President Trump and his supporters claim that he has a mandate for the extreme actions he has already taken since being sworn in, but he fell just short of receiving 50% of the popular vote. In contrast, President Johnson received 61% of the popular vote in 1964 and President Franklin D. Roosevelt received 57% in 1932 and 61% in 1936. Those are mandates. Elections do matter, but any mandate President Trump claims is a pretty thin one.
Many observers think that he won the election because moderate voters were willing to risk the chaos of a second Trump presidency in return for such promises by candidate Trump as $2 a gallon gasoline, lower grocery prices and deportation of millions of illegal immigrants.
We’re a few weeks into his administration, and that’s already not looking like a very good bet. Now that he is president, Trump is already backing off of some of his economic promises. Whether he can actually deport millions of illegal immigrants without crippling the workforce and driving up prices remains to be seen.
Moreover, President Trump is gambling with America’s national security and public health, not just by appointing such unqualified people, in my opinion, as Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy,Jr., but also by treating the Gaza crisis as a real estate play and now apparently preparing to appease Putin by abandoning Ukraine.
While it’s a close call, Kash Patel may be the most dangerous nominee. f he is able to carry through on his reputed plan for mass firings of FBI employees, who will be left to protect us from terrorist attacks within our borders, not to mention the drug cartels?
9/11 was the tragic result of multiple failures of U.S. intelligence — domestic and international. Fortunately, we learned from those mistakes. Among other things, a strong and well-coordinated FBI investigative arm is a critical element of our protection.
Will Kash Patel eviscerate our protection in the name of political retribution? And is Tulsi Gabbard up to the task as director of national intelligence?
Pretty much everybody agrees that we have to maintain a strong national defense. The men and women of our military forces are our first line of defense. Increased military spending as House Republicans propose is pointless without adequate numbers of capable people in our military forces.
As secretary of defense, will Pete Hegseth be able to meet recruiting and retention goals without lowering standards despite his disparaging views of women in combat and his implications that minorities have achieved responsible positions only because of DEI?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a lifelong real estate developer would see the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a real estate play. Common sense tells me — if not President Trump — that 2 million Palestinians are not going to leave Gaza peacefully and that if the United States is going to take over and develop Gaza, American troops will have to be sent there, putting their lives at risk to achieve President Trump’s goal to develop a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
There obviously is no electoral mandate for Trump’s real estate play. He didn’t say a word about it during the campaign.
Candidate Trump promised that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. Secretary Hegseth’s statements indicating that restoration of Ukraine’s boundaries and NATO membership for Ukraine are off the table make President Trump’s pending capitulation to Putin alarmingly apparent.
MAGA supporters have said in the past that America was great when it stood up to Nazi tyranny during World War II. Many have complained about alleged American weakness in foreign policy, for example, toward Iran and North Korea, but now it looks like Trump is going to make America cave again.
Does anyone seriously think that if Putin is not punished for his clear violation of international law in invading Ukraine that he won’t threaten the Baltic countries next? It’s hard to imagine anyone whose word is less trustworthy that Vladimir Putin.
Anyone who denies that vaccination was critical to limiting the number of deaths from COVID during the pandemic is simply ignoring the facts. Yet President Trump nominated and the Senate confirmed the most prominent anti-vaccination critic in the country. I for one take no comfort from Kennedy’s recent equivocations.
If Secretary Kennedy continues to undermine public confidence in vaccination against such previously conquered diseases as measles and polio, the public will know who to hold accountable for the resulting deaths and disabilities — not just President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, but also the senators who voted to confirm Kennedy.
And unfortunately we cannot count on the next pandemic not happening for another one hundred years. The alarming spread of bird flu should concern us all.
I haven’t even touched on the constitutional crisis that President Trump is creating by his baseless assertions of unbridled executive power.
Ed Rutan
Pinebrook