The President of the United States issued on Monday a heartfelt and touching tribute to the country’s fallen heroes, reminding them (and all the rest of us), in all caps, that “the scum” in the White House the last four years were “radical” and “sick” and the “USA hating judges” were a problem now, but progress stopping “the monsters” was being made.
He forgot to mention the fallen troops.
But then, he’s made it clear previously that he finds dead soldiers to be losers and suckers, and, oh, yeah, he also only likes soldiers who weren’t captured, unlike that loser John McCain.
This is the America a whole bunch of you wanted. One governed by hate and anger and fear and meanness and isolation and racism.
One in which you overlook the utter insane ramblings of a clearly demented individual simply because mixed in among those rantings is evidence that he also hates the same people you do, and that he’s prepared to apply the laws of this country unequally to your benefit and to their detriment.
That’s the reality. And you damn well know it.
Donald Trump, by any reasonable standard, is a lunatic who is completely and utterly unburdened by the laws and ethics of this county. He has spoken openly of defying the constitution. He has defied it. He has been arrested and convicted of breaking our laws. He has done things that would, under any normal circumstances, disqualify a person from ever even thinking of running for public office.
His entire presidency – this one and the first one – has been about personal grievance. Mainly his. And how he could use the presidency to enrich himself and those of his economic standing. While at the same time giving the shaft to working class Americans, all while telling you how hard he’s working to save you from the non-white people who are your true enemy.
And y’all just keep falling for it.
Not a one of you magas batted an eye last week when House Republicans, including Alabama’s Republican delegation, passed through Trump’s “big beautiful spending bill,” despite the bill being an absolute disaster for working people in this state. And a giant, golden handout to Trump’s wealthy supporters and major corporations.
There are many, many examples of the classic Trump bait-and-switch – the sort of thing you might learn at a fake university that has to pay out millions to settle fraud lawsuits – contained in this bill, but let’s focus on a couple: the no tax on tips promise and who benefits.
First, there are still lots of taxes on tips. In fact, all of them. The Republican House bill, along with a tips act passed in the Senate, would allow workers to file for a tax refund at the end of the year on all cash tips.
So, workers would still pay all of the same taxes on their reported tips. And then, at the end of the year, they could get back a portion of the federal income taxes paid on those cash tips. They would still pay Medicare and Social Security taxes, along with state and local taxes.
It would be a tiny benefit to an even tinier segment of the working population. In other words, the perfect Republican talking point: Grand claims of sticking up for the working class while the actual delivery falls flat.
But then, that’s the theme with this bill overall: Making broad claims of helping American workers while actually taking from them to line the pockets of America’s wealthiest.
Take the child tax credit, for example. On paper, it appears to be an increase of the credit, raising it from $2,000 per child to $2,500.
But in reality, the bill limits by millions the number of children who are eligible by increasing the income limits and requiring that both parents have social security numbers (and not tax ID numbers). The latter would remove children who are U.S. citizens, and whose parents are paying taxes through ID numbers, simply because one parent might not be a legal U.S. citizen.
The new law would also greatly reduce the refundable amount of the tax credit, further limiting the benefit to low-income families.
The money saved there would go to the slashing of Medicaid and food stamps and the near elimination of the estate tax. Nearly a billion dollars would be cut from Medicaid and SNAP, kicking millions of Americans off the rolls for no reason other than the money is needed to give rich people a tax cut. Oh, and we’re raising the no-tax floor on estates to $15 million. That means an estate worth $29.99 million would pay zero taxes when it’s passed along.
And all of this is before we even get into the many issues of preventing courts from holding the president and his administration in contempt.
That’s an actual provision in this bill. It essentially removes any check from the president, allowing him to act as a king. To detain without cause. To deport without evidence. To politicize every government job by implementing loyalty tests. To fire anyone who dares raise questions about the actions of the president. To withhold funding from any agency or institution that refuses to abide by unconstitutional or immoral directives from the president.
Now that I think about it, maybe there was a reason Trump failed to mention the men and women who fought and died for this country and the ideals it represents, the freedoms it protects, the opportunities and rights it guarantees and the hope it stands for.
They would be disgusted by him and what he’s doing to this place.
