Karen nodded, "But Trump will set us back 75 years."
"Good point," said Sue. "So, let's envision a presidency: Increasing poverty, growing wealth inequality, greater homelessness and crime, bankruptcies up, the middle class down, bankers and hedge fund managers getting richer and moving their ill-gotten gains to tax havens abroad, manufacturing and business unchecked and continuing to go abroad for lower wages and foreign customers, an ongoing civil war in Syria, ongoing drone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with "boots on the ground", a war with Iran, reactivation of the draft (for women, too), war in Ukraine and Crimea, a land and air war with Russia that could go nuclear, an authoritarian state at home with increased incarceration of those pesky 'super-predators'. Need I go on?"
Wanda looked down at her smartphone. "I see here that Trump just took us out of the TPP."
"I wasn't talking about Trump," Sue said. "I was describing the next term we'd have seen under the Democratic President and her DNC platform. Solid Republican 'neo'." She nodded, "Sure, Trump is focused on business, narcissistic, sexist, and shoots Tweets from the hip. He won't change Wall Street. And he may get us into some hot water in China. But, setting the clock back--from midnight--isn't necessarily a bad thing if we're facing a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Once we pull back from imperial wars, and broker peace rather than stirring divisiveness, we can tackle the domestic problems and stand our ground on civil rights advances."
"So why not support our protests here at home?" asked Karen.
"Because who's behind them? What's really happening? Has Trump taken away abortion or birth control? Or same-sex marriage? No, he's busy balancing catering to his Tea Party base and his Wall Street colleagues. What his victory has really done is taken the rug out from under the Middle Eastern and Eastern European strategies of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. His trade and peace overtures threaten both the far-right nationalists currently governing Ukraine, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, as well as turning off the arms-dealing, war-profiting money spigots of global bankers, intelligence agencies, and corporatists. The purpose of these protests is to not only distract and undermine Trump during his first 100 days, but to distract all of us from dissecting what has happened to the Democratic party, why they lost, the corruption of the Sanders ejection, and the "pay to play" history of money-grubbing from arch-fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia; which, by the way, has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Would you like to do your marching with your brother's permission in a burqa, be unable to drive, and see your gay friends imprisoned or executed? Huma Abedin's mother has written books saying that women should submit to their husbands, including sexually, and opposes female empowerment as causing harm." Sue snorted, "And Huma worked on her mother's discriminatory journal, and would have been Hillary's closest advisor. Would we have needed to march to keep our faces visible and our hair windblown under the influence of such regimes?"
"Well, you don't know that," mused Marie.
"No, I don't. But you don't either. We need to be ready to fight discrimination, inequality, corruption, and war. Bernie was great on everything except the last item, as we know, but he didn't get a chance to run a fair race. And, speaking of fair, if we don't like the Electoral College, we should try to get rid of it. But I don't see the Democrats doing that, either after 2000 or now--because it's a useful construct for the powers that be to have another tool to control outcomes here at home."
"What about the Russians trying to do that?" asked Wanda.
"All this talk about Russian influence is more neo-liberal propaganda. Fake news. Russia has the right to present its perspective online, even if we disagree with it in the US. There has been no evidence of actual vote tampering. Apparently, however, there are people here in the US and its media, however, who don't agree that we can disagree with what they want us to believe. And, if they keep propagandizing us domestically, that might get me out marching to save freedom of speech. Meanwhile, I'm staying alert for the 'cui bono' in every plea, advocacy, and entreaty--and I suggest you do too. The war party is not happy that Donald Trump won--they're not sure he'll buy into their meta-plan to dissolve national borders and create small non-threatening nation states in oil/gas-rich and/or strategic locations. If we gullibles can do some of their opposition and undermining work, it keeps them a few steps ahead and us from looking closely at what the Democratic party and the neo-s have become and have wrought."
"I fear they have wrought fascism," Karen said.
"I agree with you," said Sue. "But the 'rot' started long before the 2016 election."
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