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Solving Problems, Trump Style

Yes, Donald Trump is president of the United States. This is not a nightmare from which you will soon awaken. It is a fact; not an alternative fact, but a real, honest-to-goodness fact, as defined the old way.

During his bizarre, albeit successful, campaign for the White House, Mr. Trump identified a variety of ‘problems’ (see: alternative facts, above), that he is now setting about to solve. This writer would like to assist the president to the best of his ability, and he believes that Mr. Trump is looking beyond the mark, and is not recognizing the real causes of some serious problems he is attempting to address today. So, this writer will attempt to identify those, and offer solutions that he feels certain Mr. Trump would embrace.

Problem: Domestic terrorism. Solution: Register toddlers, not Muslims. More U.S. citizens were killed last year by armed toddlers than by Muslims, so the obvious threat is toddlers. Once a child reaches the stage where he or she is able to grasp something bigger than his/her mother’s finger, that child’s name must be on the Toddler Registry.

Now, some people may say that this is unfair. Why require all toddlers to register, when only a few kill people? Well, until we know what’s going on with these toddlers, we need to register them all. And, if a toddler has nothing to hide, why would he or she, or his or her parents, actually, object to being on the Toddler Registry?

It might also be helpful, but a little less practical, to prevent any new toddlers from entering the U.S. until we get things figured out. Most of them are already here; they just have yet to reach the dangerous toddler stage. This does appear to be a most duplicitous way for toddlers to enter the country, which in itself is most suspicious.

Problem: Location of Israeli Embassy. Solution: Move it to Washington, D.C., the eternal capital of Zionism. Where else should the Israeli embassy be, but in the heart of the U.S. capital? When checks need to be written, United Nations resolutions vetoed, genocide condoned and international law ignored, why should anyone have to travel all the way from the U.S. to Israel? Great amounts of taxpayer money can be saved by avoiding all these unnecessary first-class flights halfway around the world.

Problem: Citizens want health care. Solution: Just say no. This is not to imply that the government doesn’t care about its citizens. After all, members of Congress, who earn far more money than the average U.S. citizen, all have government-provided health care. But, the little people are not the ones who make the rules.

The government can do a lot for them, without angering the pharmaceutical and other medical lobbies.  It can put tips on healthy living on the government website. Encouraging people to eat vegetables and exercise is a lot cheaper than enabling them to see a physician. And, as we all know, if people have access to doctors, they are going to see them. They will run to them for every little thing: a sore throat, cough, lump on the breast, broken bones, etc. Really, how wasteful!

Problem: A hostile press. Solution: Trivialize it. We know that the media is owned by corporate America, which uses its own best interest as the basis for defining news. But that can be undercut, as was demonstrated on Mr. Trump’s first day as president. In his very first press briefing, Mr. Trump’s spokesman, one Sean Spicer, proclaimed that the crowds who watched Mr. Trump’s inauguration were the largest in history.

One must wonder just why this was so significant to the new president, that it was worthy of a special press briefing, but that is another topic altogether, although interesting in its own right. But there are two points to observe here: 1) the topic is nonsense, and 2), the information stated by Mr. Spicer was false. But, this falsehood, or ‘alternative facts’, as Kellyanne Conway later referred to them, when defending Mr. Spicer, did push the worldwide women’s marches protesting Mr. Trump off the news, at least for a time. So, while events of importance – the women’s marches, bombings in the Middle East, etc. – were happening, the media was agog over Mr. Spicer’s peculiar statements.

So in this instance, this writer cannot offer Mr. Trump advice, since he already has this particular ‘problem’ well in hand.

This writer does enjoy an occasional fanciful walk through the landscape of what passes as U.S. governance. However, as he is wont to do, he always returns to reality, that dismal world void of alternative facts. And he is concerned about Mr. Trump’s actions about the issues referenced above. Mr. Trump has not talked much lately about his plan to ban Muslims from entering the country, or registering those already here, but neither has he indicated that he has abandoned those ideas. His various spokespeople have said he is in the early stages of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, over the objections of the entire international community, with the sole exception of apartheid Israel itself. He has taken steps to dismantle the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), thus keeping a campaign promise to deprive 21 million people of health care.

This is the United States of America at the start of 2017. The so-called leader of the free world is more concerned about crowd numbers than those who comprised the crowd, more interested in ostracizing a world religion than seeing that it is accepted, as all religions should be accepted in a country that purports to be a democracy. He seems more focused on removing rights from the citizens of the nation, than of protecting them.

It is this Orwellian environment into which the world is now plunged. The future looks bleak indeed.