Trump times two
It’s been more than two years since Donald Trump became president. What has he done in that time? Two things, mainly.
He gave the very rich the biggest tax cut in history. If Trump said this, for once he would not be lying or abusing superlatives (most jobs ever, best economy, least racist, most presidential…)
A bonanza for billionaires, truly. No exaggeration, here. He should make “bonanza for billionaires” his 2020 campaign theme. Alliterative, kind of catchy and frank.
In a country that already had more inequality than any other in the developed world and one of the most unfair tax systems, Trump managed to take a giant leap toward more inequality and less fairness. In these times, someone should establish a Robin Hood in reverse award and make Donald Trump as the first recipient.
There are some slight problems with this, of course. Low taxes for the billionaires means less money for medical care for the middle class, less aid for the poor, less food for the hungry. Bigger deficits too and national debt, now at a record $22 trillion. Oh, well, everything has a downside. We must make tradeoffs. A free market is more important than a free lunch.
The other big thing Trump has accomplished in his two years is to set off the greatest popular xenophobic hysteria and the fiercest government crackdown against immigrants in a hundred years.
There is a long history of anti-immigrant crusades in this country. Racism and misinformation are always a feature of these campaigns. Typical is the name of a law passed in the late nineteenth century to keep out certain Asians, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Sheer racism was complemented by pseudoscience so off the mark that, based on intelligence tests, it was concluded that Jews were intellectually inferior.
Based on such brazen racism and absurd pseudoscience, immigration was cut off first from China and Japan and, in 1924, a draconian immigration law excluded immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, including Jews who, unable to enter the United States after the rise of Hitler, were murdered in the Holocaust.
In Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the thugs were in power and restrictive immigration laws prevented the victims from seeking safe haven in the United States. In Central America, thugs control the streets and frightened people are fleeing to the United States. Are we going to repeat with Central Americans the shameful treatment by the United States of Jews fleeing Hitler? If it weren’t already beginning to happen, it would seem inconceivable. But that is exactly what the “zero tolerance” policy of Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions intends.
Trump claims many other accomplishments but the claims are misleading or just bogus. The economy has been growing since 2010, not just since 2017. The current growth rate is not impressive by historical standards. And the gains have never been more unfairly distributed. All the other promises, especially infrastructure? Nada. Zip.
Donald Trump’s thus has “accomplished” two things. Both are ignoble, cruel, and altogether deplorable. The president’s policies afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable. He will leave behind an awful legacy that will affect this country for decades.
Trump’s reactionary overreach—the effort to turn back the clock before Obama, before the Great Society, before the New Deal, before the Progressive reformists, and all the way to the robber baron era and the Gilded Age–has produced a boomerang effect or, in accordance with Newton’s third law, an opposite and equal reaction.
The sudden and massive appearance of the despised “other” (despised by Trump and his ilk) at the center of power—uppity women, transgendered people, a Native American lesbian Ivy League graduate, a democratic socialist, a Muslim woman not afraid to call an obscene president by an obscene name—would not have taken place if not for Trump’s constant provocations. Ditto for the awakening of the long-dormant left in the Democratic Party as embodied by Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.
Finally, thanks Donald Trump for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the worst nightmare for you and your clan of Republicans and other reactionaries and for us Latino progressives the freshest breath of air in a very long time.
