TrumpBrand - America For Sale

The tweeted idiocies, outright lies, and deceptions gurgling up out of the TrumpBrand Government might appear entertaining, but the real, daily, and constant work to dismantle America is growing by leaps and bounds. Six months into this wrecking ball approach to government and the damage is already immeasurable. What a horrifying mess the TrumpBrand Government is making.

The Big Lie (aka the Blame Them Game)  which many Republicans and most Conservatives cling to, demands all problems or issues are merely the fault of any and every one except themselves - the reason those who hold office can't affect change is you, bucko, you and your crowd are bad hombres. It's the media, it's the previous administration, it's students, it's China, It's Germany (but it's isn't Russia), it's the immigrants, it's refugees, it's lazy poor people who make the problems that won't go away.

Oh and it is also the governed and those who govern. They - they - they - it's a mantra of blame throwing.

Meanwhile the real work to transform and elevate the control of business over government and the governed is on a stampede, noted in this report from Washington Monthly:

"The Trump/GOP effort to shrink the civil service plays on a narrative the American people have been hearing for decades: the federal workforce is bloated. As Mulvaney’s guidance put it, there are “too many Federal employees stuck in a system that is not working for the American people.” Press secretary Sean Spicer, announcing Trump’s executive order in January, explained that the hiring freeze “counters the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.”

"The only problem with this narrative is that it is the exact opposite of the truth. As a share of the U.S. workforce, the federal civil service is actually smaller than at any time since before World War II. In absolute terms, it has been about the same size for half a century. In 1966, there were about 2.1 million executive branch civil servants (not including Postal Service employees). Since then, the country’s population has increased from 196 million to 323 million. The annual gross domestic product, along with annual government spending, more than quadrupled. And the workforce? In 2016, there were still only 2.1 million federal employees.

"There’s no rule that says the number of civil servants has to rise in lockstep with the population or the economy. Many federal jobs in the 1960s were clerical positions that computers have made obsolete. But still. In 1966, there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Department of Homeland Security, no Federal Emergency Management Agency. Medicare and Medicaid had been signed into law just a year earlier. It’s hard to believe that the same number of people we had in 1966 can run such a radically larger government enterprise.

"And, in fact, they don’t.

"While the number of federal employees has basically flatlined for a half century, the government has ballooned if you include another group in your tally: private contractors. As the size and scope of federal programs grew, but the number of civil servants stayed fixed, that labor had to get done by someone. Congress’s answer has increasingly been to contract with the private sector. So when Trump and the Republicans say they’re going to shrink government by cutting federal workers, do a mental autocorrect. What they’re really saying is, we’re going to be shoveling a lot more money out the door to federal contractors."

For the record, anyone who says government should run like a business does not know what government is actually for or what it does. 

" ... there are between 600,000 and 800,000 service contractors; the government spends more on them than it does on the salaries of the entire civil service, which has three times the number of people. Contracting accounted for 40 percent of all discretionary spending in 2015, and service contracts accounted for 60 percent of that (even more at nondefense agencies). And it’s rising. Even the Defense Department spends twice as much on contracts for services as it spends on aircraft, ships, and land vehicles. According to a 2015 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, spending on contractors nearly doubled from 2000 to 2012, and the subset “that grew the most in dollar terms was contracts for professional, administrative, and management services”—that is, service contracts."

Who Could Possibly Be Surprised at the State of Trump's Presidency?

All of us who intentionally voted otherwise (aka the majority of Americans, thank God) knew.

A lot of those who voted for this deeply unqualified man, they knew too, but they were willing to gamble everything ... everything. Shame, shame.

Many voted to see if he would just gum it all up, turn into a headline fest of outrage. They are likely pleased, but still, not surprised.

What did we know? Trump is way out of his league, and his business practices are ragged secrets on the dark side.

As for me? My post  from Nov. 9, 2016 says it well -

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, puh-leeeze welcome the 45th President of the United States -- you know him as a middling brand name product made from toxic materials, the Kmart of Billionaires, the golden-toned skeezy Gordon Gecko leftover, the C-list TV actor popular in Soviet bloc countries - one Donald Trump -  and here we go on a slippery and rapid descent into political madness.

There has been no mass repudiation of politics-as-usual despite claims to the contrary, since the vast majority of folks already in office were re-elected yesterday. 

Anger, seething for 8 years, directed at all those who dared support a non-white male president, has flowered with poison.

Yes, only the man who was born with solid-gold privileges can save Americans from solid-gold privileged men.

On a personal note, there is not one person in office in the state or nation that I voted for. Whatever is about to happen, it will not be my fault. I'll just be over here complaining and saying I told you so."

And you know what, oh constant readers? I freakin' told you so.

What I Learned Watching The Presidential Debate

Let's see here ... the United States should

= Invade North Korea

= Or at least support a Chinese invasion of  North Korea

= Stop US business expansion into overseas market

= Abandon NATO

= Support the collapse of the US housing market because "that's called business".

OK, what else do we have here? It strikes me how much Trump talks like a character in a David Mamet con man play ... like this one about his own income:

"The report that said $650 (million) — which, by the way, a lot of friends of mine that know my business say, boy, that’s really not a lot of money. It’s not a lot of money relative to what I had.

The buildings that were in question, they said in the same report, which was — actually, it wasn’t even a bad story, to be honest with you, but the buildings are worth $3.9 billion. And the $650 isn’t even on that. But it’s not $650. It’s much less than that.

But I could give you a list of banks, I would — if that would help you, I would give you a list of banks. These are very fine institutions, very fine banks. I could do that very quickly."

I did like this quote from Clinton, which was pretty much overlooked, but really cuts to the heart of what Trump himself considers his ultimate expertise, cutting business deals:

"Well, sometimes there’s not a direct transfer of skills from business to government, but sometimes what happened in business would be really bad for government."

There's the blatantly obvious racism from Trump, however I am sure he sees his comments differently, such as he calls anyone he thinks is a bum whatever slur comes to mind. 

Overall, I learned that I remain perplexed at how some thoughtful and experienced people I know are ardent supporters for someone who is playing a dangerous game he has zero qualifications for.

The Donald Trump Explained

It is no surprise the the wack-a-doodle candidate has won the day for Republicans, as that's pretty much been the New Standard for the GOP: rude, prone to wild exaggeration and outright deception, devotion to obsolete ideas, anger, anger and some more anger. Wack-a-doodle.

Such has been the norm since, oh, we all know it - since Barack Obama became the Democrat nominee and especially since his inauguration. It might have been labeled a non-stop Whisper-Smear Campaign, except they've never whispered their outrage. Only hyperbole fixes their rhetoric in place - policies are not opposed or debated factually, instead President Obama is Destroying America to the Point It Will Be Lost Forever and Ever Just Because He's Secretly a Something.

Who else could Republicans select from their field of bobble-headed pretenders? Ben Carson? Jeb!? No, not even the righteous indignation of Angry Senator Ted Cruz could capture the fervor of the faithful because he had a little too much piety in his patter. Piety? Screw that, says Trump. Screw everything - screw you, screw Mexicans, women, Muslims, well screw all brown folks, and screw the horse you all rode in on too. Get 'em outta here.

The faithful howl with derisive laughter at the wack-a-doodle peeing in the political punch bowl. And become loyalists.

Wisely, the GOP Machine applied only criticism to the Trump campaign since endorsing him would undercut his efforts - a convention floor fight, a new contender - none of that will appear. Better for the Machine to merely stand aside and watch until Trump's in power and reluctantly work with the fellow and should he fail spectacularly they'll shrug it off since "He's not one of us!"

He is, however, the candidate of our age - he's the Internet Troll who won't go away, who demands power, who claims to be an authority, who can't be argued with because he's just blustering a 160-characters per second per second and he's taken over the American Tumblr page  and just ruined the page which used to be pretty cool. His followers like it though, akin to the way some folks like the way the Three Stooges would bake wallpaper paste into the bread rolls and serve it up the gullible rich establishment folk. 

He's a perfect foil for Hillary Clinton - lifelong politician with a name the GOP despises. Truly, they should love her. She's like Nixon - driven to be in the White House, or in any office, hungry for it on a weird level. But she has her own Trump Outsider card - she's a woman who is wife of a despised man, and that's a powerful card never to be underestimated.

The Troll with a heart (hair? comb-over?) of gold is likely to win the day.