I made it. I managed to go the last 35 days without writing about politics and especially...Trump. It wasn't always easy, but a deal is a deal. Now that the self-imposed ban is over, I honestly don't have a lot to say. I mean, there was a speech last night and all, but I can't think of anything necessarily smart or even snarky to say about anything political. Maybe it's because, Donald Trump remains exactly who I thought he was, and so do his enemies.
In the first five or six weeks of his Presidency, he has done literally nothing that has changed my mind about him. He has been no worse and no better than I expected him to be. So far, everything he has done or attempted to do has been straight out of his campaign stump speeches. People who are acting all shocked by any of this were obviously not paying attention during the campaign. Sure, many of his cabinet choices were heavy on generals and billionaires, but what did you expect, professors from Yale and Harvard? And yes, his first several weeks have been full of ill-conceived initiatives from which he has had to back track. Sort of what one would expect from someone who constantly reminded voters that he was "not a politician." Well, it turns out that if you're not a professional politician in DC, it shows.
Funny story. On the day of the Inauguration, I had a busy schedule at work. After two morning appointments I stopped by the house to have some soup for lunch. As I warmed the soup up on the stove I asked our new digital assistant, Alexa, to play WRVA. The very first words I heard were Trump saying, "So help me God." I had forgotten about the speech! So, I listened. By the time I finished my soup, it was over, a sixteen minute Inaugural speech with no poetry. But, around half way through, I ran into the library and found a piece of paper and wrote down four numbers...the Dow Jones Industrial average, last year's GDP growth rate, the inflation rate, and the unemployment rate. Then I dated it and stuffed it back into the top drawer of my desk.
Bill Clinton famously ran a campaign with the unofficial theme of "It's the economy, stupid." He was right and he won. While much of it was not his fault, the fact is that Barack Obama was the first president to serve eight years who never once presided over a nation with a GDP growth of at least 3%. As superficial and simplistic as this might sound, unfortunately, I believe it to be true...if his Orangeness can get this economy back to the 4-5% growth rates that we had become accustomed to for most of our history, he will be reelected in a real landslide as opposed to the one living rent free in Trump's brain. However, if he doesn't, the American people will soon tire of him and will drop him like a bad habit in 2020. One advantage(or disadvantage, depending on your politics) of such a short, direct, non-poetic inauguration speech is the fact that it will be easy to judge how well,(or poorly), he has done come 2020. When you don't cloud your objectives with soaring, flowered rhetoric, it's easy to find the promises. When 2020 rolls round, if we're still slumbering around with a growth rate of 1.9% Trump will be history. If he succeeds, all the Hollywood preening, all the street demonstrations in the world won't be able to prevent his reelection.
But, honestly, hasn't it been an exhausting five weeks? It's the little things, really. When I saw the picture of Kelly Anne Conway sitting crosslegged on a sofa in the Oval Office, her heels digging in to the fabric, I thought, what fresh hell is this?? I wanted to slap her. I always hated seeing pictures of Obama with his feet all over the furniture like he was kicked back watching Caddy Shack or something, but this Conway dame takes the cake. There will be four years of this sort of thing. Four years of Trump's temperamental Tweets.
I'm getting tired just thinking about it.
In the first five or six weeks of his Presidency, he has done literally nothing that has changed my mind about him. He has been no worse and no better than I expected him to be. So far, everything he has done or attempted to do has been straight out of his campaign stump speeches. People who are acting all shocked by any of this were obviously not paying attention during the campaign. Sure, many of his cabinet choices were heavy on generals and billionaires, but what did you expect, professors from Yale and Harvard? And yes, his first several weeks have been full of ill-conceived initiatives from which he has had to back track. Sort of what one would expect from someone who constantly reminded voters that he was "not a politician." Well, it turns out that if you're not a professional politician in DC, it shows.
Funny story. On the day of the Inauguration, I had a busy schedule at work. After two morning appointments I stopped by the house to have some soup for lunch. As I warmed the soup up on the stove I asked our new digital assistant, Alexa, to play WRVA. The very first words I heard were Trump saying, "So help me God." I had forgotten about the speech! So, I listened. By the time I finished my soup, it was over, a sixteen minute Inaugural speech with no poetry. But, around half way through, I ran into the library and found a piece of paper and wrote down four numbers...the Dow Jones Industrial average, last year's GDP growth rate, the inflation rate, and the unemployment rate. Then I dated it and stuffed it back into the top drawer of my desk.
Bill Clinton famously ran a campaign with the unofficial theme of "It's the economy, stupid." He was right and he won. While much of it was not his fault, the fact is that Barack Obama was the first president to serve eight years who never once presided over a nation with a GDP growth of at least 3%. As superficial and simplistic as this might sound, unfortunately, I believe it to be true...if his Orangeness can get this economy back to the 4-5% growth rates that we had become accustomed to for most of our history, he will be reelected in a real landslide as opposed to the one living rent free in Trump's brain. However, if he doesn't, the American people will soon tire of him and will drop him like a bad habit in 2020. One advantage(or disadvantage, depending on your politics) of such a short, direct, non-poetic inauguration speech is the fact that it will be easy to judge how well,(or poorly), he has done come 2020. When you don't cloud your objectives with soaring, flowered rhetoric, it's easy to find the promises. When 2020 rolls round, if we're still slumbering around with a growth rate of 1.9% Trump will be history. If he succeeds, all the Hollywood preening, all the street demonstrations in the world won't be able to prevent his reelection.
But, honestly, hasn't it been an exhausting five weeks? It's the little things, really. When I saw the picture of Kelly Anne Conway sitting crosslegged on a sofa in the Oval Office, her heels digging in to the fabric, I thought, what fresh hell is this?? I wanted to slap her. I always hated seeing pictures of Obama with his feet all over the furniture like he was kicked back watching Caddy Shack or something, but this Conway dame takes the cake. There will be four years of this sort of thing. Four years of Trump's temperamental Tweets.
I'm getting tired just thinking about it.
