Dark and Damaged

The all pain, no gain tour.

The slash and burn strategy (actually, strategy is far too complimentary a term to attach to what we are witnessing) of Donald Trump has made us less safe, less healthy, less prosperous, less of anything and virtually everything that has allowed America the opportunity to be the one thing that Mr. Trump erroneously attaches to every gigantic blunder in his arsenal: great.

With his wild firings within the Federal Government he has significantly reduced not merely the federal workforce but the protections it provides us against disease, the eyes needed to keep us from bumping into one another in the sky, the people who can oversee the industries where abuse is likely to run rampant. The list is exhaustive and exhausting. Not merely attacking our own, but needlessly, maliciously, leaving other countries who are in dire need of our continued assistance, vulnerable and exposed.

And his announced tariff war with everyone from penguins up the food chain, has provided new definition for the term indiscriminate. His 90 day pause on all but China a response to our spontaneous combustion by way of stock market collapse. And his exemptions from hammering various products manufactured in China, the ones that would decimate the value of some of the very biggest players now in his pocket, a reaction to the loudest screaming in his ear.

Mr. Trump has told us for a decade we are a dystopia, dark and damaged. That we need his guidance, his vision, to recreate ourselves and our world in his image. That we have been overrun by those who steal our jobs, those who take advantage of our largesse, those who receive but do not give. And from his warped mind he has replied with chaos, abandoning the laws that give us structure, the jobs that give us purpose and protection, the friends and allies that make us more than we would otherwise be and the freedoms that give us voice, reason and a marketplace that strengthens and benefits all those who partake in it.

Donald Trump is blind to what we are, what drives us and maintains us. He is shooting at targets, internal and external, without understanding or thought of the consequence. The pain and distress he causes every single day catastrophic. The benefits nonexistent. We are weaker, stupider and less, far less, than we were before his crusade (with much apology to that word as well) of animus began.

The undeniable truth is that the one person bringing reality to the worst nightmares he has long suggested is the man Donald Trump stares at each day in the mirror.

Dark and damaged indeed.