Post-Election Thoughts on Trump Pro & Con

I’m not yet sure what to think about last Tuesday’s election results. Surprisingly, I find myself ambivalent and guardedly hopeful.

On the one hand, I feel strong foreboding about the Trump victory. I have nothing but painful memories of his last term. It was tough to wake up each day to the crudity, mendacity, stupidity, self-promotion, and sheer ignorance of the man. As a result, like many others, especially at the beginning, I experienced great relief returning to a kind of normalcy under Joe Biden.

But then as that “normalcy” kicked in, I found that horrifying too. Distressingly, there are those billions and billions and billions spent on a war in Ukraine whose reasons were impossible for me to understand. How was Ukraine our concern? I mean, most Americans can’t even find it on the map. Additionally, by all accounts its government is incredibly corrupt. Historically, it has been consistently associated with Nazism. Ukraine seemed far from our business, especially when we have so many problems at home.

I’m referring to huge income gaps between rich and poor, to decaying cities, roads and bridges, low minimum wage, lack of universal health care, college loan indebtedness, rampant homelessness, and incoherent immigration policy. Why did the Biden administration find it so easy to find billions for Ukraine, but not for us and our problems?

Then came the genocide in Gaza! At the very least, it revealed the hypocrisy of Democrats ostensibly concerned with women’s rights, and racism, but supplying weapons to kill mothers and their children in Gaza. Clearly the administration felt differently about Palestinian women and children than about their American or Ukrainian counterparts. Isn’t that sexism? Isn’t that racism? Isn’t it politically suicidal?

Mrs. Harris promised more of the same. During her ineffective campaign she repeatedly refused to distance herself from anything Genocide Joe continues to implement in the Middle East. Doesn’t that make her a genocider too? Of course it does!

But won’t Trump just give us more of the same as well? Probably. But maybe not.

So, to clarify my own ambivalence about Tuesday’s election results, I decided to make a list of Trump’s pros and cons. Here’s how it came out:

Trump’s Negatives

There are so many! But here’s the short list:

• In general, he’s crude, superficial, and uninformed.
• He’s a pathological liar, e.g., about immigrant crime rates and their eating pets.
• His only true accomplishment during his first term was to give gratuitous tax breaks to the world’s richest people.
• He totally mishandled the COVID 19 outbreak. As a result, more Americans died than citizens of any other developed country.
• His punitive policies against Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba have increased the immigration situation he decries.
• More specifically, he repeatedly tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government ridiculously installing U.S. puppet Juan Guaido to replace Nicolas Maduro.
• He’s a climate change denier
• He’s a champion of the fossil fuel industry’s super polluters.
• He exhibits no understanding of the dangers of nuclear war. (Remember his wondering “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them.”)
• Like Biden and Harris, he’s anti-Palestinian and an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s genocide.
• He blames U.S. unemployment and low wages on immigrants and the Chinese rather than on the decisions of his capitalist friends to offshore American jobs.
• He thinks that tariffs hurt the Chinese, when they are covert taxes on American consumers, while increasing inflation and funneling the surcharged money to Washington.
• He’s disrespectful of women and has been convicted of rape by a jury of his peers
• He was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
• He encouraged the January 6, 2021, assault on our nation’s capital.
• He’s likely to incorporate into his administration neanderthals like Mike Pompeo and Marco Rubio.

Trump’s Positives

Believe it or not, there are a few. Here’s the longest list I can think of:

• Trump’s disliked and vilified by the Washington establishment and the mainstream media. (Indicating that he can’t be all that bad).
• His landslide election has exposed widespread discontent with the economic and political status quo.
• He’s a loose cannon. He and his MAGA followers form the closest thing to the third party that America requires.
• His “party” has succeeded in uniting large swaths of previously hopelessly polarized population segments who somehow realize that they have more in common with each other than what drives them apart – including women, African Americans, and Hispanics.
• He promises to incorporate into his administration anti-big-pharma, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., war critic, Tulsi Gabbard, and Putin interviewer Tucker Carlson.
• He’s willing to negotiate an end to the Ukrainian war.
• He’s highly skeptical of NATO.
• His vice-president is J.D. Vance has been described by Robert Barnes as “the most war skeptical and pro-labor Republican office holder in the last 50 years.”
• Beyond that and unlike the Biden administration, he’s proven willing to dialog and “deal” with America’s designated enemies including North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
• He promises to open sealed government documents (and their can of worms) on the JFK assassination.
• And (most importantly) his election may drive neo-con Democrats to repudiate their efforts to out-Republican Republicans and to reappropriate their identity as Roosevelt New Dealers.  

Conclusion

Well, there you have it – the pros and cons of Trump’s triumph as I see it. What do you think? Am I being naïve and too optimistic? Am I whistling past the graveyard? Can you add to my lists? Do you care to refute my reasoning?