The Trump Test

By Mickey Friedman
December 29, 2016

Bewail and bemoan. Because you are more virtuous than those, insert here whatever variation of deplorable you prefer, who voted for that …

With their explosions of righteous indignation, you’d imagine these vociferous critics crowding our town squares, declaring their determination to make things right again. Because that’s what they’ve been doing all these years, isn’t it? Making sure our children don’t go hungry in America. Making sure people of color aren’t shot for doing the ordinary things that white people do. Like playing with toys or taking out their cellphones or driving cars.

Occupying every Congressional office to ensure working people have a living wage, and affordable housing. Their compassion impossible to contain as they insist Syrian children have the same opportunity to make it to ten as our children. Making sure someone is proven guilty before they’re blown out of the Afghan sky by a drone piloted in an underground bunker in Colorado.

Of course, committed to Isaiah 2:4, adamant that we beat swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks. Working tirelessly to take the multi-billions from the war profiteers and return it to the beleaguered taxpayers.

Maybe I missed all that.

Instead the bemoaners have filled Facebook pages with angst, and Twit long and hard. But what if, instead, we take The Trump Test.

Because if ever there was an opportunity to transform America, it is here and now.

Let’s embrace the challenge. Instead of mocking the slogan, let’s actually Make America Great Again. With community conversations in every small town and big city neighborhood. In every classroom in America, let’s have schoolchildren studying, and thinking and talking about exactly what A Great America looks like. Let’s demand every Congressperson and Senator tell us what their Great America looks like, and how exactly they’ll make it happen? With or without social security and affordable healthcare?

What does a great American small town look like? What does a great American neighborhood feel like?

So far, President-elect Trump’s America resembles a playground for the rich. His cabinet stuffed with billionaires and just plain old multi-millionaires. His idea of education is Betsy DeVos robbing the public coffers to fund private education. Andrew F. Puzder, his man for the Labor Department, has made a fortune underpaying ordinary Americans to flip his burgers. No raise in the minimum wage if Hardee’s has anything to say about it. Because, as Mr. Trump reminded us during the debates, wages are too high as it is. Here come the robots.

He’s turning our State Department over to Rex W. Tillerson because Exxon Mobil has done so well by us, except maybe during those times when none of us could afford gas and oil or when their tankers spilled oil onto our pristine landscape.

Remember those too-high wages. Except for when Rex Tillerson got a fifteen percent raise in 2013 to $40.3 million a year.

How about for just a moment we refrain from calling the Trump voters fascists and racists, and humbly ask them if they think it’s OK to cancel their overtime pay. To hand it over to the guys who make millions. The folks who’ve never flipped a burger. If asked politely, they might mull that one over.

What do they think about handing Treasury right back to Goldman-Sachs? Remember Hillary’s friends at Goldman-Sachs. That worked, right? Well, here’s Mr.Trump’s friend, Steven Mnuchin, former partner at Goldman, then hedge fund and Hollywood operator, protecting our hard-earned dough. What could possibly go wrong? Except maybe we go several more trillion over-budget. At least we’ll have special effects and go broke in 3-D

As for Scott Pruitt, soon of the new EPA. His idea for the environment is to favor the polluters rather than the endangered land, the water and the air. Pro-smog; anti-climate science.

Just maybe some Trump voters would prefer skies clearer than Beijing’s; maybe they’d like to snag a fish that isn’t covered with cancerous sores. Maybe they’d like their kids to see a glacier someday.

Maybe some conservatives still prefer some personal privacy. Mr. Trump’s proposed Director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, sees nothing wrong with monitoring the phone calls and whereabouts of every ordinary American, even law-abiding, non-Muslim, white people who bowl and love baseball and who absolutely positively were born here in the U.S, of A. Even if their parents came from Italy or Ireland.

Some Trump voters are parents with daughters. Just maybe they’re some of the 64% of Americans who’ll be disturbed that Tom Price, President Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, will work tirelessly to end the right of women to choose what to do with their bodies.

The Trump voters asked for change. I’m guessing the biggest change they’ll get is being screwed worse than ever. I can’t wait for all of us to take The Trump Test.

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For more information:

http://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2013/04/12/exxon-mobil-ceo-rex-tillerson-gets-15-percent-raise-to-40.3-million
Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson got a 15 percent pay hike to $40.3 million last year, according to a regulatory filing from the Irving-based oil giant released Friday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/politics/andrew-puzder-labor-secretary-trump.html?
“President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday chose Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that franchises the fast-food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor …
Speaking to Business Insider this year, Mr. Puzder said that increased automation could be a welcome development because machines were “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall or an age, sex or race discrimination case.”

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/11/donald-trump-insists-that-wages-are-too-high/
Donald J. Trump on Wednesday morning repeated a statement he made the night before in the Republican presidential debate: that wages are “too high” in the United States, an argument he made to explain his opposition to raising the minimum wage.

http://www.getnetworth.com/tag/rex-w-tillerson-annual-salary/
Rex W Tillerson Net Worth is 151.3 $Million. Rex W. Tillerson is the current Chairman, President, and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corporation, positions previously held by Lee Raymond.

http://fortune.com/2016/12/07/donald-trump-epa-scott-pruitt-climate-change/
Trump’s choice, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, fits neatly with the Republican president-elect’s promise to cut back the EPA and free up drilling and coal mining, and signals the likely rollback of much of Obama’s environmental agenda.
Since becoming the top prosecutor for the major oil and gas producing state in 2011, Pruitt has launched multiple lawsuits against regulations put forward by the agency he is now poised to lead, suing to block federal measures to reduce smog and curb toxic emissions from power plants.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/mike-pompeo-cia-trump-civil-liberties-231619
“The choice of the 52-year-old Kansas Republican, a rising star on the Intelligence Committee who was just reelected to his fourth term, alarmed privacy advocates, who are already gearing up to fight his nomination. The American Civil Liberties Union swiftly blasted Pompeo for beliefs it said raise “serious civil liberties concerns about privacy and due process.” … “He also bashed a series of surveillance reforms approved earlier this year that shuttered a program to collect bulk phone records, imposed limits on other types of data collection and instituted new public reporting requirements.”