Donald Trump will abuse the office of the presidency. I am convinced of this. During his campaign, he routinely said he knew more about things others did not. He routinely said he knew more about things than anyone else. He routinely said that only he could fix things. In essence, the Donald Trump campaign was a bumper sticker: Let Go, Let Trump.
He was voted in because a large portion of voters were tired of being called racists, homophobic, bake that cake, etc. He was voted in because a wild card was better than a Crooked Hillary. He was voted on a hope that it would be better than Hillary. It is the GOP version of Nancy Pelosi’s “We gotta pass it to see what’s in it.”
Speaking of Crooked Hillary, he campaigned so hard on this that his campaign wanted an emoji added to it if it was used as a hashtag on Twitter. He said Crooked Hillary over and over and branded the Clinton Family as the worst in politics. In the second presidential debate, Trump promised to organize a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s email “situation”. After Clinton’s rebuttal, Trump threatened that if he were president, she’d be in jail.
I started to think that this wild card was even wilder than his supporters thought when the Sunday after he won the election, when he was interviewed by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes, he softened his stance and actually said he didn’t want to hurt the Clintons because they were “good people”. Huh?
Donald Trump has been caught in numerous lies and exaggerations and doesn’t even bother to respond when called out on them. He’s mastered the art of making a claim that benefits himself knowing that said claims are rarely investigated. Or, if so, corrections that come afterwards are rarely reviewed by the public. Proof positive is how memes move so fast around social media without any fact-checking. Trump understands this and works it.
Do we have any idea what we’re about to get on January 20, 2017? All we know for certain is Donald Trump will abuse the office of the presidency. I know this because of not only what he’s said himself (summarized above) but by the precedent that was set before him.
The office of the president has been abused for decades by both the major parties. And we the people, keep right on voting for them.
In my professional experience with Domestic Violence victims, one thing has always stood out as odd. Despite the physical and mental torment, they stay. They stay with their abuser sometimes until their own deaths at the abuser’s hands. They stay because in most cases, they have no where else to go. They are usually financially dependent on the abuser, they may be transportation dependent, dependent regarding food and shelter, dependent for caring for shared children, dependent, dependent, dependent. What the abuser has over the abused is force. The household or relationship is one of force over a dependent party. And the dependent party feels stuck.
Government operates on a larger but similar scale but is essentially in a domestic violence relationship with its people. There is a group of people in power over the majority of other people and if the other people don’t abide by the rules of the power-people, then other people with guns come to make “corrections”. The people who are ruled may petition the government for a change and, like a domestic violence abuser, the government may send flowers from time to time (small tax break, school grant) but the model of power and control remains in place. What has happened, is the American people have sunk into shrugged shoulders of acceptance thinking that if you can’t beat them, join them. Just make sure your abuser is nicer to you than others.
Government has become the provider of so many services and programs, that American elections have boiled down to which candidate can gimmie my stuff. Which candidate can force other people to gimmie, gimmie, gimmie (I love that Black Flag song, look it up). The American people have become dependent on a government that provides so much, they look the other way when bad things happen to good people as long as their share, any share, remains flowers.
Government is force. That’s it. When someone says government should do something, what they’re really saying is government should force someone to do something. And while it benefits the good of all when using force to stop infringements on your personal property or natural rights, it has been stretched to force people to bake cakes and regulate the size of your toilet.
I’ve noted here (and it’s worth reading/revisiting then returning to this essay) that the president is one person with a cabinet and numerous federal departments and fifty governors and congress and many more people that can keep him in check. Also noted is that the presidency has become much more powerful ever since the Vietnam era, over reaching so aggressively that when Barack Obama decided he was going to go it alone with his agenda, he came right out and said that if Congress wouldn’t act, he had a pen and a phone. He didn’t even try to hide the power he wielded.
This leads me back to Donald Trump and the big question that always bugged me about his desire to run for office. Why would Trump, a billionaire with worldwide properties and a glamorous Hollywood existence want a stressful, $400,000 a year job that’s run out of a two-hundred-year old house? Based on Trump’s blatant narcissism, the answer appears clear: It’s the power. It’s the ability now to force his will. Instead of having to make deals and compromises in the business world, he can use the force and power of the federal government to do what he wants. It’s not about making America great again. It’s about making the Donald more Donaldly.
Will Congress keep any outlandish executive orders in check? Will they be able to or willing to stop anything as ludicrous as, say, a wall between the United States and Mexico? I don’t know. But an interesting first test may have played itself out on the very first day the 115th Congress took office.
On January 3, 2017, the first thing the new Congress did was gut the Office of Congressional Ethics, essentially allowing Congress to now investigate itself as opposed to an independent third party. Conflict of interest much? But then later in the day, Congress reversed itself and decided not to do this. Why? Well, people called their representatives and complained. But Donald Trump also wielded his Twitter account, tweeting, “With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog…”.
Did Congress reverse itself because of calls from the people? Or did this now majority Republican Congress do it to show a unity with its incoming Republican President? I don’t know. But what I do know is that parties usually stress unity. And after Trump won, it was quite a site to see the GOP on its struggle bus getting to accept it.
Liberals that enjoyed the eight years President Obama had forcing his agenda now have to come to grips with a new president with the same power that seems to oppose everything they worked for. The same government that forced people to get into a health care program or suffer a penalty will now be used at Trump’s pleasure. He, too, will have the pen and the phone. Watching liberals on social media and talk shows speak of resistance and limiting Trump has been sweet yet bitter desserts. It’s sweet because they’re doing the “I Told You So” without me having to and yet bitter because I’m not sure they’ve learned the lesson. So let me spell it out:
The solution to stopping future Trumps, is to stop government from being too powerful. Those with desires for power seek out positions of power. The solution is not to be working towards the next election to get your people in that will use the power to give you your programs back. The solution is to be looking for candidates that want to remove government powers. Anyone who talks like Trump, doesn’t qualify.
The solution is to keep your important things out of government hands. The solution is to not becoming dependent on government for solutions. The lesson that should be taken away is that if you give government your things, you only get what you want for a brief period of time and your wants are easily taken away with the next administration.
The solution is putting all of our important affairs in a free market.
Break the cycle. Stop being dependent. Stop being a victim. Get the federal government out of everything not authorized in the Constitution and we all win.
We have lots of articles here at the Freedom Cocktail blog showing how this can be achieved in many areas of life. But if you wish to ignore it all and start fresh, feel free to continue the conversation in the comments section at the top of this essay right up there. ⇑
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