Trump’s First 100 Days in My Words
The Answer-Man takes the Washington Post’s Challenge
The Washington Post challenged citizens to write in their own words how they felt about the Trump presidency after a hundred days. Please be sitting down when you read these.
My Turn:
I described what I believed would be the nature of the Trump presidency in “Götterdämmerung is here” on the night of the election. I had no illusions about what to expect.
I believed it would embody the worst business practices writ large. He would be uninterested in the job, and unable to perform it at any level.
I believed he would hire and appoint the worst candidates as his agents, people who would lack the skills necessary to do the job, lack the intellectual rigor necessary to handle the tasks they would be assigned and lacking leadership abilities, they would be unable to inspire people to step up to the plate to assist them despite their lack of ability.
Some of these people should have never been confirmed for those jobs and will leave a lasting legacy that will damn future generations such as his Supreme Court appointee Neil Gorsuch, who said nothing useful during his hearings and yet managed to be appointed anyway. His first days only confirmed what anyone who was listening already knew, he was the wrong man for the job.
I believed he would alienate anyone interested in doing a good job in the government because he would choose to embrace fear of science, pandering to big businesses who profit from the ignorance of the American populace. I knew he would deny climate change, deny science and would not protect the nation from the predation of corporations whose only view of the Commons is as that of the lion for the last gazelles on the Serengeti without concern for what they will have to eat after the last gazelle was gone.
This apparently is the legacy of the Trump presidency, people who will be hired for work they shouldn’t be doing, cronyism, nepotism, and any other kind of graft and corruption we used to chide foreign governments for, are now part and parcel of the American experience.
Trump has not presented himself as a president of any substance, in fact, he seems barely literate most of the time, spending the bulk of his intellectual capacity writing blathering tweets on social media which contradict opinions he has had for previous presidents on nearly every subject.
This very contradiction should make anyone who is paying attention nervous as there doesn’t appear to be any relationship between what Trump says and what he will do, changing his mind from day to day on important policies, lying about troop movements, assuming he knew anything in the first place, having his press gatherings becoming little more than circus events of misinformation, social gaffes, and in some cases cultural faux pas which only bring further shame on the American government and its relationship with the press.
Honestly, I have not been surprised by a single thing the man has said or done, because I don’t believe he should have ever been in the running in the first place. This just shows me the Republican Party has no plan, has not idea of where it wants to take the country except toward further expressions of hatred for the rising minority presence in this country and what that may mean for the White constituency who see their power falling as their leadership fails to adjust for the future winds of change worldwide.
Perhaps, America indeed has the government it deserves, one it chose because it embraced fear, mistrust, greed, pandering and other forms of corruption instead of acknowledging Barack Obama wasn’t the monster they claimed he was.
That the monster was their fear of the coming changes as the world leaves American exceptionalism behind and forges a future where we have to compete just like everyone else has since World War II.
Instead of “Making America Great Again,” instead of helping to create a more peaceful world, accepting greater diversity, becoming more aware of the need for the development of new ways of interacting, helping to fund better ways of thinking about the future, he has instead, placed the world back on alert, increased the fear of the Other, increased the need for nationalism, for jingoism, for anti-Semitism, heightening fears of the very worst we can be and willing to use nuclear technologies no sane leader would even consider in our interconnected world.
The only accomplishment he has managed, that I expected, was to bring the nation and the world closer to World War than it has been in fifty years. Somehow, this is a dubious accomplishment, at best.
In a hundred days, he has undone fifty or sixty years of slow but progressive improvement in the world at large. What will the rest of his term bring, assuming we survive it?
A return to 1850 would not surprise me…
In case you think I am new to the Resistance, you might want to ask somebody.
Pre-Election
Post-Election, Pre-Inauguration
Pre-Inauguration
Post-Inauguration
Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding. You can follow him on Twitter or support his writings on Patreon. (Yes, supporting through Patreon gives him more time to create good stuff like this.)One of the best ways to show you care is to share this story.
