President Trump’s administration ‘will take us decades to get over’

‘Trust me! I’m, like, a smart person.” I think the last time I heard someone say that I was in seventh grade, but the leader of the free world said it a dozen times last year and repeated it as recently as his first week in office.

This, from the same guy who spent the last 10 years claiming that President Obama was neither a Christian nor an American born citizen in spite of the volumes of evidence to the contrary.

Sound familiar? We heard a lot of that during the campaign run up to the election. All the Republican candidates were small, low energy, slow, crooked and such. One candidate was the smartest candidate ever, with the highest IQ you have ever seen, and had the credentials to prove it. Really! Have you ever seen the president’s transcript? Me neither. What I have seen is that Trump transferred from Fordham University in NYC to the University of Pennsylvania and not to the Wharton School of Business. Penn only awards undergraduate degrees and Trump’s yearbook does not even list him as having made the dean’s list. Upon graduation at the top of his class he would then have been required to apply to the Wharton School. There is no record showing that he ever applied. What he did do was take several classes in the same building as the Wharton School. A minor distinction?

You wouldn’t think so after observing his performance in his first week as president. His first pronouncement was that he had won a resounding mandate in the general election. Yes, he did win the Electoral College vote but he lost the popular vote to Clinton by 2.8 million votes. Not a mandate but maybe a split decision. He then claimed that 3 to 5 million “illegals” voted for Clinton, although the secretaries of state in all 50 states immediately announced that they saw no evidence of voter fraud. Thirty-eight of those officials are Republicans but maybe Trump is right because it appears that Putin was the day’s big winner.

On inauguration day, Trump looked out over the crowd and declared that his was the largest inauguration day crowd in the nation’s history. The D.C. police, National Park Service, public transit system and bus renters all put his crowd at about 800,000 people. That falls a tad short of the 1.8 million that attended Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. I’m sure Penn would call that a noticeable difference. Press Secretary Sean Spicer repeated the claim and when confronted, counselor Kellyanne Conway said the president was using “alternate facts.”  I wonder if he will employ that phrase when he renews his claim that he is smarter than the generals when it comes to combating ISIS and that torture “works good.”

Wait until you see his budget, his replacement for the Affordable Care Act, and his tax reform bills.

Now, I’m not suggesting that he isn’t smart. Look at his other strategies. He said repeatedly that he would give the details of all of those programs that he would enact that would enable us to get tired of winning. Haven’t seen them yet. He said he would deport 11 million “illegals” and that his wife would show us her papers. I haven’t seen them yet or those of all the female minors that were brought into the country to work at his modeling agency.

I’m still waiting to see his tax returns. Why should it matter? Because we do know that he has numerous outstanding loans to the Russian National Bank and that the government owned Bank of China holds the mortgages on several properties in NYC that bear his name. I’m curious as to how much an international quid pro quo might cost us taxpayers this year in return for the lifting of tariffs, quotas and sanctions.

Look, I’m just a public school graduate who spent eight years defending this nation during Viet Nam, but I’m smart enough to know this guy is in way over his head and that this is an administration that will take us decades to get over.

Barry is a resident of Questa.