A Clear and Present Danger

Courtesy of Baltimore Sun

Donald Trump, admirer of despots and dictators, is dropping hints he may be one himself.  He is aided and abetted by his progeny, like his son-in-law who dared to suggest that November’s all-important election may be postponed, and that somehow, he, Jared Kushner, might be able to pull off such a feat on his own, the United States Constitution be damned.

Trump’s myriad failures would fill a catalogue the size of an old fashioned big city phone directory.  Forget the impeachment for the moment, the misogyny, the white nationalism, the threats to his rivals, the destruction of the environment as well as every institution we have come to value and depend upon as Americans.  The breadth and scope of his American destruction should lance each of us through the heart.  Let’s just concentrate on today’s follies.

As of today, 38.6 million people have become unemployed in the last nine weeks.  In this, there may be a silver lining.  The economy would have been one of Trump’s re-election hot buttons, his go to statistic.  Now, that’s gone, like those 38.6 million jobs.  If turning around an economy the size of the United States is like turning around an oil tanker in open sea, there is no way this ship gets righted by November even if we reopen the country this summer.  It will follow him into the fall, and could even be worse if we get the “second wave” of coronavirus during flu season.  He can blame anyone he wants, but this is his to own.  And he can share that ownership with his Republican cronies in congress who are balking at another stimulus package.  Once again, Americans need help and our federal government is failing us.  Worse, 42% of those lost jobs may be gone for good.

A recent report from Columbia University states that if we had practiced social distancing one week earlier, 36,000 deaths could have been averted.  Again, the Trump administration’s slow response, its failure to understand the science of the disease or listen to experts cost American lives.  He can blame Obama for everything, but this happened on his watch and there is ample evidence he was warned, some of it coming from his own people.

We are now, despite denials from the administration and CEOs, in the midst of a food crisis.  Shuttered slaughter houses and a crippled delivery system means many Americans are going to bed hungry every night,including many children.  Food banks are now popping up in parking lots across the country but they are quickly overrun by the large numbers of people who need food assistance.  We need more of these food banks but first we must admit there is a problem.  The Trump administration’s solution is to order slaughterhouse workers to get back on the job, but these employees are ill and those who are not, fear for their own safety.  One proposed solution is for America to finally, and wholeheartedly, embrace a plant-based diet.  This would offer incredible health benefits as well as easing the environmental impact of greenhouse gases.  However, meat consumption is closely intertwined with American culture requiring a paradigm shift in beliefs and lifestyle choices.  Good luck with that.

Then we have the colossal disaster of our health care system.  Testing delays, equipment shortages, inadequate medical resources for the homeless and unemployed, rising drug prices, and frontline workers who put themselves in harm’s way every day only to be harassed on their way into and out of their hospitals by Trump protestors demanding “their freedoms.”  This has everything to do with the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, and we can thank Trump and Republicans for taking away Americans’ right to health care just when cases of Covid-19 exploded.  Only Trump could turn a first world, comprehensive system into a corrupted disaster.  Drain the swamp?  Don’t look now, but he just put Big Pharma executive Moncef Slaoui in charge of developing aCovid-19 vaccine as part of the ridiculously named “Operation Warp Speed.”  This is right up there with his announced new branch of the military, the “Space Force,” with its ripped off Star Trek insignia.

Trump is also set to withdraw America from the three decades old Open Skies nuclear arms treaty with Russia.  Experts believe this is a clear sign that his next act will be to withdraw the U.S. from the New START treaty which limits the number of weapons the U.S. and Russia can possess.  Just what we need while battling Covid-19 and a failed economy:  nuclear weapons trained on us in escalating tensions worldwide.  Factor this in with Trump’s sycophantic reverence for dictators like Kim Jong-Un and Putin and the disaster that is American foreign policy becomes crystal clear.  Further, we have reports that intelligence briefers for the president struggle to hold his attention.  He refuses to read briefing books and documents, and he often wanders off on tangents during the discussions.  We have had presidents who insisted on memos being a page long, but Trump refuses to read anything, including quite often the teleprompter during his own speeches and public appearances.  When forced by aides to follow the script, he reads like a petulant, barely literate school boy forced to stand and read aloud in class.

Here we find ourselves contemplating a dangerous future.  January, 2021 or January 2025 (god help us!) we may wake to a president who has reached the end of his constitutional shelf life but refuses to take his toys and go home.  Despite pleas of constitutional malfeasance and growing demands to surrender power, we may find ourselves with a monster we have not encountered previously in our history:  a uniquely American dictator.  And then what?