Last week was a turning point week. America has found a path to renewal through George Floyd. Protests have upped the charges against the cops. The same old same old doesn’t work anymore. Violent looters can’t hijack the moral vision. Even Trump can’t reverse the trend toward reversing racism. Too bad for him. Now he can’t use racism anymore without really appearing racist. There’s no cover. And so the Republicans who have been quiet are speaking out, and ashamed. Trump is toast? Looks like it.
My guest is Filipino American history professor Daniel Phil Gonzales of San Francisco State University.
Tag Archives: Trump
Emil Guillermo: Trump praises Australia’s single-payer plan after taking victory lap for passing sub-standard Trump-No-Care.
“You have better health care than we do!”
So said Donald Trump to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
One problem. Australia’s great system is essentially a universal care, national system that takes care of its people.
TrumpNoCare does the exact opposite. He lets healthy young people and rich people off the hook. No more mandatory insurance, but that’s precisely why premiums will go up. Insurance is based on large pools so that risks are spread. When you don’t require young healthy people or rich people to buy insurance and broaden the pool, then those who will suffer are the sick, the poor, the middle class and the elderly. That is to say, most of America.
Unless we get a system like Australia.
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Emil Guillermo: Trump Failure on Obamacare a Victory for the People
Repeal and Replace?
Not the Donald, though maybe that will come in time, sooner than we think.
But today’s failure is epic.
Turns out you can say no to the Donald.
The president who was seeking to take away health care from 24 million people just couldn’t get the deal done.
The man who prides himself in being the master negotiator couldn’t get the majority of Congress to commit what I call “medically-assisted political suicide.”
And in the end, even the president had to realize it was better to cut his losses and pull the bill before a vote.
Immediately, he started to blame the Democrats. But for what?
For making sure that millions stay insured with essential health care they need?
“Let Obamacare explode,” Trump said from the White House after the aborted vote.
Fact is, Obamacare is not exploding. No doubt there are problems with ACA, but mostly it’s due to the insurance and drug companies that want to assure profitability rather than people’s health. That’s one area that needs fixing. Under a more universal broad pool, with the largest possible number of insureds who can spread the risks of health care, Obamacare would work better. That would be an emulation of Medicare, a single-payer plan. That’s the answer to many of the problems with ACA.
Republicans don’t like to admit that Obamacare was a compromise to begin with. And now it’s working like a compromise, with some people upset, and many happy they finally have some coverage.
But how do you control costs? Or streamline it?
The replacement, Trumpcare, wouldn’t have done any of that.
It would have cut off care and insureds and decimated everything, It would have left the country in a bigger health care mess than you can imagine.
It’s a costly lesson for Trump who is learning that you can’t run the country like a business.
Profit and dollars aren’t everything.
You have to care about the people.
In the end, it was their voices as happy Obamacare consumers that mattered the most.
Emil Guillermo: Trump Calls for Bi-Partisan Immigration Reform But Words Don’t Add Up to Pre-Speech hype.
It wasn’t exactly a State of the Union, more like a Trump state of mind.
But that means the best thing you could say about Trump45’s address before Congress is this: At least the TelePrompTer didn’t break.
If it did, who knows what we would have seen on speech night.
“Campaign Trump”?
Or “Twitter Trump”?
That’s the Trump who has been the real enemy of the people.
But this speech was slightly more tempered. Milder. And he didn’t veer off wildly.
The president showed us all— he could read!
Sad.
And just for doing that, 78 percent of viewers in a CNN/ORC poll gave Trump positive marks.
Now that’s something Trump understands. Ratings.
Governing, however, has been a mystery. But now Trump will learn from experience that if you give a political speech that’s long on promises on things like jobs, education, infrastructure, and Obamacare, without a stitch of detail on how to keep those promises, let alone pay for them, ratings can go up.
And maybe he’ll start acting normal?
That’s something both to welcome and to fear.
Welcome because he’s not 100 percent in your face.
Fear, because he’s figured out how the game works.
And that of course, makes Trump more dangerous than ever.
There were two things specifically I was looking for in the speech, that left me pretty disappointed.
Though Trump began the speech talking about Black History Month and civil rights, he really could have condemned the threats to the Jewish Community Centers and the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries much stronger than he did.
And he could have dwelled on the shootings of Indian Americans in Olathe, near Kansas City. One man, Srinivas Kuchibhotla died. Another Indian American was wounded.
A Caucasian man, Ian Grillot,24, was wounded trying to disarm the shooter, another Caucasian male, Adam Purinton, 51, who started it all by hurling racial slurs at the Indians.
These are the kind of things Trump45 has brought out in America since the start of his presidency.
We should have seen a passionate denunciation of these acts. Instead, rump simply read the prompter then bathed in the shower of self-congratulatory applause.
It was as if just by being gracious makes him a hero.
But what did Trump do since he’s taken over?
With his anti-immigrant, build-a-wall, nationalistic rhetoric, he has given a segment of America a signal that hate is OK in America.
The O-KKK.
Trump’s victory unleashed all that on America.
But the president acknowledged it with just a single line: “While we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”
It didn’t seem sincere. Not after the first 40 days. It seemed hollow.
He didn’t even mention the Asian Americans by nationality or name.
It was just a shooting in Kansas City.
Not good enough.
Of course, later in his speech, Trump milked another sentimental moment to honor Navy Senior Chief William “Ryan” Owens, who died in Yemen during a raid last January.
The military is always a safe bet. So honor a Gold Star family, and deplete the domestic budget in favor billions for the military.
But for the Jews, or for the murdered Indian immigrant?
Trump gave them short-shrift.
It’s the reason Trump’s big pre-speech “leak” that he would be calling for a bi-partisan immigration reform seemed just like an insincere tease.
After the travel ban fiasco, and the new ICE policies that have resulted in round ups of undocumented immigrants around the country, a real push for a compromise on immigration would have been a great headline.
But there was “no there, there.”
Not when Trump’s speech contained more talk of a border wall, references to “illegal immigrants,” and borders as “lawless chaos.” And then, as he is likes to do, Trump mixes border security with national security and all that entails, and creates for us all one big fear: “Radical Islamic Terrorism.”
And he used that exact counter-productive term, once again, despite advice to refrain.
By the time he got around to his pitch for a bi-partisan immigration “compromise,” Trump had no credibility with minority communities and those close to the immigrants who are living in fear.
Immigration has always been humanitarian based for political or economic reasons for the immigrant. The benefit to the U.S. has always been the extra.
Trump’s idea is for a merit-based immigration. He wants to cherry-pick the best, because the best will make money for Trump, the U.S., and that’s all he really cares about.
Once again, he could have made a better case had he mentioned the Indian man who died in Olathe, that suburb of Kansas City.
His name was Srinivas Kuchibhotla. He was a tech worker at Garmin, the gps company.
He was one of the immigrants Trump likes.
But not enough to mention in a major speech.
There were other glaring things Trump said. Like calling education the “civil rights issue of our time.”
Really? So is that why Betsy DeVos–the voucher queen hell bent on destroying public education–the new secretary of education?
And what about that travel ban? After the speech, Trump cancelled again the announcement for the new executive order that was to supercede the one held up by the court in Washington state.
Reports had it that Iraq would come off. Would other countries be added?
I worry for the Philippines.
This is the week the militant group Abu Sayyaf, home based in the Philippines, revealed a video showing the beheading of a 70-year-old German hostage.
Trump didn’t mention it at all.
But it was in the subtext when Trump said, “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America—we cannot allow our Nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.”
Stated or unstated, you knew that the beheading in the Philippines, reported in the New York Times on speech day, could potentially be more fuel for Trump’s xenophobic fire.
And this was a toned down speech.
So if you hear people praise Trump about this speech and the polls giving him good marks for his performance, don’t be fooled.
All he did was stick to the TelePrompTer.
And act presidential. Remember, he’s all showbiz.
It’s still the same old Trump.
