I want to talk about what Donald Trump has achieved so far in his second term.
I grew up in an evangelical family and we were friends with presidents. My mom and dad used to stay in the Ford White House. Mike Ford, Gerald Ford’s son, babysat my daughter, Jessica, in my parents’ evangelical ministry of L’Abri Fellowship back in the day. We were close to power in those years, and my dad was a leader in the religious right. I was, too, as his nepotistic sidekick. Along with Dr. C. Everett Koop, we made a film series called Whatever Happened to the Human Race that is credited, if you want to call it that, with pushing the evangelicals into the then relatively new post-Roe v. Wade world of abortion resistance.
I’ve changed my mind and I consider myself a progressive, but not in all things. I’m pretty conservative when it comes to my own life. I’ve been married for 55 years to Genie and we have five grandchildren, three of whom I do childcare for. So it’s from the perspective of someone who’s been involved in the religious right back in the day before Donald Trump was anything, all the way up to the present watching his second term, having been largely elected by 83% of white evangelicals that voted for him, the people who are or were my dad’s fans back in the 70s and 80s and made him an international evangelical star. So that’s my background for what I’m going to say about what has Trump done so far.
Well, for one thing, as a 73-year-old man who never thought he’d live to see the day when the leader of India and their archenemy China—hey, these guys have exchanged gunfire across their borders numerous times in my lifetime, not all that long—would be together on the same side, joined against America. Along with the North Korean leader, who has never had anything to do with either country in a deep sense, and, of course, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Trump’s friend. How do we get an alignment between North Korea, India, Russia, and China at a time when all of their natural differences should be driving them all closer to us? Well, you elect Donald Trump, that’s how.
And he tweets and writes on social media as if somehow these were acts of God. Why are these people together conspiring against us? And in answer, renames the Department of Defense the Department of War. So what? The fact of the matter is, Donald Trump, in terms of one achievement, has created an axis of powerful countries that, when joined together, are far more powerful than we are. You only have to watch China’s military parade they had the other day to see their new hypersonic rockets, nuclear weapons that they’re building by the dozens, and new ships and a navy that will outpace ours very soon now, to understand that this is serious business. So if the first duty of the president is to defend the country against enemies foreign and domestic, Donald Trump has united our worst enemies into one bloc. Whether it’s in Ukraine with North Korean soldiers helping Vladimir Putin or whether it’s Iran—who by the way was also there—making the drones to fight with Ukraine and possibly against NATO soldiers in the next few years if this war keeps going the way it is, Donald Trump has managed to do the impossible. He has put together all the United States’ most sworn, bitterest, authoritarian, totalitarian dictatorial enemies into one pile. Congratulations. Did you see that coming?
Secondly, our economy begins to falter, and all Donald Trump can do is to fire people who bring him the bad news, but nevertheless, the numbers keep creeping out. Employment numbers are down. His ICE raid of a Hyundai plant that arrested 500 or more people in one fell swoop and shut the plant. How does this help the economy? How does this help you and me? How does it help me with Social Security payments and my Medicare costs and the government keeping an old guy like me going who paid into the system for 40 or 50 years? It doesn’t. That will soon register with a lot of people. And when you fire anybody who brings you the truth and you get rid of them and you turn the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge, pretty soon this bleeds down into the lives of ordinary people who voted for Trump. So that’s another achievement. The Department of Justice is now the Department of Revenge. The Department of Defense is no longer about defense but about war. War against whom? A Venezuelan yacht that we blew out of the water. Who knows was in there? Were there children, women, friends, parents? Who was on that boat? We’re told that these are drug dealers and if anybody brought a different story, that journalist would be prosecuted or disappeared or whatever happens to people who counter this regime. And that’s another result of what Trump has achieved.
And then there’s the divisiveness within the Republican Party torn against itself over the Epstein files, but then mirrored by the Democratic Party that is looking inward, blaming ourselves. Kamala Harris wasn’t a strong enough candidate. The woke movement destroyed us. Pronouns pushed people towards Trump and so forth. Of course, there’s a nugget of truth in all these things. The left has become very stupid looking to most Americans because of culture war issues that the left has always underestimated. We on the left always want to talk about economics. We’ll throw another $10 billion at it. We’ll throw a trillion dollars at it. We’ll build charging power stations all over the country. We’ll have a high-speed rail system that rivals none and so forth and so on and so on, which never quite plan out, because we’ve put so many roadblocks of bureaucracy and environmental studies and everything else in the way. We can’t get anything done. Democrats just can’t govern and haven’t for a long time. That’s our rap, true or false.
But what Trump has managed to do is to consolidate not just our foreign enemies, but the enemies of democracy within our country. Pardoning people who had an insurrection against our government when they charged into our Capitol building, insulting every single one of us, liberal, Democrat, independent, black, white, brown, women, men, transgender, gay alike, because that’s our Capitol. And yet somehow they’re pardoned because they were on his side and trying to falsify the election result. So that’s another thing he’s achieved.
But what else has he achieved? Well, maybe this one will be the biggest thing with the longest lasting effect. Everything else can be rolled back, but not death, not disease, not pandemic. And of course, we’re going to be on the cusp of a new pandemic and disease and death for a whole generation of children that aren’t getting vaccines because their mothers and fathers have mistakenly believed the propaganda of cranks who instead of listening to experts have listened to this nonsense online now that the gatekeepers don’t make any difference anymore. You’re the gatekeeper because you have a phone and you can post anything you want, whether you know anything about it or not. Extrapolated, multiplied by billions and all of a sudden we’re in a world in which vaccine doubting or thinking about autism and all these other things in the cracked brain of Kennedy have become policy.
Trump could have picked a guy off a street corner sitting in a cardboard box screaming at the moon and having apocalyptic visions of whatever, and put him in charge of our healthcare system and get the same result. What? We don’t give children vaccines anymore? I have a polio leg atrophied from the knee down because my parents didn’t vaccinate me in 1953 when they could have. So in 1954, I contracted polio while on a boat with them coming back from their missionary furlough to Europe. And I have an atrophied leg. I could have died. I was completely paralyzed for a while, learned to walk again. I’m about four and a half, five inches shorter than I would have been. Okay, fine. I still fell in love with one of the world’s most beautiful women. Everything turned out fine. I don’t care about my leg. I learned to ski. I have a limp. I wear three socks on one foot and have made it work that way and a raise in that shoe and it’s a lifelong nuisance, but that’s all. I’m not complaining.
But if I was the parent that had killed my child because I didn’t give him or her a measles vaccination in West Texas and could have, I wouldn’t want to live any longer. That’s on me. Unfortunately, I believe the science and all my kids were vaccinated and they’re all alive and they’re all healthy and they’re all fine. And they’re not autistic, by the way. And so are my grandchildren, all alive and all well, because they got their vaccines and annual checkups with doctors they trusted. And of course, medicine will progress. And a hundred years from now, they’ll be saying, you did what to patients? And we learn things, but to put a crackpot loon, deranged fool in charge of your healthcare system is different than just renaming the Defense Department and calling it the Department of War. It’s even different than putting our enemies together in North Korea and Russia and India and making them a consolidated anti-American bloc because of the stupidity of one president.
Because, of course, our kids don’t get a second bite at the apple, and if you’re not vaccinating your children, you are playing Russian roulette with their lives. And if you’re being led by this fool, Kennedy, this malign, twisted person who’s left one woman behind him after another that he’s philandered with and messed with and abused and has a history of woman abuse, as do by all accounts most of the Kennedy men—I say men in quotation marks because a man is a protector, not an abuser, a real man, that is. But the Kennedys have abused everybody around them. Mary Jo, drowning after Ted left her. I knew Ted Kennedy one time back in the day. I’ve met and talked with him once. Nice enough guy, but another woman abuser. This guy’s in charge of our healthcare program and he’s questioning vaccines and the science of experts, the people the whole world recognizes except crazy people online believing conspiracy theories.
And that’s going to last a long time because, for one thing, he’s cut back on research. He’s put fools in charge of our vaccine program who agree with him. Lickspittles who pay lip service to him the way the lickspittles around Trump pay lip service to him. However this ends internationally, we know one thing for sure. Thousands of American children will die and sicken who didn’t need to, as extrapolated out over a generation. However this plays out, the research that could have been done at Mass General down the road from me—cancer research on your brain tumor that you’re going to get, on your lung cancer, on your heart disease, on your wife’s sciatic nerve trouble—all that research is coming to a grinding halt because of Trump’s revenge program against our universities, against our medical schools. And putting Kennedy in charge. Why? Because Kennedy kissed his butt most effectively. That’s it. That’s his only credential. Kennedy knew how to put his lips against Trump’s butt and kiss it most effectively. And now he is threatening you and your child because of his crackpot theories.
He could have been screaming at the moon while living in a cardboard box on a Portland street as a drug addict and you’d get a better result. And that’s going to last forever. So that’s what Trump has done. Jeopardized the economy, united our enemies, risked the entire American healthcare system, all our future university-based research. Hey, one time I was at Mayo Clinic visiting my dad who was getting cancer treatment there, and I landed in whatever the airline was, I think it was Eastern at the time, to go visit him. And then there was this huge L-1011, which I think was the Saudi state royal plane at the time with the big Saudi symbol on the side. And I asked the doctor who was treating Dad, why did I see this giant Saudi jumbo jet landing in this local setting? And he said, well, that’s the whole Saudi royal family coming for their annual checkup to Mayo Clinic. Why? Why weren’t they in London? Why weren’t they in France? Because we have the best high-end medical science practices in the world.
And when you go up against our pharma companies and when you go up against our vaccine development and when you go up against the expertise of American medicine, you are questioning the most proven, highest track record of medical care in the world. And oh yeah, there’s a whole discussion on single-payer and if Britain’s socialist system is better in terms of ordinary average people. But no one questions the fact that we Americans can be proud of being on the cutting edge and the leading edge of medical science. And one reason we can is we’ve kept our borders open so we got the best brains. They all came here. Now they’re going elsewhere. They’re leaving in droves because there’s masked ICE agents waiting outside universities to arrest that Indian researcher that was working on a cure for your cancer, your cancer. Your daughter’s heart problem. This is personal. This is where you live. It’s your health. I got a band-aid on my chest where I just got something burnt off by my dermatologist the other day, a pre-cancer thing. My head’s healing from the pre-cancer stuff I had taken off. Why? Because Harvard Medical School researched skin cancer and resulted in better treatments. And 20 years later, I benefit and I’ll live longer. And you would too. You would have, but you won’t now because Kennedy wants you dead.
That’s what’s been achieved.
