Donald Trump has won the election and will become the 47th President of the United States this January. While half of the nation rejoices, the other half’s emotions range from disappointed, to terrified, to hate-fueled rage. While I am a supporter of many of Donald Trump’s policy positions, I encourage the disappointed and frightened to read on; we may have more in common than you think.
The Losers
Arms Manufacturers: Among the losers may be those merchants of death we euphemistically refer to as the “Defense Industry.” Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, BAE, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, et al. are going to feel the pain of peacetime. The revenue stream that has thus far seen $113 billion laundered through Ukraine and back to these companies will dry up as Trump seeks a resolution to that unnecessary war and encourages the new congress to stop the hemorrhaging of cash from the treasury to fuel a Slavic civil war. As president, Trump will however maintain the insanely overblown “defense” budget, NATO membership, and, in all probability, our global military empire. So, while these companies will feel the pinch, they will survive and thrive – even if the American war machine takes a few years off.
NATO (sort of): The pointless, anachronistic, and dangerous North Atlantic Treaty Organization will feel some pain under a second Trump administration. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance between western European countries and the United States to counter the Soviet Union’s alleged designs to conquer the planet. The Soviet socialist empire ceased to exist more than thirty years ago, yet, since then, sixteen additional countries have been recruited into the alliance, destabilizing relations with Russia and expanding the number of countries America is pledged to go to war on behalf of to thirty-two. The alliance serves chiefly as a method for European nations to outsource their national defense to the United States, so that you and I pay for the defense of these countries. Continuously expanding NATO is destabilizing and disastrous for the US taxpayer, but generates billions for American weapons manufacturers, as each new member must purchase all new hardware to be compatible with the other alliance members. The last time Trump was president, he forced the member nations to pony up billions of their own money to fund NATO, and he will certainly do that once again. Sadly, he will not move to get our country out of this mess and NATO will continue to drain our resources and endanger peace.
The War Party: Sadness reigns among the members of the war party; that collection of militarists and warmongers in both political parties, the generals craving fame as war gods, and the denizens of neo-conservative think tanks that never met a war they didn’t like. The war party watched in horror the last time Trump was commander in chief from 2017 through 2021, when he became the first president in 30 years to not start a war.
Remember the hysterics when President Trump met with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-Un? The War Party (and the weapons merchants that fund them) were terrified that the Korean war, which has been ongoing for 74 years[i], might just end. In that case, they would lose not only one of their best opportunities for a full-scale conventional war, but also the justification for maintaining 30,000 troops, 16 army, air force, and navy bases, and the endless billions spent to pay soldiers’ salaries, maintain the military hardware, and provide the housing, food service, gyms, swimming pools, and four sprawling golf courses for our legionnaires. Ask yourself who is benefitting from this; it’s certainly not the American people.
Also, ask yourself why some of the most notorious of America’s retired military proconsuls have recently spoken out against Trump. Men like the architects of the utter disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan - Admiral Mike Mullin and General Stanley McChrystal – they don’t fear Trump’s “threat to democracy,” they fear he’ll shut down the war machine that they used to run and now make fortunes talking up on the TV news and the speaker circuit. General Mark Milley, who served as President Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporter Bob Woodward during the 2024 campaign that Trump is “Fascist to the core.” Yet during all the years of President Trump’s administration, while Milley enjoyed fame and power as America’s highest-ranking military official, he never warned America that it was being led by a madman? He never even leaked to a reporter an alert that the nation was in peril? Why did he not resign in protest rather than serving under a criminal regime?
American Marxists: Since America does not have a peasant class or oppressed workers, America’s socialists have turned to creating and organizing other allegedly oppressed groups. These organizers that have for years harassed and roiled the broader American society are also counted among the losers. Americans of all kinds have begun to see through the government / media propaganda that encourages distrust, envy, and disunity among us. This election result signals that the public is no longer buying into the false narrative that we are all separated from one another into competing “communities.” People who are black, Hispanic, white, gay, trans, Asian, fat, skinny, pro/anti-abortion, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and those who “identify” as anything from a made-up gender to a panda bear, whom the government-media complex have attempted pit against each other for decades, have realized that we are all one community. The media will take away some of the “activists’” spotlight as they begin to focus entirely on Trump’s every move and work to derail his presidency and remove him from office. Nonetheless, the constitutional rights of these groups will remain entirely intact as they did during the last Trump administration.
Millions of Frightened Americans: The American corporate media have so effectively promoted the image of Trump as an aspiring dictator, racist, misogynist, and unhinged lunatic, that there are tens of millions of Americans truly in fear of being returned to slavery, placed in internment camps, and ‘losing their civil rights.’ I truly sympathize with these people; if I believed such things were imminent, I’d be terrified as well. To all of you I say that we have all been losing our rights to an out-of-control federal bureaucracy for many decades – under alternating regimes of the two political parties that have controlled the government for a century and a half. I can assure you that the pace of losing your rights will not accelerate and may even slow under a Trump presidency. It also may help to remember that Trump was already the president for four years, and never made any moves to restore Jim Crow laws, outlaw or impede the rights of LGBT folks, or enact federal bans on abortion or sex reassignment, etc. President Trump also appointed the first openly gay person to a cabinet-level position – Richard Grennell. While ambassador to Germany, President Trump named him as the head of the White House’s global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in the dozens of countries where it is a crime merely to be gay. President Trump later appointed him as the acting Director of National Intelligence. Trump 47 will have a woman chief-of-staff, arguably the most powerful position in any administration.
Race and DEI Hustlers
The folks who have made themselves vast fortunes ginning up racial animosity, stoking fear and hatred, and creating consulting firms to tell every white employee in America that they are an unredeemable racist, may find the job market less lucrative. Old-school hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have made millions by fanning resentment, hatred, and sparking race riots. During Trump’s last administration, Black Lives Matter was founded, and ignited nearly 8,000 racially divisive protests, 600 riots, $1 billion in property damage, and put millions of dollars into the pocket of its self-described Marxist founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors. Today, an army of charlatans have created an entire industry based upon the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” scheme, which generates huge salaries and consulting fees for practitioners to tell white people that they are the source of all evil in the world, and to promote hiring and promotion based solely upon someone’s skin color or ethnic DNA. The large numbers of ethnic minorities who voted for Trump just might be the beginning of the end – once and for all – of people making themselves into millionaires by dividing Americans and sowing the seeds of hatred and violence. Modern America is a very inclusive society, where racism and other forms of bigotry are not socially acceptable and where any racial discrimination is illegal. The ordinary American, who now can have access to information from outside the government-media complex, has begun to see through the propaganda they promote and realize all Americans are in this thing together.
The Winners
The American Economy: Love him or hate him, Trump usually puts the interests of the United States above all other considerations. The economy under his last administration was some of the best our country has seen in the past 100 years and this cannot be denied simply because he is orange colored and often obnoxious. During Trump’s first term as president, unemployment among women and blacks was the lowest in recorded history, and the cumulative cost of all products and services were twenty percent lower than they are now. Think for a moment about what that means. If you had a thousand dollars under your mattress in January 2021, it is now only worth $800. A person who was making $50,000 a year in 2021, has had their real wages reduced to $40,000 a year. This is a situation nobody wants to live with and Trump’s track record suggests that it will improve.
Corporate Media (maybe): It’s too soon to tell whether the big media is a winner or loser in all this. On the one hand they failed to prevent Trump’s election win, despite pulling out all the stops to do so. Their polling data was once again shown to be false and designed to discourage Trump supporters and their bias was even more apparent than in the past. On the other hand, they were able to take the most unpopular vice president in history, with a room-temperature IQ and convince tens of millions of people to cast their vote for her. That demonstrates the considerable power they still hold over the country. It remains to be seen whether the alliance between the federal government and corporate media will retain this power, or whether it will continue to erode following this latest defeat.
What Won’t Change:
Living conditions in America will improve in the short term under the new Trump administration, inflation will slow or stop, the cost of everything from food to gasoline will decline, and millions of jobs will be created. Sadly, Trump is only one man and while he is the first outsider to become president since Andrew Jackson, he lacks the clear vision to create a true movement to reform the government. The entrenched interests in Washington have any president at a tremendous disadvantage.
During Trump’s first time around, elements in the FBI illegally spied on Trump’s campaign and attempted to destroy him with a “dossier” of information they knew to be false. The FBI also arrested Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on absurd charges (ultimately dismissed) stemming from an innocuous phone call he had with a Russian ambassador on the eve of the new administration taking office. It was known that Flynn, a retired four-star general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency intended to push for broad reforms of America’s intelligence agencies. So, he was targeted, set up, forced to resign, arrested, had his son threatened with imprisonment on other bogus accusations, and was bankrupted by legal expenses. Trump was impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden for actions he had already admitted to; namely blackmailing the Ukrainian government into firing a prosecutor that was investigating the company (Burisma) which his son was receiving payments from.
Not only will the bureaucracies actively work against any efforts root out waste fraud and abuse, but the new president will also be attacked every day by the corporate media giants. Given that the media and Democrats have pronounced Trump to be an existential threat to democracy, a Nazi, a fascist, a racist, misogynist, and out-of-control demon, further assassination attempts are likely. Trump’s physical safety is not only threatened by the propaganda campaign against him, but by the CIA and other rogue federal agencies. The last president to openly challenge the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff was President Kennedy, who was murdered in front of the whole world 51 days after announcing the withdrawal of the first 1,000 of the 16,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. The “defense” industry would go on to reap hundreds of billions in profits from a war the pentagon knew could not be won.
The wasteful, unconstitutional executive agencies, which Trump has talked about abolishing, such as the Department of Education, will survive and continue to thrive. Even though Trump’s party controls both houses of congress, the political scum that fill the ranks of the federal legislature will ensure business-as-usual continues, with the American people as the ultimate losers – regardless of what government-created “community” they have placed you in.
The national debt will continue to grow. While presidents propose their budgets and spending priorities, it is the congress alone that spends money. Majority control in both houses of congress has changed many times over the past twenty-five years, and we have gone deeper into debt every single year. Under the two Republican and two Democrat administrations of the past quarter century, the national debt has exploded from $5.8 trillion to $36 trillion
The income tax will continue to be legal and have no limit. Americans in every “community” will need to work from January 1 through April 16 just to pay their federal tax bill. Then, with the money they have left, they can pay their state income tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, property tax, school tax, sales tax, gift tax, gross receipts tax, capital gains tax, gasoline tax, hotel tax, cigarette tax, liquor tax, death tax, along with fees, tolls, and surcharges to federal and state agencies on everything from driver’s licenses, to cell phones, to traffic tickets, to electricity.
American and Russian nuclear arsenals will remain undiminished and on hair-trigger alert, ensuring that the entire planet continues to live one computer glitch or human error away from annihilation. President Bush II unilaterally withdrew from the US-Russia Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; President Trump withdrew us from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and President Obama – who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just for saying he wanted to abolish nuclear weapons – approved a $600 billion program to modernize and increase the lethality of America’s nuclear arsenal, sparking a new type of arms race with Russia. Trump is very unlikely to make moves to end the nuclear standoff as, like his predecessors of both parties, he has bought into American militarism, which dictates ever-increasing military power and the division of the entire planet into American military commands.
When Democrats say Trump doesn’t respect the constitution, they are correct. What they fail to admit or perhaps even realize is that no Democrat or Republican respects the constitution. From Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden, every president and every congress has flagrantly violated the constitution and/or committed war crimes. From Roosevelt’s illegal naval war against Germany before World War II and Truman’s one-man decision to intervene in the Korean civil war, to George W. Bush’s lies about WMD to trick congress into an aggressive war in Iraq, to Barak Obama’s drone wars, to our current illegal wars in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, to the 160,000-page register [ii]of laws enacted by federal bureaucrats that were never debated or voted upon by congress; no president and virtually no member of congress – Republican or Democrat – has any shred of respect for the constitution.
Still, there is hope and opportunity for everyone in the next four years; Trump can improve the economy and slow the growth of the federal juggernaut that snuffs out more of our liberties with every passing day, and even the Democratic Party can benefit by reflecting on their loss and perhaps turn away from socialism and once again become the party of JFK or even Bill Clinton. There are potential dangers as well. A case in point is Trump’s suggestion that he will use the military to assist in the deportation of illegal entrants to the US. Just as many Democrats called for the use of the military to implement forced COVID vaccinations, and prison sentences for the unvaccinated, such a move by Trump would also be an offense against human freedom and the US Constitution. The real problem is the unconstitutional power that has been assumed by all three branches of the government.
Regardless, it is up to Americans as a whole to pull together, rally around those things we all share in common, and finally reject the government and media propaganda that has worked so well to divide us. There is only one “Community,” that is the American Community; all the divisions the government has created are false. Nearly all of us share the same basic values, love of freedom, the desire for gainful employment, a bright future for our children, and equal opportunity and justice for all. Let us reject these efforts to divide us and together seek the truth regardless of political party. Let’s return to the central tenet of a free people – that government is not to be trusted. Let’s hold these politicians accountable for their transgressions. Corruption and violations of the constitution are not okay just because it’s “your” guy or gal in office; it should be roundly condemned by everyone.
Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden have been solely responsible for taking half your wages in taxes, draining the value of your money through inflation, or killing people around the planet in your name; it’s the political and corporate elites that control the government who have been doing that for nearly a hundred years. The government is not your friend nor the solution to our problems, as George Washington said, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
__________________________________________
[i] Active combat mostly ceased with the signing of armistice in 1953, but the war has never officially ended. Despite the cease-fire, more than 800 combat deaths have occurred in clashes around the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula.
[ii] Crain, W. Mark. The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms. Rep. no. 264. Washington, DC: Small Business Administration, 2005. Small Business Research Summary. Small Business Administration. Web. 31 Jan. 2012.
The Losers
Arms Manufacturers: Among the losers may be those merchants of death we euphemistically refer to as the “Defense Industry.” Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, BAE, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, et al. are going to feel the pain of peacetime. The revenue stream that has thus far seen $113 billion laundered through Ukraine and back to these companies will dry up as Trump seeks a resolution to that unnecessary war and encourages the new congress to stop the hemorrhaging of cash from the treasury to fuel a Slavic civil war. As president, Trump will however maintain the insanely overblown “defense” budget, NATO membership, and, in all probability, our global military empire. So, while these companies will feel the pinch, they will survive and thrive – even if the American war machine takes a few years off.
NATO (sort of): The pointless, anachronistic, and dangerous North Atlantic Treaty Organization will feel some pain under a second Trump administration. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance between western European countries and the United States to counter the Soviet Union’s alleged designs to conquer the planet. The Soviet socialist empire ceased to exist more than thirty years ago, yet, since then, sixteen additional countries have been recruited into the alliance, destabilizing relations with Russia and expanding the number of countries America is pledged to go to war on behalf of to thirty-two. The alliance serves chiefly as a method for European nations to outsource their national defense to the United States, so that you and I pay for the defense of these countries. Continuously expanding NATO is destabilizing and disastrous for the US taxpayer, but generates billions for American weapons manufacturers, as each new member must purchase all new hardware to be compatible with the other alliance members. The last time Trump was president, he forced the member nations to pony up billions of their own money to fund NATO, and he will certainly do that once again. Sadly, he will not move to get our country out of this mess and NATO will continue to drain our resources and endanger peace.
The War Party: Sadness reigns among the members of the war party; that collection of militarists and warmongers in both political parties, the generals craving fame as war gods, and the denizens of neo-conservative think tanks that never met a war they didn’t like. The war party watched in horror the last time Trump was commander in chief from 2017 through 2021, when he became the first president in 30 years to not start a war.
Remember the hysterics when President Trump met with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-Un? The War Party (and the weapons merchants that fund them) were terrified that the Korean war, which has been ongoing for 74 years[i], might just end. In that case, they would lose not only one of their best opportunities for a full-scale conventional war, but also the justification for maintaining 30,000 troops, 16 army, air force, and navy bases, and the endless billions spent to pay soldiers’ salaries, maintain the military hardware, and provide the housing, food service, gyms, swimming pools, and four sprawling golf courses for our legionnaires. Ask yourself who is benefitting from this; it’s certainly not the American people.
Also, ask yourself why some of the most notorious of America’s retired military proconsuls have recently spoken out against Trump. Men like the architects of the utter disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan - Admiral Mike Mullin and General Stanley McChrystal – they don’t fear Trump’s “threat to democracy,” they fear he’ll shut down the war machine that they used to run and now make fortunes talking up on the TV news and the speaker circuit. General Mark Milley, who served as President Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporter Bob Woodward during the 2024 campaign that Trump is “Fascist to the core.” Yet during all the years of President Trump’s administration, while Milley enjoyed fame and power as America’s highest-ranking military official, he never warned America that it was being led by a madman? He never even leaked to a reporter an alert that the nation was in peril? Why did he not resign in protest rather than serving under a criminal regime?
American Marxists: Since America does not have a peasant class or oppressed workers, America’s socialists have turned to creating and organizing other allegedly oppressed groups. These organizers that have for years harassed and roiled the broader American society are also counted among the losers. Americans of all kinds have begun to see through the government / media propaganda that encourages distrust, envy, and disunity among us. This election result signals that the public is no longer buying into the false narrative that we are all separated from one another into competing “communities.” People who are black, Hispanic, white, gay, trans, Asian, fat, skinny, pro/anti-abortion, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and those who “identify” as anything from a made-up gender to a panda bear, whom the government-media complex have attempted pit against each other for decades, have realized that we are all one community. The media will take away some of the “activists’” spotlight as they begin to focus entirely on Trump’s every move and work to derail his presidency and remove him from office. Nonetheless, the constitutional rights of these groups will remain entirely intact as they did during the last Trump administration.
Millions of Frightened Americans: The American corporate media have so effectively promoted the image of Trump as an aspiring dictator, racist, misogynist, and unhinged lunatic, that there are tens of millions of Americans truly in fear of being returned to slavery, placed in internment camps, and ‘losing their civil rights.’ I truly sympathize with these people; if I believed such things were imminent, I’d be terrified as well. To all of you I say that we have all been losing our rights to an out-of-control federal bureaucracy for many decades – under alternating regimes of the two political parties that have controlled the government for a century and a half. I can assure you that the pace of losing your rights will not accelerate and may even slow under a Trump presidency. It also may help to remember that Trump was already the president for four years, and never made any moves to restore Jim Crow laws, outlaw or impede the rights of LGBT folks, or enact federal bans on abortion or sex reassignment, etc. President Trump also appointed the first openly gay person to a cabinet-level position – Richard Grennell. While ambassador to Germany, President Trump named him as the head of the White House’s global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in the dozens of countries where it is a crime merely to be gay. President Trump later appointed him as the acting Director of National Intelligence. Trump 47 will have a woman chief-of-staff, arguably the most powerful position in any administration.
Race and DEI Hustlers
The folks who have made themselves vast fortunes ginning up racial animosity, stoking fear and hatred, and creating consulting firms to tell every white employee in America that they are an unredeemable racist, may find the job market less lucrative. Old-school hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have made millions by fanning resentment, hatred, and sparking race riots. During Trump’s last administration, Black Lives Matter was founded, and ignited nearly 8,000 racially divisive protests, 600 riots, $1 billion in property damage, and put millions of dollars into the pocket of its self-described Marxist founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors. Today, an army of charlatans have created an entire industry based upon the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” scheme, which generates huge salaries and consulting fees for practitioners to tell white people that they are the source of all evil in the world, and to promote hiring and promotion based solely upon someone’s skin color or ethnic DNA. The large numbers of ethnic minorities who voted for Trump just might be the beginning of the end – once and for all – of people making themselves into millionaires by dividing Americans and sowing the seeds of hatred and violence. Modern America is a very inclusive society, where racism and other forms of bigotry are not socially acceptable and where any racial discrimination is illegal. The ordinary American, who now can have access to information from outside the government-media complex, has begun to see through the propaganda they promote and realize all Americans are in this thing together.
The Winners
The American Economy: Love him or hate him, Trump usually puts the interests of the United States above all other considerations. The economy under his last administration was some of the best our country has seen in the past 100 years and this cannot be denied simply because he is orange colored and often obnoxious. During Trump’s first term as president, unemployment among women and blacks was the lowest in recorded history, and the cumulative cost of all products and services were twenty percent lower than they are now. Think for a moment about what that means. If you had a thousand dollars under your mattress in January 2021, it is now only worth $800. A person who was making $50,000 a year in 2021, has had their real wages reduced to $40,000 a year. This is a situation nobody wants to live with and Trump’s track record suggests that it will improve.
Corporate Media (maybe): It’s too soon to tell whether the big media is a winner or loser in all this. On the one hand they failed to prevent Trump’s election win, despite pulling out all the stops to do so. Their polling data was once again shown to be false and designed to discourage Trump supporters and their bias was even more apparent than in the past. On the other hand, they were able to take the most unpopular vice president in history, with a room-temperature IQ and convince tens of millions of people to cast their vote for her. That demonstrates the considerable power they still hold over the country. It remains to be seen whether the alliance between the federal government and corporate media will retain this power, or whether it will continue to erode following this latest defeat.
What Won’t Change:
Living conditions in America will improve in the short term under the new Trump administration, inflation will slow or stop, the cost of everything from food to gasoline will decline, and millions of jobs will be created. Sadly, Trump is only one man and while he is the first outsider to become president since Andrew Jackson, he lacks the clear vision to create a true movement to reform the government. The entrenched interests in Washington have any president at a tremendous disadvantage.
During Trump’s first time around, elements in the FBI illegally spied on Trump’s campaign and attempted to destroy him with a “dossier” of information they knew to be false. The FBI also arrested Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on absurd charges (ultimately dismissed) stemming from an innocuous phone call he had with a Russian ambassador on the eve of the new administration taking office. It was known that Flynn, a retired four-star general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency intended to push for broad reforms of America’s intelligence agencies. So, he was targeted, set up, forced to resign, arrested, had his son threatened with imprisonment on other bogus accusations, and was bankrupted by legal expenses. Trump was impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden for actions he had already admitted to; namely blackmailing the Ukrainian government into firing a prosecutor that was investigating the company (Burisma) which his son was receiving payments from.
Not only will the bureaucracies actively work against any efforts root out waste fraud and abuse, but the new president will also be attacked every day by the corporate media giants. Given that the media and Democrats have pronounced Trump to be an existential threat to democracy, a Nazi, a fascist, a racist, misogynist, and out-of-control demon, further assassination attempts are likely. Trump’s physical safety is not only threatened by the propaganda campaign against him, but by the CIA and other rogue federal agencies. The last president to openly challenge the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff was President Kennedy, who was murdered in front of the whole world 51 days after announcing the withdrawal of the first 1,000 of the 16,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. The “defense” industry would go on to reap hundreds of billions in profits from a war the pentagon knew could not be won.
The wasteful, unconstitutional executive agencies, which Trump has talked about abolishing, such as the Department of Education, will survive and continue to thrive. Even though Trump’s party controls both houses of congress, the political scum that fill the ranks of the federal legislature will ensure business-as-usual continues, with the American people as the ultimate losers – regardless of what government-created “community” they have placed you in.
The national debt will continue to grow. While presidents propose their budgets and spending priorities, it is the congress alone that spends money. Majority control in both houses of congress has changed many times over the past twenty-five years, and we have gone deeper into debt every single year. Under the two Republican and two Democrat administrations of the past quarter century, the national debt has exploded from $5.8 trillion to $36 trillion
The income tax will continue to be legal and have no limit. Americans in every “community” will need to work from January 1 through April 16 just to pay their federal tax bill. Then, with the money they have left, they can pay their state income tax, Social Security tax, Medicare tax, property tax, school tax, sales tax, gift tax, gross receipts tax, capital gains tax, gasoline tax, hotel tax, cigarette tax, liquor tax, death tax, along with fees, tolls, and surcharges to federal and state agencies on everything from driver’s licenses, to cell phones, to traffic tickets, to electricity.
American and Russian nuclear arsenals will remain undiminished and on hair-trigger alert, ensuring that the entire planet continues to live one computer glitch or human error away from annihilation. President Bush II unilaterally withdrew from the US-Russia Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; President Trump withdrew us from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and President Obama – who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just for saying he wanted to abolish nuclear weapons – approved a $600 billion program to modernize and increase the lethality of America’s nuclear arsenal, sparking a new type of arms race with Russia. Trump is very unlikely to make moves to end the nuclear standoff as, like his predecessors of both parties, he has bought into American militarism, which dictates ever-increasing military power and the division of the entire planet into American military commands.
When Democrats say Trump doesn’t respect the constitution, they are correct. What they fail to admit or perhaps even realize is that no Democrat or Republican respects the constitution. From Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden, every president and every congress has flagrantly violated the constitution and/or committed war crimes. From Roosevelt’s illegal naval war against Germany before World War II and Truman’s one-man decision to intervene in the Korean civil war, to George W. Bush’s lies about WMD to trick congress into an aggressive war in Iraq, to Barak Obama’s drone wars, to our current illegal wars in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia, to the 160,000-page register [ii]of laws enacted by federal bureaucrats that were never debated or voted upon by congress; no president and virtually no member of congress – Republican or Democrat – has any shred of respect for the constitution.
Still, there is hope and opportunity for everyone in the next four years; Trump can improve the economy and slow the growth of the federal juggernaut that snuffs out more of our liberties with every passing day, and even the Democratic Party can benefit by reflecting on their loss and perhaps turn away from socialism and once again become the party of JFK or even Bill Clinton. There are potential dangers as well. A case in point is Trump’s suggestion that he will use the military to assist in the deportation of illegal entrants to the US. Just as many Democrats called for the use of the military to implement forced COVID vaccinations, and prison sentences for the unvaccinated, such a move by Trump would also be an offense against human freedom and the US Constitution. The real problem is the unconstitutional power that has been assumed by all three branches of the government.
Regardless, it is up to Americans as a whole to pull together, rally around those things we all share in common, and finally reject the government and media propaganda that has worked so well to divide us. There is only one “Community,” that is the American Community; all the divisions the government has created are false. Nearly all of us share the same basic values, love of freedom, the desire for gainful employment, a bright future for our children, and equal opportunity and justice for all. Let us reject these efforts to divide us and together seek the truth regardless of political party. Let’s return to the central tenet of a free people – that government is not to be trusted. Let’s hold these politicians accountable for their transgressions. Corruption and violations of the constitution are not okay just because it’s “your” guy or gal in office; it should be roundly condemned by everyone.
Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden have been solely responsible for taking half your wages in taxes, draining the value of your money through inflation, or killing people around the planet in your name; it’s the political and corporate elites that control the government who have been doing that for nearly a hundred years. The government is not your friend nor the solution to our problems, as George Washington said, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
__________________________________________
[i] Active combat mostly ceased with the signing of armistice in 1953, but the war has never officially ended. Despite the cease-fire, more than 800 combat deaths have occurred in clashes around the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula.
[ii] Crain, W. Mark. The Impact of Regulatory Costs on Small Firms. Rep. no. 264. Washington, DC: Small Business Administration, 2005. Small Business Research Summary. Small Business Administration. Web. 31 Jan. 2012.
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