Steeped in blatant lies, outrageous hyperbole, and just plain nonsense, Donald Trump severely degrades the office of the presidency and lessens worldwide respect for the United States.
First, there’s the corruption. Ulysses Grant, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon, heretofore considered the most corrupt presidents in American history, must be celebrating Trump. Look no further than the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., which is doing brisk business since opening in 2016 (Ivanka Trump recently declared she had earned more than $4 million from the hotel last year) and is benefitting Trump despite the fact that federal officials cannot profit from government leases (the Trump organization, from which the president still earns money, leases the space from Uncle Sam).
Trump also continues to support Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Secretary Scott Pruitt, who appears to be using his office for his own enrichment, taking subsidized housing from fossil fuel lobbyists, using his influence to gain employment for his wife and spending taxpayer dollars on first class travel to places he really has no business going.
Just as Grant, Harding, and Nixon are happy, Ronald Reagan must be weeping as he witnesses Trump’s assault on free trade and immigration. While I’m certain Reagan would be applauding tariffs against China, he would be appalled that Trump has levied taxes on goods coming from our staunchest allies, Canada, Mexico, and the European Union.
After all, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by Clinton in 1993, is the ultimate statement of the free trade policies promulgated by Republicans such as Reagan and George H.W. Bush for many years and supported by a majority of Republicans in both the Senate and House of Representatives at the time of the law’s enactment. Although it has its problems, NAFTA has succeeded in increasing North American trade more than 300 percent in 25 years.
On immigration, Reagan, who was governor of California, knew the value of immigrants coming across our southern border. In 1986, he signed into law the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which gave amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants, the vast majority migrant workers from Mexico. Recent studies suggest that most of these immigrants eventually obtained better paying jobs and became naturalized, thus achieving the American Dream.
Likewise, Reagan must be dismayed at Trump’s consistent praise of dictators around the world. He would be incensed to hear that Trump places the murderous thug Vladimir Putin within the same moral equivalency as American leaders (Trump famously said, “You think our country is so innocent?” when asked about Putin by Bill O’Reilly).
And, while Trump must be given credit for seeking talks with another murderous thug, Kim Jong Un, Ronald Reagan would have never heaped praise on the tin pot dictator (“He loves his people”) or saluted a North Korean general. And, he most certainly would not have done so after insulting and dismissing the leaders of the free world by leaving the G-7 summit early in order to meet with Kim, without serious guarantees that North Korea would begin to take steps toward denuclearization. To date, they have only given vague generalities about disarmament.
Finally, and most disgracefully, there are the lies. It would be forgivable if Trump simply misspoke or tweaked the facts to fit his policies, as many presidents have done, but Trump flat out tells whoppers (more than 3,000 and still counting, according to The New York Times) that are easily fact checked. For example, he recently claimed that “thousands” of people, including parents, had pleaded with him to ask Kim Jong Un for the remains of American soldiers killed in the Korean War.
Now, anyone with the ability to add and subtract would tell you that parents of Korean war veterans would be upward of 100 years old. In fact, many Korean war veterans are in their 90s. This was simply a lie, not unlike his contention that 3 to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted against him in the 2016 election, or that the crowd size at his inauguration was the largest ever, never mind that pictures clearly showed a larger crowd at the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama. That more than 40 percent of the American people still approve of this man is a mystery to me.
Michael Smith is a resident of Santa Maria. Send your thoughts to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 5, 2018.