LETTER: How has Trump benefited the country?
While many like me will never understand the devoted base of a man as amoral and unAmerican as Donald Trump, it has become clear that many of our fellow citizens will look the other way on those absences of character and loyalty to our country and Constitution. What deserves more attention at this point is their misplaced notion that he has accomplishments or has benefited the country, when the opposite is obviously true.
He guaranteed to great chants a wall that Mexico would pay for, but when he took office he had no such plan, no Mexican subsidy, and thus no ridiculous wall. He also guaranteed that Obamacare would be immediately repealed and replaced, but he forgot the part about having any plan whatsoever, a full exposure of his fraud. When directly presented with bipartisan legislation for immigration reform and universal gun background checks, he squelched the deals at the behest of nefarious types like Stephen Miller and Wayne LaPierre. In fact, where any paltry substantive legislation occurred, including a tax cut for the rich and the CARES Act, he was so counterproductive that he was removed from negotiations.
The great but overly accepted mischaracterization of his presidency is that he could competently oversee the economy, when his only cognizable policy positions appear to be taking his ball and going home such as with our international partners or his political opponents, or stripping away any rules and regulations, even to the detriment of health, safety, the environment, and protections for the little guy. Now his buffoonish mishandling of a pandemic has stripped that notion bare, as we face the fourth recession or depression led by a Republican president in less than 100 years that a Democratic administration will have to rescue, Biden for the second time in 12 years.
As Mitt Romney said in 2016, he is “a phony, a fraud.” He has no art of the deal nor mastery of the economy or anything other than deceit and social media trolling; to call him a used car salesman is truly an insult to the many good used car salesmen. He has fooled us once – shame on him. If he fools us twice, shame on us.
Brian Gorman
Pittsburgh