Happy Black History month! Let’s celebrate by watching Trump’s really weird speech about it. Or him. Mostly him.
Donald Trump’s first military action resulted in the death of two U.S. citizens , one of them an 8 year old girl,. The other was a Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, a member of SEAL Team Six. Numerous civilians were also killed in the operation. This is every bit as abhorrent as when Obama killed a U.S. citizen, that one 16 years old.
Trump’s recent Executive Order about regulations is completely toothless. It’s basically just a bone thrown to the Libertarian crowd who have no idea how regulations are crafted. Almost all regulations are crafted based on laws and most can only be removed if the requisite law is overturned.
Let’s not ignore bills at the state level. Bills like this have been growing in popularity since the GW Bush administration, but they seem to really be picking up steam under Trump’s reign. States are passing laws that punish protestors with fines and charges for police protections that they already pay for with taxes. This is an attempt to severely curtail free speech and will only harm those whose voices can be heard through protest.
Donald Trump has already filed the papers for reelection. This is the earliest any sitting president has filed for reelection. This allows Trump to start collecting donations from “supporters”. I put “supporters” in quotes because it allows those who would like to influence his decisions a direct doorway to the presidency through financial contributions. It also prevents non-profits from speaking negatively about him because he is now a “candidate”. Doing so puts their non-profit status at risk.
It’s hard for me to get terribly worked up about Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. He’s basically exactly what you’d expect from any Republican. That isn’t to say he’s not horrible for separation of church and state and isn’t pretty corporatist. He is. I’m just not sure this is a battle worth fighting. Although, it did produce one of the more chuckle worthy tweet’s I’ve seen, “Trump shouldn’t be allowed to choose a justice in the last year of his presidency.”
It should come as no surprise to anyone that a president with no ethics whose right hand man has no ethics has ignored the federal government’s ethics watchdog by not performing any sort of ethics vetting on any of his nominees. That’s how you get nominees like Steven Mnuchin who lie in their financial disclosure forms, because, you know, it’s easy to forget $100 million here and there. Or Tom Price who lied about profiting by passing legislation on stocks that they are actively trading in. This is why senate Democrats have boycotted both their committee votes. Republicans shattered norms, again, by using a parliamentary trick to bypass Democrat participation.
Trump continues to make a mockery of the United States and violate norms on the foreign stage. The scariest is that they turned off their recording devices during Trump’s recent call with Putin. Because that’s exactly what you’d do when you don’t want people to know about your many ties to Russia. Trump called Mexico’s president and basically told him that if Mexico didn’t take care if its shit, we’d invade Mexico. Meanwhile, Trump’s war against immigrants continued apace, but this time against Australia of all places. Trump wants to renege on a deal between the U.S. and Australia in which take some refugees off Australia’s hands, whose refugee process is horrendous, and abusive. In return, Australia will accept some Central and South American refugees. It’s a great deal in which we rescue Australia’s refugees from horrendous conditions and we settle an equal amount of refugees in Australia. And finally, Norway’s former Prime Minister was recently held at our airport because he once visited Iran.