Trump: The Villian That Defied The Odds
Think of a movie from when you were a kid, Karate Kid, Goonies, ET or Say Anything. What was the main point of those movies? That the dorky good hearted kids always win in the end and the bully always loses.
If there was ever a living, breathing, incarnation of a bully from our childhood movies it has to be Donald Trump. He makes fun of the handicapped, is misogynist, picks battles with anyone that offends him; see Rosie O'Donnell or Saturday Night Live.
If this was a movie, Donald Trump would have lost this election, by an embarrassing margin. Instead we are left with the Bully in Chief who recently started a twitter war with a Union President who had the audacity to point out the truth, simply that Trump has not saved nearly as many jobs as he claimed.
How Did This Happen?
The smart money seems to be on people being fed up. Specifically the middle of the country made up of whites, who feel they may be losing their grip on power. Manufacturing jobs are being out sourced or replaced by robots. Experts say that within 5 years the truck driver will be replaced by self driving trucks. Truck Drivers make up a huge swatch of what are considered blue collars jobs.
Blue collar jobs are typically jobs where you don't need a college education but unions ensure that you get a family wage, meaning you make enough to support your family. What is the difference in skill level between a Boeing Union Worker making $35 an hour and a Burger King employee making $9 per hour, if we're being honest, not much.
Yet Trump somehow convinced the voting bloc of disenfranchised white working men that he alone would bring back the 1950's. A time when Joe Six Pack could work down at the Steel Mill and support his wife and two kids with little less than a high school diploma and the ability to show up for work every day on time, or most of time. The Union would protect his job and his interests.
Trump can't bring back these jobs, that ship has sailed. Capitalism by nature is designed to not pay unskilled labor more than they're worth. And as machines get better and do more jobs, what is considered unskilled labor continues to expand. Accounting, for instance, may soon be able to be automated. White collar jobs are not immune to the advancements in technology.
Trump should not be telling citizens he is going to bring back the coal mining jobs, he should be figuring out how to teach citizens to code or go into the health care field. Manufacturing is a dying profession and even though some of it has been lost to globalization, most of it has disappeared to automation. Why ship jobs to Mexico when you can run a factory in the Untied States with robots? Robots don't need to be paid, they don't get sick and they don't strike. That day is coming and it's much closer than most realize. Technology has been growing at an exponential rate. Don't believe it, check out the drones you can purchase for $40 or the virtual reality technology that only a few years ago seemed like magic.
The phone you may be reading this article on is more powerful than the state of the art computers from only ten years ago. Imagine how powerful computers will be in ten years from now...20 years from now.
In short, Trump tapped into the real and understandable anxiety of much of the working class. But, like Trump's history suggests, he bamboozled much of the electorate selling them a bill of goods he had no intention of every fulfilling.
Can We Hope?
The one shining star in all of this, was the hope that Donald Trump above all wants to be admired. It was with this hope that we expected to see Presidential behavior, but yet the tweets continue, the bullying and thin skinned tirades against anyone that dare speaks out against him.
The fake drama of his transition team, keeping the public in suspense like this is one more reality show that needs to increase its ratings by having a cliff hanger. Will he appoint Mitt Romney as Secretary of State.....tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion!
He has chosen the Carl's junior mogul as Secretary of Labor? A WWE executive in charge of the Small Business Administration. And most, shockingly, a climate denier as the head of the EPA?
In other words Trump has gone full Honey Badger. He don't give a damn.
In the end we can hope, and pray, and wait four years till the country clears its intensities of this vile infection. In the meantime, all hail the Bully in Chief.
