Sheldon L. Broderick of Cedar City had a recent letter to The Tribune, and it brings to mind the old adage: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.”
His first paragraph, talking about jobs and Trump’s approach to trade, particularly tariffs, doesn’t take into account the worst jobs record of any modern president as well as getting into a tariff war with China that caused U.S. taxpayers to bail out our farmers, with three of the largest annual trade deficits in history.
He goes on to talk about favorability ratings and issues that matter, but Trump’s signature piece of legislation, despite calling for infrastructure week several times and not getting anything done, was a massive tax cut for the wealthy, while he balked at tax cuts for small businesses and average Americans.
Joe Biden got it done.
Broderick’s voting for Trump and the America he envisions, but that vision is stoking the flames of division and hatred. Ronald Reagan understood that America was built on the backs of immigrants and minorities, and we cannot turn our backs on our fellow Americans no matter what they look like. The gauzy remembrance of the Trump years is not the reality that most of us remember. Suggesting that he “negotiated boldly on the international stage” as he removed the U.S. from the World Health Organization during the height of the pandemic, took us from the Trans-Pacific partnership that was designed to block China’s advances, took us out of the nuclear deal with Iran as well as the Paris Climate Accords.
Trump pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way for a photo op. He released the Taliban prisoners, one of whom is running Afghanistan right now, and invited them to Camp David. He abandoned our allies, the Kurds, to Turkey. He coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after the killing and dismemberment of an American-based Saudi journalist. He hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House.
When Jared Kushner finally got his security clearance, he told the Saudis who the spies were and they executed them. He gutted the Voice of America. He blurted out classified information to Russian officials. He almost got us into a war with Iran after threatening them with a tweet. He got into a telephone fight with the leader of Australia. This doesn’t even include the fact that he got played by Putin and Kim Jong-un of North Korea.
So what are “the tangible benefits Trump’s policies have offered and continue to promise?” The Dobbs decision? Project 2025? Or perhaps he’s talking about the fact that he took money from the military families to build his wall, or he caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, mismanaged the pandemic so badly that an estimated 250,000 lives were lost unnecessarily. He rolled back regulations that prevented coal companies from dumping waste into rivers, as well as regulations protecting the public from asbestos and mercury. He tried to withhold aid from cities and states with democratic leaders, and had to be reminded there were GOP voters even where there were California wildfires.
Suggesting voting for Trump because “every citizen’s interest comes first” would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. Trump is a liar and a con man, and, as Mitt Romney said a decade ago, he’s “a huckster and a charlatan.”
We can do better than this, we can endure four years of a Democratic president, but we might not be able to endure four more years of narcissistic chaos.
John Porcher, Salt Lake City
