We Are No Longer “The Shinning City on a Hill”
I don’t think that most people realize that Donald Trump was elected by only 31.6% of Americans who were eligible to vote. There are an estimated 260 million adults in the United States with 245 million eligible to vote. Only 152 million voted. Trump got only 49.8% of that vote, less than half. But even fewer of American adults wanted him to be president! Obviously not a mandate!
We are No Longer a Moral Nation
Congress is allowing he and Musk to take away food and medicine from children and adults in Africa suffering from drought and terrorism, and from the homeless, poor, and victims of hurricanes and flooding in the United States with the destruction of the US Aid department and the canceling of grants to food banks and from FEMA and the firing of federal employees across the country based on lies and not legal justification.
In Franklin County Ohio alone $1.4 million has been canceled by Trump with the Mid-Ohio Food Bank temporarily closing. Our elected Republicans clearly agree with Ebenezer Scrooge:
Men asking for help for the poor: .“…hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.
“Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge. (Now they are in El Salvador.)
“Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”
“They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”
“The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then?” said Scrooge.
“Both very busy, sir.”
“Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
-A Christmas Tale by Charles Dickens (emphasis added)
The following is an accurate description of our current, so-called, President:
Selected from a Twitter post ‘Why The British Don’t Like Trump’ – Written by Nate White
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a sniveling sidekick instead. (Think Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. Added)
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.
I can’t watch or read the news without getting angry and more depressed than I already have been for the last 40 years. To protect myself, I mainly read the headlines and turn the television news off when I can feel it dragging me down. I do read some articles to get details of court actions against the Trump administration but to be sure that it’s really as bad as it looks. And writing a blog is very difficult to even start. So, I have just spewed out all that I’ve been thinking about.
The American people still have a moral compass, but we have not been moving toward true North, what should be our moral target, for a long time. Republican elected officials threw away their moral compasses around 1994 when Newt Gingrich took over the Republican Party and established “winning is everything” as their standard, and the welfare of the American people is irrelevant because, as the chairman of the Ohio Republican Party declared after the victory over Issue 1 in 2024, “we (can always) confuse them.” (My addition” Gingrich's style of politics helped drag down Bob Dole when he ran for president by changing who he was and how he presented himself. He was a man for whom I have great respect. I disagreed with many of Barry Goldwater’s policy positions that respected him because he was a man of integrity not a mere opportunist just out for himself like all the Republican members of Congress are now. I cannot even respect Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski because they are so inconsistent.
I firmly believe that no one can be a Christian and a Republican! To be a Christian you have to care about the poor and follow the example and teachings of Jesus. Republicans hate the poor and when they want to cut federal spending it’s always for things like food stamps, welfare payments and access to healthcare. The first thing musk and Trump eliminated was United States food and medical aid to people in critical need across the world. I don’t think we even offer help after the Myanmar’s recent disaster. Part of their current budget efforts are directed at eliminating the Affordable Healthcare Act’s expansion of Medicare to include more of America’s working poor. They are simply, and consistently unchristian! And they are simply and consistently liars!
Elon Musk and DOGE have acted illegally and, I think, immorally in their termination of federal employees and have lied about how much money they’ve saved. Nor is anyone deducting from their claimed savings the cost of their actions. Over $800 million of food was left rotting in warehouses when DOGE eliminated USAID and all of its contracts. We are now starving children and their parents in Africa and are no longer preventing malaria infections. We are not helping refugees from terrorism and the consequences of climate change to maintain their health and not starve. Musk and DOGE are clearly incompetent and dishonest. They claim to have found inefficiencies but have provided no evidence. They claim to have found waste but have provided no evidence. THEY are inefficient; THEY are waste! Trump has apparently, will see if it’s real, placed 145% tariffs on China while giving them the gift of eliminating scientific research in the United States. He is attacking universities by cutting funding for research because he is a racist. If you are against DEI, then you are in favor of at least discrimination and probably returning to segregation as well. If you’re not WOKE, what are you: asleep, dead?
We Americans have a more than 350 year history of enslaving of Africans brought here against their will and, after granting them freedom and right to vote in the Constitution, engaging in national segregation, discrimination, lynching, denial of federal benefits limiting them illegally to whites in places like the Jim Crow South. To think that in the 60 years since the enactment of the civil rights laws that we have compensated for or eliminated the impact of those 350 years of deliberate harm and repression is
beyond stupid! It is absurd! It is deliberately racist! African-Americans are still not equal to nor do they have access, opportunities, equal to European-Americans. DEI may have been overfunded and definitely need to be more effective but it is an absolute necessity if we have any morals at all!
WE HAVE ABANDONED INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP
The United States and our President are no longer leaders of the free world. We have become the enemies of our former allies. We have even increased tariffs on countries like 
Australia whose people buy more from the United States than we buy from them. We have threatened to go to war against Denmark to gain Greenland. We have threatened to go to war against Panama to gain control of the Panama Canal when there are no real problems there caused by the current administrators.
I can’t find any evidence that we are still helping Ukraine. President Biden was far, far too weak and too slow in his support for Ukraine. If we had followed the example of President George H. W. Bush, we and our NATO allies would have sent troops to help Ukraine as soon as Russia attacked, at least three divisions from the United States. But we didn’t. We haven’t even kept up the supply of ammunition that they need, and neither President Biden nor Trump have used their executive powers to more rapidly increase its production.
I am concerned that our abandoning all of our friends and attacking them will encourage China to attack Taiwan because they know that we will have to stand alone, if we stand at all. I am also concerned that not standing up to Russia more strongly in making their illegal terrorist war on Ukraine more costly will put us if in the same position as Britain and France in 1938 when their appeasement helped cause World War II. Why isn’t Russia on the State Department’s list of terrorist nations? They are the most successful terrorist in the world! They have deliberately murdered more than 20,000 Ukrainian civilians by deliberately attacking apartment buildings, marketplaces and other civilian targets. (Only Israel may have done better in Gaza with their unjustified attacks on civilian buildings. But that’s another story. To be clear, Palestinians will not deserve their own nation until they actively join the fight and help eliminate Hamas.)
WE MUST REFORM OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEMS
I think that the majority of Americans still have and occasionally consult their moral compass. However, a significant minority have thrown theirs away. A big part of our problem are our electoral systems. The electoral college was established to protect the rich from the masses, people like me. Presidential candidates pay no attention to the people in the small states. They focus almost exclusively on the swing states ignoring the rest of us. The electoral college must be eliminated so that all of our votes count, and the president is elected by the people and not the 227-year-old anachronism. Gerrymandering creates one-party dictatorships in state legislatures while the Supreme Court refuses to enforce the plain language and plain intent of the authors and the people who endorsed the Constitution that states would have republican, representative governments. (Their claiming that that language in the Constitution is merely political is based on a completely irrelevant decision the court made 200 years ago, not a commitment to upholding and enforcing our Constitution. The six Republicans on the court are in violation of their oath of office especially after their attack on the rule of law in Trump v. U.S.!)
Our primaries are based on winner take all, first past the post, victories. This must be changed to break the Republican and Democrat parties monopoly of our government. But more on that another time. What is important is that the majority of Americans recognize that it’s time to reform our electoral systems so that we can honor the Declaration of Independence and the sacrifices of the ancestors of many of us in the Revolutionary war to obtain truly representative government for all of us at all levels of government.
