My solace in the first six weeks of the second Trump presidency is that our chaotic leader never shuts up, like never, and keeps digging a deeper hole for himself and the Republican Party.
Elon Musk showcases a bejeweled chainsaw at CPAC. (CREDIT – VALERIE CHU/MNS)
How would you like to be a president with a 51% disapproval rating, as just highlighted by a Marquette Law School poll, and with a “strongly disapprove” rating of 45%. Close to a majority can’t stand anything about how he is handling his job. They hate his guts.
Many American citizens have expressed extreme distress – to the extent of not reading the news or listening to anything he says.
The hope for the future of the country stems from his shooting himself in the foot just about every other day. He is angering one big bucket of voters after another with his barrage of executive orders and his sabotage of the heroic Ukrainian defense against criminal Russian invaders.
Let’s look at the multiple buckets of voters he has turned off:
- Investors are voting with their pocket books. The stock markets have been in near freefall since Trump started imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China. Workers have lost more than 5% of the value of their retirement accounts in just a few short weeks. (In anticipation, I got completely out of the stock market 10 days ago.)
- Voters on our northern border who trade with Canada every day are mystified about Trump’s cockamamie belief in tariffs. Economists almost unanimously agree that tariffs raise consumer prices, which Trump promised to lower on the campaign trail. (Note that we have a trade surplus with Canada; we sell more to our neighbor than it does to us.)
- Veterans in particular have to be deeply upset by the cut of 80,000 employees of the Veterans Administration and by his animosity toward NATO and the 32 countries that make up the alliance. That alliance has worked well for the most part for 80 years since the end of WWII. The vet’s fathers fought for European peace.
- Trump has turned off anyone involved in the transportation industry with deep cuts to the Federal Aviation Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which deals with weather predictions.
- Another chunk of disenchanted voters are those involved with education. Trump and Elon Musk, his chainsaw slasher, are moving to eliminate the Department of Education, which channels billions of dollars to local schools and colleges and Pell grants to students to support their education and career ambitions.
- Trump cultists dismiss climate change, but the majority of Americans want to stem the obvious damage that record high temperatures and extreme weather have wreaked on many parts of the planet.
- Trump and Musk had already lost the votes of the gay community, but voters sympathetic to their rights are becoming disaffected by the severe attacks on that estimated 10% of our population. Many families have gay members.
- Another bucket of voters simply can’t understand why the White House would cut back on the Internal Revenue Service. Fewer auditors mean that the billionaires who Trump hobnobs with at Mar-a-Lago will get away with more loopholes that their battalions of lawyers and accountants concoct. Citizens for the most part don’t mind paying their taxes unless the system is rigged in favor of the fat cats.
- People who believe that medical scientists have improved the human condition with their research are perplexed about why research and development dollars are being slashed. (I have dodged two fatal health bullets because of that research.)
- The same cohort of voters know that the American economy leads the world, partly because of the innovation that comes from governmental funding of research and development. The Internet is just one example.
- Trump will lose votes from people who see him trying to “Make Russia Great Again.” They simply can’t understand why Trump’s team is working to bring about a Russian victory over Ukraine. Instead, we should arm Ukraine to the teeth with conventional weapons, like we do with Israel. Those voters are becoming cynical about what kind of self-serving deal Trump has cut with Putin and what kind of secret leverage Putin may have on our president.
You get the picture. Trump won the Oval Office by only 1½ points. If he had campaigned honestly about his intentions to wreak havoc here and abroad, he would never have been elected last November.
The hallmark of his second term has been negativity – tearing things down. Positivity on new ways to bring about prosperity and peace have been strikingly missing.
Can somebody point to any positive initiatives in his first six weeks?
