The Rest is Yet to Come

As a Republican you may have not liked Barack Obama for a myriad of reasons. He was a Democrat (reason enough to not like him), he was black, he supported social funding that was to be paid for by more wealthy Republican people and corporations.

For the eight years of his Presidency and this year since, he has been disparaged as being a secret Muslim, not birthed on US soil, and for being the cause of racial tensions in this country.

While the first three attributes are intrinsic and indisputable, the latter three are conjecture, propaganda and most probably not true. Mostly he declined to dignify the accusations with any specific reply and went about doing his job, the job more Americans vote for than against. Twice. So what we have is accusations by pundits and conspiracy mongers about who President Obama is and what he did for (or to) the country.

Now we have a new person in the Office of President. What we know about him comes from listening to his own words effusing from his own mouth. We see his posture and demeanor, his praise and condemnation of specific people, and the nature of the people with whom he surrounds himself. We see the staff defections from the White house, we see the firings of his own cabinet level appointments, we see and hear the vitriol he shouts at his nearly bi-weekly campaign rallies.

Whereas, Obama was able to be positively judged by the character of his actions and policies, Trump cannot. In the absence of positive outcomes of any of his actions or policies he must stand before the choir and preach the Gospel of Donald and bask in the adulation of a few thousands of his loyal followers on a regular schedule. He must keep his message in the faces of those people lest they fall from his grace and turn away from his "church."

Donald Trump's rhetoric falls quite flat unless he denigrates an opponent and claim the pious position. In short, his gospel needs a devil or many demons to be the cause of everything wrong while he is the savior. Obama, Hillary, HER EMAILS, the biased FBI and DOJ, the Fake News. Without referencing them he has nothing good to say or report. He conveniently omits any negativity associated with him.

No mention of children being mistreated by ICE personnel. No mention of financial hardships he created with wild and poorly conceived tariffs. No concern for climatic conditions which have actually begun to manifest as wildfires, floods, tides lapping at the stoop of mansions-by-the-sea. The undoing of education, voting rights, consumer financial protections, air quality, water quality, and all around national infrastructure security. In Donald Trump's play book all of these negatives accrue to his greater score. When playing an endgame all outrageous acts are positives.

The economy is represented by an equation. There is an Equals Sign in the middle. When he says the economy is doing great, it means that corporate earnings and profits are up but on the other side of the EQ is labor costs are down. While a CEO loves such a bottom line, workers can't pay their bills and their lives go down in quality. Eliminating environmental constraints may increase shareholder value, but everyone else must live with the pollution.

Deporting people who have been in the US sometimes for decades may bolster his credibility for being tough on immigration, but they are people with families and lives built here. Tossing people out without considering the consequences leads to forcing vulnerable people back into the hands of oppressors from which they fled. The lives they fled are on the other side of that EQ Sign.

The Latin phrase ipso facto means the facts speak for themselves. The Trump Administration is so far into the swamp that in will never find its way out. It and the people who comprise it will need to be led out by the FBI and the DOJ but then only to face the actions they used to get them entrenched in the first place. Hundreds of indictment charges against dozens of people and businesses have already happened. Convictions and guilty pleas are fait accompli (French phrase definition - a thing accomplished and presumably irreversible.)

The propagandists can claim prior administrations were similarly criminal but the complete lack of legal actions against them belies that assertion. We have seen the tip of the corruption iceberg. The best is yet to come.