Donald J. Trump’s actions in his first 100 days in the Oval Office cannot be normalized as some commentators have attempted to do.
Mr. Trump is not just an incompetent purveyor of traditional Republican economic and social policies with some populist overtones.
He is a threat to our national security while at the same time threatening to tear apart our country’s moral fabric.
Mr. Trump’s foreign policy moves have been head-spinning, at first engaging in China, Iran, North Korea, NATO and NAFTA bashing and then seeming to back off while continuing to employ undiplomatic language.
In an area where precision is everything, Mr. Trump’s inability to articulate coherent policies is dangerous.
For a long time, Mr. Trump was seeking to reset our relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
As more and more information about Russian connections to the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to elect Mr. Trump came to light, however, Mr. Trump made an abrupt U-turn.
On the one hand, Mr. Trump has raised tensions with North Korea, even saying that he was sending an armada to the area when, in fact, our ships were heading in the other direction.
On the other hand, he announced last week that he wants South Korea to pay for the missile defense system which the United States is installing against North Korean missiles and which we had previously agreed to pay for.
The White House national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, had to bail out Mr. Trump on that blunder.
But, the next day Mr. Trump was saying that he was willing to meet with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. Go figure.
In still another undiplomatic move, Mr. Trump invited President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of drug suspects, to the White House, catching the State Department and the National Security Council completely off guard according to news reports.
At least Mr. Duterte was smart enough to say he had better things to do than meet with Mr. Trump.
On the domestic front, Mr. Trump continues to threaten the rule of law with his attacks on the judiciary.
His refusal to rid the White House of bigots and his continuing attacks on immigrants and Muslims undercuts every statement he makes about tolerance and respect.
In fact, the courts have used Mr. Trump’s own inflammatory words and those of his staff to block his restrictive executive orders.
And Mr. Trump remains a threat to our environment with his attacks on the Paris accords on global warming and his executive orders opening up federal lands to exploitation.
The damage that will result from failing to address the dangers to our environment threatens to destroy the sustainability of human life on this planet.
About the only thing normal about Mr. Trump is his one-page “plan” to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy without explaining how we’re going to pay for the lost revenues.
Deficit-conscious Republicans, who falsely mocked Democratic budgets as budget busting, create those lost revenues through “dynamic scoring,” which most economists dismiss in the same way they discredited supply-side economics.
Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics.”
I call it magical thinking.
But, I get it.
Republican deficits are a good thing. Democratic deficits are terrible.
Republican tax cuts for the wealthy will grow the economy.
Democratic tax cuts for the middle and lower classes will destroy the economy.
Republican revenue projections, however baseless, must be taken at face value. Democratic revenue projections, however well supported by independent analyses, are magical thinking.
Sadly, history tells us that it’s Republican administrations which have been guilty of magical thinking and led us to deep economic downturns.
Are we doomed to repeat this ideological recipe for disaster once again (double dip recession anyone?), or will cooler heads listen to the danger signals raised by mainstream economists?
Donald Trump has done a lot to enhance the value of the Trump Organization and his own finances since he entered the Oval Office and his tax plan is just the latest example of where his interests lie.
The question that remains is when will the workers who put Mr. Trump in the White House recognize that what’s great for Donald Trump and his billionaire friends won’t bring back the great jobs that he promised them?
Jay N. Feldman
Port Washington
