Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his role as Speaker of the House of Representatives on October 2nd, 2023, through the filing of a motion to vacate by the one person everyone knew was going to file the motion because he was the strongest arm in implementing a new rule saying the Speaker could be ousted by a single motion to vacate: Florida’s District 1 Representative, Matt Gaetz.
“He’s the product of a corrupt system that rewards people who collect large sums of special interest money,” Gaetz said of McCarthy, “and then redistribute that money in exchange for political loyalty and political favors.”
Sound familiar? The refrain of politicians being out of touch or incompetent because money made them so is an old one, and has been around for generations. “I don’t think they think about people like us,” said a gas station cashier in an interview twenty-some years ago about the two candidates in the upcoming 2000 U.S. presidential election. “Maybe if they lived in a two-bedroom trailer, it would be different.”
Political ambitions aside, what Rep. Matt Gaetz is accomplishing (among other things) is articulating the anger, helplessness and resentment many Americans feel regarding the political establishment which, it seems, has always listened to richer and more important voices than their own.
Ironically, a few weeks after this in New Hampshire, similarly-minded attendees of a Trump rally were spouting ridiculous answers to why they were still supporting the former president after all this time: “He’s the only man to do the job that’s in front of us,” one said. “He’s taken care of everything that he promised he was going to,” said another. “He is a man for the people,” some moron actually took the time to expend the breath and mental energy to disclose.
Trump was seen as an outsider during his 2016 campaign; his populist and nationalist promises are what (almost miraculously) helped vault him into the presidency. And it was with the same sense of anger, helplessness, apostasy and hope that these anxieties would be forever dashed, that many people saw in him such an iconoclastic figure, and continue to support him to this day.
But after listening to those New Hampshirites, and needing something to restore my faith in human evolution, I went and actually looked into it. What were Trump’s major black-and-white accomplishments as president, one of the categorically and historically worst in U.S. history?
Let’s look.
Trump administration (TA)
- Overhauled U.S. Tax Code
- Created the Space Force branch of the military
- Staffed the Federal Judiciary
- First Step Act
- U.S. – China Phase One Trade Agreement
- Cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership
- Re-negotiated NAFTA
- Congressional acts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic[1]
Quickly, I’m going to go over how pertinent these things actually were to Trump’s leadership, and, if applicable, how effective they were in helping further establish the country as a sometimes-assistive, sometimes-hands-off and overall prosperous place for a majority of the citizenry.
Tax code: a regressive tax benefiting corporations and the wealthy over time, with tax relief for lower income households stagnating after a few years. Paul Ryan and establishment Republicans had far more to do with it than Trump. None of the administration’s promises or promised trickle-down effects have yet to (or ever will) pan out.
Space Force: While war hawks in the military warned of America’s enemies (Russia, China) branching out into space, presumably to ultimately drop a bunch of nuclear bombs to benefit themselves somehow, the jury is still out on this one. Except to say it wasn’t a Trump original (the idea goes back to Eisenhower, and Reagan and W. Bush almost pulled it off), and its budget today stands at $28 billion, most of which goes to building tracking and detection mechanisms, a solar-powered space base and developing methods of fast materiel transport.
Federal judiciary: pretty much all Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Republican-controlled Senate and the Federalist Society’s doing. Trump just pointed a finger, nodded his head and signed the papers.
First Step Act: It gave a step forward to addressing the problems of mass incarceration and major drug offenses here in America. These issues have been serious problems for decades, but Trump was the first in a long while to sign a relevant bill into law.
U.S. – China deal: Trump picked a fight with China by raising import tariffs. China, of course, fought back, and a trade war ensued. In January 2020, the two countries agreed to a deal whereby China would agree to buy an extra $200 billion of U.S. imports over two years. Two years later, China had done no such thing, and the deal was a failure. It should also be noted that, as of 2023, the Biden administration (BA) has kept those same Trump-era tariffs in place.
Cancelling the TPP: This was sort-of good for American workers, keeping jobs from being further offshored (and benefiting workers’ rights around the world). You could tell Trump had an inkling of how bad the TPP would have been, had it been implemented.
Re-negotiating NAFTA: No one really can say how the country has benefited from the 2019 deal, the newly-named United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA). But, since NAFTA was designed to benefit U.S. corporations from the start, I’m guessing all these potential worker benefits you hear being discussed will never quite pan out.
And the COVID-19 congressional acts: Trump again just signed a piece of paper after Congress had worked out the details.
As for the failures and lies of Trump himself and his administration, I won’t list them here. (But you can click some of these words if you want to be reminded.)
Anything else anyone could say about Trump is outside the realm of objectivity (or even factuality), and isn’t worth a second listen. Unless you like watching FOX News, listening to conservative talk radio or podcasts or look at pundits and commissars arguing back and forth on primetime television.
Now what about Joe Biden?
Biden administration (BA)
- American Rescue Plan
- Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
- Inflation Reduction Act
- Wartime aid to America’s allies
- something else, probably (it doesn’t matter)
As to the categorical relevance/overall harm of these efforts, time will tell. Arguably, an economic downside has already been noticed—e.g., the inflation that has in part resulted from the American Rescue Plan (though it not only started with the TA’s COVID-19 bills, it also merits pointing out that as much fault lies with those who spend the money as those who hand it out, and with both administrations and/or concurrent congressional members).
Having gathered all this in front of me, it wasn’t too hard to see the objective similarities: potential job creation, maintaining American dominance and hegemony, moving the country forward (whatever that means). The differences, really, lie in the ideology, masked by the platform (which translates into the question: ‘Who really benefits by these decisions?’), and the core belief systems of individual party politicians and voter-members. In a word: individuality.
People and their deeply embedded belief systems and accompanying cognitive biases are going to say what they will, think what they will and believe whatever they’re going to about anything, and then likely choose up sides. No amount of polling, numbers crunching, interviews, investigative reporting or muckrake journalism will change that. Adults do and think what they want in a free society, and believe that what they do and think is the correct way to do and to think in a free society.
And what they tend to think about all this, is that there’s not much about the U.S. government in which to have faith. That sentiment has continued on a downward trend (into the gutter) over the last 60 years, and the numbers show that whatever political party happens to be in power during whatever quadrennium makes virtually no difference.
The reasons haven’t changed, either: real wages stagnating for the lower and middle classes, rents rising to ridiculous levels, jobs disappearing overseas for cheaper labor markets, the dissolution or downsizing of seemingly robust companies, some foreseen/unforeseen man-made/natural catastrophe that greatly disrupts the economic system, etc. Some of these have likely reached you or me in the past, personally or merely in mention. And when they have, were we given the actual reasons?
We weren’t, no. So, here they are:
Greed. Ineptitude. Lackadaisical oversight. Carelessness. Don’t-give-a-shit-ism. Greed. Fear of money loss. [You pick the unflattering noun]. All via the actions of people who have more money and power than we do: politicians, businesspeople (executives, bankers, owners, managers, board members, investors, etc.), or others whose job description it is to foster any one of those unflattering nouns, all in the name of money and the pursuit of power.
In the end, some 80% of Americans (who don’t fall into any of the above categories) have a lot more in common with each other—socially, economically, civically—than they may want to think. Their prospects are waning, and because of that, they want change in the upper echelons (and would even support a man like Donald Trump to get it). They want representation. They want a better life (without having to measure it against someone living in South Sudan, say). They want peace. They want prosperity.
We’re in the same lifeboat, basically. What hard-right Republicans did in the U.S. House, ousting McCarthy and dismantling the system, even saying negative things about the first nominee afterwards for the Speakership, Steve Scalise, like, “We [still] need a trajectory change,” is do and say exactly what a lot of people want to, only without having to do it in the voice of Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy, Lauren Boebert or (God forbid) Marjorie Taylor Greene, and without wanting to fundamentally believe the same things as the most close-minded, narrow-minded, uninformed, belligerent and fixated of Americans.
But sometimes, you just can’t choose your own lifeboat. Not when your country keeps looking more and more, over time, like a sinking cruise ship to everyone traveling in steerage.
[1] – the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the CARES Act & the Consolidated Appropriations Act.
