One of the ways President Trump has been regarded is as an avatar of the common sense voter. What is a common sense voter? You know the type; I can hear them echoing in my head. “It’s only common sense that …”
Quite often, but not always, a decision made by, or action initiated by President Trump or his minions, conforms to someone I’ve heard, or could have heard, saying, “Finally, President Trump has taken the common sense approach and …”
Yeah, my reader might have a relative that pops right to mind.
Or recognize themselves.
And it’s not confined to one political group. I’ve heard President Obama proclaim his propositions for gun control were “only common sense,” a statement that raises a couple of red flags for me. Heck, if I can stretch a point here, my own father, a liberal, claimed Social Security didn’t have to be in financial difficulties if they would only something something annuities. While the deadly phrase, common sense, was not attached, it was strongly implied.
To return to my primary point, President Trump’s Administration, from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s contemptuous proclamations, to White House communications director Stephen Cheung arrogant announcements and reproaches, to Hegseth’s well-groomed lunatic decisions, to the President himself, has issued a series of decisions, opinions, announcements, litigation, failures to act, and over-reactions, that has been a nearly uninterrupted series of disasters for the Administration.
This isn’t like previous Administrations where a few maneuvers, while well-meant, did not pan out. Yes, perhaps Biden’s stimulus was out of line; Obama, as I recall, tried to subsidize a solar power company, and that went belly-up.
But Trump and his minions make one bad decision after another. Pick your area and you’ll find a horde, such as RFK, Jr, and all of his decisions that hurt vaccines and the confidence we should have in them. It’s almost hard to find a good decision in the bunch, although my Arts Editor, a former banker, is in favor of the decision to kill off the penny.
And that’s the only one.
Yeah, in this plenitude of decisions, from starting a war with Iran to pardoning drug pushers and criminals so they’re beholden to Trump to firing members of the FBI simply because they were tasked with investigating Trump stealing papers to which he had no right to beginning planning for a useless class of battleships, his best decision was … to kill off the penny.
The rest, crippling our preventative health services and wasting our munitions and not throttling President Putin of Russia when the opportunity presented itself, has been a disaster.
And so we bear witness to the death and disaster that follows the common sense voter. They finally got their wish, and their common sense, used in place of the expertise which they do not possess, the evidence which they only wish they had, has played the United States into the hands of the Russians, the Iranians, and other adversaries, while betraying Canada and so many other allies.
Perhaps H. L. Mencken should be studied in high school, just for this quote:
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
In the future I dearly hope Trump and his common sense voters are generally recognized as a sign warning of the foolishness potential of being common sense. It’s just like pouring sugar in a gas tank.
