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Stephen Gottlieb: We Have Trump To Thank

The President has been taking apart all previously made progress handling the environment and global warming. His actions will contribute to what has been called the sixth extinction – the premature death of billions of people on this planet, large proportions of our children and grandchildren and the shrinking of any remaining habitable portions of earth, so that few can survive and those who manage to live on the meager remainder will have had to survive the bloodiest war of all against all just for the scraps remaining.

We have Trump to thank for trying to stop California from regulating its environment so that people can breathe in Los Angeles. We have Trump to thank for reversing the decline in greenhouse gasses from car engines and coal driven power plans. We have Trump to thank for encouraging the pollution and garbage that destroy fish and marine life, and poison the water we need to drink. We have Trump to thank for doing his best to put us out of our misery by making sure most of us cease to exist.

We have Trump to thank for making suckers out of those who supported him, putting all the resources which could have provided good jobs, into the hands of the richest among us, people who did everything except spend money on workers, whospent their tax breaks instead on stock buy-backs, dividends, McMansions, and outsourcing. We have Trump to thank for making suckers out of the people who thought he’d rebuild their jobs, their towns, their cities and their ways of life, and sacrificing them instead to twits about foreign countries.

Americans were famous across the globe for our ability to work together in everything from sports stadiums to armies and industry. America built its success on teamwork. But the President’s ego couldn’t stand it because he doesn’t get the credit. So, he found a way to destroy all those accomplishments by dividing us in order to conquer us.

So, we have Trump to thank for encouraging a war among Americans over race, religion, parentage and national origin. Alt-wrong mass killers have murdered a multiple of the Americans killed by any other source of domestic terrorism. They work individually as copy-cat killers, to defy blame and prevention, much like the Communists worked by separate cells. Yet the President praises and encourages them and prevents funding and enabling the surveillance the FBI should be doing to defend us.

We realize it’s very important to him to destroy all the strides we have been making to recognize each other’s strengths, talents and decency, to embrace each other as brothers, sisters, cousins and children of God so that he can stay in power riding a crest of hatred.

Instead, for Trump, only Trump counts. He has become the most corrupt president in the history of the country, the only one whose very loyalty is in doubt, who encourages violence against the public instead of protecting it from violence, and does all he can to weaken, not strengthen America.

I wouldn’t have thought it a good idea to lock up presidents and presidential candidates. It’s dangerous for democracies to do that. But Trump put it on the table by encouraging the chant to “Lock her up” directed against Hillary. It would be better for the rest of us to give him some of his own medicine, locking him up as he would have Hillary, but I’ll be satisfied by any legal means of getting him out of office. Then we can get back to saving our environment, strengthening the position of our workers, and protecting Americans from descending further into violence.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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