Trump’s “big deal” scorecard

Photo by K K on Unsplash

Thoughts from Eileen Workman

Trump seems entirely incapable of getting out of his own way.

I say this because, as I’ve observed:

Mr. “Art of the Deal” seems unable to make any sustainable deals that actually help the American People.

His fallback is always to use force, punishment, shaming, threatening, and violently imposed manipulation through relentless financial and legal coercion to exhaust or deplete the opposition, in order to “get his way.”

That’s not an art; it’s brute force, pretending it actually has some rational, moral foundation to justify its continuous use against other sentient human beings, and against the whole world.

We have no trade deal with Canada.

We have no nuclear treaty deal with Iran.

We have no deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or end this war.

We have no deal with Israel regarding how to address the Palestinian challenge.

We have no deal with the drug cartels to stop,shipping fentanyl here illegally.

We have no mutually beneficial trade deals with our allies that seem to be improvements at all over the deals he gleefully abandoned earlier.

We have no better deal with our NATO allies than we had before he took office, and in fact our allies are isolating us, and are moving on to forge closer ties with China without our support, because our word cannot be trusted anymore.

We have no better deal with the entire healthcare industry than we received under President Obama.

We have no better deal with an entire technology industry that’s decimating our jobs and wages and environment than we have had in the past.

We have no better deal on global climate change regulations, on cleaner air and water policies, on building out renewable energy systems, on taxation simplification and fairer tax burden distribution, on voting rights or on basic human rights, on drug addition, crime, overdoses, guns, mass murder, or how we manage our public commons for the quiet enjoyment of ALL people—not merely the resource extraction industries.

We have no better deal on immigration policy writ large; on how we diversify our inputs for greater wisdom, creativity, and strength; on how we caringly include those whose gifts may be hidden beneath surface disabilities or other challenges; or on how we equitably share both opportunity and the collective bounty of our ONE home planet.

We have no better deal on education, on a comprehensive social safety net, on social security, on Medicare and Medicaid, or on how we manage to maintain a constitutional democracy in the face of religious authoritarianism.

So from where I sit, we Americans got a raw deal once a majority of voters stopped at admiring Trump’s flashy (ghost written) descriptions that described the “Art of the Deal” without first putting themselves in the dealer’s sights, and realizing what that eventually meant for them.

—Eileen Workman

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