Drowning

While Donald Trump is failing spectacularly at some of his major campaign promises -- repealing Obamacare, barring immigrants from certain countries, ending Washington business as usual, curbing corruption -- he is succeeding in one, less obvious way. He's working to make government smaller, weaker, and more easily manipulated by powerful special interests.

James Hohmann wrote an excellent piece about this topic yesterday in The Washington Post (link here).

This brings to mind arch conservative Grover Norquist's goals for the Republican Party: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." That's exactly what Trump is striving to do.

For lower and middle income people, minorities, women, immigrants, and LGBT Americans, they're left without a strong advocate when the government is weakened. That's what would happen with the absurdly titled "First Amendment Defense Act" -- LGBT Americans and their government would be powerless to prevent people from discriminating if they want to, under the excuse of "religious beliefs."

Whether or not Trump will ultimately succeed at this stealth goal remains to be seen. He may prove too corrupt to keep his eye on the ball or too inept to close the deal.

He promised to bring all Americans together and to represent all Americans after he was elected. What we see here, however, is that he's doing the exact opposite -- he's rigging the system so the wealthy and powerful have even more power, and the rest of us are left with even less than we had before.

This is not what Trump promised his supporters during the campaign. He promised to fight for the common man and woman.

But he's doing the exact opposite. He's trying to build a plutocracy, a country ruled by and for the wealthy. He lied during his campaign about this, of course, but that's to be expected -- he lied about nearly everything.