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ACCORDING TO LIZ - When asked if it was his job as president to uphold the U.S. Constitution on the May 4th episode of “Meet the Press,” Trump responded “I don't know. I'm not, I’m not a lawyer. I don't know.”
The man who not once, but twice, swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution… now admits he doesn’t even know he has to follow it.
It’s clear that he does not represent “We-the-People,” just “Me, me, me” – the quintessential narcissist he was in the beginning, is now, and will be, world without end.
When pushed about if every person on American soil was entitled to due process as guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment, he just repeated: “I don’t know.”
When probed if both citizens and non-citizens alike deserved due process, he rambled on “…if you're talking about that, we'd have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.
“We have thousands of people that are some murderers and some drug dealers… [s]ome of the worst people on Earth. Some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth.”
That he “was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it.”
Somehow this disjointed introspection is supposed to justify why Trump’s executive orders can deliberately break the law of the land.
That miraculously, by being elected by 77.3 million Americans (out of some 347.3 million men, women, children, decline-tos plus a few million undocumented aliens) gave him the dictatorial right to impose his interpretation of what that one-fifth wanted, bypassing the almost 250-year-old Constitution.
By executive fiat on his first day in office the sTrumpet signed an order to deport illegal immigrants, many of which he erroneously characterized as “committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans... engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities.”
That same executive order states the “American people deserve a Federal Government that puts their interests first and a Government that understands its sacred obligation to prioritize the safety, security, and financial and economic well-being of Americans.”
Wasn’t it the last really what most Trump voters really wanted? Financial and economic well-being? The return to an America where everyone flourished, something they felt the Biden administration denied them?
Not the wholesale expulsion of friends and neighbors.
Not this rollercoaster ride of successions of tariffs run up the flagpole, delayed, torn down, and redirected. All of which threaten the American consumer with further inflation and irreparable economic harm.
Not a ploy by the president to circumvent traditional and reasoned out trade deals that take the time to assess potential blowback and limit unintentional hardship.
Yes, those can take an average of 18 months to negotiate and 45 months to implement but isn’t that better than living through the emotional trauma of the past hundred days?
The country is already a whole lot poorer – financially and morality – than under Clueless Joe who, along with his advisors, adhered to the Constitution, to the rule of law, and to the deep-rooted rights of all Americans.
In Los Angeles, Trump’s ever-fluctuating tariffs – imposed and not – have already taken a significant toll at the Port of LA where the shiploads of cargo containers and traffic trucking those goods to retailers have declined dramatically since Chinese-manufactured products became laser-targeted as the poster-child cause for American economic insecurity.
This has led not to a trickle-down effect but to gushing waterfalls washing away livelihoods, hemorrhaging jobs far beyond the Port: the gas stations that fuel those trucks, the stores in the far-flung neighborhoods where the port workers live and where they no longer have money to spend, and the merchants who can no longer stock their shelves with cheap products.
Competition and shrinking availability have driven up prices exacerbating inflation for American consumers across the country. Profit margins have withered as wholesalers struggle to maintain customers and market-share.
While this new 90-day pause on tariffs between the U.S. and China may produce a nice pop on Wall Street today, its impermanence means no-one will be making those long-term commitments that trade infrastructure requires.
This has not created any jobs, and won’t so long as the country’s economy continues to be roiled by fickle fiats from the White House.
In its first 100 days, this administration took more than 140 actions to weaken or rescind environmental regulations specifically enacted to protect people from the selfish ravages of corporate profiteering by those who shelled out their millions to put Trump back in office.
The Trump-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill” budget now headed towards reconciliation that the Republicans hope will bypass a Senate filibuster, slashes Medicaid for millions while its huge tax cuts and enhanced military spending presage consequential damages for everyone but the wealthiest of Americans with health care, education, Social Security, and other services potentially all in the line of fire.
In San Francisco, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston blocked mass layoffs of federal employees for 14 days but that is but a finger in the dike of “reductions in force” cascading from the tsunami of executive orders and the mauling of government infrastructure.
The law may be on her – and the people’s – side since her ruling cited precedential law that a president may “broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress”. But this is just a brief respite from the chaos being thrown off by the whirlwind in the White House,
The reckless dismemberment of federal programs and departments by Elon Musk’s band of robbing hoods has laid waste a plethora of small businesses dependent on them and were the economic engine that was the last best hope for resuscitating a Los Angeles left devastated by wildfires and its own government’s fiduciary mismanagement.
Again, this ripples out, magnifying uncertainty and impacting the working-class foundation of the City’s economy – bus-drivers, nurses, the administrative support that keeps our lives rolling.
It’s pretty obvious, even to a lay-person, that it isn’t only what’s been done, it’s the ham-fisted approach – a lack of nuance and attention to detail. This president’s refusal to follow time-proven processes that protect the people, his blatant indifference to their suffering unless he can capitalize on it to advance his personal agenda, and his appalling ignorance of the Constitution that exists to protect them.
If immigrants must password a test of basic knowledge about the American government and history including the rights guaranteed under the Constitution in order to be a citizen, so must the president.
Why not do the same for politicians who are a clear and present danger to the American people and the economy under which they live, everyone in a Government that has actively rejected “its sacred obligation to prioritize the safety, security, and financial and economic well-being of Americans”
Mm-m, I wonder where the Führer would prefer to go? China? Or El Salvador or Libya? It’s not as if he gave other deportees much of a choice…
And what might be the tariff?
When asked, would Trump still respond, “I don't know”?
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno who now resides in Vermont and is a regular contributor to CityWatch on issues that she is passionate about. She can be reached at [email protected].)
