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Wednesday January 24, 2018

This Guy Said It Well

Filed under: Politics — don @ 8:26 am

As I pointed out in the previous post I wasn’t a fan of Trump and didn’t vote for him.  I’m still not a fan but like before I prefer he is in office rather than her.  There is a guy on Quora who posts a lot and he said it very similar to what I feel.  His name is John Cate and here’s his post.

I’ve written quite a bit on the subject before. I had an open mind about his candidacy until he started to embrace the alt-right and people like Steve Bannon, at which point I decided I couldn’t possibly vote for him. Finding both candidates to be totally unacceptable, I voted my principles and cast my ballot for Gary Johnson in the 2016 election.

Insofar as his record as President goes, no one applauded more than me when he demanded that our so-called European allies in NATO pay their fair share of defense expenditures under the treaty they all agreed to. It’s ridiculous that we protected them from Soviet aggression for 45 years after the end of the war, let them get back on their feet and even prosper, and now they basically spit in our faces and won’t even pay their share. I didn’t like the way he went about it, basically playing “ugly American” on Twitter, but he said pretty much the same things I would have said to them behind closed doors. Uncle Sam’s gravy train is done. The EU’s basically at parity with the American economy. Pay your fair share.

And that goes to a lot of my issue with Trump—the man’s lack of diplomacy, both home and abroad, is embarrassing and counterproductive. I’m sure Trump, and a lot of his supporters, would say that he’s getting results. And to an extent, he is. But when you get results by bullying and publicly humiliating other countries, they resent that and they won’t ever forget it. You can sit down with them behind closed doors and say “this is how it’s going to be, if you want to still be allies,” but you don’t read them the riot act on Twitter. Trump is on a power trip and he likes to make people bend to his will. Someday, the bill for his being a dick is going to come due.

It’s already coming due domestically. When Trump became President, he did everything he could via executive orders to enact his agenda, but he quickly found out he could only accomplish so much without support in Congress—and even the Republicans in Congress put limits on his far-right planks, let alone the Democrats. He’s undone a lot of U.S. immigration policy without having a coherent replacement in place, the government is functioning on emergency spending bills, and he’s failed to reform or replace Obamacare. And a big part of the reason why is because he’s such an asshole that people can’t just sit down with him and negotiate a bipartisan solution. Back in the 1980’s, you couldn’t get much further apart politically than President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill, but guess what? They got stuff done because they weren’t buttheads.

Between Trump’s incessant diarrhea of the mouth, generally reactionary domestic policies, and his tacit support of racists, it’s very hard for me to support him even when he has successes, and he’s actually had more than a few. The freeloaders in NATO are starting to ramp up defense spending to the agreed-to levels. ISIS is all but destroyed, and you couldn’t help but notice that the U.S. and Russia stopped butting heads. And North Korea and South Korea are talking directly to each other for the first time in a long time. He’s starting to make inroads in reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy—even if he’s allowing for the expansion of the Department of Homeland Security, which I despise.

Trump was basically a dick to everyone as a businessman for the last 40 years and got away with it. But that style of “leadership” isn’t suitable for a President. Unfortunately, I don’t think he knows any other way or cares to learn any other way.

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