“Incredible!” “Unbelievable!”
These are the most frequently used adjectives Donald Trump pulls out of his limited vocabulary to describe his businesses, his family members, his actions, or himself. He has always been self-congratulatory, modesty never having crossed his mind. Having watched his carefully choreographed press conference just a few days before his inauguration (his first in six months and the only one since his surprise victory in 2016), and the subsequent meltdown during the Q&A session, these two words could best describe his own behavior. For a man who built a career out of deception, lies and fakery to accuse members of the press of fake news has been a recurring bad joke. Especially since he can never back up his claims with much evidence. At that time he branded those who published news of the secret intelligence dossier on him as Nazis, while behaving like a tyrant and dictator, refusing to answer any questions he didn’t like and ignoring or insulting reporters. His first press briefing was quite a performance and as a sign of things to come, it was terrifying.
Trump’s behavior and actions after he was elected reinforced the worst fears of his detractors and did not do anything to support the optimistic view that he may change and not keep some of his more outrageous promises once he was President. He lacks the ability to back off from any statement, ever, no matter how outrageous, or from the most ridiculous of his promises. The list of his appointees, from the beginning to the present, reads like a who’s who of the alt-right, the far right, the ultra conservative, and the downright crazy. Most of them could not have been more inappropriate to head the department or office he chose for them.
In the few years of the Trump era, this man turned the US into one that resembles more than any other in the western world a country with a bleak future, a banana republic, a sycophantic dictatorship, isolated and alone, marginalized, and a joke
Starting with his first chief advisor and the White House chief of staff Steve Bannon, an ultra-right wing nutcase who created and headed the most virulently racist, sexist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic website Breitbart News. There was the climate change denier who headed the Environmental Protection Agency (General Scott Pruitt); the Department of Energy was headed by a man who had pledged just a couple of years prior to his appointment to shut down that very department (Rick Perry); a Secretary of State who had major business interests in several countries, most notably in Russia, and who had no foreign policy experience (Rex Tillerson); a Treasury Secretary who while with Goldman Sachs bilked thousands of low income families of their homes and life savings, and until his appointment was best known as a film producer (Steve Mnuchin); a Secretary of Education who had pledged to shut down public schools in favor of private charter schools and who could not answer any question posed by the selection committee coherently (Betsy DeVos), and who also happens to be the sister of the man who heads and owns the infamous Blackwater firm (Erik Prince); a Secretary of Defense whose nickname “mad dog” was totally appropriate (Jim Mattis); an Attorney General who had spent most of his career working against racial equality and against the Voting Rights Act (Jeff Sessions); a paranoid conspiracy theorist was chosen to head the National Security team (Michael Flynn), a man whose son spread the fake news of a pedophile ring being run by the Clintons out of a pizza shop (the Pizzagate scandal); the list of “deplorables” in the first Trump cabinet was endless.
Unfortunately this was just the beginning. It got worse over the years. Every subsequent appointment, and there have been many, too many to recall, has been abysmal. The musical chairs at the White House in less than four years of Trump would require someone with an uncanny memory to recall. Most subsequent appointees were worse, some marginally, but many much more so. The list was never ending. The rare times he chose someone that may have been an improvement their tenure lasted less time than one could breathe a sigh of relief and say: at last, someone that doesn’t deserve to be incarcerated for some kind of crime. All have been guilty of actions against decency, and many against humanity itself.
In the few years of the Trump era this man turned the US into one that resembles more than any other in the western world a country with a bleak future, a banana republic, a sycophantic dictatorship, isolated and alone, marginalized, and a joke. A country riddled with corruption, and nepotism; racist, regressive, and unenlightened. Lest we start believing that all of this happened in just a few years, it is fair to remind ourselves that the pre-conditions had been there for some time. It took one man and his craziness to strip the veneer and unleash the worst that was hiding below the surface. And to turn a country that was for many, rightly or otherwise, the promised land, the one and only United States of America, into a bitterly divided country. Trump turned the USA into a country that could be renamed Trumpistan; turning the American Dream into a nightmare for millions.