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What have we done?
It’s been a week since the election, and like a lot of people, I’m still in shock and trying to figure out what went wrong. There’s plenty of blame and finger pointing as we all try to understand what happened. I don’t have any answers, and I don’t think anyone does.
Maybe people forgot what a disaster the first Trump administration was, with the Muslim travel ban, family separation and children in cages, threatening to withhold aid from states that didn’t support him, and his mismanagement of the pandemic.
The second Trump administration will be a lot worse, with the Supreme Court granting him full immunity to do anything while in office, many of the safeguards that prevented some of his worse abuses weakened, and competent government workers replaced with loyalists. His Project 2025 plan calls for eliminating environmental protections, most of the social safety net, the Department of Education, TSA, National Weather Service and many other government functions. He will also be weakening protections for LGBTQ people.
One thing I’ve heard frequently is that we’re just not ready to elect a female president. Really? We are one of the few countries that has never been lead by a woman. Even a conservative country like Pakistan has elected a woman to lead them.
Food and gas prices are frequently blamed, but it’s mostly out of the president’s control. Part of it is due to corporate greed and price gouging, and the war in Ukraine also contributed to it by cutting off a major supplier of grain.
Despite accomplishing more than any president since LBJ, Biden is extremely unpopular, and it weighed heavily on Kamala Harris. Among his major accomplishments were the Inflation Reduction Act, which reduced prescription drug prices; the CHIPS act, which brought manufacturing back to the US; and the Bipartisan Infrastructure package, which invested in improving our roads, bridges, and public transit. All of these will be reversed under the Trump administration.
Biden has taken major steps to address climate change, which is becoming a crisis, with more devastating storms and places becoming uninhabitable due to unbearable heat and rising oceans. Trump plans to undo all of it, so we can expect a lot worse.
