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ACCORDING TO LIZ - The illusionists propping up the ex-prez have reimagined his prior presidency as France under the Sun King, as the best days of our lives, glossing over the giveaways to the plutocratic class at the expense of ordinary Americans.
“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” asked Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference the day before Biden’s State of the Union address to America.
The answer from Trump co-conspirators was a resounding NO!
But far from a country that “was coming together” – as the Ex put it when he accepted the Republican nomination last week, it is a land he deliberately drove apart over his four years in office, and fiddled while his followers and opponents alike burned in the time of Covid.
From the ashes, Biden brought it back from the brink, but it is a pale shade of the once great America of the Cheat-o’s dreams, an ongoing nightmare in the land of the lost for far too many.
Excluding, of course, ruling corporate elite – enabled by tax breaks and a packed Supreme Court engineered under Trump’s heavy partisan hand.
Stefanik stole her line from Reagan at a time when America was suffering from a combination of high unemployment and high inflation.
Yes, there was massive inflation post-pandemic driven by excessive corporate greed and grievously aggravated by supply chain issues that took months, sometimes years, to repair.
Yes, there was a huge spike in unemployment but Biden fought to push through legislation to boost job creation, and now unemployment rates are close to a 50-year low despite dramatic improvements in wages paid to workers across the country.
Trump’s full-throated support for dismantling Social Security and Medicare will be front and center to a new reign in the White House so he can continue reallocating what American workers have paid into all their lives to subsidize corporate welfare and tax cuts for the uber-rich.
A recent study showed that a second Trump term would mean four BILLION more tons of carbon dioxide being released every year just from rolling back existing regulations (which he has already promised to his corporate funders).
And if he adopts Palin’s previous pledge to “Drill, baby, drill!” thus raising worldwide emissions from amplified extraction and burning of oil, gas, and coal… Although 1.5°C was the tipping point for catastrophe set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, under his Greediness we could be looking at global warming ballooning beyond 2°C.
But the narcissistic buffoon shall forever be besmirched by his disgraceful handling of the Covid outbreak, an epochal event that he first denied, then downplayed, and then responded to with miraculous thinking – to maintain his self-image for the rabble he had empowered in his rush for the presidency.
Instead of being even a halfway competent leader, initiating swift and effective public health measures to slow and contain the virus, he dithered while more and more Americans suffered and died.
What Trump and his court choose to remember are the self-serving fantasies of a Republican Camelot utterly indifferent to the suffering of those outside the castle walls.
The United States has about nine times the population of Canada, but had over 23 times the infections and almost 23 times the deaths. If the Ex had pursued the same path that Trudeau followed north of the border, many of the 700,000 American Covid corpses could be ambulatory today.
The not-quite-so-Orange Oinker is bat-shit crazy and for that there is no known cure.
His lack of comprehension that the main purpose of masks was not to protect the wearer but to protect those around him demonstrates why the man, if you can call him that, should never again be put in charge of a small business let alone a country. And one where the president can have his fat finger on the button to launch a nuclear holocaust.
The unrelenting reveal of the same absence of acumen in the ongoing litigation over his businesses that he demonstrated as president can guarantee that he should never be considered for chairman of any organization ever again.
The future he’s bringing us holds nothing but the gutting of Social Security and Medicare, more desecration of Mother Earth, and further incursions into our personal freedoms – rights of open expression of ideas, protection from corporate abuses, access to healthcare, and control over our own bodies.
He is a bully attracting support by enabling other bullies, buoyed by the appeal of an egotistical contrarian to the dissatisfied, and enabled by a media machine that values clicks on eye-candy over solid news. Where immigrants are animals, and lies are just alternate truths.
The Fourth Estate must return to its roots of revealing what is really going on, sticking to the unvarnished truth, and avoiding spin to satisfy corporate shareholders.
What should be newsworthy is not the presidential candidates’ behavior but the consequences their policies will have on the country.
On our lives.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
