UGH

 While Trump's speech before the Joint session of Congress was not the State Of the Union, I watched most of it just the same. The only parts I muted were the places where he inserted merit for the average joes of America who he was trying to thank or help out. Not that there's anything wrong with that since the last few Presidents have done the same. I zoned out of their "merit badge" hand outs, too. Glad you could help out ONE person in the country now how about the rest of us?

Before I start to vent on Trump and the Republican congress, I want to start by shaming the Democrats. Look, I know Trump makes us feel all prickly and anxious and spiteful and hateful inside. I know, we'd rather just stay home and not give him the time of day or the attention that he so desperately craves. But you need to do your job. Your job is to sit respectfully and listen to the President. Just doing so doesn't mean you agree with him or that you're going to support him, it means you respect the office. You can agree with some of the stuff he says; if he says anything that's true or meaningful. But don't just walk away. Voters put you in office and you need to do your job. Bernie Sanders doesn't agree with most anything Trump spouts but he was there. You should have been, too.

That being said, it was a hard pill to swallow. Like I said, I could barely stomach the rhetoric. He inflated numbers, repeated false information, gloated, insulted his predecessor, and doubled down on his Tariff policy that caused the stock market to drop over a thousand points. He continues to see a path of gold toward American Greatness where factories will reopen and build cars and computer processors and chips to provide jobs for workers who were born in the USA. He thinks we can just "Drill, Baby, Drill" to obtain all these raw materials that are necessary to build these things without importing it and avoid the tariffs that he's putting in place. 

He's all about deregulation. Because who needs rules? Nobody needs to be safe on the job. That's what insurance is for, I guess. Who needs clean water or air? It makes sense for him to deregulate because he's firing so many federal workers that there won't be enough employees to enforce the rules anyway. 

He's all about taking back the Panama Canal and offering a statehood to Greenland. I thought you were all about American First. So take care of the people within the walls you build BEFORE you start annexing more territory. See, Trump, there's people that comes with the territory and you'd have to take care of them, too. Well, unless it's Gaza because as you've stated previously, it's uninhabitable so nobody would be allowed to stay there until you turn it into a golf course.

sigh

Do we need all these government regulations? Probably not. But can we just chop them all down? No. If he deregulates the way DOGE is cutting workers and government departments, no one is safe. But we can trust large companies and corporations to keep the little guy in mind, right? They'll do what is right by their workers and the communities they build their factories in, right? Right? Tell that to the Akwesasne who lived downstream of Alcoa. Tell that to the people of Love Canal. Tell that to Hinkley, CA. Tell that to the dying lakes of the Adirondack Mountains when the acid rain starts up again from the deregulated smoke stacks. 

He wants to build ships?! What the fuck was that about?

I hate to tell you this, Trump, but we won't be able to build cars with the factories we've got let alone ships in factories/ports we don't got. Where do think a lot of parts for cars come from? Do you think we build them all from scratch? We import them. We assemble the parts into cars. So we are going to build all the parts here now? How much is a car gonna cost me next year? I can't afford a new car now. I can hardly afford a used car. Guess who supplies most of those car parts? Canada.

Guess what else we get from Canada? Uranium. The Northeast also gets a good deal of energy from Canada. You declared an energy emergency in this country but you're gonna piss off a country that supplies a lot of it to your voters. That sounds like good strategy. Let's tick off the neighbors and sink our biggest consumer and trade partner. Kinda sounds like our foreign policy is "we're just better than all of you so fuck off". 

That is certainly how we handled Ukraine. I almost cried as Trump read the note Zelenskyy had sent to the White House saying he was willing to sign the mineral agreement and to secure Trump's strong leadership in brokering a ceasefire and lasting peace with Russia. I want to believe that Zelenskyy has to do what he must for his people and if that means crawling back to Trump, he does it. In all honesty, I don't think Ukraine can trust us. I never thought I'd even think that but there it is. We are not the America of WW2. How sad. How sad that the Republican party demanded that the elected leader of another country, allied with the US, should grovel for the aid we could provide. How shameful.

I'm sure I'm some kind of hypocrite. I don't like to use our military to solve other countries problems. But I have a bad feeling about any peace agreement that Trump brokers. His administration has already implied that Ukraine would have to give up territory to Russia. So Ukraine loses land to Russia and valuable mineral wealth to the US for peace. Ukraine loses twice, or I should say, pays the US to keep Russia at bay. And when Trump leaves office, all bets are off with Russia and the US gets dragged into a war with Russia. That would be a great deal. I can maintain a small hope that Trump is, in fact, the Great Dealmaker that the Republicans claim he is, and he hasn't overlooked the future safety of Ukraine. 

But hey, it was just a speech before Congress. Trump is just testing the waters. Throw all the crazy out there and see what sticks. Time to refresh the sharpies, Mr. President, I feel another hundred Executive Orders coming down the pike.

-Wy