Editorial voices from across the country
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:
Coming next on today’s episode of “Donald Trump: Reality President:”
Voter fraud nearly costs Donald Trump the election!
Millions of illegal votes cast!
Major investigation forthcoming!
If only this was reality TV.
But it’s not. Unfortunately, it’s just reality.
President Trump, a true believer in “alternative facts,” is calling for a major investigation of his latest lie – that widespread voter fraud caused him to lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in November’s election. Millions of illegal votes were cast, the president claims without a shred of evidence.
What actually should happen is this: Voter suppression techniques put in place in state after state should be lifted so that more voters have a better chance to have their voices heard.
The president and his team have provided no facts to back up his audacious claim and independent analyses of the election found almost no confirmed cases of fraud.
What this really is: The mark of a guy who is still stewing about finishing second.
Get over it, President Trump.
And get on with the business of this great nation.
President Trump seems intent on keeping many of his campaign promises, and perhaps among the most popular – and controversial – is construction of a wall between the United States and Mexico.
President Trump has now ordered the building of such a barrier, so we need to start a conversation about its potential good or harm.
The first obstacle to fulfilling that campaign promise is finding a way to pay its estimated $12- to $30-billion cost. Trump insists he will make Mexico pay for it. Mexico’s president says that’s not going to happen, a divergence of viewpoints that led Mexico’s president to cancel a scheduled visit to Washington, D.C.
Facing Mexico’s resistance to paying for a wall built inside the United States, Trump then threatened a 20-percent import tax on Mexican products, which represents a very real threat to the hundreds of billions in trade between the two nations.
And here’s something else to consider – what if Mexico stands firm against paying for Trump’s wall, and instead chooses other major trade partners, maybe even some of the Pacific rim nations whose leaders probably are miffed that Trump backed this country out of the Pacific trade agreement brokered by the Obama administration?
If the United States falls out of favor with both Chinese and Mexican manufacturers, think of the potential impact to the U.S. economy.
It is abundantly clear that building a big wall between the United States and Mexico is far more complicated than a sound bite on the campaign trail. Real money and real lives are at stake here.
Republicans in Washington, D.C., now have the majorities they need to repeal the Affordable Care Act – which they have been wanting to do since the law was passed in 2010.
What follows next could be nothing short of catastrophic for many millions of Americans. Enough smart politicians know that, and hence the hesitancy to repeal the law so far. They are smart enough to know that if they repeal the law without some kind of reasonable replacement, the political consequences could be dire.
Rather than repeal the law, let’s fix what needs fixing – the parts that contribute to rising premiums and overall costs – but retain the expansion of Medicaid and the bans on lifetime caps on insurance payouts or the refusal to cover patients with pre-existing conditions. And let young people stay on the parents’ policies until age 26.
Change the name of the program if it will allow Republicans to claim they have repealed Obamacare. But keep what’s been clearly successful about this program. Don’t leave millions of Americans without adequate access to health care.