Trump Doesn't Reflect Our Values

(So what are we going to do about it?) 2/21/2025

Trump is taking a sledgehammer to our systems so he can take more flesh out of working Americans and feed it to the wealthy 1%. Income inequality started with Reagan. He was such a lovable grandpa actor that people believed the bullshit he peddled. Americans were so bedazzled by his lies even many Democrats adopted his trickle-down economic strategies in what is called “Neo-liberalism.” Perhaps you may have heard Barack Obama give homage to Reagan in one of his 50 speeches, mentioning him as a significant influence. Bill Clinton made the mistake of signing the neo-liberal treaty NAFTA, a byproduct of the Reagan/Bush administrations. Why would Clinton make such a stupid mistake? He, too, had drunk the Kool-aid and was a disciple of Reaganomics, aka neo-liberalism. Ironically, there is nothing liberal about neo-liberalism. Its core value is capitalism and limiting the “welfare state.” It has created the obscene income inequality we are currently laboring under, unseen since the Gilded Age.

From the ¹Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

One central concern about neoliberalism is that, even if it boosts economic growth, it also increases economic inequality, which is problematic in several ways. Two kinds of inequality criticisms are generally offered. The more well-known are the empirical criticisms that neoliberal regimes lead to dangerous inequalities just from the data, such as Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital (2014), which holds that economic inequality is growing and is a threat to democracy, much as Martin Gilens’s (2014) work on inequality and the responsiveness of democratic policy-making to the richest 10%.

Thomas Piketty and Martin Gilen’s assessments were right. We are at democracy’s breaking point now, just a decade later. I doubt anyone thought it would be that fast at hand, but here we are. The breaking of this democracy into a plutocracy has been a concerted effort by the super-wealthy back to the days of FDR. The movement found its spokesperson 40 years later in Reagan. Through the perfection of double-speak, Reagan sold Americans on the beneficence of corporations, wealthy individuals, and the evils of government. It was an easy sell to gullible Americans who had gone through two decades of turmoil culminating in the famously corrupt Nixon administration.

People started waking up to the ravages of neo-liberalism as we watched the economic system teeter toward the edge of collapse, saved only by our government. The banks that were “too big to fail” were bailed out while middle-class Americans lost their homes and retirements. But even this wasn’t enough for people to fully wake up from the sweet-sweet lies of the Reagan neo-liberal sugar-high, the fantasy that somehow there’s always room at the .001% for the rest of us.

The reality is that we live in a world with finite resources, and the very nature of the uber-wealthy, or even the very rich, is pure, unadulterated greed. We can make excuses for them, pretend like they don’t know when they pay $4,000 for a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes or $20,000,000 for their third home (which they live in only two months out of the year), all of that money wouldn’t be better spent helping homeless people or abused children. No one needs tacky $4,000 shoes. I mean, they aren’t even cute. They are just expensive, which is why people buy them. They are part of the wealthy uniform, the price to prove you fit into this exclusive club. They can’t have any peasants in their mix.

Now that we have this insane income inequality and people are more dependent on government assistance, which is already scarce, we have Trump indiscriminately axing the lifelines many people rely on. Seventy-two million Americans receive Social Security money, meaning 22% rely on this institution for survival. That is almost a quarter of our population. Axe social security, and we are looking at an unprecedented disaster.

Trump has been hatcheting programs like the FAA, and we’ve had an air disaster nearly every day since. However, other institutions will impact us downstream, like the FDA, the EPA, the National Institute of Health, NOA, the CDC, and WHO, to name just a few. We are currently teetering on the edge of a major pandemic. Bird flu has been mutating and adapting to infect mammals like cows and now humans. It is only a matter of time before it becomes an infectious disease transmissible from human to human.

So what are we going to do about this? The pace of destruction is dizzying, confusing, and overwhelming. This is on purpose. It is meant to leave us breathless and unable to focus on any one fight. We are being surrounded by arson on all sides. Which fires do we put out first?