He’s been in office less than a week and he’s already wreaking havoc.
In his first full day playing president, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, issued a hiring freeze on the federal workforce and took federal funding from all nongovernmental agencies that perform abortions. In subsequent days, he pushed for the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone oil pipelines to continue building on sacred Native American land, and ordered federal workers to begin building that wall.
In less than a week, Trump’s pen has been moving faster than New Edition’s did when they heard the words “$500 and a Betamax.” Has he even unpacked? Has he put his Trump steaks in the fridge and his Doritos spray tan on the bathroom shelf?
It isn’t so much that President Trump (trust me, it burns me as much to write it as it does you to read it) has moved swiftly to begin ripping away at Barack Obama’s legacy after less than a week in office; it’s that the Electoral College—the people didn’t choose Trump, the damn Electoral College did—elected a man I fully believe doesn’t even fundamentally understand what he’s signed.
Not that he doesn’t understand the language or the ramifications of his actions—because I don’t think he cares about that—but I literally don’t believe he understands what he signed. Like, I think he might be one level above being functionally literate.
And that is what scares me most. In Trump, the Electoral College has given the White House to King Joffrey Baratheon, a petulant child who’s more concerned with how he’s perceived than with what governing this country actually entails. And he is still tweeting, still sending Sean “Spicy Facts” Spicer out to the press corp with no truths.
In President Pussy Grabber, we have a man who not only lies but also fully believes his own lies as if they were the truth, which is a sign of mental disorder, I’m sure of it. We aren’t talking involved, top-secret-clearance-levels lies; we are talking easily disputable lies. He lies like a fourth-grader who’s telling his mother the teacher didn’t assign any homework. He’s not even witty, and the whole thing—the lying, the idiocy, the executive orders, the comb-over—it’s all fucking bizarre.
Because this egomaniacal walking bag of pus can’t accept that he lost the popular vote, we now have to watch taxpayer money go to a “major investigation” into voter fraud that didn’t happen. In fact, the only proof that Trump has to show that voter fraud took place is his losing the popular vote. It’s scary stuff; scary, scary stuff (Trump voice).
Because the president is an ego-obsessed liar, it’s hard to know what exactly we are dealing with. At the time of this writing, I’m still unclear as to whether Trump has released his business dealings to his sons; how much, if any, stake he still has in Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota pipeline; or how many shares he has in Phillips 66. Don’t tell me that a spokesperson for Trump has confirmed his sale of anything, because Trump and his team all lie, all of them. And if you can’t trust the boss, you damn sure can’t trust his minions.
But this is what happens when white America (I’m looking at you, white women) turns itself on its head and functions with hate as the single unifying thread. A vote for Trump wasn’t because he posed a good position on how to reduce taxes or how to actually replace universal health care. It was a vote for hate—unbridled, white-nationalist-style hate—and the weirdest part is that we’re all going to suffer for it. Not just the blacks, or Latinos, or whatever marginalized group Trump hated to earn racism’s vote.
All of us are going to pay higher gas prices. All of us are going to potentially have to pay into a damn health savings account or whatever is created in the end. All of us are going to pay higher taxes because, while Trump shares your Midwestern good-ol’-boy hatred, he’s in the 1 percent, and as such, he believes in big business above all.
To be honest, I don’t think I spent any energy thinking about what kind of governance would be had with Trump because I was busy working myself through the stages of grief. The grief that 53 percent of white women left their girl (and, in turn, the rest of us) high and dry for this assclown. The sadness of an immaculate first family leaving the White House and America being in Trumprograde.
But Trump uses Twitter and social media much like a bullying middle schooler. But he’s not tweeting and Facebooking because he’s disturbed—which I absolutely believe him to be; he’s on social media because he’s comfortable there. He doesn’t understand anything about policy and budgets and the military. He doesn’t understand anything. He answers difficult questions in generalities. When asked how he was going to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump claimed that people were hard at work doing real “technical stuff.” This isn’t new; here’s our now president talking about cybersecurity during a debate:
Lester Holt asked: “Our institutions are under cyber attack, and our secrets are being stolen. So my question is, who’s behind it? And how do we fight it?”
Here’s part of Trump’s answer:
As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said. We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t think anybody knows that it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia—I don’t, maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?
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We came in with the internet. We came up with the internet. And I think Secretary Clinton and myself would agree very much, when you look at what ISIS is doing with the internet, they’re beating us at our own game. ISIS.
So we had to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a huge problem. I have a son—he’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers. It’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe, it’s hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester. And certainly cyber is one of them.
I have no idea what the hell he was talking about. None of us do. I realize now that between mourning the loss of the first family and gaining cousin Putin, I was too busy being saddened by our incoming president being openly racist, xenophobic and misogynistic to notice that the Electoral College gave the White House to Allen Gregory.
For those unfamiliar, Allen Gregory was a cartoon that came out on Fox in 2011. It followed the life of the 7-year-old title character (voiced by Jonah Hill), a self-important child who truly believed that if he acted the part, he would be respected as such.
In the end, critics hated the show and it was canceled. My hope is that the Trump show meets a similar fate. That at some point someone will say enough and return Trump to a box that he’s more comfortable in so we can all get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Because if this first week is what we can expect, then I’m concerned about us all.