Don Rose
Yes, he frequently rambles incoherently. You may wonder why he gives clearly dangerous executive orders, such as restoring the coal mining industry’s right to dump its wastes into unpolluted rivers and streams. Will that bring back jobs for miners or just lower expenses for owners?
But look again at some of Trump’s biggest lies and worst orders, typically catering to racism and xenophobia, but bearing no relationship to making America “great again,” and you can get a whiff of the grand plan.
- Reiterating again and again with no evidence that 3-5million “illegals” voted against him, otherwise he would have defeated Hillary Clinton in the popular vote.
- Charging, through his robotic aide Stephen Miller, that busloads of people came up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to defeat him there and oust Senator Kelly Ayotte. Standard operating procedure for years, says Stevie the Robot, former spokesman for Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.
- Issuing the notorious, illegal, but soon to be revised travel ban of immigrants from seven Middle East countries that have not exported a known terrorist to these shores–while halting the influx of the relatively few Syrian refugees we agreed to accept.
- Beginning his promised mass deportations of undocumented Mexicans and other Latin Americans who allegedly committed or were found guilty of major crimes–but the sweep includes scores, probably hundreds, guilty of only minor infractions and misdemeanors, breaking up families in the process. Included are “dreamers” whom Obama had exempted from deportation.
What links these?
A long-range plan to weaken the Democratic Party.
Here’s how:
First, by keeping alive the myth of massive vote fraud by undocumented Latinos as well as full-fledged citizens from Democratic Massachusetts, it gives more and more state legislatures the rationale to create more and more voter repression laws.
Certain recent voter-ID laws and other actions, such as reducing the number of polling places in black and Latino areas, have been found by some courts to be illegal because they are clearly aimed at minorities who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Many others are still on the books and GOP-dominated legislatures are working hard to create new laws and perhaps find ways to make some of the older ones legally acceptable.
As to the travel bans and minimizing the acceptance of needy refugees, as well as the deportation of noncriminal Latinos, he has a longer-term, demographic means of reducing the development of potential Democrats. In short, it’s a way of slowing down the birth rate of genuine citizens born here, regardless of the status of their parents. Remember how Trump raged against “anchor babies” and tried to de-legimatize the constitutional amendment that grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil? Recent history shows that those new citizens – sons and daughters of Latino immigrants and Muslim refugees – tend to vote Democratic.
All this goes along with his attempts to split unions – another important segment of the Democratic base. Trump must be weeping bitter tears that arch anti-unionist Andrew Pudzer was forced to withdraw as nominee for Secretary of Labor.
Beneath Trump’s nutty lies and rants beats a truly Nixonian heart.
The Contrary Perspective 
Well now, let’s see. Had any of the other sixteen declared GOP Presidential wannabes won, would they not pursue the same objective–further debilitating their opponents “on the other side of the aisle”? I can’t but suspect that the Trump Agenda is really primarily driven by the racism that spurred the remarks about “Mexican rapists” pouring over the southern border. That set the tone that started really firing up The Donald’s base. (And can one imagine a “baser base”?!?) His regime needs to keep that base excited, fired-up, ready to go into the streets again, chanting “Build the wall!” And now I invite you to ride a time machine with me back to 1964 or ’65 and I will show you how this base has been around a long time. The Civil Rights Movement has gained legal protections (on paper, at least) in the realm of voter registration, housing discrimination, etc. New social welfare programs have been established as President Johnson pretends we can have real butter at home while sending hundreds of thousands of guns to Southeast Asia. I am a high school student in a virtually lily-white suburb of New York City (Nassau County on Long Island, to be precise). And there’s a new “joke” going around: “Did you hear about the new organization called ‘SPONGE’?” “No. What’s that?” “The Society for the Prevention of Ni**ers Getting Everything!” Pretty hilarious, eh?
But of course there is a no less sinister underlying backbone here. These guys really, really are eager to flush all environmental “regulations” down the crapper. Yes, surely this is how to “Make America Great Again”: put the unemployed to work in the dirtiest industries, arenas of manufacturing so toxic that they’d been outsourced to places like Bangladesh in recent decades. No threat of any such facilities being established near Mar a lago, Florida, though.
A nasty quip came to mind as I read this: If you can’t beat them at the ballot box, beat them so they can’t make it to the ballot box.
This article could well have been titled A VERY AMERICAN COUP. They don’t need thugs in brown shirts marching through the streets beating up citizens. All they need is to use the lie that there is a great voter fraud denying them the election they deserve as a cover to pass laws that legally deny potentially Democratic voters the right to vote.
Hitler pulled it off with his Brown Shirts marching through the streets beating up German citizens. The republicans started by a law they pushed through with Democrats support in state after state to deny incarcerated citizens the right to vote. Serving a sentence should be the payment for a crime. Denying a citizen of the right to vote consigns them to a life sentence outside what other citizens have as a right. Now they are going for the gold, a dictatorship of one party rule.
Just read an article about Norway. Norwegians are automatically enrolled as voters, and they vote at a rate that approaches 80%. Whereas in the USA, our “leaders” are doing everything they can to erect barriers to voting, driving the rate downwards to about 50%. Norway also has about 8 serious political parties; the “democracy” of the USA has two, and those two are often essentially one.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/norway-world-s-best-democracy-we-asked-its-people-why-n720151
The Democrat party needs outside assistance in making it weaker and more ineffectual? Seems to me like the movers and shakers in the party have been doing a fine job of that themselves for years. They were the ones who decided they would rather lose to Trump than win with Sanders just for starters.