Trump’s Worst Nightmare
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Donald Trump doesn’t sleep a lot, and it won’t get any better soon. The president is a racist and a misogynist, so Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris, a black woman, as his VP candidate is about the worst thing that could have happened to him. Harris’s race and gender are sufficient to launch Trump into the curtains of the Oval Office, let alone her political and legal skills and electrifying laugh. In the Vice Presidential debate she’ll send Mike Pence crying to the wife he calls ‘mother,’ and on the campaign trail she’ll be a formidable asset. Trump undoubtedly considers it ‘unfair’ that Biden did this to him, after he had just shown such gracious generosity to the American people. First he signed an executive order that pre-existing conditions have to be covered by health insurance plans. Nasty slanderers call that an empty gesture, because those conditions are already covered by Obamacare, which Trump is trying to get invalidated by the courts, but the president argues that even if the ACA is overturned pre-existing conditions will still be covered, just not for the 25 million Americans who will lose their coverage altogether.
Next, the president signed four executive orders at his country club in New Jersey, surrounded by members who mostly didn’t wear masks and didn’t care about social distancing, violating the directives of NJ’s governor but just how Trump likes it. The orders, some of which are really just suggestions, pertain to halting evictions and deferring student loan payments, and extending unemployment benefits by $400/week as well as deferring payroll taxes. The latter two are the most controversial because the president expects the states to contribute $100 of the $400, money the states simply don’t have, and taxation is a responsibility of Congress, not of the executive branch. Moreover, payroll taxes fund Social Security, so any cuts in these taxes threaten a program most Americans rely on, now and in the future. On the corona front Trump has given up on protecting the American people. He would rather not talk about the pandemic, but when asked he says that the US is doing great, much better than the world, and that it will all go away, while Americans are still getting sick in record numbers and testing becomes a bigger mess every day.
It’s fairly obvious that Trump sees a vaccine as his only way out of this predicament, and therefore he keeps announcing that a safe and effective vaccine might be available on or just before Election Day, no matter how unlikely that is. And nobody would be surprised if the president would take a shortcut and start touting his BFF Putin’s vaccine, of which the safety and effectiveness has not been demonstrated in any way. Peter Navarro may already be negotiating the purchase of millions of doses that will probably end up next to his hydroxychloroquine collection.
In his attempt to sabotage the upcoming elections Trump’s Postmaster General, after creating a mess by ‘re-aligning’ USPS management and changing delivery procedures, is now trying to inflate costs by raising the postage on mail-in votes by 300%, something the states cannot afford. With a pandemic raging in the country Trump will force people to either risk their life or lose their vote, and even pro-Trump Republicans realize that it affects his voters as well as Biden’s.
As always the president was good for a few laughs this week. First it came out that he inquired with the governor of South Dakota if and how he could get his countenance added to Mount Rushmore, and then he stated that the Spanish Flu pandemic, which lasted from 1918 to 1920, ended WW II in 1945. Only when it comes to gaffes can Trump compete successfully with Joe Biden and come out a winner.
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