Originally Posted by
Terry
Trump is definitely not business as usual.
He's certainly not there to give the government back to the people like he claimed: if you live in a democracy, as a citizen you have control of the government via your participation and the ballot box. It's much the same as the concept of freedom: nobody can give you your freedom. You either have it or you don't. If you don't, the only way you get it is to take it back yourself.
Trump's basic, core belief is economic Darwinism. In that people are free to succeed or fail, and via privatization of various human services (education, medical care) coupled with tax breaks for corporations and deregulation, the deck is going to be even more stacked against the majority of the population. Trump divides people into 2 categories: winners and losers. If you're a winner, the ends (even if illegal or unethical) always justify the means you took to get there. If you're a loser, it's 100% your own fault and you shouldn't expect any help from anybody because you are totally to blame for your lot in life even if the capitalist system is by and large rigged against those who aren't already wealthy.
He's a huckster and a con man. Like any huckster or con man, he saw an opening and was able to ride a wave of anger so many in this country justifiably feel because they realize the country isn't being run with their interests in mind. It's being run almost entirely to serve the whims of those at the apex. It always has been, and the only time that has changed is under threat of force from the citizenry, at which point a few more scraps are thrown down from the table than otherwise would be freely given. Sadly, a lot of these understandably frustrated people include foreigners and foreign labor as a cause for their lot in life, rather than being angry at corporations who have outsourced the manufacturing jobs.
Trump was a human Molotov cocktail thrown into the works of government. That's fine as far as it goes, but now Trump has to actually govern. I don't doubt that Trump would prefer not to get himself into trouble as Nixon did. However, Trump is impulsive by nature and has a Reagan-like ability to believe things are so because he thinks they are so. It's kind of like how Trump has stacked his Cabinet with this particular group of anti-regulatory, anti-union, pro-privatization millionaires and billionaires: I'm sure low-income Trump voters will somehow convince themselves these people actually care the slightest about (or could even imagine, much less relate to) their daily concerns or their lives, even though there is no reason for them to believe this is true.
What scares me more about Trump than the fact that he isn't particularly beholden to either of the political parties are his personality traits which, unlike Nixon's, have been unabashedly out front for everybody to see. Just as scary would be the amount of people who voted for him in spite of those traits being in clear view, inasmuch as it speaks to their level of frustration with what has happened to America over the last 35 or so years and the desperate measures they will resort to in responding. Trump is a primal scream.
He has only been in office a week, but look at the rollout of his travel ban. Even putting the legality/morality of it to one side: you roll it out without properly notifying in advance the agencies that will actually have to physically implement the policy? Smacks of impulsive amateurishness just in the mechanics of it, never mind the ideology behind it. If one can't get the small things right, what does that portend for the bigger things? Sure, nobody bats a thousand and nobody is perfect, but the manner in which this was carried out speaks well neither of the President nor those who function as his advisors.