Now we can all see with our own eyes the harsh reality of Trump 2.0. It has been one year of very damaging leadership by this President’s administration. Nothing is this country is better, except that we have regained control of our southern border, which is a good thing.
But what else is better? Not the cost of living. Not our international standing. Not our safety and security.
Kamala Harris was a bad presidential candidate, but she did point out the worst tendencies of Donald Trump and warned us that giving Donald Trump another presidential term would be disastrous, and it appears that she was right. But not even Kamala Harris could have foreseen the extent to which Donald Trump would go in order to glorify himself, enrich himself, seek personal retribution and vengeance, and ultimately lead this country down the darkest of rabbit holes.
Now we have ICE – a brutal private army – engaged in illegal forced entry into private homes, asserting that they, and they alone, are uniquely allowed to do so without a judicial warrant. This private army engages in needless and excessive physical abuse of U.S. citizens and legal non-citizens, as well as various categories of people who are here in this country illegally. This private army can seize people off the streets of this country and send them to undisclosed locations without any due process, even deporting them without giving notice to their families, friends, and legal counsel. And now, as we have seen, this private army has begun to murder American citizens who were naive enough to expect to be treated in a way that did not violate their constitutional rights or the Geneva Convention.
It has taken awhile for much of the American public to understand that the actions of this president and his administration are just not right. Many people proudly living in so-called red states naively thought that Donald Trump could do no wrong, and were happy to see that the leftist socialist god-hating agitators that lived in the so-called blue states were finally getting what was coming to them.
There are a lot of reasons why this thinking was erroneous, one of them being that most of the so-called blue states have 40% or more of their citizens that are pretty conservative leaning. These people are being punished right along with their more liberal neighbors. You could say that they are just collateral damage, but the damage has been done to them all the same.
What should be more concerning to these red-state conservative people is the fact that their elected senators and representatives have chosen to let President Trump and his administration do whatever they wanted to without any serious questioning. No objections, no oversight, no policy debates, no acting in the best interests of the people that they were elected to represent.
I know that these red-state conservative people have been led to believe that the Democratic Party that their grandparents voted for is the godless party of the devil, but the Democrats are not the party in power now. The Republican Party has a lot to answer for, because it has allowed all of the bad things that are going on right now to happen. Are you really going to blame the trans movement and Joe Biden for this current disaster? Seriously?
This is the time to take a stand for decency, for generosity, for respect, for faith and friends and family values. In its own dysfunctional way, the Democratic Party is now the party that stands for these ideals. Not to mention standing up for the Constitution, the rule of law, due process, checks and balances. Not to mention taking a stand against shooting a naive good-natured woman point-blank in her face, and shooting a well-meaning unarmed man point-blank in his back.
Rest assured, the Republican Party will eventually find its way back to a more balanced approach to conservative values. But for right now, the Republican Party is failing to address the needs of the American people, and is allowing the Trump administration to destroy the legacy of our country.
The Trump administration is engaging in a selective war against its own people through legal means, through intimidation and violence, and now murder. It has made a concerted effort to eliminate parts of our history when the story being told conflicts with its own ideology. It lies about its own people to its own people, and then demands that we believe its lies.
And now we are sending ICE personnel to Italy to protect our Olympic athletes. Will they be masked and heavily armed, without any limitations being placed on their actions? What other countries are sending a similar quasi-military security force to protect their athletes? Is protection of our athletes the real reason for ICE to be there, or is it to intimidate our own athletes to ensure that nothing will be said or done that could embarrass the Trump administration in such a visible forum?
It is hard to imagine a more provocative and threatening selection of an agency to provide security for our Olympians. Having experienced the Trump administration for the past year, this is probably the point.