It was probably pretty naive to ever suspect that a billionaire
reality television star could actually be any kind of populist. Before his 2016
presidential campaign, I felt the same way about Donald Trump that I feel about
every billionaire, and was repelled by his sleazy, arrogant public persona.
But candidate Trump said some
things that no other presidential candidate ever has. He criticized the
embarrassing state of our crumbling infrastructure. He called out the media for
its blatant dishonesty, and made the term “fake news” a national sensation. He
was the first politician since before World War II to declare that we should
take care of America’s many problems first. He lambasted a foreign policy bent
on nation building and lamented the waste of trillions of dollars on senseless
wars.
Trump became the first
presidential candidate in any party, major or minor, to make illegal
immigration one of the centerpieces of his platform. He spoke out on behalf of
families who’d lost loved ones to illegal immigrant criminals that were somehow
permitted to remain in this country despite a slew of violent crimes. He
promised to end the diabolical H 1-B Visa worker program. Creating a masterful
symbol for crowds to rally around, Trump promised to build a wall, and that
Mexico would pay for it.
Trump brought up the clear
and obvious connections between vaccines and autism, and stories broke early
into his administration that he was forming a special commission to investigate
these connections, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He even promised to audit
the Federal Reserve, and apparently mentioned the collapse of Building 7, which
was a primary signal to those in the know that he harbored at least some
“truther” sentiments.
What
really appealed to me, and many others, was Trump’s willingness to boldly call
out corrupt public officials for what they are. His references to “crooked
Hillary” resulted in loud cries of “lock her up” wherever he spoke. And perhaps
the central theme of Trump’s campaign was his promise to “drain the swamp.” Survival of the Riches...Best
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Now, some ten months after
his shocking election, President Trump appears to be a pathetic shell of the
man he was. His waffling on every issue finally forced his supporters to
recently begin burning their “Make America Great” hats in protest of his
seeming consideration of amnesty for Obama’s unconstitutional DACA program,
designed to protect the “dreamer” children of illegal immigrants.
I certainly was skeptical
about Trump even after he said some of the most radical things any major
presidential candidate has said in my lifetime. This was because, in the next
breath, he’d talk about instituting national “stop and frisk” procedures, and
continued to stress how we needed to build up our already gargantuan, bloated
military. When he picked a typical mainstream neocon, Mike Pence, as his vice
president, many of us could still rationalize that he was trying to shore up a
wing of his party, much as John F. Kennedy had tried to do by choosing Lyndon
Johnson.
When Trump gave a rousing,
truly historical inaugural address, many of us remained hopeful that perhaps
finally someone was going to drain this odious, corrupt swamp. But then he
disappointed all those supporters still shouting “lock her up” by calling
Hillary Clinton a “good person,” and actually quieting those who continued to
chant this mantra with “we don’t need that now.” Not long after that, the man
who’d derided “globalism” over and over again, claimed that he was now both a
nationalist and a globalist.
From there, things just kept
unraveling. Trump, who’d blasted NATO, now claimed that it was a good thing.
The candidate who’d dared to point out the bogus nature of official
unemployment figures, began to brag about them and claimed they revealed that
his administration was creating a multitude of new jobs. His appointments were
putrid, neocon types that would have fit perfectly into a Jeb Bush cabinet,
except for General Mike Flynn, who was unceremoniously and unfairly forced out
before he could do anything, because his son was a high profile “conspiracy
theorist.”
Trump opened the door for his
justice department to prosecute Julian Assange, the courageous whistleblower in
exile, whose leaks had played an instrumental part in getting him elected. He
defended Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ antiquated and politically stupid
emphasis on cracking down on marijuana users, and supported his campaign to
actually strengthen law enforcement’s criminal abuse of asset forfeiture laws.
Later, he would characteristically begin publicly criticizing Sessions, as if
he himself hadn’t approved of all his actions and non-actions.
Because of the undeniable
fact that Trump surrounded himself with not only those who hadn’t supported
him, but actually a large number of vocal “Never Trumpers,” his promise to
“drain the swamp” became truly laughable. Trump never even tried to get a
single outsider nominated to any position in his cabinet. Instead, he remained
glued to his keyboard, as the tweeter-in-chief, producing one 140 character or
less tweet after another, often in an astonishingly juvenile manner.
But the greatest
disappointment came when Trump bombed Syria for absolutely no reason at all. He
then bombed Afghanistan for good measure, again for no logical reason. Spurred
on by his Never Trump United Nations Ambassador, the loud war monger Nikki
Haley, he began an unprecedented bit of frightening saber rattling with North
Korea. Never before had an American president directly threatened to nuke
another nation. Predictably, when Trump bombed Syria, he received the first
positive press of his presidency. Everyone in the swamp loves war.
Trump has unfortunately
proven to be exactly what his detractors claimed he was; immature, egotistical,
unprincipled, vain, elitist. This certainly doesn’t make most of his critics
any less offensive than they are. Indeed, that is the lone redeeming value of
Trump’s administration; he continues to have all the right enemies. The threats
of violence, even assassination, from every pillar of the establishment almost
make one want to continue to defend him. Almost.
At this point, the only
question I have left in my mind is whether or not Trump ever had any sincerity,
or whether he ever meant anything he said during his campaign. I think it’s
virtually a certainty that we will never see that vaccine-autism commission, an
audit of the fed, a massive infrastructure rebuild, an end to DACA or any other
aspect of our mindless immigration policy, an end to our reckless foreign
adventurism, or a draining of even the shallowest part of the swamp.
The saddest part of the Trump
phenomenon is that it may very well make it impossible for any major candidate
to ever raise the important issues of immigration, dishonest media, putting
America first, or official corruption ever again. In fact, when some candidate
even alludes to some of Trump’s populist themes, he or she is likely to be met
with derisive comparisons to the failed and disgraced President Donald Trump.
If Trump was ever sincere,
his election has proven that one person simply cannot fight this corrupt
system, this horrid swamp. Trump the reformer, the unlikeliest of knights in
shining armor, is gone. The renegade billionaire striking fear into the heart
of the establishment lasted a brief shining moment, like Camelot.
Donald Jeffries [send him
mail] is the author of the best seller "Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes,
Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics," published
in November 2014 by Skyhorse Publishing. Author of the 2007 sci-fi/fantasy
novel "The Unreals," which has been described as a cross between The
Wizard of Oz and The Twilight Zone, and compared to A Confederacy of Dunces and
classic Russian literature. A second edition of "The Unreals" was
published in February 2015 by Pocol Press. Long time JFK assassination
researcher. Marketing more fiction and nonfiction, including a book about
bullying and the social hierarchy, and a book about the Natalee Holloway case.
His latest book is Survival of the Richest.
Copyright © 2017 Donald Jeffries
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