Saturday, November 12, 2016

The Morphing Face of Donald Trump. Or How Quickly Campaign Promises Are Forgotten



Now imagine this:  All those wonderful promises that Donald Trump made have already started to disappear or to morph into your usual ultra-right-wing fanaticism.  And he has been president-elect for four full days!

1.  Trump campaigned against lobbyists, but they are part of his transitioning team.   He vowed to drain the swamp that is Washington.  Instead, he is petting all the swamp critters and inviting them into the White House:

In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. by, among other things, introducing tough new restrictions on lobbying.
“I am proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again,” Trump said during the October 17 appearance in Green Bay, Wisconsin where he first used the “drain the swamp” line.
It appears Trump is already backtracking on that pledge. Politico reports that “lobbyists are all over” Trump’s transition team. Those lobbyists include Cindy Hayden of tobacco company Altria; Michael Torrey, owner of a lobbying firm representing the American Beverage Association; Steve Hart, chairman of the Williams & Jensen firm; and Michael McKenna, who lobbies on behalf of Dow Chemical.


2.  Trump's transitioning website has had some careful alterations.  For instance, he never campaigned on the privatization of Medicare, but now his site tells us that Medicare will be "modernized," a euphemism for privatization.

3.  And a new insertion concerns the rights of all health care professionals to control the behavior of slutty women and to determine exactly how they should suffer while receiving health care.  The so-called "conscience clause" is an integral part of the religious right wing's demands, and Trump is going along with them.  I've read that ninety percent of them voted for the man with three serial wives and several additional mistresses, perhaps, because gods send weird messengers.

But note that Trump did NOT campaign on that issue.

4.  Neither did he vow to strongly cater for egg-Americans, but his transitioning site promises that his government will

Protect innocent human life from conception to natural death, including the most defenseless and those Americans with disabilities

I'm not sure if that means the immediate banning of all abortions for any reason whatsoever, once the Supreme Court has been stuffed with Christianists, but that's the most likely outcome.  As an aside, it seems that only innocent human lives will be protected, and only if they die in a natural way.

Very bad framing, all that, though of course I get the subtext:  That euthanasia is out and that egg-Americans have not yet murdered anyone.  Wonder what he plans to do about those egg-Americans who are not in the soon-to-be-socialized wombs of this country's womb-men.

5.  Finally, remember how Trump railed against Wall Street and bankers in his campaign speeches?  Only a few days later:

Trump’s reliance on insiders goes beyond lobbyists. His financial advisory team is full of veteran Wall Streeters such as former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin, the Wall Street Journal reports. Both Mnuchin and former JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon are reportedly in the mix to be Trump’s Treasury Secretary.

All this makes perfect sense from Trump's angle:  He gave the speeches he needed to win.  Once he won, the ideas in those speeches had done their job which was to secure him a victory.  They have no further use value for him, and are thus tossed out with the garbage.  Because he doesn't care about those promises at all, and neither does he care about those who voted for him.

The promises are replaced with things Trump has been persuaded to include to satisfy the arch-conservatives and Christianists among the Republican base.  It looks to me that someone is influencing him.

Very very sad.  Humongously sad!  Sad in a bigly way, especially for those who believed Trump's messages.

But perhaps even sadder for the rest of us.