What isn’t said is revealing
President Trump and Vice President Pence are assiduously trying to hide why the President made an urgent visit to Walter Reed last year. Trump explicitly denied it was due to strokes, which may be the cat out of the bag. But whatever it was, you can be pretty sure it was important from the effort they are making to cover it up.
The same is true for Rod Rosenstein’s ending the investigation into Trump’s financial ties to Russia when he turned the FBI’s work over to Special Counsel Mueller, who should never have accepted a truncated mandate. Rosenstein may not even know what he was hiding, but as Deputy Attorney General he repeatedly did the President’s bidding. If the instruction came from the President, you can be pretty sure whatever was covered up in this maneuver was important.
So now, in addition to his many more blatant disqualifications from a second term, we’ve got two partially hidden reasons to be worried: the President could be both financially beholden to Vladimir Putin and unfit for office by reason of his health. There really isn’t much doubt that these issues. That Trump relied on Russian money he acquired via Deutsche Bank is at this point well-established. No one rushes a President to Walter Reed without good reason.
These are serious matters that require elucidation, but they are unlikely to get it before the election. They would be reason enough for me to vote against Trump, if I hadn’t decided that five years ago on other grounds. I’m hoping a few of the fence-sitters will now think twice: do you really want a President who can’t tell us why he made a rushed visit to Walter Reed? Do you really want one who might be selling out the country for the sake of Russian financing for his real estate? Remember: he still hasn’t raised with Putin Moscow’s bounties to Taliban for killing Americans. Nor has he objected to the Kremlin poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the single most important opposition figure in Russia.
Never mind Trump’s mindboggling defense of a 17-year-old vigilante accused of murder for killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, or his failure to offer to visit the family of a man shot seven times in the back there by a policeman. The President excused that violent act with the allegation that he must have “choked,” like a golfer. The President’s preference for white perpetrators over their black victims is no surprise, but no less reprehensible for its predictability.
Worried about other issues? No one pays any attention now, but
- The budget deficit was ballooning even before Covid-19 due to Trump’s tax cut for the wealthy. GNP and job growth had slowed below the pace set in the Obama Administration.
- The Chinese are not meeting their obligations under the agreement that suspended the tariff war to import vastly more agricultural products from the US.
- The promise of more spending on infrastructure has gone unfulfilled.
- The Social Security/Medicare tax holiday the President declared will leave many people with a giant tax bill at the end of the year, so most companies are not opting to implement it.
- The suspension of housing evictions just announced comes without the $100 billion in funding the Democrats have included in the latest Covid relief bill that the Republicans refuse to consider.
These are all relatively undiscussed issues that even the most ardent supporters of Trump should contemplate. Instead, the President expects them to respond to the siren call of “LAW AND ORDER,” intended to appeal to white suburban fear of minorities and stem the hemorrhaging of Trump’s support there. Anyone who falls for that deserves what they get: an unqualified president who has failed at almost everything, except lining the pockets of the wealthy and appointing equally unqualified judges to the Federal courts. That’s another subject too few are talking about.
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