Wellness Check on the President

My observation that Trump is well into a major cognitive decline is not pejorative. Whether or not I like him is immaterial. My claim of his infirmity does not make it so in the same was as your denial of it doesn't, makes it non-existent. We can dispute each other's assertions; however, time will settle the debate one way or the other.

I do not like his personality, his politics, his behavior, his lack of veracity, his decisions, his representation of me and this country around the world because they are completely opposite of my ethic. For many other Americans, they love him not in spite of those attributes but because they are so closely aligned with their own.

Many people more learned than I have observed the same or similar indications of cognitive dysfunction in the President. While he has traits to admire and approve, there comes a time in everyone's life when concerned family and friends need to take away the car keys and hide the matches lest he precipitates a major tragedy. A person may love the father or mother who is declining with Alzheimer's or other variation of dementia, but that doesn’t mean they must allow the parent to go about in public unsupervised.

Similarly, whether the affected person was a good person or bad ceases to be relevant once the dementia is fully manifest. There is little purpose of prosecuting or persecuting the impaired individual who fails to understand the gravity of their crimes and misdemeanors. The only valid purpose that remains is  to contain the damage already done. Once the compromised parent has crashed into the pedestrians the only thing left to do is make sure he cannot do it again. Senator Lindsey Graham spoke eloquently back during the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings when he asserted that impeachment is not punishment for crimes committed but a necessary step in preserving and restoring the dignity and respect of the Office the public official has tainted with his actions.

Here is where we arc back to the President. Yes, people love him. Yes, people would and will vote for him again given the chance. Yes, there will be ancillary improvements in the economy. Yes, there will be a price to pay for all the negative aspects of what he says and does. Yes, there will be a period of "reconstruction" necessary after his Administration is over just as though there had been a shooting war. Yes, there is a lot of pain coming down the pike.

For every apparent positive gain attributed to this President, there are one or more negative aspects. Mineral extraction commerce comes at the permanent destruction of the environment. Removal of safety regulations on businesses may raise their bottom line but at the cost of clean water and air. Tax rate cuts are really only Revenue Reduction Acts that will make it impossible to fund the society we hold dear. Cutting social programs can only further impoverish people who are already poor without providing and remedies. At the current revenue rates and budget levels, military spending alone is not supported by the remaining tax rates.

His claim of "uniting the country" is a bit delusional. While he has formed a loyal base in the same way as Coke and Pepsi has, the vast number of people drink neither. And many don't drink the other lesser brands of sweet fizzy-water either. The brand-loyal people who favor one product over the other typically cannot describe accurately why it is they do so. All of the choices are sweet, have some level of caramel colorant and most of all fizz when opened. This President claims massive support while only generating rally turnouts totaling less than 0.15% of the eligible voters, which is 0.075% of the US Population. He believes the spot turnouts demonstrate love for himself and his job performance.

His 46 million Twitter "followers" are a combinations of People who support him, people who just want to read what he says without commitment of any type of support, Retweet Bots and outright fictitious handles. The number looks good to anyone who needs his ego stroked. "My numbers are greater than Barack Obama's." In the election which placed him in the White House, he received about 25% of the eligible voter's votes. Those numbers represent slightly less than half the actual votes and about 2.8 million less than his Democrat opponent. But the Electoral College system prevails. With these facts being self-evident, he continues to cry "Fake News" at everything he cannot accept.

He has been on the defensive for his entire Administration trying to convince people he is victimized by Everyone else around him. The Media can't be trusted, his own Intelligence Agencies can't be trusted, the FBI is against him. His mistrust is so great that he prefers the advice and solace of foreign dictators with whom he identifies and envies.

It is widely spoken that his favorable treatment of President Putin against all reason is evidence of his subservient position relative to the man. Although he can't see it through his cognitive fog, his body language and smiling countenance in the presence of powerful men who stroke his ego to get what they want, the thousands of hours of video easily demonstrates the essential nature of his condition.

Every move this President makes, every policy statement and directive he promulgates with a claim that it is good for the Economy has with it a greater benefit to Russia and the oligarchs who stand to reap billons from the void America creates by being lead by the current President.

Whether a person loves him, hates him or merely doesn't like what he has done to this country, that attitude informs whether they believe he bold lies, merely misrepresents facts, speaks the absolute truth or confabulates a narrative to make sense in his own mind of the gaps of memory and understanding which are part of his reality. The person experiencing dementia rarely realized it. The person who has memory gaps confabulates plugs to fill the holes. His struggle to pronounce words is not specifically a speech impediment as would be with stuttering and stammering. They are more closely associated with cognitive lapses that come and go on an irregular interval.

His speech is peppered with filler words, phrases and repetitions that attempt to keep the monologue going in the absence of knowing what to say. It amounts to bad ad libbing. Larry David comedy is rife with long stretches of ad lib as are many scenes of the serial Soap Operas. When done well, ad libbing can be creative, but the longer it is employed the worse the dialog becomes. "Plot holes" and inconsistencies arise which intent listeners pick up on very quickly. In a Presidential speech it is a sure fire indicator the speaker is ill prepared to handle the topic or the venue itself.

Someone with lifelong undiagnosed impairments or at least a collection of personal flaws should not be able to become elected and remain in office when those attributes negatively impacts job performance and the lives of millions if not billions of people. Applying a functional test of suitability, it doesn't matter whether the deficiencies are nature or nurture. It is the results that are looked at and matter.

When a person speaks statement which are incorrect, whether his is intentionally lying or is merely majorly uniformed, it is the lack of correction which matters. Whether the person is eccentric in his personal presentation or mad as a hatter, matters little when that person has control of so many people's lives.

Here we presently have to perform the evaluation and decide whether the man should be allowed to continue on his trajectory or be stopped.  This must not be a political decision nor one made from love or fear. Today the whole world is watching and what we do now will have generational reverberations. Choose wisely.

Yes,The Law is on Trumps Side, but...

Yes the Law is on Trump's side. Therein lies the problem. The laws have always been written and interpreted in terms of rational people who were placed in charge of our democracy. Alternatively, they were written by people who would derive value from the efforts of others and call it their own.

Never before has there been a scenario where United States elected officials were subverted by foreign influences and those people were the ones in power. It has always been the influence of domestic power that allowed the individuals vested with power to yield that power with little or no interference. While the Law may be on Trumps side, that doesn't mean the laws are good laws of just and equitable laws. Those laws can be changed.

Today we have a man who has wrested power from the former owners and is utilizing it for entirely new purposes. Not only does he represent a particular political party but he also has the backing of both the House and the Senate. His use of power has been commingled with his own enterprises for creation of personal and family wealth. People with whom he has business relations are standing in line for him to sign the papers to free them to exploit terrestrial resources and those of people that in need. 

Nothing he sends their way will get voted down and no bills sent to him will be vetoed. This entire scenario is the recipe for disaster. At some point in time he and Congress will differ on some positions but all the important and far reaching actions will already have been agreed upon. Food availability, housing, medical care, education are all a matter of law. So is who is allowed to have such things.

He is feeding the GOP controlled Congress all the items they have had on their agenda for decades. Education policy is trashed by a religious zealot until Congress formally disposed of the Department entirely. Similarly, the Attorney General, William Sessions, is a self-styled racist judge who also promised to foist his religious notions on minority groups under the guise of "restoring religious freedoms with such Act as titled: Restoring Religious Freedoms Act. Eliminating the Environmental Protection Administration is yet another action now or soon to be signed out of existence via signature on an Executive Order.

Once GOP is finished with Mr. Trump, they will kick him to the curb in favor of their more favored President, Mike Pence. He will be better suited to carry America into its century of Theocratic governance.

However, in the meantime, the Law is on the side of the now President, Trump. But that power of law is not absolute. The US has a Judicial Branch which was designed to keep the Legislature and Executive in check. Neither of them can run off willy-nilly doing just anything they want to. There remains that ever-present and highly regarded document, the Constitution, to be satisfied.

The founding father of this country saw the possibilities of a tyrant getting into power or for an incompetent to be elected by the folly of the people who were so taken astray. They built into the Constitution safeguard to right the wrong. It is time this country take a long and hard look at the road we are now traveling. It is time to stop and go a different way. 

Repurposing the Doomsday Clock

Let us cut through all the name calling and character assassination after the 2016 Presidential Election. He's this and She's that. There is little value in continuing the rhetoric and vitriol. We can even dispense with recriminations for how and why the election turned out the way it did. Whatever comes now we must be able to survive it.

  Whatever else Donald Trump is, he is a corporate CEO. He thinks like a corporation man and acts accordingly. None of his supporters can or would argue against that statement. He uses the rules which have been put in place to benefit corporate interests. He is correct in his assertion that he was proper in writing off nearly a $1 bn in losses which would allow him to not be liable for income taxes for nearly two decades as the result. Not even the reason for the written off losses are really pertinent.

The trouble with his mentality as a CEO and President of the USA is that one cannot run a country like it was a corporation. Here is the point. Corporations have Internalities and Externalities. Countries of people cannot have externalities.

To a coal mining corporation the price of mineral leases and how much labor is required to get it out of the ground is an internal concern of the owners. What their customers do with the coal is an externality, i.e. none of their concern. The coal mining company doesn't care how efficiently the coal is burned, how much ash is left over to handle or what the customer does with it. The company only concern is to pay enough wages to get a man into the mine. Whether that pay is enough to live on is external to their operation. If the miner is injured, it requires Federal legislation to force the company to attend to the costs. They do not take care of disabled miners out of the goodness of their heart. Doing so diminishes shareholder value.

Donald Trump in and by himself is not so much a counter-productive thing, but the CEO of a corporation sets and shapes corporate mentality and attitudes. The fiasco of Wells Fargo Bank and the employees defrauding millions of customers with unwanted credit accounts flows directly from the top down. Corporate leadership created the climate where employees felt it necessary to commit financial crimes in order to succeed in their jobs.

Mr. Trump has led a sizable portion of this country down a road that leads to manifestation of fear, hatreds, violence and vitriolic free speech. The gun manufacturers had yet another banner year of sales with the prospects of Hillary Clinton becoming President. I suggest this time sales were driven not by the prospects of the government coming for the weapons but that they will be needed in an imminent demographic clash. Who suggested that such a need would come to be?

Beyond the prospects of ultra-conservative SCOTUS appointments gutting the ACA, Roe v. Wade, Marriage Equality and Gender Rights is the prospect that the Trump-modified complexion of the Supreme Court will more deeply entrench Citizens United, corporate and fetal personhood, and divest the nation of such externalities as fair living wages, health care access, education and environmental protections.

Beyond the Supreme Court appointments, there are dozens of cabinet positions and agency chiefs who will not be aligned with human being concerns such as clean water and air (corporate externalities.) They are likely to give concessions to corporate interests which can never be recovered. The divestiture of a National Forest to logging and mining cannot be taken back. Once the ground water is contaminated it will take centuries if ever for it to be clear again.

If we do not put our financial resources into high school graduations and post-secondary college degrees, we will not have enough doctors to serve every American. We need nursing and other medical staff. We need to focus our efforts of training tens of thousands of such position. Where is the Trump leadership to keep that imminent disaster at bay? But remember, health care is a corporate externality.

One of the several Presidential job duties is to be America's Ambassador to the world. There are countries which already acknowledge the ineptitude of Donald Trump. More so than what WE think of him, is what the world thinks of him and of us. We are only 4.5% of the global population. What they think matters.

America cannot treat human needs and the environment like they were externalities. Doing so will increase suffering and move us closer to the metaphorical doomsday midnight. We used to have the clock face showing 11:58 pm to show us the world was only two minutes from nuclear disaster due to conflicts with China and the now defunct Soviet Union. That clock needs to be rebranded as the environment/social collapse clock.

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