Doris W. Draper is a resident of Houston.
Do you want to stop government waste? Then, consider this.
It cost the taxpayers well over $2 million for Donald Trump to go to the Super Bowl and the Daytona race. He has gone to Florida to play golf 13 days out of 48 in office, each time costing over $622,000, for a total of over $8 million. This does not include the $17,500 per day for Secret Service or the C-17s that have to go along to carry the vehicles for his motorcade.
Let’s face it: He knows nothing about economics (hard to believe that The Wharton School graduated him), geography, science or the government. He is turning this country into a predatory extortionist nation. If Joe Biden had espoused taking Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and Gaza, plus divesting of Puerto Rico, Republicans would be screaming to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Trump has told India that it doesn’t share a border with China. It shares a 2,000-mile border with China.
He doesn’t know what AUKUS is (our partnership with the United Kingdom and Australia) and doesn’t know what countries comprise BRICS (a coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). He probably has no clue what “Five Eyes” is (a security agreement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) and doesn’t remember that he was the one who signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade.
He has mandated that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cannot post information until he approves. After telling people to inject bleach during the pandemic, it is obvious that science is also a nonevent for him.
He has violated the Impoundment Control Act, which says money approved by Congress cannot be held up. He has decimated our government workforce, permitted Elon Musk to obtain all your personal info, let Musk transform rooms at the General Services Administration into dorms for his workers (complete with beds and dressers), used the Oval Office to make personal deals with the Saudis about a golf merger, eliminated the committee on meat and poultry inspections, turned all our allies against us, tanked your 401(k), pardoned over 1,500 people who attacked our police and wrecked the Capitol, pardoned the most influential drug dealer in human history, denied entry into the Department of Education and the Treasury Department for our elected Congress, canceled classes at the National Fire Academy and allowed Musk to use U.S. marshals to take over agencies. The list goes on.
His tariffs have nothing to do with fentanyl. If you were truly interested in stopping it, you would press Congress to authorize the money to install the scanners that have been sitting at the southern border for two years.
Republicans have the power to stop this mess, but it seems they do not have the backbone.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
