By Jonathan Moniz, Staff Writer
Wow. Trump woke up in the morning Saturday with the intent to get to work, huh?
Or Monday, if you believe the reports that weekends are no workdays for him. It makes you wonder how all these executive orders are being thought up.
But I too like to take my weekends off. The only small difference is, I’m not needed then.
A president certainly is. And while Trump is the president, the world won’t stop for him anymore. He doesn’t get to call it quits. It’s go-time all the time now.
However, he’s certainly been on the proactive with executive orders.
From restarting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, to reinstituting an abortion ban, putting a freeze on federal hiring, and giving employees the ability to remand the Affordable Care Act (with the very clear terms of when it puts a burden on the economy), that’s an awful start.
Withdrawing from the TPP and considering the same for NAFTA is just icing on the cake.
That’s not even mentioning all the others, like the gag order for the EPA (if someone silences an entire agency it’s a gag order), and the order to build “The Wall.” He’s really doing it! Seriously?
Does no one see how insane this? Is all of the current Republican party really so blind as to see the dangers this poses?
Already, with three super-storms and possibly fifty unconfirmed tornadoes ripping through the mid-west, that federal freeze is already hurting many Republican governors calls for aid.
The wall? Well, Mexican President Enrique Nieto canceled his trip for this week so … do we need it?
I mean, we’ve already effectively murdered whatever chance at good relations we had.
With our economy about to go down the drain, Canada will become the new hotspot of North America to find work.
So let’s summarize so far – Trump has already worsened relations with our neighbors to the south, threatened the geopolitical situation abroad with potential trade wars, threatened to tank the economy, introduced new legislation that will ruin the environment, and just about did everything in his power to make sure the wall will be built.
I mean, who will he have? With the federal freeze and budget cuts, there’s going to be no federal agents left to oversee it.
The only thing left is Trump’s executive orders, aside from the ones that can be implemented immediately by the federal executive branch, are going to become mired down in politics, like the red tape that frustrated Obama at office.
Big initiatives like the wall certainly won’t be the cake walk Trump wants.
Yet, he is starting off with the same tools and principles that made it so easy for Obama to get things done.
He’s using executive orders, expanding the powers of the branch, and using that to accomplish what he wants.
In that sense, he’s already managed to do so much and accomplish many of the campaign promises, or at least make the attempt, that will satisfy his support and consolidate his power.
With only a forty-nine approval rating, though, this may indeed prove far more tenuous a grasp than Trump thought.
When the numbers and the economy start to turn against him due to the proposed ten billion to the estimated ten trillion he could add to the deficit, it’s terrifying.
But I have a feeling that’s going to be a constant and re-occurring theme this year. Trump’s entire campaign was built on terror. Fear of Muslims, fear of change, fear of losing jobs, or status, or power.
It’s always been a narrative spun on fear, with the sole promise that only one can fix it.
I don’t know who that is. But as these actions have proved, it certainly isn’t Trump.