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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 4/2/19

Promise Land 2020

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But when an elected official does a complete and/or unprovoked about-face on campaign pledges that were crucial to getting him or her elected such as trump's insistence that American taxpayers now pay for a border wall that he promised he'd force Mexico to pay it probably should be viewed as a particularly egregious betrayal of voter trust.

In trump's case, we're two-plus years in. Yet still, scattered throughout the list of 9000-plus lies that The Washington Post has compiled on trump since he took office, are many of the more than 80 campaign promises that as reported in 2017 by Think Progress trump hadn't accomplished in his first 100 days.

In many ways a president's mettle and re-election prospects -- are both linked to how many campaign promises they fulfill through the art of legislative deal-making. And so with all that's involved, the process of making good on as many as 80 campaign pledges in a little over three months might be a formidable task for any chief executive, especially one who spends the first five hours of each workday watching cable TV and most of his weekends playing golf.

Nevertheless, shouldn't fulfilling 80 campaign promises through the legislative process within that time-span be easy money for a "deal maker" president? Particularly one brazen enough to loudly proclaim that he "alone, can fix" America's problems? Hell, Franklin D. Roosevelt was in a wheelchair yet still managed to push through 76 major legislative initiatives during his first three months in office. And Harry S. Truman managed to get 53 bills signed into law over the same period of time. Granted, those numbers were achieved during an era of less political polarization and more willingness by political parties to work toward compromise. But under the right circumstances, it should be an easy chore for any president who touts himself as a master deal maker.

Promises and Realities

If former president George W. Bush's somewhat flimsy roots as a bonafide Texan led to his characterization as "all hat and no cattle," then on the matter of promise-keeping it's certainly reasonable to consider donald trump to be "all sizzle and no steak." But the truth of the matter, however, is that no recent president has come close to what FDR or Truman achieved. "Dubya," for example, only managed to achieve seven legislative victories in his first three months (two fewer than both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan). Barack Obama managed to rack up 14, but they came at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. But even with the advantage of a Republican-controlled Congress which, for close to two years, had been completely in trump's back pocket, the deal maker still failed to negotiate passage of any campaign promise of major significance other than what's perhaps the easiest piece of legislation to get passed in a GOP Congress -- a trillion-dollar tax cut.

To be clear, trump has followed up on a number of significant campaign promises even though many were achieved not through the give-and-take of congressional negotiations, but rather by executive order (100 thus far). Trump moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognized that city as capital of the Jewish state; he's placed hard-right candidates on the Supreme Court and into federal judgeship; he has essentially voided NAFTA; withdrawn the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal; scrapped the Iran nuclear deal; reneged on America's commitment to the Paris climate accord; and succeeded in implementing what amounts to a de-facto ban of specific categories of immigrants entering the United States.

But trump's unfulfilled, ignored, or reneged-upon promises include: "a full report" on Russian cyber-meddling "by my people within 90 days" a promise he made less than a week after his inauguration; a promise to eliminate the then $19-trillion dollar national debt in 8 years; a tax cut that he promised would "hurt" billionaires and help the middle class; and a promise to lower prescription drug costs. He also promised that an "Election Integrity Commission" would uphold his assertion of widespread voter fraud; that LBGTQ rights would be supported; that he'd save the coal industry; earmark a trillion dollars to rebuild America's infrastructure; exclude Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from future federal budget cuts; and repeal and replace Obamacare.

In addition, he pledged to "drain the swamp;" pay legal costs of supporters who physically assault anti-trump protesters; and build a border wall for America that Mexico would pay for. He topped it off by promising that Americans would eventually grow "tired of winning all of the battles he'd initiate on our behalf. And although it was made after he became "president," no list of trump's broken promises is complete without a mention of his promised sit-down with Robert Mueller to answer questions under oath about whatever he knows about Russian election meddling.

Those were some of the promises made back then. And, as of this writing, here are some of the realities. There has never been a "full report" on Russian cyber-meddling issued from the White House; the debt has ballooned by $3 trillion after just two years in office, and the tax cut which he promised would "cost me a fortune" has in fact, according to the New York Times, saved him more than a billion dollars. As for his promised lowering of drug costs, a recent analysis by AP Fact Check determined that they have slowed but continue to rise. Meanwhile, trump's auspiciously hyped Election Integrity Commission quietly disbanded in January without issuing a report, and, as of January 22, transgender Americans were officially barred from serving in our military. Of course, there's more. Under trump, coal consumption is at a 39 year low according to the U.S. Energy Information Administrato r; and, after week after week of administration-promoted "infrastructure week" announcements, pretty much the only infrastructure renewal to-date has come in the form of the trump "administration's" relentless effort at transforming the information superhighway into a boulevard of alternative facts.

Other broken promises show up in trump's 2020 budget. They include proposals for $845 billion in budget cuts from Medicare, $241 billion from Medicaid, and $25 billion from Social Security. And while Obamacare has been substantially gutted, it has been substituted with nothing that remotely resembles a legit replacement. Meanwhile, rather than drain the swamp, trump, having loaded his administration and the federal government with friends, family, fellow demagogues, hacks, quacks, white supremacists, and criminals has built a grotesque, openly corrupt den of kleptocracy. Added to all this is the fact that Mexico continues to have no plans to contribute a single penny toward construction of trump's symbolic monstrosity on the southern border.

As for blowing off his promised sit-down with the Special Prosecutor, one must take into account the leaked reports about trump's inability to avoid lying during mock Mueller Q&A sessions. According to published reports, trump's compulsion to lie was so bothersome, that his then-lead attorney in the Russia probe, John Dowd (who later quit out of frustration), warned his client that if he testified before Mueller, the session would end with trump in "an orange jumpsuit." With that in mind, and, considering the toll Mueller's probe had taken on the lives and liberties of many of those who had agreed to sit with him, it's easy to figure out why trump chose to renege on that particular promise.

But it's still unclear, however, whether trump ever kept his promise and actually did pay the legal expenses of John "Quick Draw" McGraw, the 78-year-old trump supporter arrested for sucker punching Raheem Jones, a 28 year old African-American protester," at a March, 2016 trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

"Silly Season" in Promise Land

It's hard to disagree with anyone who might argue that endeavoring to highlight the broken promises of a compulsive liar is not only pointless but, in the long run, essentially futile. But with the conclusion of Mueller's probe roughly coinciding with the start of the U.S. presidential campaign season -- which some have described as the political "silly season" -- now is as good a time as any to refocus on some of trump's reprehensible behavior, reckless domestic and foreign policy decisions, empty claims and, for the purposes of this article, his many broken promises.

That's because, for a politician like donald trump, America's silly season is truly the point in time best suited for the use of the well-crafted" psycho-linguistics, dumbed-down"idiolect," bold-faced lying, and bare-naked double-entendres that trump deploys " like rocket fuel for the reckless empowerment of false hope. But why now, one might ask? Larger audiences, of course. The silly season is the time when ordinary, less politically honed-in voters start to become just as politically attentive as the year-round process junkies.

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Anthony Barnes, of Boston, Massachusetts, is a left-handed leftist. "When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the (more...)
 

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