Promises, promises

Naked Eyes

You made me promises, promises
Knowing I'd believe
Promises, promises
You knew you'd never keep.

The pop bank "Naked Eyes" hit the charts with that anthem back in 1983.  I think it would make a great theme song for Donald Trump's fanatical "base".

The big un-fulfilled promise is, of course, Trump's idiotic "wall" (which has, of late, morphed into his "fence".)   The vast majority of the American people - including yours truly - don't buy the argument that this "wall" thing is a proper or cost-effective solution to our immigration problems.   I wrote an article about the Immigration topic sometime back .  

Forbes magazine has an article describing how the whole cockamamie wall idea was a political stunt from the get-go, dreamed up by a couple of political strategists who were great at marketing but had zilch background in immigration issues.  The purpose was to help keep the short-attention-spanned Trump focused on immigration because his base would like it.  So Trump gave it a spin, and lo and behold, the crowds loved it! 

What happened next was classic Trump, a man who cannot be bothered with tedious details like researching or consulting to determine whether something truly is factual, feasible, or practical.  He adds: "and Mexico will pay for it!"  And the crowd goes wild.  The rest is history. 

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the other Trump-worshippers continue to grovel and kiss the ground that He walks on, praising the fact that no President in history comes close to Trump for being a faithful keeper of campaign promises.  Notice how they conveniently ignore the whole "Mexico" part of that promise.

So let's get into some of Trump's other legendary promised kept and bring out some other irksome details. 

Judicial appointments:  the Trump-worshippers gush on and on about how he kept his promise and successfully got not one but TWO conservatives onto the Supreme Court.  Sorry, but this is not as big a deal as they make it out to be.  It works like this:  conservatives appoint conservatives.  Liberals appoint liberals.  That is the "norm".  The unspoken presumption here is that if some OTHER Republican had been elected, that he/she would have appointed liberals to the court.  Baloney Sandwich.  Trump merely showed up for work and did his job.  Big woo.

Moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem:  After much research, I am still clueless about how the heck that affects an ordinary American like me.  This whole Israel thing was just a bone tossed to the Evangelical Christians, who for some ungodly reason have anointed the lying, adulterous, lecherous, thrice-married Trump as an inspirational role-model.  Anyway, these Evangelicals have somehow concluded that the U.S. government is supposed to hasten the second coming of Jesus, and moving the embassy thusly will somehow convince God to alter His timeline.

The tax cuts:  My beef with the whole tax cut thing is that it ignores government SPENDING, which is the real elephant in the living room that nobody wants to discuss.  Trump's FY 2018 budget was something like $1.3 Trillion.  And this from a so-called "conservative".   Well, fear not, because whoever gets elected next time around, government spending will certainly … KEEP GROWING!  Remember, you read it here first.  And that brings us to:

Infrastructure:   Everybody has plenty of ideas about how government can get bigger and spend MORE money, but nobody can think of any reasons to spend less money.  "Infrastructure" is just another buzzword to get voters to automatically approve the spending of more of our hard-earned money on things that nobody questions whether it should even be a government responsibility in the first place.  Well it works for Venezuela and North Korea and it worked for the Soviet Union, so it should work in the U.S. too.

Make America great again:   See my article on pulling the troops out of Syria.

Actually, if he really wants to MAGA, then he could try, just for once, stop behaving like an immature, narcissistic, petty, dishonest, belligerent, illiterate, spoiled brat.  But he never promised to do that, so scratch that idea.