Make America Great Again - MAGA Unmasked

Written on:  October 17, 2020

We the People of the United States (WtP, We, Us, Our, etc.) have provided a model of democracy for the world to follow for more than 244 years.  Never have Our democratic principles been put to the test as thoroughly as they have over the past four years.

I have watched America undergo some pretty significant changes over these past four years.  As I think back to what was happening four years ago, I am struck by the catch phrase used by Donald Trump and his Trumpers in their effort to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential Election.  The phrase then was “Make America Great Again” (MAGA).  As the years have passed, I have been vigilantly trying to figure out to which specific era Trump was trying to return Us, which era of America was the greatest in his mind.  The only answers I have been able to come up with that matched my observations during these years of Trump were the early 1860s, the late 1910s, or the late 1950s to early 1960s.

As I have often done over these four years of Trump’s Presidency, I was responding this morning to something he recently wrote on Twitter, and I had an epiphany.  Trump wasn’t intending to bring America back to some great point in the long-ago past.  He was working to destroy America now to make Us realize that We were taking America’s greatness for granted.  America was the great Country it had grown to become, but cracks in that greatness were beginning to appear and We need to act now to prevent a total collapse.

How did We get to this point in Our history?

In 2008, America demonstrated to the world the greatness We had achieved when We elected our first non-Caucasian President.  The many successes of the Melting Pot that combined the best of all races and cultures into one, blended society was on full display, shining across the globe for all the world to witness.

Among the promises of the 2008 Presidential campaign was the need for all Americans to have health care coverage.  As expected, the Democrats and Republicans had very different ideas as to how to resolve the health care deficiencies in America.  However, along with winning the Presidency, the Democrats also won control of both Houses of Congress and held all the cards.  As popularized by Stan Lee in the Spider-Man comics, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Abuse of that power by the Democrats in Congress sparked a Second Civil War, pitting Republicans against Democrats with the sole objective of each side being nothing more than to inflict pain on the other (war).

The first shot fired in this modern Civil War came on March 23, 2010, when the Democrats utilized its power and some unprincipled maneuvering to force the Affordable Care Act through with zero support from Republicans. The United States desperately needed a health care system that covered all Americans, but the cost of forcing it through in such a partisan manner has been very high.

So, what happened in 2010?  The Affordable Health Care for America Act was passed by the House of Representatives on November 11, 2009 and passed to the Senate where Democrats had acquired a filibuster-proof majority with Senator Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party in April 2009.  The Senate went on to pass the Bill on December 24, 2009 with no Republican Senators voting in favor.

On January 19, 2010, a Republican was elected to replace Ted Kennedy, the recently deceased Democratic Senator from Massachusetts.  With that election, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority.  In order to avoid the reconciliation process that occurs whenever a Senate Bill differs from a House Bill, the House opted to pass the Senate Bill approved by the Senate on Christmas Eve rather than face the filibuster that would have occurred during reconciliation.  The agreement in the House to pass the Senate version came with a promise to fix the objectionable components of the Senate Bill after it became law.

In the 2012 Election, the Republicans gained enough Senate seats to take Senate control away from the Democrats.  Rather than lead the Republican Party in an attempt to work with President Obama during his second term in Office, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky opted instead to dig his heels in and block every legislative attempt the Democrats tried to put forth from 2013 – 2017, eventually earning himself the nickname of Grim Reaper.

The Civil War between the Democrats and Republicans set up the Perfect Storm for Donald Trump to be elected President in November 2016 using his infamous slogan, “Make America Great Again” or MAGA.  From January 20, 2017 through today, Trump has worked to bring more misery to Americans than We have experienced since at least the Vietnam War era.  He gave a voice to the tens of millions of white racists (now proclaiming themselves Trumpers) occupying the right wing of the Republican Party.  Trump catering exclusively to the Trumpers led to the splintering of the former Republican Party that is likely to never repair itself.

With the Republican Party now split between Trumpers and a number of coalitions that are publicly denouncing Trumpism, including formalized groups such as The Lincoln Project, Republican Voters Against Trump, and 43 Alumni for Joe Biden, Trump is once again using his MAGA slogan to keep his Trumpers engaged with him.  He was elected in 2016 to MAGA, so why is he reusing the slogan for 2020?

With 17 days until the Election of November 3, 2020 Election, I feel as though I have finally figured out how Trump might actually make America great again.  Through his overt attempts to destroy everything about Us that is American, Trump has forced Us to reunite Our liberal and conservative citizens in a common fight against racism and fascism.  From this experience, he has given Us the opportunity to come together and fight to avoid the fate that befell Germany in the 1930s.

Civil War in America, 21st Century Style

Written on:  November 13, 2016

The signs are clear, but recognition is slow to come.  The United States of America is once again engaged in a Civil War among its citizenry, but it isn’t recognized as a War because the death toll isn’t what it was during the Civil War of the 1860s.  The signs are there, but The Establishment that currently has a firm grip on the power needed to rule the United States Government does not want us to see those signs and it is not willing to acknowledge this War, likely because they are what sparked it in the first place.

What exactly is The Establishment?  The Establishment is the group of career politicians and their dedicated followers that control the Political Parties of the United States.  The Establishment represents itself and its own interests at the expense of We the People.  The Establishment builds war chests by soliciting funds from people and organizations that don’t represent the people, We the People, that The Establishment claims it represents during General Election campaigns.

Regardless how many of us feel about the outcome of the 2016 General Election, the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders deserve to be recognized for exposing a series of undemocratic policies held in place by both the Republican and Democratic Establishments.  On the Democratic side, the concept of the Super Delegate gained widespread attention and consternation.  Super Delegates are the Democratic Establishment’s trump card (no pun intended) for overriding the people of the Democratic Party if the people try to choose a candidate that isn’t supported by The Establishment.  The implementation of that strategy became blatantly obvious when Democratic National Committee e-mail messages were exposed that specifically discussed The Establishment’s favoritism of Hillary Clinton over Sanders.

On the Republican side, as Trump began to emerge as the front runner among the Republican Party members, the Republican Establishment overtly scrambled in an attempt to move the members away from this candidate The Establishment couldn’t control.  The more The Establishment pushed, the harder the members pushed back.  Even the media got involved in the effort to stop Trump from becoming President.  However, all the anti-Trump strategies backfired because We the People fought increasingly harder against every attempt by The Establishment and the media to manipulate our vote, and the manipulators appeared dumbfounded of the unanticipated impact they were having on the voters.  Or, were they?

Because the Democratic Establishment decided early in the Election Cycle which candidate it was going to support, the campaign of Establishment outsider Sanders was successfully crushed following an unexpected hard-fought battle from his grass-roots movement within the Party.  The Republican Establishment, on the other side of the aisle, however, provided its membership with seventeen different candidates to choose from.  This turned into a strategic blunder that allowed a non-Establishment candidate to be selected by Party members as the Party’s flag bearer.

As the 2016 Election Season matured, a need arose for a viable Third Party candidate for President that could offer a third alternative to voters who were crying out for a better option than what the Democratic and Republican Parties were offering.  However, as the Presidential Debates approached, The Democratic and Republican Establishments colluded with each other, along with the national media, to ensure no Third Party candidate could emerge.  Although there were two Third Party campaigns that worked to obtain enough ballot access to theoretically win the 270 votes needed from the Electoral College, The Establishment successfully blocked access to the Presidential Debates for those Third Party candidates, thus preventing We the People from getting to know those candidates well enough to consider them viable alternatives to Trump and Clinton.

Although the successful campaign of Donald Trump delivered a major blow to The Establishment, both Houses of Congress escaped the scrutiny of We the People and remain under The Establishment’s tight grip.  If We the People don’t seize this opportunity to further weaken the solid grip The Establishment has had over the United States Government, then our voices will soon die in the wind once again.

So, what does The Establishment have to do with a Civil War?  Frankly, The Establishment has created an environment of divisiveness that this country hasn’t seen since the Civil Rights riots of the 1960s.  Police are killing unarmed civilians, the public is rushing to judgment before the facts of the shootings are known, civilians have taken up arms to ambush policemen that have had nothing to do with the shootings, and we are seeing mass riots immediately following a Constitutionally sound General Election.  Today’s wars do not occur on the Battlefield as they did in the 1860s, so if these acts of violence against that are emerging due to our overly corrupted system of Government, then perhaps war has become a term that should simply be removed from the modern dictionary.

We the People have been awakened from a long slumber and we need to keep ourselves awake long enough to make enough changes to ensure there is never a repeat of the 2016 Election Season.  If you don’t like what you’ve just witnessed, then act now to begin fixing things.  Waiting three years for the next Election Season to begin will be too late for us to make any substantial changes, so be warned that inaction now will give us the potential to find ourselves in the same exact position four years from today.