Arthur E. Sowers is a resident of Harbeson.
Since the beginning of Trump 2.0 until now, data from the internet says average wages went up from 3.3% to 3.5%, but inflation went up from 3.8% to 4.2%. National debt went from $39 trillion to $43 trillion. Gross domestic product growth went down about 40% across various sources. Sources say Donald Trump is spending $134 billion to $169 billion per year on deportation (his ethnic-cleansing project).
Trump expressed massively poor judgment when he posted an artificial intelligence deepfake with his face on a Jesus-like healer figure. That image is now part of history, as is documented and stored at Wikimedia Commons. The Iranians posted their own counterdeepfake of a real Jesus, punching Trump’s deepfake. Being that Jesus is in Islam, Trump probably insulted all the Muslims in the world, too. See the Wikipedia article: “Jesus in Islam.”
An internet search on “Poll Trump anti-Christ” showed me that the backlash against Trump’s stunt, even from his Trump-loving “Make America Great Again” followers, is going to cost him votes. Trump does a lot of this childish stuff. He has been failing and will continue to fail. The polls prove it. The following three-part story on our future is based on facts and how history repeats itself.
Part 1 is Trump’s efforts to establish permanent dictatorial power for himself. An internet search on the keywords, “Trump efforts to rig future elections” gave me many links. Here is just one, from ProPublica: “Inside Trump’s Effort to ‘Take Over’ the Midterm Elections.” Of course, in Frank Daniels’ recent Daily State News letter, “Is democracy dying as we mark 250 years?” it is only the Democrats, liberals, socialists, communists, Joe Biden and Barack Obama who have been killing democracy. On the contrary, this 2022 Forbes article says: “Two-Thirds Of Voters Think Trump Tried Changing Election Outcome, Poll Finds.” And Forbes is pro-capitalist and pro-rich, and is not any of those things on Daniels’ list.
Part 2: In this part, Trump is corrupting everything in sight in the U.S. At the same time, his family is becoming increasingly rich, like a protodynasty in imperial China.
A Google search on this keyword string, “Trump family grift,” gave me an AI summary. I quote the first sentence in that summary here: “The Trump family has generated an estimated $2.3 billion to $9.7 billion in realized profits, paper wealth, and foreign investments since the president retook office, heavily blurring the lines between public service and private business.” By the way, I found out that AI sometimes “recalculates” the answer from scratch and with new data, if you re-ask the AI the same question. So, if you do this, you might get different sentences to the same question, but the overall message will be at least very similar. And dozens of other links show the same result, too. It’s “Trump First,” not “America First.” Trump has been very successful at these selfish and greedy acts, as well.
Trump operates like a bad king in a medieval, “dark age” kingdom. So far, Trump has barricaded himself behind “fixer lawyers”; a rigged grant of absolute immunity from a SCOTUS prepacked with pro-Trump, far-right justices who he helped push in; a Cabinet of loyalists who would never “25th Amendment” him out of office; and a Department of Justice, a Department of Homeland Security, a Federal Communications Commission and an FBI that are all now organized into a sort-of giant gestapo, goon squad juggernaut, so Trump can harass, investigate, prosecute, fire, hurt, threaten, sue, subpoena, insult and name-call his enemies. For all the rest, he quietly manipulates wealth and changes our legal system to buy up, reorganize and consolidate media corporations, so he can neutralize or inhibit our free press from investigative reporting or from blowing the whistle on any and all of Trump’s mischief. He has been quite successful doing all these bad things.
Part 3: This is Trump’s idea to get everybody to think he is a “stable genius.” Because of this, he was going to “fix everything” by improving the economy with tariffs and his tax budget bill. We were also going to get a “golden age.” And you were going to agree because he kept pushing you and everybody else into remembering this second idea: “Trump was right about everything.” It has a nice ring to it, but there were lies, boasts, bullying and lots of things he said that made no sense (e.g., “big, beautiful clean coal” and “Mexico will pay for it” and “treat COVID-19 with bleach”). Well, all the polls — as well as the data I have cited at the beginning of this essay — show that his “stable genius” gave us a mostly bad ending or nothing. But I have a different story about how “smart” works.
In 1965, in the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos was elected president. He declared himself dictator in 1972. In 1986, he got chased out of the country after mass protests. You can just skim this Wikipedia article to learn the details about how bad the Philippines corruption was: “Corruption in the Philippines.” This all led to the impoverishment of the people and the enrichment of Marcos. See this Wikipedia article: “Unexplained wealth of the Marcos family.” When I asked the Google AI about the “Marcos wealth and corruption,” I got the following answer: “The phrase ‘some are smarter than others’ is a famous quote credited to former Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos. In 1979, an American journalist asked Imelda Marcos why so many of her relatives and friends had rapidly reached the top levels of business and government. She reportedly replied: ‘My dear, there are always people who are just a little faster, more brilliant, and more aggressive.’” What do you think she is talking about? Well, we get another big hint from this HeraldNet article about Rex Tillerson’s experience with Trump: “Tillerson says Trump directed him to do illegal things.”
OK, my bottom line has three parts. First, Trump’s low polls prove he is not a “stable genius.” Second, the regular and smart Republicans saw Trump, right from the start, as a “bad cookie” and became anti-Trumpers. Third, the Republicans who converted themselves into radicalized “Trumpublicans” need to see Trump for what he really is and convert back into regular Republicans.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
