Local opinion: Trump fought reality and reality won

So, are you feeling it? A bit edgy and confused? Are financial threats stimulating your stress and anxiety? Are you feeling vulnerable and alone? Life out of control. Is that what you are feeling, Bunky? Well, it’s called fear, pure unadulterated anxiety, distress caused by awareness of danger. You’re not alone. The reality of Donald Trump’s chaotic economy, disastrous governance, and his disregard for the law has whacked you right smack in the kisser.

You’re experiencing this because The Mad Hatter, Donald J Trump, is scaring the bejeebers out of you. Trump’s financially debilitating trade war and government demolition are causing colossal economic challenges. Americans face destabilizing uncertainty about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, and what is happening at HHS’s Centers for Disease Control. Think bird flu and measles plague! And there’s that migrant from Africa, the admitted Ketamine user Elon Musk, whose devastating slashing handiwork dismantling U.S. government agencies grinds on us.

Trump spent a lifetime gaslighting, simply deceiving and misleading the public. Today, his lying has run squarely into the wall of reality. It’s harder for Donald of Queens to convince us that reality and truth are untrue. Example: his outright lie that Zelenskyy is a dictator and he started the war with Russia. Really? Now, that’s fake news.

The lifelong naked economic incompetence of Trump, the narcissist, is catching up with the aging Capo-in-Chief. You’re paying for his ignorance and bullying tactics of gaslighting the public as he barrels America headlong into probable economic collapse in his clash with reality, and reality is winning.

Trump’s message of disinformation, misinformation, abstract propaganda, and intimidation tactics is becoming ineffective. In the first 100 days of Trump, the monetary ignorance of this brutish child wannabe-king’s administration is flailing, causing the possibility of a full-blown recession. Ask yourself, what is the Commander-in-Chief’s plan, his end game? Well, he calls it “instincts.”

Moreover, the President has surrounded himself with a circus of sycophants, only loyal people, not competent individuals, who will challenge him and contain this vengeance-ridden and retribution-driven executive. Trump’s Cabinet is filled with second-rate intellects, misfits, and conspiracy theorists not qualified to manage government departments. It’s a political payoff job for their support. And exceptionally dangerous. But The Donald can’t ever hear he’s wrong about anything.

We have watched Trump traverse global economics to the brink of meltdown with his erratic, incoherent unilateral tariff decrees, acting “instinctively” more than anything else. Trillions of dollars of stock-market value have evaporated in a matter of days as Trump rolls the dice at the world’s craps table with our future and our money. Does he even care any longer if he forces a recession?

Meanwhile, the progress of federal budget legislation is a disaster. Republicans talk of cost-cutting and tariff-driven revenue, but there is little progress on the Hill as Americans grind away on our hamster wheels to keep from drowning. Especially galling is the fiscal wreckage triggered by an administration that promised business acumen and conservative restraint. Republicans are delivering the opposite: self-inflicted destruction of wealth, creeping inflation, and an abandonment of even the pretense of fiscal discipline.

The era of American exceptionalism is over. The biggest casualty in Trump’s administration is America’s place in the world. We have no friends left, and our allies don’t trust Trump. But what’s going on in America is not about abstract legal principles, but about your health care, personal safety, clean air and water, and economic security. Trump wants unlimited authority to strip Americans of their health care, dismantle environmental protections, and manipulate the system for wealthy collaborators at the expense of working families and the vulnerable poor. Remember, in a democracy, the government’s power comes from the people, not a king.

Our system of government depends on all of us, “We the People,” standing firm against what Trump is doing to us. We owe it to ourselves and the future to do everything we can to stop this assault on democracy. Resist, America. I took an oath years ago to protect the Constitution and intend to fulfill that promise.