The 100 Day Nightmare

“Everything is public relations and public relations is make-believe.” I.F. Stone

Almost 100 days of the Trump regime. The marker is somewhat artificial, a measure without much meaning in the big scheme, but presidents and the media pay attention to it. To hear Trump tell it, his first 100 days have been fantastically successful, unprecedented, stupendous, almost FDR-like, loaded with monumental accomplishments that have already lifted America from the quagmire in which it has been stuck.

Reality paints a far different story of Trump’s first 100 days. Most of the silly promises Trump spouted on the campaign trail lay broken on the White House lawn. Signing executive orders is not the same as passing legislation, but those signing ceremonies make fine photo opportunities for Trump, and provide the illusion of momentum, of accomplishment, and Trump clearly relishes them; almost as much as he enjoys his weird campaign-style rallies before friendly, fawning audiences. The adulation junkie needs these periodic fixes.  

Read almost any transcript of an interview with Trump and you quickly realize how inarticulate and ignorant the man is, how incapable of coherent thought; he’s nothing but a showman, carnival barker, and fraud; this was true the day Trump announced his bid for the presidency, and every day thereafter, but because his campaign reality show produced such bounty for the corporate media his idiotic bleatings were treated seriously.

In less than 100 days Trump has degraded the office of president, made it tawdry and risible. No, the office hasn’t changed the man as many pundits predicted, the man is changing the office. If many countries around the globe were not also lurching to the far right, proposing barriers, nationalism, attacking immigrants, the United States under Trump would be a laughing stock. But Trump has company, kindred souls, who favor heavy-handed solutions to every conceivable problem; these are strange, unsettling times all over the world and it’s damn hard not to feel pissed off all day every day.

Despair is easy, resistance hard. Trump and his merry kleptocrats came out with a tax proposal today, and, lo and behold, it’s at bottom all out class warfare, designed to make the rich even richer. Wonderful. Trump claims tax cuts for the rich will produce jobs and bounty for the rest of us, a myth the GOP has peddled for decades. Far too many of us bought this load of steaming BS, and continued to buy it when the evidence of its failure was all around, easy to see. Shame on us for falling asleep at the wheel and allowing these greedy bastards to strip away our hard won gains. Now our democracy is in tatters, bought and paid for by corporations and Wall Street financiers, big banks, defense contractors, private prison operators, the rapacious pharmaceutical industry.

The will of the people? The powerful could care less because they know they have nothing to fear from the people.

It has been a long, long time since the people frightened America’s ruling class. Systems of surveillance and intimidation and control are many times more sophisticated now.

I’m tired and my head hurts. How bad will things get? How much pain, suffering and degradation will be heaped upon the masses? Wake up and the nightmare rages on, the broken empire lurches into another grim morning, snarling threats, pumping petrol into the death machine, ready for another run at its enemies, foreign and domestic, real and imagined.