President Trump's Combative Inaugural Weekend

I didn’t get a post out yesterday because I couldn’t decide what to focus on. This morning I realized that is exactly what I need to write about.

The reason I had so much trouble deciding what to write about yesterday is because, for three days, we were inundated with lies, half-truths, conflations, misrepresentations, and outright propaganda.

Before I go any further, I want to say:

                ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE

It is a part of governing.

                ALL POLITICIANS LIE

They cannot get elected or even inspire confidence otherwise.

The Bush and Obama administrations both employed the strategy of hiding their lies. I’ll let you decide who did the better job.

President Trump seems to be employing the strategy of the Clinton, Nixon, and Johnson administrations. This strategy is to overwhelm the public with so many lies of varying types it wears the public out. The overwhelm strategy erodes the resistance of everyday people who are working to take care of their families. This erosion happens quickly, like a mudslide in a California rain storm. Soon, the only resistors left are the most radical. Because these folks are so far outside the mainstream of the “Average American” they are easily dismissed and marginalized by the government propaganda machine and their sometimes willing, sometimes unwitting accomplices.  

I will be delighted to be proven wrong on this, but, if the first weekend is any indicator, we are in for an exhausting four to eight years.

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Important Happenings

Besides the U.S. continuing its 220 year streak of peaceful transitions of power, some other significant events happened this weekend.

President Trump’s first executive order was to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. This is exceptionally good news for the American worker. This agreement, while possibly shoring up U.S. influence in Asia, would have our workers degraded by even more competition with fifty cent per hour laborers and three hundred dollar per month knowledge based workers with no protections from our government. U.S. wages have been depressed for far too long by these types of agreements. The only people enriched by these types of agreements are large, multinational corporations.

A record number of people marched in protest on Saturday against President Trump and in favor of women’s rights. This number is nearly equal to the number of popular votes he lost by in the general election. I find that an interesting coincidence.

Finally, the U.S. military carried out drone bombings in Yemen on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as President Trump wasted no time getting to work trying to fulfill his promise to “eradicate extremist Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.” 

I searched again this morning and could find no U.S. Congressional authorization for the U.S. military to be conducting war in Yemen. Our president, neither Obama nor Trump, have any authorization to be conducting war on Yemeni soil. Still, I see almost no news coverage of this. No outcries from the leaders of either party. No grass roots uprisings. The American people seem content to allow our presidents to illegally use our military to eliminate those they don’t like in other sovereign nations while killing more civilians than combatants - as long as they are “keeping us safe” here at home.

I’ll be back to writing about happier things on Thursday.