It feels like Trump is sniffing out all the issues that are sensitive with the majority of the population and then looks for any way possible to impose a kind of bill that will get on the nerves of the largest amount of people on any given one of these issues.
Let’s take one of his latest projects: abortion. It is so blindingly obvious that this thing is annoying not only Americans, but also a large portion of the Western Europeans. But voicing your outrage has never proven to be the way to make Trump change his mind, if anything it just fuels his conviction that his is the way to go, that this is an issue to attach his name to.
It seems highly likely that this behavior is a reflection of an agenda he has for the future that he is yet unwilling to disclose in detail, but clues to the nature of which exist implicitly and can be speculated upon. Throughout his presidency and leading up to it, he has vowed to return jobs to the industrial sector, thus targeting the personal interests of a large part of the actively voting population. That was one of the points that secured his victory. He set up construction projects, getting Melania to cut pretty ribbons here and there, getting big ‘hurrahs’ from his most obvious fan base. But who cares if these projects are ever really seen through to completion? (Think of the Mount Pleasant fiasco as the latest example of this.)
He looked good on the news, fed his people favorable statistics about the percentage increase in the amount of jobs in the manufacturing sector. Jobs were created, he lived up to that promise, but what about the wages? And the rise in prices on a large amount of goods as a result of his infamous bickering with China…But appearances are what matters and the building up of a multifaceted image also seems of importance, since this way, when confronted with the less favorable numbers, he can always find some other data to contradict them without necessarily lying. And thus, he continues to confuse and mislead a notable portion of those who elected him, keeping his popularity just high enough to continue his less advertised side-projects.
He positioned himself as a friend of the worker from the very start of his campaign. And though he is anyone’s friend if you ask him, he never promised to place women or human rights advocates first. You can hardly criticize the man for not committing to the promises he made during his campaign. His main focuses were returning jobs to the manufacturing sector, to continue the nasty tradition of American interference in Middle-Eastern affairs, to build a wall, to cut taxes. (Details were not specified, he offered a vision of the big picture, as he does.) This provided him with support from a big portion of hillbillies and the ultra-patriotic ‘God bless America’-crowd. He approached the campaign as a businessman and targeted the largest market, his marketing strategy was borderline flawless.
As for human rights, supporting them is not as profitable as advocating their violation. Banning guns? Huh, as if, need to test them on the general public before selling them off to the Arabs. Persecuting the Saudis for killing a journalist? But he’s got a real estate empire to run and they have the biggest money. Investing tax-payer money into healthcare and education? Yeah right, the military is way more worth it; also, America has an image of external affair interference to upkeep ever since the mid-20th century.
With a brief look at the proposed budget funding plan for 2020 (as seen, for example, on The Washington Post) it becomes very obvious that it was never really America first in the way it was initially marketed. It’s a very vague word combination and it has been entirely misunderstood: in his view, it’s anything-related-to-increasing-America’s-external-influence first.
So this whole abortion issue is hardly surprising. Almost every American president in the last century or so has been demonstratively anti-communist. Trump has been pretty quiet on that issue. Though, of course, he’ll say anything he has to say to win over the crowd he’s addressing at any given moment (so he can be both a great friend and a great enemy of Communism at the same time). He is, after all, a businessman.
But, of course, he wants to abolish abortion. Who cares if they’re children of incest or rape? All the better, they’ll be children with no future, from a resentful household, probably with some crippling insecurities and abandonment issues. They’ll be in search of a father figure, all the more obedient to Uncle Sam for lack of anything to lose or anything better to strive for – what with the unrealistic costs of education, among other things – and a whole plethora of unresolved grievances that they’ll be more than willing to unleash on future enemies of Democracy. In communist states adults have always been encouraged in various ways to produce healthy communist babies. You can’t play that card in an individualist society where the development of the self is seen as the greatest virtue with kids being regarded as an extra that is desirable by some but not the primary goal in the lives of most. But banning abortion is effective. They’ll complain now, they’ll definitely still be complaining in years to come if this law sticks and it will be condoned by progressive European states as anti-humanitarian, just as the Communists were condemned in the past. But the reaction of the Pro-Choicers is hardly relevant when you have sound-proof walls and the capacity to block haters on Twitter.
Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can whine all they want about abortion being a constitutional right, Trump will see that before the end of his presidency, be it through impeachment or failure to get reelected, he will get the anti-abortion law passed in as many states as he can. Sure, if the next president is Pro-Choice, which is most probable, they’ll spend their four or eight years in office trying to undo this, but the necessary damage will have been done. Trump will be happily picking chicken wings out of his KFC bucket somewhere on a golf club patio while watching Fox & Friends cover the national struggle to undo his policies. He’ll rub his hands with delight, knowing that when this new generation of non-aborted babies comes of age, the American Army will be greater than when the Boomers started to be enlisted for service in Vietnam. America will truly be great again: bigger, more blood-thirsty and desperate than ever. We’ve had the Lost and the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, some letters of the alphabet. Next up is the Trump Generation. He will go down in history as a man with a great knack for putting his name on big things that are hideous to the eye.