It's been nearly a year since Trump took office. It hasn't gone well.
After 300 days of lies and incompetency, the Trump train has left the rails of reality. Under the Trump dictatorship of right wing extremists, America has abdicated its world leadership and has abandoned its contract with its citizens to protect their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
They are well on their way to destroying our health care system and have their sights on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Their only priority is assuring tax cuts for the superrich and supporting the lavish lifestyles of Trump and his Cabinet.
Betsy De Voss plans to destroy public education and sell it to the highest bidder. After all, education is a privilege not a right. You don’t need an education to sell Amway. The Department of Interior wants to shrink our national monuments and parks to the size of postage stamps and open them up to exploitation by oil, gas, mineral mining, and timber corporations. Big money for rich corporations is more important than preserving the beauty of the natural world for enjoyment of American citizens.
Scott Pruitt is hard at work destroying America’s environment. He may find a way to charge for the air you breathe. After all, you already have to pay for the polluted water you drink.
However, Pruitt is not content with destroying the American environment, he wants to destroy the world with CO2. He wants to unleash massive amounts of CO2 to enrich the oil, gas, and coal corporations and to speed up climate change and ensure world destruction.
As these destructive forces eat away at the fabric of our nation, Trump and his sycophants are filling the airways and Twitter feeds with a plethora of disinformation, propaganda, and just plain lies. They are attacking reality itself.
As the jaws of the Mueller investigation close around the Russian conspiracy, the attempts to warp reality have multiplied. Even before Mueller indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos pleaded to guilty to lying to the FBI, Senator Bob Corker described Trump as “utterly untruthful” and was “debasing the nation”. Senator Jeff Flake said Trump had “flagrant disregard for the truth and decency”.
Since those indictments and guilty pleas, Trump has thrown his distortion machine into high gear. His desperate defense has devolved to junior high school taunts, transparent false equivalencies, desperate pleas of innocence, and “DO SOMETHING” tweets.
His “base” has been bombarded with misinformation by Trump and his echo machine. They have consumed so much false information that it has severely damaged their reality testing. They are caught between what their own senses tell them and the lies that Trump insists they believe.
The reality testing of the Trump base is so impaired that they are willing to accept treason. A recent study found that 80 percent of Trump’s Republican supporters are willing to continue supporting Trump even if he is convicted of conspiring with Russia to sabotage the 2016 election.
Electing an incompetent, narcissistic liar to the Presidency may spell the end of America as we have known it. Game over—Putin wins. The November 7th elections are a ray of hope that all Americans are not brain dead.
Terry Stulce served two combat tours in Vietnam, one with the 101st Airborne and one with the 69th Border Rangers. He was an LCSW and owner of Cleveland Family Counseling before retirement in 2009.