You’re Making It Up Again, Arnold March 19, 2017March 19, 2017 From New York Magazine: Trump Health Secretary Says States Should Only Require Vaccines If They Feel Like It. . . . If the government of Pennsylvania decides that it isn’t going to require its residents to vaccinate their school children against measles, that poses a threat for people living just across the border in Maryland. President Trump’s Health secretary does not seem to recognize this problem. . . . Trump’s team also seems not to recognize climate change is a problem. At the end of the day, what do “scientists” know? Or generals! “I know more about ISIS than the generals do” — he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS “very, very quickly.” Except that he didn’t, anymore than he released the tax returns he “absolutely” would — the man lies constantly, about everything, from having investigators in Hawaii finding incredible stuff about Obama’s phony birth certificate to having had the largest Electoral College victory since Reagan — there are so many lists of Trump lies someone is doubtless compiling a list of those. Politifact scores him at 16% true-or-mostly-true for the items they’ve checked, 34% half-true-or-mostly-false, 50% false-or-pants-on-fire. Frighteningly, the Breitbart / Fox / Limbaugh crowd largely believe him. And cheer when he calls journalists “the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Trump’s buffoonery would be laugh-out-loud, “you’re-making-it-up,-again,-Arnold” entertaining — delightful, indeed — who doesn’t love that song? — only, it’s not “The Book of Mormon,” it’s a fiendishly complex world with urgent problems in which a single man could literally cause nuclear winter that ends human life on the planet. Or launch a trade war that leads to global depression. Or merely transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from struggling Americans to those, like Trump himself and his Cabinet, in the top tenth of 1%, leading to a depression that way. (The last time we saw such inequality was 1929.) And it’s not just the lying. “You’re-making-it-up-again-Arnold” didn’t have a vindictive bone in his body. Trump, like a spoiled 6-year-old, lashes out at anyone who keeps him from getting his way. We have a delusional, pathological, grossly undignified, erratic, incompetent president who for years kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside . . . who claimed the despicable Roy Cohn as his mentor . . . and who — with big help from the successor agency to the KGB — came within 3 million votes of his opponent*. Most of the country and the world see this clearly. They saw before he was elected — and see now even more clearly — that Trump is everything Republicans said he was: a national disgrace, a pathological liar, an unstable narcissist, a dangerous con man, “undercutting everything that we stand for.” The sooner he can be impeached (if, say, it turns out he colluded with Russia) or “Section Four-ed” (see: the 25th Amendment), the more easily most of us would breathe. But back to ISIS for a second. Trump is for torture (“Trump calls for ‘hell of a lot worse than waterboarding’“) — a wonderful ISIS recruiting tool, as Abu Ghraib was for Al-Qaeda. And now we have the travel ban — the “blessed” travel ban, ISIS calls it — another great gift to those trying to radicalize young people born here and around the world. But leaving aside how stupid it is to give them this gift, when we already have extreme vetting, I’d like to note that it was billed as an urgent 90-day ban, imposed to give the Trump team time to evaluate, and perhaps tighten, the vetting procedures for travel from those seven, now six, countries. Well, guess what? The 90 days are almost up. And surely, given the threat, Trump’s team haven’t been waiting for the ban to take effect to START that assessment. They must have started immediately. What’s more, they might not have needed the full 90 days to do the job. A good deal maker asks for more than he needs. So could it have been completed in 60 if they asked for 90? In short: why waste even another dime on the legal wrangling? Whatever would have been done during those 90 days must already have been done, or will be within days. You can dispute the urgency of the reevaluation. (“There have been zero fatal terror attacks on U.S. soil since 1975 by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries President Donald Trump targeted.”) But even assuming Trump was right abut its urgency, that reevaluation must now be complete, or nearly complete. Good for him for keeping us safe. Can we move on? Perhaps to the beautiful — and deeply stupid — wall that Mexico will not pay for? *Partly because everyone was assured it was safe to vote for him — or not to vote for her — or simply not to vote — because he couldn’t win. He had “no path to 270.” Had the pollsters and news media not gotten that wrong, and 5% of those who voted for Trump as a harmless way of saying, “hell yeah I’m pissed, listen to us!” voted for her instead (or not voted) . . . and millions who threw their votes away voting for Stein and Johnson chosen what they would have described as “the lesser of two evils” . . . and millions more who stayed home because they knew Hillary didn’t need their help . . . the popular vote would have been more like 80 million to 60 million. Still appallingly high for Trump/Putin/Pence/FBI, etc., but wide enough to swear in the best-prepared, rather than the least-prepared president in our history.