Trump has been the President-elect for less than two weeks now. During his campaign a fair number of people defended him by saying he wasn’t really as bad as he was being portrayed; when he got elected we’d see how reasonable and moderate he was. He’s begun appointing his cabinet and other key positions and the picture that’s emerging is not very encouraging.
So far he’s appointed a racist, right-wing nut job as his chief strategist (Stephen Bannon), a xenophobe as his national security advisor (Michael Flynn), a CIA chief who believes torture is just fine (Michael Pompeo) , and an attorney general (Jeff Sessions) who once called an African-American attorney “boy” and called the ACLU (whose sole purpose is to protect First Amendment rights) “un-American” and “communist-inspired.”
Bannon has probably received the most negative press, as he came to Trump’s campaign directly from Breitbart, which has made no secret of their political attitudes in numerous articles. Flynn is a former general who, by all accounts, was respected by most during his earlier career, but he seemed to go off the rails later in his career in his attitudes about Muslims (he has said that Muslims as a group represent a threat because of their ideology and doesn’t understand how that’s offensive to moderate Muslims). To compare, if any here in the US were to refer to abortion-clinic bombers as “radical Christians,” I doubt if that would go over well. Most people I know who profess Christianity would not like to be connected, even tenuously, to such hate-filled people, yet Flynn sees no issue with lumping all Muslims together into a group we should be very afraid of. Pompeo wrote an article criticizing the Senate committee that investigated (and exonerated) Clinton for the Benghazi tragedy, and feels that waterboarding (which the Geneva Convention has outlawed as torture) should be used and in fact more aggressive torture should be fine too. Sessions has joked about the KKK, saying he thought they were “fine until he found out that they used pot.” And we should recall that during Reagan’s administration a Republican-dominated Senate declined to approve the nomination of Sessions to a position as a federal judge because of his reputation as a racist.
Quite a group. And we’re just getting started.
Trump is rewarding the people most loyal to him regardless of their qualifications or suitability for the job. At least so far, his statement that he’s going to be the president that “heals the division between Democrats and Republicans” and “unifies America” is a ridiculous charade, just like his candidacy. His appointees appear to be just as radical as his campaign promises.
I am not looking forward to the future under a Trump administration.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
And so it begins
Trump has been the President-elect for less than two weeks now. During his campaign a fair number of people defended him by saying he wasn’t really as bad as he was being portrayed; when he got elected we’d see how reasonable and moderate he was. He’s begun appointing his cabinet and other key positions and the picture that’s emerging is not very encouraging.
So far he’s appointed a racist, right-wing nut job as his chief strategist (Stephen Bannon), a xenophobe as his national security advisor (Michael Flynn), a CIA chief who believes torture is just fine (Michael Pompeo) , and an attorney general (Jeff Sessions) who once called an African-American attorney “boy” and called the ACLU (whose sole purpose is to protect First Amendment rights) “un-American” and “communist-inspired.”
Bannon has probably received the most negative press, as he came to Trump’s campaign directly from Breitbart, which has made no secret of their political attitudes in numerous articles. Flynn is a former general who, by all accounts, was respected by most during his earlier career, but he seemed to go off the rails later in his career in his attitudes about Muslims (he has said that Muslims as a group represent a threat because of their ideology and doesn’t understand how that’s offensive to moderate Muslims). To compare, if any here in the US were to refer to abortion-clinic bombers as “radical Christians,” I doubt if that would go over well. Most people I know who profess Christianity would not like to be connected, even tenuously, to such hate-filled people, yet Flynn sees no issue with lumping all Muslims together into a group we should be very afraid of. Pompeo wrote an article criticizing the Senate committee that investigated (and exonerated) Clinton for the Benghazi tragedy, and feels that waterboarding (which the Geneva Convention has outlawed as torture) should be used and in fact more aggressive torture should be fine too. Sessions has joked about the KKK, saying he thought they were “fine until he found out that they used pot.” And we should recall that during Reagan’s administration a Republican-dominated Senate declined to approve the nomination of Sessions to a position as a federal judge because of his reputation as a racist.
Quite a group. And we’re just getting started.
Trump is rewarding the people most loyal to him regardless of their qualifications or suitability for the job. At least so far, his statement that he’s going to be the president that “heals the division between Democrats and Republicans” and “unifies America” is a ridiculous charade, just like his candidacy. His appointees appear to be just as radical as his campaign promises.
I am not looking forward to the future under a Trump administration.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.