No, I am not talking about the investigations into the Trump administration. That is being handled. Not as quickly as I would like, but unfortunately these things take time. The national emergency that I’m talking about is the pending Senate passage into law of a health care bill that is nothing more than a thinly-disguised tax cut for the rich. It goes something like this: The Republicans realize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them to permanently screw the working class and the poverty-stricken in order to give the wealthy a huge tax cut. The health care (preliminary tax cut) bill has to be passed before the official tax reform (tax cut for the rich) is up for consideration. The reason is that the health care bill is throwing 23 million or so people off Medicaid in order to cut the Medicaid taxes that Obamacare put in place to assist those who can’t afford health care. That lowers the baseline, because, under the rules of reconciliation, there is a limit on how much they can cut taxes permanently. This article provides an explanation of the reasoning behind the health care bill’s relation to tax cuts.

It’s a truism that nothing bad happens without a silver lining to it. “It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good”, so the saying goes. Due to the national disaster of Trump’s election, the once moribund print media is coming back. Especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, which are in a cutthroat competition for eyeballs, in what can be described as a win-win situation. Revenues are going up. Speaking for myself, I have subscriptions to the T&G, Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Of course, the only print subscription I have is for the T&G. But regardless, they are all getting revenue from me, and I’m sure I’m not alone. That truism that I mentioned can work in reverse as well. Every good thing that happens has negative consequences as well. For instance, from my point of view, this scandal about the Trump administration’s possible (in my view, almost certain) collusion with the Russians to influence Trump’s election is a wonderful gift. A gift that will keep on giving for years. Now that a special counsel has been appointed, Trump’s (and Jared Kushner’s) many financial shenanigans are going to be investigated. That’s what a special counsel does. He starts with one possible crime, and he keeps digging through everything. So Robert Mueller will go through Trump & Co.’s possible collusion with the Russians, and it will keep on going. How do you think we got Monica Lewinsky out of a Whitewater real estate investigation?

Donald Trump has been operating on the fringes for many decades. He has been involved with domestic and foreign organized crime. It is a good thing that these subterranean dealings will be exposed to the light of Robert Mueller’s investigation. But we cannot let ourselves be duped into ignoring what the Republican congress is attempting to do behind closed doors. They, too, are trying to get some good from a bad, to them, situation. While we are all breathlessly watching the hearings and awaiting the next Russian shoe to drop, the Republican Senate wants to destroy the progress Obama has made towards universal health care. While no one is paying attention, Mitch McConnell wants to throw our most vulnerable citizens to the wolves and hyenas of the private market, without government assistance, of health care administration.

Donald Trump is perhaps the most widely despised president in history. He was elected even though he lost the popular vote by about 3 million voters. He won through an ancient artifact that, for political reasons, cannot be done away with. That artifact is the Electoral College, and 70,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. You could say he won on a technicality. But he did win legally, fair and square. I had a brief hope that the College might refuse to vote Trump in, on the grounds that he isn’t qualified to be president. But, looking back on it now, that would have been a fool’s errand. To deny Trump his legal, albeit technical, victory would have caused civil unrest like we haven’t seen in many years. People would have been killed. So it’s probably just as well that didn’t happen.

Even though I and many others knew that electing Trump president was a mistake of historical proportions, he did win fair and square. So, given that he won on a technicality, with a minority of voters electing him, I might have thought that Trump would try, even halfheartedly, to bring the country together. He is capable of being very gracious when he wants to be. He also has a sense of humor. I actually liked Trump when he first started appearing in rallies. He seemed like he was enjoying himself, while the rest of the Republican candidates acted in public like they were going to the dentist. Nervous and dour. Trump even compared favorably to Hillary in my mind, with his easy-breezy disposition and the smile on his face. What I believe happened though, as time went on, was that Trump learned what the people at his rallies wanted to hear. Donald Trump had, from the start, campaigned against the “other”, as in the other race or religion. He has been a xenophobe, or some might say a racist, for a long, long time. The “Central Park Five” case, back in 1989, provoked Trump to take out full-page ads against the accused young black men. Even when they were found to be innocent by means of DNA tests, Trump, typically, wouldn’t back down. But aside from his “othering” of people, Trump has, for most of his life, been a fairly liberal person. He contributed to Democratic candidates. He was in favor of abortion rights. But Trump, deep down, is a needy child. He craves adulation and approval. So when he saw that his biggest applause came from demonizing different groups of people, demonizing Hillary Clinton, promoting gun owners’ rights, in other words: When Trump saw that he was getting love for spewing hate, that hate became his dominating message. So Donald Trump won the presidency as a racist and xenophobe. What I had hoped for was that when he became president, he might try to reach out, at least a little, and try to broaden his support. That never happened. Even on his foreign trip, Trump continued to speak to his base. Taking the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. Even conservatives in America were against that.

And, of course, there is the matter of the people Trump surrounds himself with. An anti-environmentalist at the head of the EPA. A right-wing anti-Semite with an office next door and walk-in privileges. I could go on and on.

It would not have been very difficult for Trump to try to bring the country together after his divisive win. He had the skills to do so. He did not want to. So he continues to generate enthusiasm from his base supporters, and hatred from much of the rest of the country, and the world. I don’t believe that Donald Trump will complete a full term in office, due to his Russian scandal. Even though the congressional Republicans are traitorously supine and mute, the presidency of Donald Trump will die. John Dean, back at the start of the Watergate scandal, told Richard Nixon that there was a cancer on his presidency. In Trump’s case, there is a raging, extremely aggressive cancer moving through his administration. And neither his base nor his congressional co-conspirators will be able to save it. Possibly, Vice-President Pence will be implicated also. Maybe not. But regardless, all this tax-cutting and reverse-Robin Hood crap that the Republicans in Congress want is not going to go through. They won’t be able to push it through in the middle of a scandal that is sucking up all the air in the national body politic. And then, in the midterms in 2018, the good guys and gals will return and kick the traitors and moneymen out the door. I hope so, anyway.