Landmark
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The first hundred days.
It’s grown harder and harder to see the America I know through the fog of ignorance, xenophobia, and me-firstness that is the so-called Trump administration, through these long, long days.
It’s not that we were actually that shining city on a hill. It’s that we aspired to be. We don’t share that anymore.
In the first hundred days, according to the Brennan Center for Justice and elsewhere:
The President of the United States has repeatedly lied about an “American carnage” of crime, citing a phantom crime wave begun under his predecessor, and vowing to crush it (just as soon as he can actually find it).
Hate crimes, on the other hand, against people listed in the handbooks of the KKK, really are on the rise.
The mad elf who calls himself the Attorney General of the United States has urged his army of U.S. Attorneys to ramp up prosecution of the Mexican “filth” who “rape and kill innocent civilians” in the homeland they pretend to make their own. Jeff Sessions also called for the destruction of sanctuary cities in “the Trump era,” momentarily forgetting those folks protect the filth that harvest the prunes that keep the little guy regular.
He’s also branded, as a “war on police,” previous Justice Department efforts to reduce the number of times poorly trained white cops shoot unarmed black men and boys. The number of new targets he’s painted on black backs is yet to be determined.
The President has vowed to deport three million people. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” he suggests, “and I will get ‘em outta here.”
For-profit private prisons are making a comeback, reversing another Obama effort, to put fewer of our people in prison and keep them there.
There’s a new war on drugs, emphasizing treatment for white people addicted to pain-killer opioids, and prison for pot-smoking colored folk.
Dictators and other idols of the far right are finally getting the Presidential adulation they feel they’ve always deserved.
Sexual harassment and even assault likewise are receiving the support its perpetrators have long sought.
We have by far the greatest Cabinet money has bought.
A wholly new crime has been added to the U.S. Code: theft of a Supreme Court Justice.
No more sissy talk about closing Guantanamo: we’re gonna make it bigger and better.
Talk about draining the swamp has been clarified: Trump really meant he was going to drain the wetlands and roll back other environmental protections — for the good of the environment, of course.
He’s restored full Second Amendment rights to the mentally ill so they can kill school children just like anyone else.
And he’s discovered military power the quickest and surest popularity poll adjuster.
Not to mention the Muslim ban. Nor the attempt to euthanize thousands of Americans by taking them off health care support. Nor the big, beautiful wall (Canada’s considering its own wall to keep fleeing Americans out). Nor the endless, endless lies and puffery (biggest electoral victory, biggest crowds, biggest dick — though to be fair he may well be the biggest dick Americans have ever elected, to any office).
It’s to the point that the best we can now hope for is this:
The last hundred days.
g sheehan
5 May 2017 @ 3:06 pm
Reading through all that…. when I got to the last paragraph I had a good chuckle! thanks for cheering up my day!
Jack Frank Sigman
5 May 2017 @ 3:44 am
You cannot make this case to Trump voters if you use the language of Trump haters. Just remember that this is the country that produced a poll of housewives, 87% who stated it was wrong for Congress to attempt to allow in 20,000 refugee children under the age of 14.
walli
4 May 2017 @ 4:32 pm
What’s most astounding is that we live in an America that’s divided like never before, with even the thin veneer of civility wiped away.
Kirk Bottner
4 May 2017 @ 4:16 pm
Right on Philip!!!
Bruce Luyendyk
4 May 2017 @ 12:12 pm
Don’t bother making this case to Trump voters. They are deaf, dumb, and blind…happy to go backwards in time the mythical perfect white America.