It may come as no surprise that I’m not really a fan of presidents, generally. If I had to choose, I’d say my favorite one was that guy who died of the sniffles 30 days into his term because he wouldn’t put on a raincoat at his inauguration. That’s my president.
Although many recognize the paralyzing danger presented by a Donald Trump presidency, we have too quickly had our attention diverted with each daily mini-scandal: the pumpkin-spice covfefe, if you will.
I am no less guilty of this. I, too, laughed when Trump thought the air force had actually designed and built invisible F-35s, when he forgot Russia invaded Ukraine about two years prior to his comment, or when he said that al-Qaeda had flown American Airlines Flight 175 into a 7-Eleven convenience store.
And don’t even get me started on the Stormy Daniels media circus. The guy with access to the nuclear codes basically had to pay a porn star for the emotional labor of watching Shark Week with him. That is rich.
The private sector wrecking crew has found an obliging foreman in Trump. He will give them whatever they want to beautify their balance sheets. The fact that Rick Perry has been tapped as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency should be enough to make you want to grasp your reusable straws and catch the next Metrolink to any other planet.
As the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlines in great detail, we are well on our way to a planet that has been deep fried to extinction. The GOP position, which resists any legislation that would leave a square inch of inhabitable land for the next generation, is inexcusable, and all lawmakers or lobbyists supporting it should be forced to build their second houses on the Arctic sea pack.
Recently, the cabinet has jettisoned regulations pertaining to the sale of asbestos, the carcinogenic particulate responsible for classic hits from your childhood such as lung cancer and mesothelioma. Beyond this, Trump has been dismantling consumer protection laws at the behest of special interest groups and ushering in a new era of public anti-unionism.
That’s only the domestic half of it. The failing infant formula industry, which is being propped up by government subsidies and predatory business practices in the third world, pushed Trump to threaten economic warfare on Ecuador if they enacted a policy that was universally supported by the scientific community and the UN World Health Assembly.
This resolution, which was aimed at curbing the breastmilk substitute industry’s exploitation of new mothers (which has been estimated to have caused a million infant deaths in the developing world), was eventually passed when Russia told the U.S. to back down. How’s that for active measures?
Mohammad Bin-Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and 2018 Ethnic Cleanser Of The Year finalist (runner-up to Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi), has been massacring unarmed men, women, and children in Yemen in his pursuit of unchallenged regional domination. This was not only with Washington’s approval, but involved using arms bought from American arms manufacturing companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
These are the things we don’t hear about. Liberals would rather write some lofty piece about the decline of civil discourse. The reason we don’t hear about these singularly evil policies in Washington is because equivalent measures have been enacted by previous administrations of both political parties.
The neocons like Marco Rubio and the late John McCain hate Trump because he wholly eschews the illusory air of respectability that insufferable journalists imagine flows in the ventilating unit in the cesspool that is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Look, kid, if you’re gonna threaten another sovereign state with wholesale annihilation, at least do it to the tune of Barbara Ann by the Beach Boys, and also let that sovereign state be Iran.
Trump or no Trump, there are hordes of terrible, terrible people who pull the levers behind the smoke and mirrors of our everyday lives. POTUS 45 just doesn’t shake our hands and look us in the eye when he sells off the public interest to the highest bidder.
We are the victims of a national anemia in which we are politically impotent, and the 40 percent of the electorate that has read a book since seventh grade can only resort to smugness, ridicule, and ultimately despair when our elitism hands us a Trump presidency.
In the words of former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, Trump is “the fool who prances at the front of our death march.” The presidential motorcade of spectacle and absurdity is delivering death to human beings on foreign shores on its way to our own doorstep.
No one in Washington is on our side, and no one is looking out for the interests of the American people. For me, for you, for the captive Marlon Bundo, we need to organize and mobilize ourselves against the forces arrayed against us. It’s an uphill battle, but the future of our nation, our planet, and our species depend on it.
Sean Burke PZ ’21 is an ideological crackhouse from the North Shore of Massachusetts. One time, his old band, Rarig’s Kid, almost played at a Jill Stein rally, but she heard their music and summarily rescinded the invitation. He can be reached on Twitter @RachaelRaytheon.