Hurtling into the vortex.

"I don't stand by anything."
Donald Trump

The Trump train wreck continues to be such a nightmare for me. Of course one man's nightmare is another man's wet dream and I recognize that a lot of people are freaking ecstatic.

Today word comes down the pike that he is appointing a woman who doesn't even believe in contraception to run Family Planning for the administration. Sounds about right. Teresa Manning should dovetail perfectly with another recent Trump appointee at HHS, Charmaine Yoest, who says that an IUD has life ending properties.

Manning is so sympatico with her new boss the president that she has the fake facts thing down perfectly, like many of her ilk.

“Of course, contraception doesn’t work,” she said in a 2003 NPR interview. “Its efficacy is very low especially when you consider over years, which you know a lot of contraception health advocates want, to start women in their adolescent years when they’re extremely fertile, incidentally. And continue for 10, 20, 30 years, over that span of time the prospect that contraception would always prevent the conception of a child is preposterous.”
Manning has referred to abortion as “legalized crime” and mistakenly argued that emergency contraception, which can prevent pregnancy for up to 72 hours after unprotected sex, is “the destruction of a human life already conceived.” (It’s not.) She has also claimed that the link between abortion and breast cancer is “undisputed,” when there is actually no evidence of a causal relationship between the two.
 “This is the fox guarding the hen house, and women with low incomes will pay the price,” said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood. “It is a cruel irony to appoint an opponent of birth control to oversee the nation’s only federal program dedicated to family planning.” .

In other news today, the Agricultural Secretary is rolling back Michelle Obama's program on childhood obesity. Healthy food is icky food and unAmerican. More fat and sugar on the way to our nation's schoolchildren. Everyone knows that salads are for left wing types and homosexuals.

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I have to admit that I have never seen anything like this Presidency. It is a brute force, scorched earth affair. With a gerrymandered House, a minority of rural Americans have figured out a scenario for consistently thwarting the will of the majority. There is no thought of bipartisan governance.

Trump doesn't even try to create consensus in the middle, he is more than happy to just feed his base red meat. This will put GOP moderates in a very interesting position come the next election. See if any of them remember their principles, not to mention common decency, if they still have any. Their constituents will be very interested in how they voted on gutting Obamacare.

Has the President ever met a strongman thug dictator he didn't admire?

Pick continual fights with Canada, South Korea, Germany and Mexico but invite the murderous Duterte to the White House. Praise that sharp leader of North Korea Kim Jong Un.

"People are saying: 'Is he sane?' I have no idea... but he was a young man of 26 or 27... when his father died. He's dealing with obviously very tough people, in particular the generals and others.
"And at a very young age, he was able to assume power. A lot of people, I'm sure, tried to take that power away, whether it was his uncle or anybody else. And he was able to do it. So obviously, he's a pretty smart cookie."

Trump wants to cut taxes and that will create some debt. He must be taking lessons from Sam Brownback. See how great the strategy worked in Kansas. And we are going to deregulate Wall St. because the funny money derivatives scheming is a thing of the past. We have such awfully short memories.

Now he's trying to figure out a way to rescind the First Amendment. Are you awake, America? It was merely a bad dream, go back to sleep. Your country has been sold.

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I love Andrew Jackson. I have studied his presidency for much of my life. He did some terrible things as both a slave holder and an executioner of native americans. But it is unfair to judge a man by the social mores of a distant generation. He made valuable contributions to the evolution of democratic law and governance.

Having said that, President Trump is so far off base here.  Jackson was certainly not prescient enough to head off a war that occurred some sixteen years after his death.  I shudder to think how Donald would have worked that "slave thing" out. He can't even pass a health care bill but he could have "worked out" the Civil War?