We’ve Been Had!

One year ago, I wrote a post titled You’ve Been Had!, highlighting the people that the administration had placed in positions of high responsibility, and detailing their (un)fitness for those same positions. It is now time to revisit this administration, showing how much (or little) progress has occurred in support of the stated objectives of Donald Trump, with a special emphasis upon how the actions taken are diametrically opposed to the goals espoused during the campaign. I would write more about the people involved, but most of the original list are either under indictment, or have left the administration in order to crawl back under the most convenient rock.

So what were the pledges that Donald Trump made that fully excited his base and enabled him to claim victory through the vicissitudes of the Electoral College. Here’s what I took away from the campaign in terms of pledges.

• Build the wall. Build a physical barrier along the southern border of the US in order to reduce the 50% of the illegal immigrants to the country who physically cross the border
• Lock her up. Appoint a special prosecutor in order to determine the basis for prosecuting Hillary Clinton for her E-mail pecadillos.
• Drain the swamp. Run an administration that works for the forgotten people of this country who have been dominated by those coastal elites, who are probably Jewish
• Eliminate all traces of the actions of that traitor, Obama

There were more, but these were the pledges that resonated most strongly with the base during the campaign events in 2016 (and 2017 and 2018). So now that we are two years into this administration, how are things going? How well have these pledges been fulfilled? Note that we are not discounting the one true accomplishment of this administration, that of turning our judicial branch of government over to the Federalist society to be remade in its own image. That is one that has been overwhelmingly successful, probably to the long-term detriment of the citizens of the US.

Build the Wall. Ban Muslims. Stop the invasion of the US by undocumented others. Well, after two full years, we have seen prototypes of physical wall designs installed near San Diego. We’ve fixed some of the existing barriers on the southern border. And we’ve sent thousands of active duty military to the Texas border where they are sitting awaiting the onslaught of, women and children and men who form a rag-tag army of pestilence aimed at inflicting gang violence upon an unprepared nation. Or so we heard in the lead-up to the mid-term election.

We’ve not had any fiscal authorization for a physical wall, even though Republicans have held a majority in both houses of Congress to this point. Maybe it is because even those Republicans who have had to link arms with the President in order to survive his famous tweets, realize that building a physical wall across thousands of miles of arid landscape makes zero sense. Who knows? But with the legendary negotiating skills of the Snowflake-In-Chief, we can expect a braying noise to begin hitting the airwaves about the absolute necessity to authorize funds for the wall. This is in order to allow a continuing resolution to be passed that will keep the Federal government operating in the near future.

We’ve seen incredible incompetence in the implementation of the zero tolerance policy earlier this year leading to the family separation debacle. To think that children would be separated from their families without even a rudimentary way to connect the parties after separation occurred! To think that, if concern for children being brought into the country for exploitation was a reason for this policy, they would not have had a genetic testing program in place to confirm familial relationships. No, what we the people got in the implementation of this program was a totally incompetent effort that was fatally flawed in order to demonstrate the toughness of this administration. Incompetence that is continuing with the show of military force at the Texas border.

So all of the effort we see is aimed at the interdiction of people physically coming over the border from Mexico. Meanwhile, we see zero activity aimed at stopping the roughly 50% of those who are in the nation illegally due to overstaying their legitimate visas. That’s about par for this administration. Devote outlandish attention to their incompetence with one half of the problem while totally ignoring the other half of the problem as if it doesn’t exist. The people of the US applaud the efforts of this administration to rid us of the flood of illegals who are forcing us to eat tacos.

Lock her up! We will show the nation what we value by assigning a special prosecutor to take down that noted criminal, Hillary Clinton. What she did by exposing the secrets of this nation to the risk of discovery by having her unsecured e-mail server is a traitorous act. So how’s this effort going? Uhh, there doesn’t seem to be a special prosecutor anywhere in sight for Hillary, but the effort by Robert Mueller seems to be giving this President fits at this time. I never realized that the word collusion had to be preceded by the word no, but now I cannot separate the two words in my mind. Seems like the walls are closing in on this President, much like the walls of the garbage compactor in the first Star Wars movie. Once Roger Stone is indicted, and the facts show that he indeed was the link between the Russian operatives and the Trump campaign, feeding them tidbits about the upcoming release of scores of e-mails, the loop will be closed, and we will see the collusion duck waddle and quack in a very duck-like manner. But it is amazing how the line of Lock Her Up still elicits uproarious shouts each time it is brought out at one of the hundreds of copy-cat rallies this President uses to get his adrenaline fix.

Drain the swamp! Yeah, that isn’t quite working like people may have thought. Who could have foreseen that by draining the swamp, that would include gutting the efforts to enable for-profit college students who were defrauded by institutions that scarfed down the Federal student loans of their marks  students, from being able to gain relief from these loans? Why, didn’t Betsy DeVos appoint a program dean from DeVry University as head of the Student Aid Enforcement Agency? What could be better than to have someone intimately involved with one of the for-profit colleges being sued, to serve in an oversight and enforcement role for the debt forgiveness program? Is not the fox the best guard of the hen house?

Ok, maybe this was an isolated case. Let’s look at something that really does affect many of Donald Trump’s core supporters. Those who are suffering financial distress, and have to turn to payday lenders in order to meet an immediate need for cash. Unfortunately, due to the excessive fees and interest charges for these loans, many who use them as their last resort find themselves trapped in an endless series of rolled-over loans, each with additional service fees added. It is the perfect mechanism to squeeze profits out of those least able to pay.

The Federal agency working on behalf of consumers, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued regulations on October of last year that provided at least some regulation of this new financial product offering. The regulations would have ensured that the lenders make an assessment as to whether the person seeking the loan could pay it back, and set a limit on the number of times that a loan could be rolled over. Alas, the regulations were not to become effective until August of 2019.

In July of this year, Treasury Department urged the CFPB to rescind the rule, stating that it was not needed. The administrators of the Treasury Department, who have only the hearts and well-being of the public in mind, insist that it is the proper role of the states to set guidelines for the payday loan industry. Just like they had done so thoroughly before the Federal effort to set regulations in this area. Guess that the swamp drain got clogged up with all of those donations from the payday loan industry to receptive swampers.

Oh well, I guess it is going to be difficult to find cases where the swamp is actually being drained. Let’s go on to the last of our items, erasing all traces of Obama from the government. On this pledge, we can unequivocally state that the pledge is well on the way to being fulfilled. From the Iran nuclear deal, to the non-binding Paris Climate accord, to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and through a myriad of other actions, Donald Trump is demolishing all traces of his predecessor in office. And he’s not through there. He’s demolishing all traces of the past 73 years of the post-war diplomatic environment. Through his blatant disregard for diplomacy and for the necessity to understand that words have consequences, this china shop bull has smashed the crockery higgledy-piggledy. Throwing the weight of the US around, he unilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear control pact. Iran is now unencumbered from adhering to the limits and inspections imposed by the pact, and could restart their nuclear program.

But Iran is small potatoes compared to the signal diplomatic achievement of the Trump presidency to date. That is the love affair he is conducting with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Who can forget the statements of affection between Donald and Kim? “A very worthy, smart negotiator, absolutely,” in the aftermath of the June meeting between the two men in Singapore. And, who can ever forget what was said in Wheeling, West Virginia in late September. “I was really being tough, and so was he. And we would go back and forth. And then we fell in love, okay? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” Of course, other than not conducting actual nuclear explosion tests, or new ballistic missile tests, there is absolutely no evidence that North Korea is taking any steps to denuclearize. Our inexperienced diplomat-in-chief, who knows more than all of the rest of the government put together, would never let himself be snookered by a tyrant whose only ambition is to keep his regime in power. I would bet that Kim has actually read Machiavelli. He certainly is using the playbook very well as he uses flattery to disarm the leader of the US until he can make his nuclear arsenal and its deployment a “fait accompli.”

No, even more so than when I wrote it in November 2017, it is clear that “We’ve been had.” The track record of nearly two years shows that we can only expect worse and worse as we wind our way to the next election cycle. At least there will be one chamber of the legislature that will not bow down to the leader of our nation, who is so afraid of a bad hair day that he would forego a centenary observance of the end of the first world war.