Anyone who has had children knows that until they are approaching their teenage years they tend to have minimal impulse control skills and a poor grasp of consequences. Young children want what they want, and they want it right now. Couple this with their inability to see the big picture and understand all the ramifications of their desires or actions, and the results can be frightening.
Now imagine what a child would do if he was handed the power to do precisely what he wanted, and you begin to understand what is happening in the United States. During his rhetoric- and hate-filled campaign, many supporters of Donald Trump tried to assure people that he didn’t mean everything he said. Give him time to get his feet under the desk, they promised, and we’d see.
In his first week in office we have found out that the wall between the U.S. and Mexico will go ahead; that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) will be repealed, leaving some 20 million people without health care coverage; that Trump thinks torture works, and is considering bringing it back when interrogating terrorism suspects; and that the president has ordered a media blackout of people who work at the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and had these agencies take down anything on their websites about climate change.
Trump has reinstated and greatly expanded the global gag rule, which will cut off funding for foreign family planning organizations that so much as mention abortion. Experts in the countries affected say that this will greatly restrict contraception access, as well as HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, for millions of women, and lead to the deaths of thousands of women due to unsafe abortions or complications from avoidable pregnancies.
And then there was the order, signed on the evening of January 27—Holocaust Remembrance Day—temporarily banning residents of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days, suspending all refugee admissions for 120 days, and closing the door to Syrian refugees indefinitely. This resulted in chaos and confusion around the globe, as those with valid U.S. visas and/or green cards—many of whom were actually in transit when the order went into effect—were barred from entering the United States to return to work or be with family, despite being legally entitled to do so.
I haven’t even touched on Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud, to the tune of millions of votes, or the hiring freeze for all government departments except defence and homeland security, or his adviser Kellyanne Conway’s comment about “alternative facts” when a White House spokesperson flat-out lied about the number of people at the inauguration during a press conference, or the government’s proposal to cancel funding for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (where PBS gets much of its funding from). All of these proposals have had, or will have, major consequences and repercussions, of which Trump is either ignorant, uncaring, or both.
Wait and see, Trump supporters said. We certainly have; and the view is terrifying.