Don't Read This Book

If you are, like me, someone who is upset about what is happening in Washington, D.C., maybe you don't want to read David Cay Johnson's "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America."  I haven't even finished "Fire and Fury," the book about the chaos in the White House, but I've been watching interviews with Johnson and had to check out his book.

I already find myself on the verge of tears about this country I love and what is happening to it.  The combination of my mother and Donald Trump leaves me feeling like the title of an article I read about Judy Garland once, "Always on the edge of a scream."

Jeri tells me there is always hope, but when I read the things Trump has done to destroy the country we all know, I wonder that even if he is no longer in the White House, how long it is going to take to "get our country back."

For example,

• To overhaul the federal Department of Education, Trump chose an heiress with no background in education theory of administration, but an intense desire to promote schooling that is corporate run and free to be religious.
• To run Housing and Urban Development, he picked a retired surgeon with no administrative experience, no housing expertise, and who has said that the Egyptian pyramids were not tombs for dead pharaohs but granaries.
• At Treasury, Trump chose for secretary a Wall Street banker who made much of his fortune aggressively foreclosing on homeowners.
• To run the Environmental Protection Agency, he chose a lawyer who had vowed to destroy it.
• For Surgeon General, a job where a principal duty is to persuade Americans to not take up smoking, Trump named a physician who owned tobacco company stocks.

He is doing his darndest to stifle the free press.  Bit by bit, he's destroying all of the progress Obama made in health care, environmental protection (you will soon be able to drill for oil wherever you want), protection for national parks, etc., etc., etc.

Tomorrow morning, the Trump administration is expected to announce a new rule enabling its civil rights office to shield workers who refuse to provide abortion-related care and services to transgender people on religious grounds. The rule would reportedly allow HHS to punish organizations that don’t allow practitioners to express these objections. This administration will allow "do no harm" to become "my harm to you is religiously based and paid for by your taxes."

Every day there is some new erosion of the advances we have worked so hard to achieve.  When is he going to decide to reverse same sex marriage?  It's obviously coming.

I am only 3% into this book and already I am even more depressed than I was before.

I want to say..."...and the worst part is..." but just when I've said the "worst part" something worse comes along.  One of the worst parts is the silence by most Republicans, who seem to be following along like sheep.  Only a handful are showing any spine at all.  What does the president have on each of them that is making them keep silent?

Another worst thing is that his base is loving this.  I saw a video on Facebook yesterday, made by an enthusiastic Trump supporter.  It was in response to the "shithole" comments and this woman was completely ecstatic.  This is HER president and he's "freaking awesome!"

She kept saying it over and over again.  She was positively orgasmic that this was her president and that he was "freaking awesome."

I was literally sick to my stomach watching her, thinking of the 800,000 young people whose lives hang in the balance while he talks about the shithole countries that they come from and how he wants them OUT of here.

Yeah.  I'll continue reading this book, but it's not going to go a long way toward making me think that there is always hope.