| Anyone paying attention to current
events will understand the references in the above haiku. For the
benefit of future generations, however, I offer a few words of
explanation.
Donald Trump is a real estate magnate and
reality television personality with an amazing head of hair and
narcissistic personality disorder. For people who mistakenly thought
that the government should be run like a business, Trump was their man.
Remarkably, he was elected 45th President of the United States,
though Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton received more than 2.8
million votes more than Trump. Trump claimed a “landslide” victory and,
without evidence, asserted that 3 million non-citizens voted in the
election illegally.
One of Trump’s campaign promises was that he
would build a wall on our southern border to keep out drug runners,
criminals, and rapists. He repeatedly insisted that Mexico would pay for
such a wall. When Mexico showed no interest in the project, the Trump
administration suggested that it might impose a 20% tariff on
Mexican goods.
Kellyanne Conway became Trump’s final
campaign manager and was named a Trump advisor after the election. She
is adept at re-interpreting Donald Trump statements and making them seem
nearly reasonable. She also makes up stuff. At a time when people are
concerned about “fake news,” Conway happily made up the “Bowling Green
Massacre,” an event that never happened.
Trump’s inauguration attracted many fewer
people than did, for example, the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama.
Trump has insisted, contrary to all evidence, that that was not the
case.
The Affordable Care Act, often referred to
as Obamacare, was President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare bill. It
became the chief Republican bogeyman, so, of course, Donald Trump had to
oppose it and try to get rid of it as soon as possible.
The Dodd-Frank Act was passed after
the disastrous banking crisis of 2008. It sought, through intelligent
regulation, to prevent such a catastrophe in the future. Regulation is
anathema to Republicans, so President Trump is determine to get rid of
Dodd-Frank.
Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of
Education. She is a billionaire who has contributed tens of thousands of
dollars to Republican senators who would vote on her nomination. She is
an advocate of charter schools and school vouchers that could be used
even to pay tuition at religious schools. She has never taught, attended
a public school, or sent a child to public school, and she is widely
considered to be an enemy of public schools.
Ben Carson, a retired brain surgeon, was a
candidate for the Republican nomination, and, failing in that endeavor,
he eventually became a Trump
supporter. Trump nominated him to be Secretary of Housing and Urban
Development, though his interests and qualifications in this area are
not apparent. In response to
violent clashes at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville,
Virginia, on August 11 and 12, 2017, Trump blamed people “on many
sides.” The primary provocateurs were white nationalists of various
stripes and neo-Nazis, but Trump largely avoided blaming his alt-right
supporters for what happened. The
early months of the Trump administration have seen repeated and
successful missile tests by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
North Korea has also been testing atomic bombs, culminating in the
announcement of a hydrogen bomb test on 9/3/2017. The Trump
administration has responded with increasing intimations of future
military strikes against North Korea. Pronouncements by the
administration seem not to have intimidated Kim Jong-un, but they have
scared Americans to death. Trump
seems to lie more often than not.
The Washington Post, which has been keeping a running tab on his
untruthfulness, reports that the president is less than forthright in
his public statements on average almost five times a day.
The first nine poems were written 2/7/2017,
shortly after Donald Trump took office. The final three were written
9/4/2017 and reflect more experience with the Trump administration.
Minor changes were made to earlier poems at the same time to make them
conform to a conventional haiku structure. —
LED, 9/4/2017 |
