Trump missed his chance

 I have been reading an article in the November 2nd New Yorker magazine entitled “The After-Party.” The author is Nicholas Lemann, and it is an in depth survey of the two political parties in the US. 

He discusses the big switch in sides, which he calls the Reversal. For one hundred years or more, the Democrats were the party of the working class and the poor, and the Republican party was the party for business, bankers, and rich owners of industry.

Since Trump took over the Republican party, the working class has become solidly Republican, due to the policies Trump espoused, such as trade protectionism, border protection, and opposition to “Obamacare.”

He has been unwilling or unable to follow through on many of those promises, even though he has the old business wing of the Republican party thoroughly cowed into disavowing the old GOP platform. The only Republican platform this year is whatever Trump wants.

Meanwhile, The Democrats, having learned nothing from the last election, have lost the working class. They are now all in for helping loan companies screw students if they need money to go to college, all in for bailing out bankers who want to foreclose and evict homeowners who run short on the mortgage payment, and especially all in for pharmaceutical companies screwing people with chronic needs and medical insurance companies extorting people who need medical care.

It occurred to me that here’s where Trump missed his chance. For one time in US history, all the indications were in his favor, and he was too ignorant to do it.

In 2001, Congress passed the PATRIOT ACT, which cedes total power to the president if he declares a national emergency. He can use Executive Decrees to enact any policies he deems necessary to fight the War.

What War? Why, the War on COVID-19. When this country was first attacked by the virus, rather than ignore it or downplay it, he could have declared war on the pandemic, and immediately committed government money to pay for all medical care for everybody in the country, in exchange for some temporary distancing measures and mask requirements. The pandemic could have been stopped, just as they did in Taiwan and New Zealand, and then he could have kept his promise to replace “Obamacare” with a better plan that covered everybody.

Trump’s base would have accepted the restrictions, for the most part, because their own beloved president would be showing leadership such as we haven’t seen since Franklin Roosevelt instituted Social Security back in 1935.

Those other Republicans are so afraid of Trump, they would have enthusiastically caved to his demands, just as they have on all the other old GOP policies. They don’t care about those policies - they just want to win!

Millions of Independents and populist Democrats would have swung to Trump as someone who finally felt their pain and was actually doing something for them, other than empty promises. 

I truly believe if he had used the pandemic to solve the problems with medical access in this country, he would have easily won a second, or even a third or fourth term, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt did. 

If Trump loses, he has only himself to blame. He had his one chance to follow through on at least one campaign promise, and he blew it. 

If Biden wins, and continues the previous Democrat strategy for siding with Wall Street crooks against the working class and poor people, then the election in 2024 will be a Republican blowout, if they can find somebody with the political instincts of Trump combined with the smarts to understand the populist wave that is still building in this country.