Trump Promised to Make America Great Again. Maybe He Will. Then Again?
President Trump’s campaign and administrative promises defy his campaign slogan. It’s virtually impossible to “Make America Great Again” when your blueprint for success dismantles the constitutional, moral and empathetic foundations of your efforts.
“Make America Great Again” suggests America is not great; it’s ostensively broken. When something is broken, it must be repaired. It must be put back together, and if one is particularly ambitious, put back together better.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you accidentally break a plate in half. You can’t glue the pieces back together by throwing them at a concrete slab. Trump’s stump commitments and subsequent actions are the executive equivalent of doing just that. His “Build a Wall”, “Muslim Ban” and “Dodd-Frank Repeal” promises are prime examples of self-destructive rhetoric and self-sabotaging policy.
Campaign Promise — Build a wall to keep “illegals” out. Mexico will pay for it:
This campaign commitment could only “Make America Great Again” if it stopped the illegal cross-border immigration at no cost to the United States. The promise itself has already “Made America Worse Again”. It has further divided a polarized electorate, legitimized a once marginalized racist community and insulted our third largest trading partner.
Thus far, the implementation of subsequent, poorly executed policy further exacerbated the situation. Trump humiliated himself and the President of Mexico, pre-initiated a potential trade war, threatened (or hyperbolized) a military invasion of Mexico and exposed the depth of his astonishing ineptitude. He “Made America Worse Again”.
Campaign Promise — Ban all Muslims. Once Donald Trump became President, he switched the promise to Travel Ban and Extreme vetting of Muslims:
The campaign promise presupposes that a majority of Americans want Muslims banned from their nation. Opinion polls have consistently proven this supposition boldly inaccurate.
Instead, the ‘Muslim Ban’ promise could only “Make America Great Again”, if a pending or an imminent threat made America less great.
That threat, that fear, only existed in the mind of Donald Trump and the factless, paranoid, collective psyche of his handlers and the most fervent supporters. The rest of us felt pretty darn confident that the current eighteen to twenty-four month vetting process for refugees (from Muslim majority countries) was pretty effective.
Factual media reporting and transparent government information seemed to confirm that reality. There simply has not been a terrorist attack on US soil by Muslim refugees. The vast majority of attacks since 9/11 were perpetrated by home grown, self-radicalized terrorists.
Even the vile Tsarnaev brothers who detonated two homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon were not refugees. They were granted derivative status and admitted to the country when they were less than ten years old (too young to be vetted). Their father was an asylum seeker, fleeing violence in Chechnya.
If President Trump were to successfully “Make America Great Again”, he would have promised (and implemented) a solution to a real life, terrifyingly dangerous reality; young people radicalized here at home. That’s a much tougher nut to crack.
Campaign Promise — Repeal Dodd-Frank and deregulate the financial industry:
Republicans in Congress, President Trump and the financial lobby, live and breathe a misleading, anti-Obama regulatory narrative; excessive regulation stifles large banking institutions and crushes smaller, community lenders.
If that were completely true, Trump’s deregulation campaign promise might have some semblance of merit. Conglomerate banks complaining that the Dodd-Frank Act has hampered lending is as inaccurate as it is divisive and reckless. Reuters reported, “recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis showed U.S. commercial-bank lending at a 70-year high, climbing steadily since late-2010.”
That being said, smaller community banks suffered under the regulations. Approximately a fifth of those institutions disappeared and few new banks have risen from the ashes.
A sensible congressional debate and a few legislative tweaks would balance the scales. Smaller banks, free of unnecessary oversight, will flourish. Larger banks (still too big to fail) need not take on the cumbersome, appropriate and reasonable tasks of self-policing and customer protection. (They’ve already proven themselves morally incapable, ethically corrupt and far too fiscally imprudent to assume such a vital responsibility.)
Trump’s campaign promise and the subsequent Dodd-Frank repeal order will bring the industry back to pre-2008 status, and history will more likely repeat itself.
Rage, skipping from one extreme to the other (to simply satisfy one mad man’s insatiable desire to “win at all costs” and “placate an honorless ego”) has already “Made America Worse Again”. If left unchecked and unconstrained, it will certainly “Break America’s Faith Again”. This time, the nation may not recover.
Following the path of least resistance (and alt-right, populist, ill-informed rage), POTUS chose style over substance. He promised and is now implementing a foolhardy, amateur, immature and reactive policy. Early results suggest this emotional approach to leadership has a metaphorical comparison to his faux blond hair coloring. It’s temporary, poorly executed, obnoxious and indicative of a spoiled, adolescent brat in an old man’s body.
Trump is unable to “Make America Great Again” because the slogan’s rationale is based on a fictional populist narrative. Application of that narrative can only “Make America Worse Again.”
