Part 1 here: https://garveys-ghost.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-trump-presidency-rise.html
In the last installment, I discussed what I thought were the major issues that made a Trump candidacy and election possible. In this post I'll discuss some of the major problems and issues of the Trump presidency.
First, before I get into the critiques I think it would be unfair to point out one of the biggest successes of the Trump presidency prior to the COVID scamdemic. Yes you read that right. The economic performance that happened under Trump was by all measures HUGE. Trump deserves every bit of credit for it as he did not accept the prevailing attitude that the jobs "weren't coming back" and there was nothing we could do.
That Trump recognized that China was eating the US' lunch and dinner should not be forgotten. Many countries had and have been using the grandiosity of the US to take advantage. Deals often were huge economic and IP transfers to other countries with little if anything to show for the average citizen.
The chart below shows just how much China has grown in the last 20 years.
Trump recognized that China was pulverising the US under both Democrats and Republicans. All that change in trade represents industries you and I cannot find jobs in.
I pointed out in a few pieces. MAGA has been very economically beneficial to black Americans.
MAGA for African-Americans
All those black folks with higher wages than before thanks to the idea of bringing jobs BACK. Black folks stand to win with less illegal immigration and even legal immigration. Black folks stand to win with an America first ideology that brings back or creates manufacturing jobs that can employ those persons not particularly suited for jobs requiring advanced education.It will be rather interesting if during the presidency of a Republican (in name only?) black unemployment drops significantly.
In May 2017, the Trump administration sent letters to about 800 employees, saying they weren’t authorized to work in the United States, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show.
Those Hispanic employees didn’t return to work, leaving the bakery desperate to fill their jobs. So the company turned to another placement agency, Metro Staff Inc., and it provided Cloverhill with workers screened through the government’s “E-Verification” program. Most of those new employees are African American.
Ed French, owner of Elgin-based Metro Staff Inc., says his company became the main provider of workers for the bakery and that about 80 percent of them are black. According to French, workers at the bakery were paid slightly less before his company was hired two and a half years ago — with wages up by about 25 cents an hour, to just above minimum wage.
And the news only got better from there. Record employment levels since the 1970s. So again, credit where credit is due. And now the bad.
Trump, unfortunately, looked at the presidency as he did Trump Inc.: A family affair. With the possible exception of Don. Jr., none of the family were in on Trump's stated policies. Jared, Ivanka and the lot were NY Democrats in a supposedly Republican admin. Trump seemed to be unduly influenced by Ivanka. This was disastrous. Ivanka didn't get Trump into the white house. Bannon did. Bannon was soon shown the door due to Jarvanka.
Trump is and always has been a "connector". He is a 'big picture" person who then delegates the hell out of the job at hand. When you run an organization like that you must trust the people you delegate to to do the job and understand and agree with the mission and are WILLING to do it. Trump, unfortunately, made hiring decisions that did not reflect what he STATED were his goals. Others had their own agendas. In either case Trump made a lot of bad hiring decisions on top of the nepotism.
Before we get into some of the failures of his hires, which are Trump's failures, we should get into his own immediate failures. Trump had railed against DACA during his campaign. As it was an executive order it could be rescinded by another one. Trump's people should have had that ready on day one.
Day. One.
That one failure, in my opinion, foreshadowed all other failures. There was no reason to not have that ready other than Trump didn't really want to do it for whatever reason. Sure the Democrats and their media arm would have raised hell and certainly, a judge or two would have tried to stop it. Never mind all that. First, even if it did get struck down, which it did due to a complete failure of the courts to abide by the law, that it happened right out the gate would have sent a clear message to his opponents that he wasn't messing around.
The second thing was the failure of the wall. Again, the admin should have gotten on the "and Mexico will pay for it" part straight away. There are states that charge remittance taxes on money transfers. Someone should have copied that legislation, changing whatever was needed and had that ready to go in the first 100 days.
Then we had the failure of Sessions.
Jeff Sessions was a "genteel" man who was simply not up to the task at hand. Trump needed a shark AG. Sessions was not a shark AG. Sessions should have made it his business to not only deal with illegal aliens themselves BUT also to the state actors who enacted policies in direct contradiction to federal law. Here's me back in November of 2017:
You can count me among those who are dismayed at the current state of affairs of the Justice [sic] Department. How we have states talking about being sanctuary states and cities talking about being sanctuary cities in blatant violation of federal law without action is beyond me. Why the mayors of NYC and LA haven't had a public perp walk with members of various city councils not indicted on RICO immigration law charges is also baffling to me. How the perpetrators of so called "hate crime" hoaxes haven't been charged with civil rights violations of the citizens they attempted to smear and intimidate is also of great concern to me.
And:
I'm going to focus on Sessions here. Since the campaign we have seen unprecedented levels of political violence mostly by leftist groups. We have seen a level of lawlessness, where governors and mayors have openly violated immigration law or stated their intent (which is what is needed for criminal prosecution) to violate immigration law. Various govt. officials have brazenly told police under their watch to allow persons designated "nazis" to be beaten and to have their constitutional rights violated. All of this has happened with mice level peeps from Sessions. This is unacceptable. Where there is a lack of law, lawlessness escalates.
Kathryn Steinle: Victim of Liberal/Democratic Policies
Lastly:
Lets take a walk down memory lane to when Obama was president. Arizona, a state, decided that it was going to finally "do something" about illegal aliens in it's borders. It passed a law that allowed it's officers to check the immigration status of anyone they stopped. The constitutional basis for this was that once police have probable cause to stop someone, they can use their discretion to inquire about immigration status. "Hispanic" leadership immediately took offense, saying that this amounted to racial profiling (Hispanic is not a race). Never mind that over 70% of illegal aliens in the United States are Mexican nationals and Arizona borders Mexico.
What did the Obama administration do? Did they sit on their ass? Did they give a news conference and then go about business as usual? No. The Obama administrationimmediately sued the state:
In September of 2017 California passes a "sanctuary state" law. How long
Where is Sessions? Where is Trump?
When Arizona passed its laws, which the supreme court said wasn't within its rights because immigration is a federal issue, the Obama administration went directly into action. They didn't even wait for the law to go into effect. Meanwhile California brazenly proposed, passed and allowed a law that contravenes federal law and the only thing Sessions did was give a speech.
That is a disgrace. thats fucking incompetence or complete dereliction of duty
Yeah. I wasn't happy with Sessions. He seemed more interested in confiscating money and property of people accused of crimes (rather than convicted of them) than dealing with the open treason that is the sanctuary city movement. So no I wasn't sad to see him go. The problem was that Barr was no different.
I think Trump took to Barr because Barr had previous experience, unlike Sessions. Heck, I liked some of the things that Barr did early on. But I came to realize that Barr was a deep state snake. Yes. Barr is a deep state snake who used his position to unnecessarily delay the prosecution of the traitors who spied on the Trump admin (because it was traitorous regardless of who was elected) until the 2020 election with the hopes that Trump would be put out which would/should save everybody's neck.
Just like how Comey, after laying out the case against Clinton in regards to her server, decided that he still couldn't indict Clinton because supposedly it wasn't maliciously done, The Inspector General's report laid out the crimes of the fake dossier replete with where it came from and who paid for it. It clearly showed it was "foreign interference" and that various laws were broken. But he also gave them cover by making excuses for them rather than hauling them into court, given the probable cause, and making THEM convince a judge or jury that the state did not prove its case.
No Barr was a deep state agent whose job was to distract an easily distracted Trump with promises that reports are "coming soon". Maybe July. Maybe September. Oh wait, it wouldn't be "proper" to release a report during an election campaign.
*wink*
*nod*
Note how they hemmed up some low-level guy for falsifying an e-mail, yet as far as I know, nobody who lied to the FISA court has been prosecuted. Lying to the FISA court is a crime. We know who did so. How come they didn't get the 8AM raid?
So yeah, Sessions was inept and Barr was a plant. Trump hired them both. Buck stops with him.
And while I'm on the subject; Why the HELL was Ben Carson not made Surgeon General, given his background?
Getting back to the nepotism angle, it cannot be overstated the damage that Jarvanka did to the Trump presidency. Again, the buck stops with Trump and he clearly was unable to see or understand that Kushner was out for self and his wife's political ambitions. Speaking of, Ivanka should understand that the Trump name is now dirt in many places and those who were in the Trump admin and family of Trump who didn't bail on him won't be allowed anywhere near elected office in any Democrat state.
But Kuchner has been making sure Kushner has been taken care of.
Despite its incessant panhandling, the Trump campaign emerged in late November with a surplus of $7 million. Stepien reportedly didn’t know the campaign had money left in the coffers. But everything comes back to Kushner.
Despite its incessant panhandling, the Trump campaign emerged in late November with a surplus of $7 million. Stepien reportedly didn’t know the campaign had money left in the coffers. But everything comes back to Kushner.
“Nothing was done without Jared’s approval,” a former Trump campaign advisor told Business Insider. “What Stepien doesn’t know is because Jared doesn’t want him to know.”
The use of shell companies is indeed nothing new in American political life. During the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC collectively funneled approximately $12.4 million through the law firm Perkins Coie to avoid properly disclosing an opposition research contract with Fusion GPS. That arrangement gave birth to the salacious Russian dossier. That figure is dwarfed, however, by the amount of money that evaporated in the hands of Kushner and the Trump campaign. Moreover, Democrats may have lost the 2016 election but at least got something for their money—opposition research, manufactured though it was.
On the other hand, the Trump campaign lost its bid for reelection, and no one has any idea what happened to nearly half a billion dollars. This doesn’t seem to bother Kushner, the man at the center of it all, who recently purchased a $30 million lot on Indian Creek Island, a private, guarded and gated redoubt in Florida with a 13-man police force for just 29 residences. And the fundraising machine appears ready to roll on.
But that's not all. Kushner sold Trump on the racist idea that outreach to black voters was by "criminal justice reform". Yes, I called it racist. Why? Because even though black crime is WAY higher than white or Asian crime, most black people are law-abiding and are quite fine with criminal black folks being put in and kept in jail. There's a reason black folks, when they get money, generally leave black communities, unless that community is already black-gentrified.
One of the good things that Trump did in his campaign was to not talk to black people as black people but as citizens. No talk about civil rights. None of the slavery talk. Black people are not used to being spoken to as *equal* citizens. They are used to being scared into voting by being told about KKK a pending return of slavery and Jim Crow. Never mind that those things never come to pass.
So the outreach to black voters was essentially: "Look we let out a few people. Vote for us." Yeah, let's do photo ops with Kim K and Kanye West. Yeah, there are totally NO OTHER black people you could turn to. No there are no other issues more important to black voters.
Meanwhile; white conservative voters, who put Trump over the top in 2016 went unappealed to. In fact the violence and de-platforming that started before Trump accelerated with Trump tweeting about how he's looking into it and big things are going to happen. Of course nothing did happen, at least from him.
And that was a repeating theme of the Trump presidency. A lot of tweets about big things and what he's looking into but very little of substance. He flip-flopped badly on the DACA thing. One day he's talking about ending it, another day he's talking about how something should be done *for* them. Then his base howls and he backtracks. Which goes back to Trump's major flaw: His need to be liked; particularly by the people who oppose him. Trump could be best described as the big dog that barks loudly but is found to not have any teeth.
Some may point out that Trump got +3 conservative judge count on SCOTUS. Well IF your case gets that far it may be of some help. However; a lot of people will go broke and be forced into a settlement, if that, prior to getting to file for consideration by SCOTUS and SCOTUS may decide it doesn't want to hear the case. Worse, in terms of left-right, the newest trick of lawfare is to pass the law, announce the rule or start the legal intimidation and then when it looks like the case may get to an unfavorable judge, to stop enforcing and repeal the law, reverse the ruling or halt the prosecution so that the court decides that the case is "moot" and no precedent-setting decision can be made.
Oops! My bad. *snicker*
By that time your business or organization has been either destroyed or irreparably harmed. Reputation sullied. Job lost , etc. Finances ruined. Exactly as planned. The Trump organization will probably see this action in the near future.
So Trump suffered many self-inflicted wounds by thinking he could use nepotism to battle the swamp. He made other bad hiring decisions that voluntarily gave key positions to people who were "swamp agents" who were able to distract him long enough to get him out of office. He himself, as noted earlier was shown to be the big, loud dog with no teeth.
In the next segment we'll see how Trump's weaknesses lead to his defeat.