Here are the Terrible Things Trump Did That You Might Have missed in the Midst of Impeachment...(from The Daily Beast):
He banned travel from Africa’s biggest nation, poisoned the water and polluted the air, and lots more.
In his State of the Union address, an unchastened Donald Trump, awaiting acquittal tomorrow from the Republicans who call what he did “shameful and wrong,” took credit for things he didn’t do and deflected blame for those that he did. After declining to shake Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand before beginning his speech, he touted an historical “economic miracle”(a mild uptick in growth which is slowing), that the military has been completely rebuilt (it hasn’t), and that he’s protecting coverage for pre-existing conditions (he’s trying to kill it).
Separating fact from fiction in any Trump speech while enduring his reality-television bits (Rush Limbaugh being awarded, on the spot, the Medal of Freedom and a soldier returning from Afghanistan surprising his wife and kids in the gallery) is enough to sap the soul of those living through the worst presidency in modern times. It leaves us without the energy to block his executive actions, which don’t attract as much attention as the drama of impeachment or a set speech, but do cause great and lasting harm.
He moved to poison the country’s water and pollute its air, allowing emissions even greater than the auto industry had asked for, and lifting the ban on toxic chemicals like PFAS. You might have missed the change to runoff rules that over time will turn every city into Flint, where the water is so toxic its residents had to bathe in Evian. The Environmental Protection Agency, so-called, has reopened negotiations with cities, including the nation’s capital, to allow them to dump raw sewage into its rivers until they can afford to upgrade their sewers.
Last Thursday, the same agency finalized a rule to strip protection for streams, wetlands and groundwater, to the pleasure of real estate developers and fossil-fuel producers. It’s all part of Trump’s crusade to remove all traces of Obama and to repeal or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules and laws on climate change, clean air, chemical pollution, coal mining (the head of the EPA is a former coal-mining lobbyist), and oil drilling—soon to be happening in a national forest near you. His support for the Trillion Trees Initiative, proposed by the World Economic Forum in Davos, will hardly compensate.
Trump’s aiming for a lawless state of affairs that benefits the same 1% who reaped a windfall from “our massive Republican tax cuts” (massive, in the long run, for wealthier Americans) he boasted about Tuesday night. The connecting thread in all his efforts is that the moves benefit one CEO or industry at the cost of the many.
That barbecue you like? Beware. Pork inspections have been Boeing-ized. A new rule out of the FDA removes government inspectors from hog slaughterhouses in favor of “establishment personnel.” You’d think that insiders inspecting themselves would be banished forever when two crashes of new 737 Maxs in five months killed 346 people, after the Federal Aviation Administration let the aircraft maker certify its readiness to fly.
