No Country for Old Men

   


President Trump is trying, by fiat, to implement his racist and un-American immigration policies. He has stopped all immigration, temporarily, and has begun to put in place his program for the exclusion of Islamic people from entering the country. No surprises here, it was among his signature campaign promises. In fact, it was a very popular part of his appeal to his base and clearly helped propel him to the Presidency.

Now that his ideas are coming to fruition, we hear of a huge backlash against the fascism that these policies reek of. Why just last week, a YUUUUGE Women's Demonstration, with affiliated marches across the country and around the world protested against the coming anti-women's health policies promised by the incoming administration. As I've said before, the protests were just about ten weeks too late, the election is over now.

The widespread despair and dismay upon Trump's election are still palpable. If it didn't sink in on the morning of November 9th, it had better start to sink in soon. It's not just that the candidate that most people thought would win didn't, the true nature of the discouragement is that we didn't know that the country had fundamentally changed from an imperfect but always seeking to improve nation to one that readily yields to and embraces its worst xenophobic and immoral streaks.

Shutting the door on innocent refugees, denying healthcare to the poor, handing tax cuts to the wealthy, these are the new American values. This is what passes for patriotism in the twenty-first century.

Polls tell us that Trump has the lowest approval ratings of any incoming President. Have we learned nothing at all about putting faith in polls? Polls foresaw an easy landslide victory for Hillary Clinton in the election, but somehow that didn't pan out. It's clear that the polls are fundamentally flawed, and that their assessment of Trump is absolutely unreliable. Let's face it. Most folks are fine with Trump and his policies, what they report to pollsters is immaterial.  

The bitter truth is that Trump was elected by this country to carry out his fascist agenda, plain and simple. The moral high ground, always staked out by the notion of "American Exceptionalism", if not a lie in the past, is now most certainly a lie.