Update for Trump Voters

1. He told you NATO was “obsolete,” claiming it doesn’t fight terrorism. You bought it. Now he says NATO is “no longer obsolete.”

2. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. Now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”

3. He said he’d close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers." You bought it. Then he picked a Wall Street financier Stephen Schwarzman to run his strategic and policy forum, who compares closing those loopholes to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

4. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. Then he met with China’s president and declared "China is not a currency manipulator."

5. He said he’d “renegotiate NAFTA” on Day One. You bought it. He hasn't.

6. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.

7. He said he’d build a wall along the border with Mexico. You bought it. Now his secretary of homeland security says “It’s unlikely that we will build a wall.”

8. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. Then he brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, along with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

9. He said he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “wonderful.” You bought it. Then he didn’t.

10. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. Then he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, in which no one is in charge.

11. He said he’d release his tax returns, eventually. You bought it. He hasn’t, and says he never will.

12. He said he’d divest himself from his financial empire, to avoid any conflicts of interest. You bought it. He remains heavily involved in his businesses, makes money off of foreign dignitaries staying at his Washington hotel, gets China to give the Trump brand trademark and copyright rights, travels to promote his properties at taxpayer expense, manipulates the stock market on a daily basis, and has more conflicts of interest than can even be counted.

13. He said Clinton was in the pockets of Goldman Sachs, and would do whatever they said. You bought it. Then he put half a dozen Goldman Sachs executives in positions of power in his administration.

14. He said he’d surround himself with all the best and smartest people. You bought it. Then he put Betsy DeVos, opponent of public education, in charge of education; Jeff Sessions, opponent of the Voting Rights Act, in charge of voting rights; Ben Carson, opponent of the Fair Housing Act, in charge of fair housing; Scott Pruitt, climate change denier, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Russian quisling Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.

10. He said he’d faithfully execute the law. You bought it. Then he said his predecessor, Barack Obama, spied on him, without any evidence of Obama ever doing so, in order to divert attention from the FBI’s investigation into collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives to win the election.

15. He said he knew more about strategy and terrorism than the generals did. You bought it. Then he green lighted a disastrous raid in Yemen- even though his generals said it would be a terrible idea. This raid resulted in the deaths of a Navy SEAL, an 8-year old American girl, and numerous civilians. The actual target of the raid escaped, and no useful intel was gained.

16. He called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done. You bought it. He has by now spent more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama did in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.

17. He called CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times “fake news” and said they were his enemy. You bought it. Now he gets his information from Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars.

18. Trump broke 64 promises in his first month in office

I'm not writing this to be vindictive or to just shoot holes in his efforts. I'm really trying to be fair.

On the one hand, we haven't gotten blown up yet, and we have seen either action or attempts at action. Those are pluses. And there's been entertainment factor as well as a true challenge to the way business had been done in Washington. Also pluses.

But then on the other hand:

1) Lot's of executive orders, but only one actual legislation that I know of, and many of those orders are held up in court action or embroiled in controversy.

2) Zero bipartisanship. They literally blew up the rules of the Senate to get Gorsuch through. And before you rag on the Democrats for not trying to cooperate remember Republicans did that for eight years and you still blame Obama for it.

3) Multiple international tensions - Russia, N Korea, Syria. People are genuinely starting to talk about whether he'll get us into WWIII.

4) Instead of draining the swamp he filled it with the most predatory invasive species he could find.

5) He has totally mishandled conflicts of interest, pay for play, and foreign meddling. So instead of people moving on and believing these are "fake news" he has wrapped them in red flags making them even bigger issues.

6) His budget proposal is pure insanity, demolishing just about everything and then spending us broke on more pork barrel military stuff.

7) His meteoric drain on taxpayers for security protections and travel costs, and his constant golfing and carousing at his own properties, stinks of behavior unbecoming of a man who claimed a populist mandate. He's just another spoiled rich man sucking everyone dry.

I could go on.

Look, he's not as bad as he COULD have been. But he's still plenty bad. He is still going to be looked back on in the history books as more destructive to integrity of the office than Nixon's Watergate.

His supporters will now rag on me. But I'm just calling it as I see it.