Merry Christmas! Trump insists we all say to one another because “Happy Holidays” would be too respectful of others, and “political correctness” is a sign of weakness.
Merry Christmas! he says after a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies while in custody of US border patrol, to which Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s replies, Well, that’s what they get for taking a child on a dangerous journey [to escape violence].
Merry Christmas! as migrants are tear-gassed at the Border after being barred entrance through legal crossings and 1,000 unaccompanied children who could be released to sponsors are kept in a prison camp for months.
Merry Christmas! as Trump threatens to deport (get this) tens of thousands of refugees from the Vietnam War and hundreds of thousands of others – from Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua – here legally for decades after escaping some disaster, and he moves to change the “public charge rule” to effectively bar immigrants with green cards in the US from obtaining certain assistance like food stamps for fear they would lose any possibility of legal residency.
Merry Christmas! as he licks his chops at having turned ICE into a Gestapo-like force which deported a record 254,000 in 2018 – of which a mere 12,000 were actual “bad guys” (gang members, drug dealers, criminals), which means 242,000 were likely decent, hardworking people contributing to their communities, very possibly parents or spouses of American citizens, snatched up as they dropped their kids off at school.
Merry Christmas!
Trump says as he threatens to shut down government if Congress doesn’t give him $5 billion to build his phallic border wall, which will do absolutely nothing to address illegal immigration – money that would be better spent hiring judges to hear applications for asylum, evaluate DACA recipients and parents of American citizens to qualify for legal status, and final setting up a functioning legal immigration system.
Or maybe, in the interests of Christmas (“good will to men”), he might consider spending some of those billions on aid to Central America to address the violence, lawlessness, poverty that has caused hundreds of thousands to flee for their lives on a perilous journey that could well take their life, instead of on setting up a Space Force to militarize outer space.
But if Trump doesn’t get the money to build a useless wall, Merry Christmas! he will “proudly” shut down government, without regard to casting hundreds of thousands out of work or force them to stay on the job without a paycheck, or the disruption to the lives of people who rely on government services (many of the same who despise government and cheer Trump’s bullying), like veterans who have been shortchanged out of housing vouchers.
Every time the government shuts, it costs the economy millions of dollars – this could be enough, combined with tariffs and trade wars, that puts the economy over the edge and snaps that remarkable business expansion that Obama put into place.
Indeed, Merry Christmas! he says as the stock market he so cherishes as a barometer of his business brilliance, instead of the traditional “Santa Claus rally” has the worst Christmas since 1931; the markets reacting as they did in December 2008 heralding the Great Recession, plummeting 500 points in a day, and makes veiled threats against the Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell dare he raise interest rates.
The “markets” which have given back all the gains of 2018 are reacting to concern for the economy in 2019 largely due to Trump (Tariff Man)’s misguided tariffs that are exporting economic insecurity around the globe (making it unlike China will rescue the US by continuing to buy our debt), his wild trade wars, his easy threat to shut down government (“proudly”), the ballooning budget deficit and national debt resulting from the Republican Tax Scam, and likely erosion of consumer buying power.
On the other hand, it’s a Merry Christmas for Republicans, who see the silver lining in the budget deficit and rising national debt. It gives them the excuse they crave to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, food stamps, foreign aid – or else blame Democrats. And though you would think they would be sad at suffering a humiliating loss in the midterms and the repudiation of their policies, they are still cheered by gleefully going about setting their power in concrete so that elections don’t actually matter.
Merry Christmas! Trump says as he cheerily greets the news of a federal judge ruling the Affordable Care Act “unconstitutional,” reveling in the terror of millions of people living with cancer, a heart condition, diabetes, a child who will not be able to get life-saving treatment, facing the insecurity of losing access to health care, as his administration actively works to sabotage what health care there is, so more Americans can be impoverished, desperate and suffering and at the mercy of the rich and powerful.
Merry Christmas! As he dooms the planet, the only home that can support humanity (there is no Planet B) by unleashing tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, cheering the Yellow Vest protesters burning down Paris over a regressive gas tax, as his flunkies at the Climate Conference ally with Russia, Kuwait and (surprise!) Saudi Arabia, in obstructing a global alliance to transition to clean renewable energy to forestall a 2-degree increase in temperature and the dystopia he envisioned in his inaugural speech.
Merry Christmas! As he ignores the plight of tens of thousands made homeless just this month in California’s wildfires (which spewed 68 million tons of carbon dioxide and toxins into the atmosphere), offering them a rake as a defense.
Merry Christmas! indeed, as Trump makes sure that every Christmas stocking is filled with coal and every heart with dread about dark days that lay ahead.
