President JFK was assassinated 53 years ago today. This morning I heard someone on the radio speculate that maybe Trump might be like him, once he becomes president.
I couldn’t help but find the comment amusing because Trump’s transition team is well under way, floating the usual suspects from the guilty wing of the republican party for cabinet positions.
It’s such a who’s-who list of characters from previous administrations that it’s clear, Trump was a mask for the GOP all along – pretending to be an outsider, a populist for the forgotten man.
The republican brand was so tainted in failure, they had no other choice but to run an outsider to beat Hillary, champion of the status quo, and it worked.
Even though Trump just spent a year criticizing republicans, and being criticized by them, he’s now hiring them.
It’s the fastest flip-flop of revolving-door collusion in white house history.
President elect Trump is not an “outsider” and he never was. He’s an unmasked strategy to regain the white house, by the same old institutional relationships that had it before.
Already it’s easy to see this will be a reorganization of the same cast of characters, with the same motivations.
Trump is just the continuation of previous republican agendas.
Trump won, in large part, because the democrats deprived the ticket of the credible populist alternative, Bernie Sanders.
Bernie had the big crowds ready for “political revolution”. But despite being cheated and defeated by the democratic national committee, and Hillary, he now graciously supports them as the lesser of two evils.
The failure of the democrats to win this election is so much more than their own failure. Those who need the assistance that good representation provides, will be the ones who will feel the failure of the democrats. The democrats will be sad, but the suffering will be done by others.
The millions of people who donated to Bernie in small but heartfelt amounts, and millions of others who couldn’t afford to give, will physically feel the failure of the democrats to maintain a majority in government.
So in reality, while this last election, which was promoted as the year of the outsiders, with Trump and Sanders drawing record crowds hungry for change, it was not that at all.
It was a trick. It was a contest of deceptions for the vote of the common man, and the republicans did it better. That’s how the current electoral system works.
Politicians pander to their voters and then legislate for their donors.
If you believe Trump and Sanders were outsiders, then you will need to consider the system has changed them. They did not change the system. Even if they were outsiders, they are now insiders.
Either way, The election is over and the public loses, because the duopoly rule will continue to strengthen at the expense of our democratic processes.
You might think, wait a minute, Trump hasn’t even gotten started. Well, yes he has. His cabinet nominee choices make that clear.
It’s an old agenda by the hacks he criticized for over a year during his campaign. Now the band is getting back together, in the white house.
The contradictions between Trump’s campaign promises and the policies he advocates as president on behalf of “the forgotten man”, will be plentiful. I look forward to parsing the rhetoric.