Occam's Razor

Donald Trump is really not that hard to figure out. If Obama was for it, he’s against it. This is because in 2011 President Obama publicly lampooned him at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Not used to being publicly humiliated and having an extreme case of narcissism, Trump of course dialed it up to 11. He used every opportunity since then to undercut Obama. His way of getting back at enemies is to get even. Thus his presidency and while in office using every opportunity to destroy Obama’s legacy. Thus we have an EPA chief Scott Pruitt trying to turn it into the Environmental Destruction Agency and an acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Mick Mulvaney working hard to make it do absolutely nothing related to helping consumers.

Obama was for an agreement with Iran to restrain its development of nuclear weapons, so naturally Trump was against it. That this means that Iran is free to develop these same weapons of course doesn’t occur to him. Obama was against open dialog with North Korea absent significant verifiable concessions, so it’s not surprising in the least that Trump just concluded a very short “summit” with its despotic leader Kim Jung Un wherein North Korea agreed to nothing concrete but Trump unilaterally ended joint US-South Korean military exercises. The hypocrisy of engaging in the sort of behavior Obama engaged in with Iran with North Korea doesn’t occur to him.

Fortunately for Trump, his fellow so-called “Republicans” don’t see it either. They are praising Trump for the exact sort of behavior that had Obama done it likely would have resulted in his impeachment. And that’s because it’s okay if you are a Republican. Only the Republican Party as it has morphed over the years is now effectively gone. It’s become the Party of Trump. Those few willing to timidly stand up to Donald Trump are either leaving Congress anyhow or, like former South Carolina governor and now U.S. House representative Mark Sanford, you lose your primary to a challenger who will blindly follow Donald Trump.

Trump obviously trust his instincts, so much so that not only will he not brook any dissent, he has removed pretty much anyone in his administration that might want to offer a contrary opinion. His Chief of Staff John Kelly is reportedly miserable and looking for an out. Trump seems likely to let the position go vacant when Kelly leaves. He’ll kind of winging the whole presidency thing himself, when he isn’t obsessively watching Fox News during his frequent “executive time”.

Pretty much everything the Republican Party traditionally stood for, Trump has chosen the opposite and Republicans laud him for his leadership. North Korea was to be wiped off the planet, until King Trump decided otherwise, and now he is a brilliant leader who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Free trade is out and tariffs are in, despite the history that tariffs were the exact cause of the Great Depression. Canada is our new enemy; Russia is our new friend. Trump at least had the smarts enough to discern that what the Republican Party stood for was not at all what its base stood for. The base didn’t care about that stuff. All they really care about is hating those not like them and white nationalism. And they really, really want to rally behind a standard bearer who fights to implement that message.

Party of life? Only if it means forcing a woman to give birth to a child. Otherwise it’s quite correct to call them the party of death. This administration rips families apart at the border and traumatizes their children for life. It’s basically building tent city prisons for undocumented kids. Customs and Border Enforcement is becoming a Goon Squad, feeling free to act unchecked and at will against pretty much anyone. Also, it’s peddle-to-the-metal time accelerating global climate change and pollution by actively trying to make our environment much worse and much more quickly. It’s also all about making people with less wealth even more miserable and being poor even more degrading. Trump is more than capable at keeping his base whipped up, endlessly pushing their buttons that allow them to hate even more.

The irony is that all of this is because Republicans know their time is coming to an end. They sense it; they fear it. The demographic shift underway in America makes it inevitable. The only way to prevent it is to change the system completely, replacing democracy with authoritarianism led of course by Trump. Trump instinctively knows how to do this. Fortunately for the rest of us, he’s particularly inept in doing so because he listens only to himself and Fox News. Trump specializes in creating chaos, but chaos is not a plan, it’s simply chaos. Trump’s hope though is that if he creates enough chaos he makes it easier to make America an authoritarian state. His chaos creates the conditions that help authoritarianism thrive. And that’s what the “Republican Party” is now banking on: the end of our democracy as we have known it, with only themselves in charge. Because they know they can’t win honestly, so they must win dirty, pulling the rug from under all of us before we can marshal an effective response.

This must change on November 6 somehow or those of us living will probably live to see the end of a 250-year-old experiment in democracy.