The Ignominious Parade of Americans Whom Trump Has Wronged

The Ignominious Parade of Americans Whom Trump Has Wronged

Trump wants a Parade, and there are many who are anxious to give him one to register their complaints. Without military vehicles and bands, they can do it for little cost down the Capitol mall.

We start with the 565 innocent immigrant children seeking asylum, who still haven’t been returned to their parents. They can each be accompanied by their foster families who will be taking care of them through their maturity. Behind them are the 2,000 immigrant children seeking asylum who were also traumatically separated and mistreated, but who were restored to their families.

Update:  In keeping with my love of presenting numbers, and in the numerical lyrics of “76  Trombones”, I can now add to the parade 175 past intelligence leaders who protest the perhaps unconstitutional “prior restraint on free speech” of Trump’s removing security clearances for past intelligence officers who speak out in opposition to Trump.

I can also now add the 487 people, companies, or institutions who Trump has attacked on Twitter, according to the NY Times.  A great example for young kids “Being Best” on social media.

Then we get to the free printed press. Their number has been decreasing, but we have to limit their participation, so we only include as many as the number of times that Trump has said FAKE News, which is now over 400. They can be led by Jeff Bezos, who now owns the Washington Post, and as founder and CEO of Amazon, has received many Trump insults and threats.

They are followed by the TV media, limited to the number of people who have looked up or shown instances where Trump or Rudy or Sean or Sarah or Kellyanne have denied statements which have been contradicted by videotapes.

We need to include all of the State Department experts whom Trump has tried to fire in his proposed cuts. Since this is too vast, we have to limit it to those experts who were fired or quit due to Trump’s ignoring their expertise or advice. These would be led by the experts who wrote the 100 page background and advice Reports for Trump’s one-idiot-on-one-expert meetings with Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir “KGB” Putin, which Trump totally ignored.

In health care, there is no Washington venue large enough to hold the 32 million threatened to lose their Obamacare health insurance by Trump’s first health care proposal. There is no room for the number of people who buy the Trump-Cheap healthcare policies that do not cover essential illnesses and find that they are financially destroyed by their coverage limits.

There have to be some representations for the 4,000 lies told by Trump. I doubt that any community would allow its band members to march in such a parade to make up part of the 4,000. Since a lot of the lies were about the effect of the tax cuts, maybe just 4,000 representatives of employees who’s companies used their sharp reduction in corporate tax rates to fatten shareholders by stock buybacks, and not increase employee salaries.

There have to be representatives of the 700,000 DACA Dreamers put in limbo for the benefit of Trump’s political leverage in dealing with Democrats, especially concerning building his Wall.

No parade is complete without its motor-cycle contingent.  In this case it would be the many Harley Davidson hog drivers, who are slandered by Trump’s calling Harley Davidson “unpatriotic”.

The intellectual contingent could consist of dedicated government scientists who work for the EPA, and who have been let go or transferred, or whose advise will now be ignored in favor of industry scientists.

Representatives from schools which have been attacked by crazed gunmen will be included to protest Trump’s lack of action on preventing school violence, especially through improving gun purchase restrictions.

There are so far no victims of those who will now receive government school funding by Trump-University-like private schools, but be defrauded by not finding employment, due to Betsy DeVos’s cancellation of Obama’s restrictions. I’m sure there will be many for next year’s parade.

If Trump’s pre-selected two Supreme Court appointments are successful in reversing Roe vs. Wade, there will be a fair fraction of women who would be denied abortions in their home states.  In the current data (2014), there are about 650,000 abortions a year. That is still a lot, but a huge decline from the 1.4 million abortions per year in 1990. In 2014, there were 186 abortions per 1,000 live births. Using the at least 20 year terms of the newly appointed Justices, up to 13 million women could be affected. There is clearly not enough parade space for all of these, but maybe the challenged Planned Parenthood society, which could have prevented many abortions among poor people, could march in their honor. Planned Parenthood says 80% of its patients receive services to prevent unwanted pregnancies. In 2014, it performed half of all abortions.

Well, like all parades, the list of marchers goes on and on. But, you get the idea.

The theme for this article was inspired by the March “76 Trombones” for the movie “The Music Man”.  But thinking through an analogy, the supposed hero of The Music Man was a defrauding con artist.  The heroine was a school librarian “Marian the Librarian” protecting the children.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
This entry was posted in 2018 Midterm Election, Affairs of State, Affordable Care Act, AHCA, Children, Donald Trump, Dreamers, Families Belong Together, First Amendment, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Assemble, Freedom to Petition, Humor, Kellyanne, March For Our Lives, North Korean Nuclear Agreement, NRA, School Security, Secretary of Education, Supreme Court, Trump Administration, Trump Budget, Trump Tax Cuts, Trump Wall. Bookmark the permalink.

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