Last week, Donald Trump “officially” kicked off his 2020 campaign for re-election in Orlando, Florida. The “original” announcement regarding his re-election campaign actually took place the day of his Inauguration, when he boldly announced he was going to run again in 2020 and would be accepting donations for that campaign. That was something that was unprecedented.
There were strong similarities to the kick off for his 2016 campaign, with the same kind of rhetoric; immigration is a disaster, there are too many “bad” people coming into America illegally and it is the fault of the left-wing Democrats; if working Americans felt they were still being ignored, it was someone else’s fault. One big difference was this time he was able to whip up a crowd of approximately 20,000 supporters with all his accomplishments and ignore his failures or blame them on others.
Mr. Trump really said nothing new. He “speech” was just a regurgitation of his tweets and comments he has made over the past few months. He complained about the Mueller Report, calling it a “witch hunt” by 18 angry Democrats. He talked about the great economy he created, along with the wonderful tax cuts that helped everyone. He failed to mention the doubling of the National Debt. Mr. Trump congratulated himself for “winning” the trade wars, especially with China, ignoring the fact that American companies and consumers are paying higher costs for Chinese products. He even rallied his followers while talking about Hillary Clinton and her missing emails and smiled as the crowd chanted “lock her up”. He relished making himself seem like a victim stating if he had done anything like Hillary did, people would have wanted to put him in the electric chair.
Not surprising, Mr. Trump never mentioned Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia or any conflicts in the Middle East and the strong possibility of future American military involvement. Then again, Donald Trump does have a way of avoiding the elephants in the room. His rallies are never really about substance, they are ego boosters for him. Last week, various voter polls showed a good possibility of Donald Trump losing re-election in 2020. Polling done by the White House showed similar numbers. According to reports, Mr. Trump went ballistic and had a couple of those polling firms, that had been contracted to do the polling, fired because he did not like the numbers he received. At least he didn’t “shoot the messengers”, but I doubt they will ever get paid.
Over the past few weeks, several major news outlets have held town hall meetings with Democratic Presidential Candidates with reporters asking questions from a cross-section of voters from both parties. The people in the audiences expressed support of some of Donald Trump’s policies, they were concerned with his lack of a clear or precise vision for the future direction for America and the people. A few Republican voters expressed concern over the President’s use of Twitter. I thought that point was rather interesting. They acknowledged some understanding of his use of Twitter to “defend” himself when he felt he was being attacked by “fake news”, but they were worried about the number of “rants” and the amount of time he spends on Twitter.
Recent reports have come out about our military hacking into the Russian power grids and the President was not informed of these actions. “Sources” reported they didn’t want to tell the President what they were doing because they were concerned, he would not be able to keep “the secret”. This was disturbing news on one hand, but sadly, it was rather understandable considering Donald Trump’s close ties to Vladimir Putin and his erratic behavior that appears to be getting even more strange lately. The fact that our military doesn’t seem to trust the President, should make rational thinking people wonder who is really running the country and why?
We have people like John Bolton, Lindsay Graham, Mike Pompeo and other Republican members of Congress pushing America towards intervention or war in various areas around the world, especially in the Middle East and South America. What do these places have in common? The simple answer is oil. We have fought other wars in the Middle East on false pretenses when the real issue had been oil. Donald Trump brags that the United States is the biggest producer of oil, so the question becomes, why should we care about oil from other countries? The even greater question is why aren’t we gearing up more for renewal energy, which would stop our military involvement for oil? I know it isn’t a simple answer, but I doubt it is as complicated as some in power pretend it is.
Donald Trump bragged about America having the cleanest air and water, in the world. I don’t know where he got that idea. It doesn’t take much research to find out that is far from true. With leaking oil pipelines and rigs in the waters surrounding America, and deregulating water safety rules, our water quality is far from the best and cleanest. Renewable energy sources would help clean our air and water, but that is not on the Trump Agenda now or in the future. Pouring more billions into the military industrial complex is more important for the foreseeable future, under a continued Trump Administration. We need to ask ourselves are we willing to sacrifice more young men and women to fight for greed and oil and then ignore them when they come back home? You know it will not be the children of these politicians or tycoons that will do any fighting.
The simple truth is that even though staunch Trump supporters feel everything is just fine, the majority of Americans do not. For many, they question how long we can continue down this erratic path Donald Trump has created for us, especially when suddenly our allies don’t trust us, but dictators have become trustworthy.
