First few days

It has been quite a start to the new administration.  I somewhat expected the surrealness to begin to ware off but honestly it just keeps getting odder and odder.  The most normal actions were the executive order around the ACA which is almost completely non-understandable in its scope and implications.  Pulling out of the TPP and renewal of anti-abortion “gag order” are symbolic at best.  All of this going on while the WH is sending out the press secretary to argue alternative facts which were neither an alternative nor, as it would be, facts of any sort.  He then went on to chide the press for not reporting them properly.  It did not take an expert at all to look at comparable pictures from the past two inaugurations to say that there were fewer people at this one than the last.  It was nothing short of complaining that the press was not reporting that the sky is, “in fact,” green.  And then there was the substance of the President’s speech itself which was… startling.  It provided such a bleak view of the country that seemed utterly contrived to simply support his view that Washington has been robbing the people blind.

Now here’s the thing… to a certain degree, I don’t think that his view is that far off from how many see the country today.  I think that there is a divide that a good portion of the population vastly under recognizes even after the election.  It is this group that Trump has been able to channel.  It is in some way the same group that supported Sanders.  They are the ones being left behind.  The ones that see the rise of the cities and the coast with skyrocketing wealth and don’t see how they are sharing in the benefits.  I don’t believe that they cling to a time when the opportunities were better necessarily as much as they reach back to a time when the differences weren’t so obvious.  They look for a time when it didn’t feel like they were falling farther behind.  They are looking for answers to a world that increasingly looks less like them and is increasingly difficult to understand.  While the elites speak in a language all their own about financial derivatives, international trade and the high finance of governmental financing the town, schools and states have never recovered from the financial crisis.  Schools are not keeping up with the pace of innovation, police are chronically underfunded and infrastructure seems to be crumbling under their feet (especially forgotten the father they are from a major city.)  These concerns are real and they are valid.  They also have zero chance of getting solved or even of being addressed by the new republican singularity in Washington.  This is largely due to the fact that the GOP is almost universally on the wrong side of the solutions to these issues.

 

I honestly wish the new President would address these concerns but I have little hope that he will.  Just look at the first few days almost completely consumed by their performance in the theater of the inauguration.  A couple of swipes of the pen to make the far right happy but nothing for the angry that they seem to channel.  I suspect the ACA will get gutted in the coming days with no hope of a grand replacement that forgoes the countless people that will lose coverage and will, because of it, die sooner than need be.  That is the unavoidable facts of it.  In addition, the administration froze government hiring because of the inherent evil of the bureaucracy apparently.  No mention that the federal government is the largest single employer in the country and the effect of a hiring freeze will have on the economy.  No mention of the contracts and projects employing countless other Americans that will not happen because the federal resources needed to define and manage those projects are not in place.  Ah but political points were scored and if not reported to be of the benefit of all Americans, then the press is corrupt.

There is a great need for help in this country.  A great cry that helped usher in the current administration. A constituency that can already begin to see has been duped and will be discarded… until the next election that is.