During his campaign for president, Donald Trump bragged about the size of his penis. Since taking office, by any reasonable measure, he has made more wild, unsubstantiated boasts than any president in living memory. Is he just compensating for his political impotence?
His latest distorted distraction is a claim that Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in our election makes America look weak. In truth, it is Trump’s flaccid policies and statements that have actually weakened our country.
Let’s start with his rollbacks of environmental protection. The latest – – unwinding safety regulations on oil drilling that were put in place after the disastrous BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico – – makes America look like a lamb waiting for another fossil-fueled wolf to slaughter by inviting more reckless exploitation of our natural resources and communities (especially in the public lands and sacred sites he recently stripped of their protections too). His withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and his representatives’ promotion of coal and oil at the recent climate talks in Bonn make us look foolish and backward, two glaring signs of weakness to the world.
And what could look weaker than a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing? Take health care, for example. For nearly two years of campaigning, he bragged he could repeal Obamacare and replace it with a plan that would provide healthcare to more Americans for less cost. But when he took office, that turned out to be a total fabrication resulting in his assertion that “nobody knew healthcare was so complicated” and the inevitable reply from late-night comedians “just about everyone knew, except you, Mr. President!” If the policies he has since supported come to fruition, countless Americans will be less healthy and, quite literally, weaker.
Yet another example of his flaccid presidency are the appointments he has made to his cabinet and the judiciary. Virtually none of his cabinet members, from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Health Secretary Ben Carson (not to mention his nepotistic appointment of clueless family members to his White House inner circle), have any government experience. Or his appointment of Brett Talley, who has never tried a case in his life, to be a federal judge, not to mention his nomination to another lifetime judgeship of Matthew Peterson, who couldn’t answer any basic questions about the law during his confirmation hearing. When added to Trump’s apparent lack of understanding of (or interest in) how government works, what greater signs of a weak government and rule-of-law could America show to the world?
But as they say in TV ads, “wait, there’s more.” Take Trump’s demonstrably false statement that the FBI, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, was “in tatters.” If this was in fact true, the President of the United States is essentially inviting criminals, foreign and domestic, to have their way with America, advertising that we’re too weak to investigate crimes (or to prosecute them with judges that are clearly unqualified to sit on the bench). Or how about the racist hate crimes that he invites by appearing to support Nazi rabble-rousers and candidates like Roy Moore, which divide and weaken our nation from within.
Another obvious sign of weakness is running away. How else should the world interpret the leader of a country that wants to literally build a wall to keep out anyone who doesn’t look like him and whose immigration policies have repeatedly been struck down by the courts for their obvious fearful bias of a religion that he doesn’t share?
Finally (the list actually goes on much longer, but my word count isn’t endless), let’s consider a president who is willing to risk nuclear war with childish insults to an unstable North Korean dictator. His gutting of the State Department only adds to his inability to even try to find a peaceful resolution of such issues, like hanging a “kick me” sign on America’s back.
Mr. Trump’s incompetence has not just made America appear weak, it has sadly made our country actually weaker at home and abroad. His campaign slogan was based on a false premise about America before he took office, but now raises a legitimate need. If only there was a pill we could give this president to give him real political manhood, perhaps he could stop faking it and start to make America great again.