- … and can he win again in November?
I got to thinking about the most notorious leaders in today’s dictatorships: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, King and Mohammed bin Salmon of Saudi Arabia, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and China’s Xi Jinping. Not one of them is caught saying I grab women by the p*ssy because I’m a star and they let me do it. Trump’s total lack of class, even among dictators, uniquely stands out. And sometimes his crassness is touted by media as an attribute for his “fans”.
What was arguably the biggest gaff in presidential election history bounced off Trump’s back water off a duck’s back. And people began to think that people in flyover over country liked this locker room talk stuff – that it was an attribute for Trump. But that’s too easy. There is more to understand, and to slough it off on Trump’s garish style truly misses the mark.
Americans have endured eight years of Republicans fighting with Democrats during our first not-pure-white president’s terms; then four years of a president who never though a day in his life about serving anyone but his own self, then covid, inflation finally leaving us with high interest rates in a nation with too many debtors.
And to make matters worse, all of these crises are left to be dealt with by a seemingly intentional do-nothing Congress. This is why the flyover country developed an appetite for a guy like Trump in the first place. It was not about trash talk and Trump’s divisive American vs. American hate speech. Many people were just weary and sick of the people in Washington DC for years of ignoring their needs and taxing them in so many ways, while giving back the bare minimum.
DC is skimming our common wealth. It is corruption. That was the first gripe of middle America. It is still a valid gripe. The meme is: all politicians are corrupt so what is the difference. We hear of the Big Lie. Well this is the Big Gripe. It stretches back to the Reagan meme that the government is the enemy. It is why Biden does not get credit for being a better man and president than Trump.
And the corruption exists on both sides. We all know politicians – no need to mention names – whose family members reap benefits from advance knowledge of government dealings. That is corruption, and to make it legal is to day its is okay to be corrupt and that fuels an appetite for a new kind of politician – which Biden is not. Trump, in many ways, just does the quiet part of corruption out loud. In some ways, it’s less sneaky than what Biden does.
We have endured about forty years of government officials governing by the greed is good mantra. MAGA folks were unified in one thing; hating the people in our government, and the way government treats them. They wanted something that felt like change. Trump gave them that hope. But he had four years to drain the swamp, and instead it just got swampier.
Polls tell us the Democrats want change too. I do.I was one of the first to recognize Trump was allied with Russia because I knew him from AC NJ, and there was a Russian mob component active there in that “carney” town in the 80s. He fell in love with Putin during the Miss World pageants in Moscow. Everyone who knew him knew that. Atlantic City is a small town. Everyone knew what Donnie was up to.
2024 presents voters with the starkest contrast between two agendas since the Civil War. Biden is trying to preserve the functioning of the institution of free and fair elections – of people deciding who should make the laws we all must agree to live by. Trump is fighting for his life to stay out of jail, and says he will create an agenda to run America a new way. But most Americans know he is running to keep himself and his family out of jail for life.
I stand with the MAGA people on their complaint that we need a change. Most Americans do. Right now, I have a gripe against the “establishment” because I got stuck in an ARM mortgage that floated up after Putin attacked Ukraine, which instantly changed the world’s economics. If I sell my home to have no mortgage, which is normal for people by age seventy-five, the first thing I must do is pay a huge capital gains tax. But is that really a capital gain, or is it just that the dollar has depreciated via inflation and so it takes more dollars to “buy” the home? Is this why Biden leaked “inflation is a good thing”?
I have my gripes against the way the US government favors the corporations too. That however does not cloud my assessment of Donald Trump. I know him too well to believe he cares about anyone but himself.
I also don’t think high interest rates are a proper way to fight inflation anymore. It worked decently in the 70s, but back then people had almost no credit card debt because credit cards themselves were relatively new. Mastercard began in 1966. The parents of the baby boomers often owned their houses with VA loans. College was relatively inexpensive. The Fed is advertising that high interest rates are needed to curb inflation, but today, a high interest fate fuels our inflation more than it fights it. Landlords must raise rents to pay off their loans; and mortgages and college loan costs take up much more of a family’s income.
Economic justice should count as much as criminal justice; in fact more so because criminal behavior involves a small percentage of Americans, but economic justice involves us all. Equal justice under the law is basically a lie. I like to think of the original meaning of words. The word tax is a form of the word take. If a billionaire pays a lower tax rate than a working person, how is that equal justice under the law?
It’s not the institutions themselves that Americans disrespect. No one is going around saying free and fair elections is a bad idea. What we are all saying is that the people in government don’t work for us much anymore. And the the voices of the fully honest politicans are downed out by the chorus of corruption that has existed in DC since anyone living can remember.
We know there is a better way. It starts with ending corruption. It does not start with making a president immune from criminal prosecution. The way out of this mess is to make Americans proud of the people in their government again. That begins with qualifications for holding office being upped and careful vetting of any candidates financial ties and past work ethics and experience. That cannot begin with a more authoritarian government.
We must never forget one of Trump’s first acts as president was to lower corporate taxes, which forces working people to shoulder a larger percentage of the expense to run a government.
Biden can function fine as the gateway to a new America. Unlike Trump, he knows he is mortal and takes pride in turning the wheels of government over to a new generation. Then it will be up to the new generation to fix what is broken for working people in this country.
If they stay with “greed is good” we are doomed. But I am hopeful the sheer unchristian ugliness of the Trump campaign and the spewing of his hateful, vengeful, divisive words will get Americans to wake up when it counts the most, in November.
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