During the campaign I thought most of what Trump was proposing, if bellowing out applause lines can seriously be considered proposing, was unrealistic (The Wall), and the rest was just what normal Republicans were going to do anyway (Repeal PPACA). I didn't believe that he knew what he was talking about, or had put any serious thought it the how of any of his ideas. I thought his ignorance of virtually all facets of governance was his biggest downside.
As he started to "get to work", if a four eight hour days followed by a golf weekend can be called work, I was unhappy with his executive orders, but was not surprised, after all, eliminating regulations was an old Republican standby. There's certainly an argument to be made about how harmful his executive actions are, and how his cabinet picks, people who don't believe in the mission of their departments, could be characterized as re-filling the swamp, rather than draining it.
His obsessive jihad to eliminate the PPACA also wasn't surprising, in that the Republicans had been threatening to do it for eight years and he had been shouting about it throughout his campaign, and I shouldn't have been surprised that he had no idea what was actually in the so-called replacement bill. It goes right along with his general ignorance.
Trumpists, and Trump himself, put a lot of stock in the Second Amendment, but support for the First seems to be conditional. Say what you want about bias in the press, a free media, while not a branch of government and outside the constitutional system of checks and balances, often acts as an unofficial check and balance against government overreach. How many examples of government skulduggery has been exposed by a newspaper that just wouldn't back down? An independent media is one of the first things to go in a dictatorship.
Trump, almost from Day One has made it his mission to sow distrust in the mainstream media and portray media outlets as liars who use nonexistent sources and make up stories to make him look bad. He regularly calls major newspapers and television news "fake news" and has declared them "the enemy of the people". Among his followers, anything that he says is to be accepted without question, despite his easily documented lies about virtually everything, while anything from the mainstream media is "fake news". His evident goal is to discredit independent reporting, so that Trump and only Trump will be the source of what is true about Trump.
The second disturbing thing about Trump is the Russia investigation. At first it was simply about hacked emails and fake news reports. That didn't seem so bad. No one was suggesting that voting machines were tampered with, just that Russia had interfered, or attempted to do so. But after a while it seemed like every week, or even every day, another Trump associate turned out not only to have ties with Russia, but had lied about it. And now we have Trump firing the head of the FBI in the middle of the investigation, and said former FBI Director claiming that Trump tried to get him to back off and intelligence directors also testifying that Trump tried to get them to get the FBI to end the investigation.
If this is a "made up story to create an excuse for losing the election" why the cover-up?
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