to enter politics, lashing out whenever anybody says something he doesn’t like.  Moreover, he actually wants to loosen libel laws in order to make it easier to sue people for saying things he doesn’t like.  This is an incredibly slippery slope because it risks our freedom of speech and freedom of press.

6.     You wanted somebody to make our economy prosperous.  Our economy is already prosperous, no thanks to a Republican Congress that has refused to do its job.  But Trump’s plans will undo the last eight years of growth.  His tax plan will cost us an estimated $5 trillion over the next ten years because all the cuts are at the top.  His other economic plans are equally as damaging, and it will be we the people who reap the consequences.

7.     You wanted somebody to fix our healthcare system.  A great deal of work has already been done under Obama with the ACA.  I am the first to admit that it isn’t perfect, but Trump’s plan will do far more harm than good.  He intends to repeal the ACA and replace it, but has given few details on what he will replace it with, other than Health Savings Accounts, which are universally a TERRIBLE idea.  Replacing the ACA isn’t inherently a bad idea, but it is nothing short of lunacy to repeal it without having a replacement set up and ready to go, akin to quitting your job without having another one lined up.  This can ONLY do further damage to our healthcare system.

8.     You wanted somebody to clean up our foreign policy.  I admit that Obama’s hasn’t been perfect, but Trump’s childish temperament could lead to the biggest foreign policy disaster in our nation’s history.  Diplomacy is an art form, one that requires poise and flair.  Trump has neither.  His claims of “not having time for political correctness” mean that he will almost certainly use his standard bullying tactics, which will lead to serious issues.  There are heads of state that take offense at the drop of a hat, and many of them will not hesitate to retaliate.  Trump will be like a bull in a china shop, which cannot possibly end well.

9.     You wanted somebody to bring the country together.  There is no universe in which that is Trump.  He spent his entire campaign alienating, denigrating, insulting, and disenfranchising virtually everyone who isn’t a straight, white male.  He wants to ban entry to people from Muslim countries.  He has repeatedly implied that all Hispanic immigrants are criminals.  He has been caught on tape bragging about assaulting women.  Even if you don’t believe these things, the fact that both the Ku Klux Klan AND the Nazi Party endorsed him should show that this is a man who only seeks to divide.  Someone who has made his political career out of disparaging more than half the country cannot possibly unify it.

10. You wanted someone who would be truthful to you because you’re fed up with lying politicians.  But Trump’s record with the truth is even worse.  Politifact has rated 70% of his statements as Mostly False or less as of this writing, and rankings from other fact checkers are similarly low.  In addition to constantly uttering bald-faced lies, he also flip-flops on his stances every time he speaks.  Most of his campaign promises are in direct contradiction to his historical stances, and he’s already started walking back some of them since winning the election.

11. You wanted somebody to protect our country from its enemies.  Trump has no military experience (he’s actually a draft dodger, using school and bone spurs as his excuse, which makes it even more confounding that Republicans supported him), and his foreign policy experience is limited to negotiating deals for his companies.  He brags and claims that he has a huge amount of knowledge and expertise (“I know more about ISIS than . . . than the generals, believe me!”), but gives no facts or evidence to back up those claims.  Moreover, his policies will actually put us a greater risk; for example, he wants to pull out of NATO, which means that we could not count on our allies to help us in a time of crisis.

12. You wanted somebody to protect our rights.  Trump won largely on his pledge to protect gun rights (which he more than likely will), but his policies risk so many more rights.  The rights of women, minorities, non-Christian religions, and the LGBT community, for which countless people shed blood, sweat, tears, and in many cases their very lives, are in more danger than they have been for decades.  Trump built his entire campaign on racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, and xenophobia, and he riled up the worst parts of our society, which have made this country more divided and more dangerous than it was before.  In the weeks since the election, there has already been a huge spike in harassment, vandalism, and assault against all the people that Trump denigrated (yes, I know that some of the reports later turned out to be hoaxes, but the majority of them are legitimate).  Vile epithets are being thrown around once more.  Hateful graffiti and signs are popping up.  School children are being subjected to bullying right out of the 1950s based solely on their ethnicity.  Muslims across the country are beginning to fear leaving their homes.  A gay man in a Santa Monica bar was viciously beaten by several Trump supporters.

This isn’t just limited to his supporters’ behavior either.  Trump himself was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.  The fact that you buy his explanation of it just being “locker room talk” or shrug it off is indicative of how entrenched rape culture is in our society.  How can we trust an admitted sexual predator to protect women, who make up more than half the country?  Trump and his running mate Mike Pence are actually crusading AGAINST women’s rights with their crusade against Planned Parenthood and intention to overturn Roe v. Wade, actions that would set women’s rights back to the 19^th century.  Trump and Pence have also voiced support for overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage.  Between this and Pence’s longstanding support for conversion therapy (a completely debunked form of therapy that purports to “cure” homosexuality), LGBT people across the country are now living in fear.   

Other groups are living in fear now as well, because of the people Trump is surrounding himself with.  His nominees for various positions already include the former editor of Breitbart Steve Bannon, who is a white nationalist, anti-semite, and accused wife beater; Jeff Sessions, a former senator with a soft spot for the Ku Klux Klan and such racist beliefs that he was once denied a federal judgeship; retired General Mike Flynn, who is an extreme Islamophobe who eagerly spreads conspiracy theories with zero basis in reality; and Betsy Devos, a billionaire who wants to end public education in favor of charter schools and who is a greedy as the Koch Brothers.  Even if Trump’s brand of hatred isn’t as bad as it appears, it is made to be by the sheer presence of these people.  The rights of everyone who isn’t a straight, white, Christian male are endangered because of this, and a man that sees nothing wrong with this cannot, in any way, shape or form, be someone that will defend and protect our rights.

I could go on, but my point is made.  I also know that an equally long list could be made of the dangers Hillary represents.  That’s why I found it so distasteful to vote for her (for the record, I was a Bernie supporter, so I hate Hillary even more for quite literally stealing the election from him).  But when you compare the dangers of both of them, there simply isn’t a comparison.  They may both be cold-hearted, sociopathic criminals, but at least Hillary is competent.  At least Hillary can take criticism.  At least she can stand for something without being told to do so by her handlers.  At least she isn’t so unhinged that she can’t be trusted to run her own Twitter account.

As I said at the beginning, I will not bash anyone who voted for Trump, even though I’ve been bashed for voting for Hillary.  This was the worst election I have voted in because both choices were absolutely terrible, and because we have a two-party system, voting for a third party often feels like a wasted vote (however, I certainly won’t slam those that took that route, especially since I seriously considered it myself).  But now that he is our president-elect, we need to look forward to what his presidency will bring.  I admit that I could be wrong about many of the things I noted above (especially since he constantly changes positions on nearly everything), but there are five things that tell me what to expect.

The first is the way Trump ran his campaign, which, as I noted above, was done with hatred, bigotry, sexism, xenophobia, and abject divisiveness.  The second is the way he has run his career over the years.  He has been repeatedly sued for racial discrimination, paying ludicrously low wages, and has faced no less than 3,500 lawsuits for failure to pay people.  He has filed bankruptcy six times, used tax law to steal money from others (which is essentially why he filed bankruptcies), and just settled a lawsuit over the fraudulent Trump University for $25,000,000 (a mere fraction of what he made off of that particular scam).  In short, a thorough look at his business history shows that he is nothing more than a glorified con artist.  The third is the people with which he surrounds himself.  Already he has nominated a selection of people that include anti-Semites, racists, homophobes, islamophobes, sexists, and a wife beater (not to mention his unsavory endorsements).  His own sons have been shown to share these views, with one of them going to far as to say that if a woman can’t deal with sexual harassment, she doesn’t belong in the workplace.  The fourth is the way in which he responds to criticisms.  His constant Twitter rampages and verbal assaults serve as proof that his skin is thinner than tissue paper.  Finally, the fifth and perhaps most telling is the way he treats his inferiors.  There’s an old adage that says that the best way to know a man is to consider how he treats his inferiors.  As Trump is a textbook narcissist, that is nearly everyone that isn’t him or his immediate family (although the fact that he’s been married three times and openly brags about his affairs show that he doesn’t even consider his family to be on his level).  His treatment of Hillary throughout the campaign is all the evidence you need, as the Clintons are old friends of his.  If a man is willing to completely turn on a friend and throw the lowest of blows while picking apart every facet of their life, how would he treat others?

Look at these five criteria.  Really look at them.  They tell you every single thing you need to know about Donald J. Trump.  I may be wrong about many of my beliefs about him, but these criteria show exactly the man he is.  They show exactly how abjectly unqualified he is to serve as president.  Obviously, only time will truly tell what kind of president Trump will be, but the above criteria already put the odds in a very negative place.

I just pray that I’m wrong.  I honestly, truly hope that I am wrong.  Unlike many, I will not take satisfaction in another’s failures, nor will I detract from another’s success (I’m looking at you, Republicans).  If he screws up, I will not rub it in his supporter’s faces.  If he, against the odds, succeeds, I will be happy, so long as every person in this country can share in that success.  I will simply wait and see what happens.  That’s really all we can do at this point, just wait and see.  But I won’t sit idly by.