Trump Cards, Con't

Earl Ofari Hutchinson makes the case that while 2017 has been an overall disaster for Trump and America, here in December Donald Trump is winning.

This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to write and admit: Trump is winning. In the brief space of a week, he won a brief court fight to shove Mick Mulvaney to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Mulvaney wasted no time in unhinging a spate of consumer protection rulings, regulations, and personnel hires made during the Obama years.

His SCOTUS pick, Neil Gorsuch, eagerly cast a vote to impose the Muslim travel ban. His EPA head, Scott Pruitt, delivered a couple million acres of public monument land in the West to oil, gas, and coal industry developers. Trump busily continues to pack the federal judiciary with a parade of ultra-conservative, strict, constructionist Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia clones.

He switched gears and backed alleged pedophile Alabama judge Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race, who almost certainly will win. The Republican National Committee, which had practically declared Moore a pariah, quickly jumped in and said it would back him. He got another sweet perk when Senate Democrats turned with a vengeance on Minnesota Senator Al Franken and virtually ordered him out of office. His subsequent resignation got rid of a pesky thorn for Trump. Franken had a big voice, lots of name recognition and popularity, and was not afraid to take shots at Trump.

He pooh-poohed the guilty plea of his former National Security Advisor Mike T. Flynn as no big deal while shouting “no collusion, no collusion” and got away with it.

He got his tax heist for the rich and corporations through the Senate, and as an extra bonus, brought his long-held dream of dumping the Affordable Care Act closer to reality when the Senate tacked on a provision to the bill wiping out the mandate requirement. When the markets took another tick up he crowed even louder that he was the man who brought the good times rolling to America. As always, he did all this with the sheepish connivance of much of the mainstream media, which is always off to the races in giving round-the-clock coverage to his self-serving, vapid tweets as if they were the word from the Mount.

And Roy Moore's coming victory Tuesday will only make this worse.  There should be ten million people on the National Mall screaming for Trump's resignation.  There should be nationwide strikes grinding entire regions of the country to a halt.  There should be a National Day of Rage every day until Trump and the GOP are gone for good.

But we lost that chance.  We're just trying to make it to the next day, now.  We've been beaten down for so long and with such stunning force that any brief period where we're not being directly kicked in the crotch looks like a victory to us, and as Hutchinson points out, even if Trump resigned tomorrow, in less than eleven months he has done generational, if not lifetime damage to the country that we may never be able to fix.

We are now led by an "addled couch potato" who chain-slams a dozen Diet Cokes and 4-8 hours of FOX News daily and golfs all the time. 

We have no future but destruction.  It's just a question now of how awful the damage will be.

And 2018?  It will be worse.  Far worse.