America has Never Been Less Great than we are Today

I could possibly be the most anti-Trump person in the United States of America and one of the few who devotes entire articles to nothing but him and his supporters but trust me, there is a method to my madness and a purpose for my focus on him.

The reason that I am so focused on this man and those who support him is a simple one — Trump and his Make America Great Again movement have done the complete opposite of what he claims he wants to do, he and the folks who support him have made this country less great than we have ever been in our 244 year history.

Let us look at the facts.

Are we great yet, America?

We have a pandemic sweeping across this country that so far has left 130,000 dead, nearly 3 million infected, and tens of millions out of work, race riots in our streets, and the most divided that our nation has been in the last 60 years with no unity in sight and Trump makes to coin the slogans ‘Make America Great Again’ and “Keep America Great”.

Give me a break. He has not made us great and because of that he for sure cannot keep us great.

The Trump presidency has been an absolute disaster. There has been nothing great about the last four years and if he is given another term, the next four will be even worse than this first term he has been in office, and as a nation, that is simply something that we cannot afford.

Trump and his supporters continue to say “Make America Great Again” yet he has not made us great and when we look around we can clearly see that there is not anything great in our country, not one thing. In fact, the things that are great (or were) about this nation are things that came from the previous guy in the White House.

Having a president who lies and who blames everyone else for the messes that he has caused is not great. Slowing down testing for a virus that continues to take the lives of thousands of Americans is not great either and when we look at the way he governs this nation, during a pandemic nonetheless, we can see that we are less great than we have ever been.

A great nation and a real leader would put the public health of the people of that country first, yet Trump does not do that and in many ways, he puts the people of this country last. A country that is great does not dismiss a global pandemic as a “hoax” when it reaches their shores and a competent leader leads during a public health emergency, unites a nation during racial division, and brings people together and we are not seeing any of that.

Our country has lost our way and we have lost our greatness and we must come to terms with the fact that we will not be great again until we have real leadership and a competent president who puts the needs of the American people before his own.

I remember when America was great

I do remember a time when we were great and that ended in January of 2017, when Barack Obama left office.

During Obama’s eight year run in the White House was when we were great and when we had hope and a vision of greatness. Since then we have not been even mediocre and will not be until Donald Trump leaves the Oval Office and some sanity is restored to our nation.

The Obama days were great in so many ways.

Just look back and ask yourself the question if we were better under the leadership of Barack Obama than we are today and I think that if you are honest with yourself then you will admit that yes, we were much better off during the Obama days than we are today.

Just think of what we are experiencing now with this pandemic and the racial issues and so on. If we had a leader of the competence of Obama then we would for sure be better off than we are today. Obama would not call this pandemic a hoax and he would for sure not have waited weeks to take any actions.

Obama would not call white nationalists “Very fine people” or side with the dictators of the world over our own intelligence community, and the guy that we had in charge before Trump would read his daily briefings and know what we were facing as a country.

So, without a doubt, we were much better off before Trump and we were a great country.

America was great when Barack Obama was president in so many ways and it was a place that we could be proud of. Our nation has fallen so far since he left office and our value system has changed to where we no longer have one to measure up against how we were previously and that is the saddest part of all this mess — we no longer have values.

The longer that we have Trump, the less great we become

What good is living in a nation built on diversity and inclusion when we have a president who does everything in his power to make us less diverse and less inclusive and use that power he has to divide us and make us a place where those different than us are not welcome and are made to feel left out?

The United States at one time was a place that was open to all but when he took office that all changed and we are now not only a place that doesn’t welcome immigrants but also a place that doesn’t make those Americans who are different feel like they belong and this version of our country is not who we are, or who we are meant to be. The vision for our future that is in Trump’s America is certainly not the vision that our founders intended when they wrote the United States Constitution all those years ago.

The founding fathers of America wanted the Constitution to be upheld but this guy continues to do the exact opposite of that, and his many defenders enable him and let him get away with these criminal acts and to me, they are just as guilty. In his United States, the rule of law no longer has meaning, he expects others to obey the law, yet he refuses to do the same and those who claim to be patriotic certainly prove themselves not to be in this type of country that he has created.

See, nothing he has created has been good for the well-being of this country and despite the lies he tells of how “great” things are, the facts show that they have never been less great than they are right now and certainly will not improve for a very long time if he is re-elected and given four more years as President of the United States. This is simply something that we patriotic Americans cannot allow to happen, as if we do, we may not have a country any longer to defend.

This is why we must call out the mess of this president and his agenda. Because, in his short time in office he has turned the great things his predecessor did for all Americans into chaos and mayhem among our people and taken away or attempted to strip things like Obamacare that gave millions health insurance, DACA which gave young undocumented immigrants a real chance at the American dream, the Iran deal which effectively ended their nuclear program and brought peace to the world, and much more.

I truly hate to think of what will become of our country if he is awarded another four years in office, I really do. I am sure many of you feel the same as I do about what this administration has done to our nation and how he has done away with the compassionate and common sense policies of Barack Obama simply because it was Obama who did those things, there was no other reason why he would do it otherwise.

Put the two versions of this country side by side (Obama vs Trump) and it is easy to see how far we have fallen in these past few years as a country and as Americans. Anyone who thinks things are better under Trump clearly has no idea what a great America looks like, because it is more than obvious that things have gone downhill since January of 2017 when Trump was sworn in as our president.

Trump Vs Obama — Hate vs Great

One of the ways that Trump’s America is different and worse than Obama’s America is that when Obama was president we did not have the hate crimes against Muslims, Hispanics, LGBTQ people, and so many more and we did not have a president who incited violence and tell those who support him that he would pay their legal fees if they assaulted someone, and we certainly did not have a president who demonized those who are different than him but now in the year 2019 with Trump at the helm, we do.

Trump loves to create fear and use tragic events to scare his supporters into blame others for their problems and we have seen this in action with his tweets and speeches and interviews, to him it is always someone else’s fault and his supporters eat that stuff up. If you look at Obama then you will see that did not happen when he was in office, Obama would never politicize a tragedy to score political points, but with Trump it is all he ever does and because of that hate crimes and fear are on the rise.

Also, in the years when Obama was president, we did not have the term “fake news” but now it is all we ever hear. I will as with all of these topics go further into the fake news phenomenon later in this book but it is important to see how it is a constant term we hear used today in Trump’s America and one that has had extremely bad consequences and a lasting negative impact on our country.

You see, when fake news is spread like he does then people believe the outrageousness and that is how hate and division is spread like wildfire. We see this every single day in today’s America and we will continue to as long as this man is allowed to hold the highest office in the land and that my friends is dangerous and the impact is one that will be devastating to our nation for years to come.

Another major difference between America now and then is how it is led and how people are treated. In previous administrations, people were treated with respect and decency but not so with the current president. As we stand now, people are attacked for who they are whether that be immigrants, Muslims, or any other marginalized group and that translates into those who support the president and his policies also treating people the same way.

It is a sad place we live in today in 2019 and it only will get worse if we do not vote for our future in the upcoming election. Even previous Republican presidents had respect for those who are different. You saw that G.W. Bush disagreed on politics with Democrats but he never would attack them and their personal lives but that is exactly what Trump does on a daily basis in tweets and speeches and it is disgusting and unacceptable.

We live in a country where treating people with compassion is a foreign concept and it begs the question, who have we become?

So, who have we become America?

It seems that we have become an America that has lost its soul and its identity as a caring nation that loves one another. The moral fabric of this country has been dramatically changed in just the short time this man has held the highest office in the land and the political and social landscape of the United States has been transformed into something that for many of us is simply unrecognizable.

If you had told me just a few years ago that we would have a president who never shows any emotion or empathy for others and almost fifty percent of our fellow citizens were perfectly fine with that I would have thought you were crazy, but that is where we stand in the current state of our nation and we are there because of Donald Trump and him alone.

It is unbelievable that we have fallen so far off from the days when we had a president (Obama) who shed tears for the victims of mass shootings like he did with Sandy Hook to a guy who on a seemingly daily basis shows no empathy for kids kept in horrific conditions in his detention centers or gun violence victims or even victims of natural disasters like they had in Puerto Rico and California.

What is worse than the things Trump does and says are his supporters who are completely fine with his lies and deplorable actions. Fixing Trump and his horrible policies is rather simple but curing the culture and voters who elected him is a far greater challenge. It is those who defend him and cheer him on who are the much greater threat to our country and our way of life as there is one of him but millions upon millions of them.

To make America great again we must make America humane again. Trump is right. There is a crisis at the border, but it isn’t what he says it is. He claims the crisis is a danger to our nation, but it for sure isn’t. What the crisis is however is a clear humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

The way these immigrants and especially the children are treated is inhumane and wrong and we must do something about it. The detention facilities where immigrant children are housed are worse than where we keep prisoners and suspected terrorists, yet he and his supporters claim he is making America great.

If we would start treating people with humanity again and become the Christian nation that we claim to be then we would be a great nation but the way we treat undocumented people as well as our homeless, mentally ill, addicted, poor, and disabled is nothing to be proud of or boast about.

Trump supporters say “Not my problem” when they try and defend the mistreatment of these groups but imagine if Jesus had said that to the people he healed, fed, clothed, and so on, that would have been the start of something inhumane that would have had a long-lasting negative impact on the human race and perhaps the end of humans all those years ago back in his time.

To lock children in cages and deny them basic dignity and necessities is not only wrong, but it goes against the very values of our nation and what we were founded on. These children who are kept in such deplorable conditions are denied the most basic human needs as they have no access to basic things like toothbrushes, soap, and even adequate food and medical care.

This is not who we are America. How can the “president” and his defenders claim to be Christian and “pro-life” if they treat people this way. They only claim to care about children when they are in the womb but once they are born, they immediately stop being pro-life and want to throw poor families off of their healthcare, food stamps, out of section 8 housing and so on.

They always say when we talk about helping undocumented immigrants that we need to take care of our own first yet they have never cared about America’s homeless before, when it is to demonize immigrants then they say they care but they always have called homeless people horrible names and judged them.

They are not fooling anyone, and neither is Trump.

Trump claims to put “America First” but he has offered zero solutions to fix our epidemic of homelessness, help Americans who suffer from drug addictions and mental illness, give low-income Americans healthcare or higher wages and so on. He for sure does care about his billion pals and corporations, just not the average American.

Now, he wants people to think he puts our country and people first? No, he does not and never have.

The anti-immigrant agenda is the same as his anti-poor agenda. It is to rile up his base and make his supporters blame immigrants and other marginalized groups for their problems and failings in life.

I have news for his fans. Undocumented immigrants are not to blame for their problems and locking children in cages and separating them from their parents will not make their lives better or America safer. This is inhumane and we should all be ashamed for allowing this to take place in what is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, we should hang our heads in shame without a doubt.

It is time that we choose a new direction, a great direction

It is pretty obvious, Trump has not made us great.

The direction that we are headed in with Trump in charge is a direction that will lead this country that a very destructive path and one that will send us into the future with no future at all and this is not the America that any one of us should accept.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not going away anytime soon and we need a leader who is prepared to handle such a crisis and that person is for sure not Donald Trump. Besides the pandemic, there are other challenges facing our country and we need someone in charge who is smart enough to accept help to meet those challenges, not ignore them.

The new direction that we must head in is the direction of Joe Biden and whoever he picks as his running mate. The Trump/Pence years have been flat out awful for our country and we for sure cannot afford four more years of that nonsense, we simply would not survive another term of Trump and what he has to offer.

We are not great under Trump and for us to become great again then we must move on from him.

The next election will be the most consequential in our lifetime and for us to meet this challenge that we face then we must choose country over party and choose the sane and smart candidate over the unhinged and unprepared one and that means doing the following.

Vote for Joe. He is the one to give us a future that is great and full of promise and hope while Donald Trump will give us the exact opposite and lead us down a path to nowhere and in the worst case, destroy any future that our nation has as we move forward!