Reactions During the Trump Presidency
We are 18 months into the Trump Presidency, and our country is divided more than ever.
We are all trying to understand why it seems both sides are full of hatred. On the right and left viewpoints, emotions seem to control the discussions. Unfortunately, calling each other stupid, lets the Russians win… they want to divide our democracy, and are succeeding as they are doing in other democracies.
The Right demeans the former President and yet doesn’t like the Left demeaning the present one, and vice versa. Yes, all Presidents have their good points and bad points… they have a VERY tough job. And intelligent people can look at their actions and point out good points and bad points. History will treat each President differently.
While most people on this left disagree with this president’s policies, on the right they disagree with the former president’s policies. However, the right could have exercised their rights to protest that administration at the time, and did – thus the creation of the Tea Party.
One of the best things that Trump has done for the country is to stir our apathy. Our democracy is alive and well!
However, our job as Americans should be to figure out where the hate is coming from. People on the right feel the people on the left are full of hate, and people on the left feel those on the right are full of hate. And ALL of us love our country, our democracy, and our life of opportunity.
I feel that one thing this president has done wrong is to erode our sense of propriety. I know that a lot of people feel that he’s “real” in the way he speaks and that the sense of “propriety” had gotten so out of hand that politicians are sneaky and underhanded. After all, Washington is built on the swampy sections of Md and VA, thus the expression of “cleaning the swamp”. People on the right think he is doing just that, but people on this side just feel he is filling it with Wall Street swamp characters. But the propriety has eroded (through society NOT just the President, but he is supposed to be the model our kids look up to) so much that our manners have also disappeared.
For so long, it’s been the accepted norm in this country to “agree to disagree” on politics and religion. However, now we are talking about issues we’ve swept under the rug for decades. Our generation thought the Civil Rights War had been settled in the ’60’s and’70’s yet it is coming out now that there is more to fix to make “equality” better for all.
It hurts to see us at odds with each other, but these discussions need to happen for us to understand each other. Through these discussions, we are digging into past wounds of our country, and cleaning out some of that hate that has been festering. It’s going to hurt.
This President is getting the brunt of it all because of his mannerisms. His history is still to be written by his future actions and the responses of the world.
But in the long view….. we all know that if an event like 9/11 happened again…. we’d be a united country in a heart beat… no matter who the President is…. but let’s pray that nothing like that happens to challenge this President while we are still working through the festering…..
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As election day 2020 nears, reflections on how Trump did as a President abound in the news media and social media. It’s been a real growing time for our country. Not so much for Donald Trump.
In the beginning of his presidency, I kept hoping that he would learn the ins and outs of diplomacy, statesmanship, empathy, and respect for his fellow man even if they were not his equal. After all, those qualities should be inherent in a good leader, right?
But Mr. Trump has failed to learn the above qualities. Even leading through a global pandemic and catching COVID19 himself hasn’t given him any decency when dealing with others. The CEO in him (one who puts money as his bottom line), never met the President in him (one whose bottom line is people’s lives).
Today, on the eve of the election this week, the election battle rages on with several changes from years past. Because of the pandemic, mail-in-voting, aka absentee voting, and early voting have been utilized across the country in every state and province. Each state has developed its own way of trying to protect people from being exposed to the virus. The result is that people have been voting almost the whole month of October so their votes will be sure to be counted on November 3rd. The consequence is that more people have early voted in some places than came out for the election in total in 2016.
The two-party campaigns have been different as well. Trump has held rallies with hundreds of attendees not wearing masks, thus exposing them to each other and the virus, and being super spreader events. I suspect their goal is to head to “herd immunity” to get rid of the virus. The challenge with that approach is that many deaths can come with that strategy as well. The focus of the campaign has been all the “good” Trump has done with the economy, jobs, rolling back restrictions, and filling the courts with conservative judges. Note that at the present time, the economy and jobs are very unstable due to the pandemic. In addition, he has not handled the pandemic very well, so that our country is one of the worst hit with it.
The Biden campaign has focused on trying to unite the country by saving health care which has been threatened the last four years, trying to listen to the needs of all Americans in response to the protests (and unfortunately rioting as well) that have permeated the nation the last 4 years, and getting both parties to work together in Congress to be able to make progress (which hasn’t happened the last 4 years due to Republican control of the Senate). Most of the Biden campaign events have been either virtual or outside with masks, or car rallies where participants stay in their cars (kinda like church services have done during the pandemic).
So as election day approaches, news media and airwaves are flooded with video clips from both sides. Each side calls the other lies. All one can hope is that a few folks have been able to weed through the hype better than we did 4 years ago when Russian hackers managed to convince us that the other side was evil.
But again, the final result has been that American apathy has been awakened as evidenced by the rush to vote. Can’t wait to see what the American voters have chosen for the next four years! And to see if a smooth transition is still the hallmark of the American dream.