Another banner week for the just-born Trump administration, beset by a growing scandal around purported contacts with Russia, rocked by the forced resignation of anti-Muslim National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, scrambled by contradictory messaging from both surrogates and the President himself, and so on. Trump’s truly bizarre Thursday press conference saw him describe his White House as a “running like a fine-tuned machine.” Probably seems that way to someone as deluded as he appears to be. I’m not even including the very public situation room they convened at a restaurant table inside Trump’s Florida resort – a night that saw some crony posing for a photo with the dude who carries the nuclear football. Eek.
Late in last year’ campaign, when the T-man seemed to be burning out of control, I wrote a blog post titled “Burning Man” wherein I suggest that the candidate was like “a crazy-ass Frankenstein’s monster set on fire and spreading his conflagration to everything he touches. Better that he should do it during the campaign than in the oval office, am I right?” It hadn’t occurred to me at that time (a) that Trump would likely win under those circumstances and (b) that, if he did win, he would govern in much the same manner. Clearly both (a) and (b) have turned out to be the case. We’re going to see four years of this, people. Fasten your seat belts.
What can be done? Well, resist, of course. Join or start an Indivisible group in your area. Call or visit your Congress members and demand action out of them, not just to counter the Trump agenda, but to work against the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell program that is threatening every corner of American life, from health care to financial security to environmental sustainability and so on. We need to be active in our own communities, working for real change, but we also have to focus a good bit of our efforts on an electoral strategy that will give us some leverage. Democrats stand little chance of winning back the Senate in 2018. The House is uphill as well, but it’s likely the only chance we have. That means flipping seats in places like upstate New York.
This will take work, and lots of it. Activism alone won’t hold back this tide of bad policy – we need some political gains at the state and federal level, particularly in advance of the next reapportionment fight in 2020. It’s a thin straw, but it’s the only one we have.
luv u,
jp
Okay, I’m not going to dip into one of those “things were simpler in the old days” reveries, but what I’m describing are both first-world problems and 21st Century foibles of a type that would have baffled us back when we started this moth-eaten music collective known as Big Green. When we first started using that moniker in 1986-7, we were working with people out around Albany, NY. Matt was writing songs like a mad man, just as he does today. Only there was no internet, no smartphones, no simple way of getting your music out there other than standing on a stage or hawking home-made cassette tapes at the local record shop. Kids these days!
Of course, the most problematic member of the administration is the man himself. Only 20 days into this regime and it feels like forever. In a way, it might as well be three years in. I keep hearing pundits, like sometime Trump adviser Joe Scarborough, saying that he needs to dial back the motor mouth a bit …. as if that is ever going to happen. Why the hell would he? It’s worked very well for him so far. Anyone who has ever worked for a small businessperson knows how that works. The man is going to impugn the judiciary when it goes against him and praise it when it decides in his favor, period. Separation of powers, constitutional laws and traditions – none of that means anything to him. He has dictatorial tendencies, and we have placed him into the most powerful office on the planet. Nice going, people.