It is only about 50 days into the new Trump administration, and we can already see dangerous trends. In that short time, we went from Trump’s announcement of a “Golden age” to his warnings of “recession.”
The best analysis of the current state of affairs I have seen came from former republican congressman, David Jolly, of Florida, who does political analysis for MSNBC. Jolly noted that if you want to destroy a country from within, you work on three main points. First, you disable the government to the extent that it is unable to perform basic tasks. Trump has taken a big step in this direction. Second, you disable the international treaties alliances and other arrangements that help provide security for the nation. By withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organization, betraying Ukraine, and threatening NATO, Trump has taken big steps in this direction. Third, you try to bring down the economy from within. It looks like Trump is headed that way. Confusion over tariffs, tax policy, etc. has seriously disrupted the markets; they are tanking.
Jolly left out what I think is an important fourth plank of this kind of program: that is the attempt to discredit, disrupt, disable and intimidate any political opposition. That would include attacks on the media, the opposition party, academia, and the legal and judicial system. Trump has already done all of that.
The prestigious writer, James Fallows, of the Atlantic Monthly, noted two things that made America particularly appealing when it was compared with other countries. The first was our relatively open immigration system and the second was our extremely well financed universities and their high-tech research facilities. These two things made America a magnet for some of the world’s greatest talent. Trump’s policies have obviously degraded both of these attractions.
A lot of ink has been spilled about why Donald Trump might be motivated to attack our country in this way. Explanations go from the idea that he is actually a real foreign agent (probably Russian) or that he is merely a criminal on the make, a megalomaniac, a narcissist, or suffers from some other personality disorder or psychological pathology. In my view these are all possible explanations, but I have never been a fan of conspiracy theories. It is hard to prove or disprove any of the above charges. They all rely on speculation, but the way that Trump has degraded the capabilities of the American nation is not a matter of speculation, it is a matter of fact. Whatever Trumps’s motivations, the results are the same. Putin couldn’t be happier.
Trump has made Billionaire Elon Musk the point man for implementing “efficiency” in the US government. Instead, Musk is taking a chainsaw to departments and agencies he knows little about. The cuts to USAID will cause millions of deaths across the world. Most of the victims will be children. There could hardly be a worse choice for “efficiency czar” than Elon Musk (the same could be said about many other Trump cabinet picks- they mostly seem to be charged with destroying the departments they are in charge of). Musk’s famous Tesla cars seem to be riddled with problems. His SpaceX corporation just blew up its second major multimillion dollar missile on launch, with dangerous debris raining down over the Caribbean. I hope some air traffic controllers were still on the job. Perhaps Musk should work on making his own companies more efficient.
In terms of efficiency, the firing, rehiring, and training of personnel is highly inefficient. In the end, after an enormous expense, you arrive about where you started.
Musk recently said that in destroying government agencies that he is “pulling up weeds.” He pointed out there was no point in simply cutting them back- they needed to be “pulled up by the roots.” Think about that. If our government, and the agencies it has properly created and funded are just “weeds” then the roots are the constitute itself.
The bottom line is that under Trump and Musk, America is far weaker, not stronger, than Biden left it 50 days ago. The only solution is for serious people to help Democrats take back the house and senate in the upcoming midterm elections.
Mind-Cast 
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