Rational Nation USA

 

Following is an excerpt from an article published in the NEW REPUBLIC July 12, 2016. On Presidents’ Day 2017, as we pay respect to President’s of the past as well as witnessing widespread dissatisfaction and protests of our current siting president, the words following now seem  prescient

If making sense of Donald Trump requires regular reminders that he is an outgrowth of powerful, ingrained political forces, rather than an unfortunate aberration, the world is certainly obliging. He is the patron saint of resentful whites, who are in turn the dominant faction of the Republican Party. But these reminders provide little information about how the American political economy should be reordered to meet the needs of both white nativists and ethnically diverse liberals.

In a country divided such as ours is, an election can help break impasses by providing reasonably clear guidance on what changes the majority of people want to make. But the strangeness of Trump’s campaign is sidelining that guidance. Rather than serving as an exponent of white working-class interests, advancing a policy agenda that would materially benefit his supporters, Trump serves merely as their id.

This has made collateral damage out of ideology. Not since 2000 has a U.S. election been so untethered from substantive questions about how to make people more satisfied with the ways the government serves them. Trump has made this election a referendum on our national identity—are we the kind of country that turns to a demagogue when enough people are frustrated?—rather than on our policy status quo. Once that identity issue is resolved, the question of what comes next won’t have a clear answer.

America choose a demagogue and they got what only 40% of Americans apparently wanted. The other 60% either mildly or vehemently disapprove of the man America placed in the most powerful job I the world.

Aside from Trump’s gross incompetence on other thing can be said bout the man. He is keeping the promises he made on the campaign trail. Most of which are as in American and borsch and Putin.

America got what it voted for. Let the intense buyer remorse, and, extreme resistance begin.

This weblog has been a critic of Donald J. Trump’s constant attacks on the legitimate press since he took office on January 20th. Make no mistake, his constant repetitive attacks are to Delegitimize   the credible press that points out his  deceptions and lies.

History provides a long list of demagogues and tyrants that have used the same rhetoric that Trump is using today. The end results for the people of the country they ruled? Lets just say it didn’t turn out well.

A free and independent press is one of the pillars of a democratic republic. Trump is attacking it because it is critical of him. For damn good reason. Anyone valuing the democratic republic built by our founders must resist Trump.

President Donald Trump ramped up his criticism of the news coverage of his administration Friday, again taking to his favorite social media platform.

“The FAKE NEWS media,” Trump wrote on Twitter, “is the enemy of the American People!”

An initial tweet put only The New York Times, CNN and NBC News on his enemies list. That message was quickly deleted, however, and replaced by an almost identical note that added two more domestic television networks: ABC and CBS.

The social media attack, the latest in a long series of Trump broadsides against the news media, came after the president had left Washington for a visit to a Boeing aircraft plant in South Carolina. The president later headed to Florida, where he is to spend the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago complex.

As the president arrived at the estate he has dubbed the Winter White House, social media and the networks crackled with debate about the significance of Trump calling some of the top American journalistic outlets enemies of the people, a phrase that goes back to ancient Rome and was used with chilling finality during the communist revolution in Russia a century ago.

U.S. diplomat recalls ‘petty tyrants’

“As an American diplomat, I stood up to petty tyrants who called journalists ‘enemies of the people,'” tweeted Tom Malinowski, former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “Guess that’s not our policy anymore.”

“It is one of the most controversial phrases in Soviet history,” said Mitchell Orenstein, professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The phrase has its roots in Latin, during the Roman Empire, but “enemies of the people” gained its most notorious associations during the 20th century, during the purges ordered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that killed tens of millions of people.

An “enemy of the people” in the Soviet Union was not necessarily a criminal, but more often someone stigmatized by social origin or pre-revolutionary profession. The label alone was akin to a terminal illness, and merely being a friend of an enemy of the people was a certain cause for official suspicion.

Read the full Voice Of America article and then YOU be the judge.