Donald Trump’s second presidency is off to a terrible start, filled with broken promises, constant lies, and worsening problems he claimed he would fix. Trump’s day one executive orders were all over the map, from cruel to crazy, to pointless, and even illegal. Sloppy mistakes throughout the orders raised the question of whether they were written, at least in part, by AI.
That’s how Trump approaches being the President: lazy, half-thought-out directives that allow him to be surrounded by cameras. When you elect someone like that, you end up with someone who:
claims to back the blue while pardoning people who violently beat police
said they’d solve the debt but turn around and demand a suspension of the debt ceiling while they’re in office
has defined drug cartels as terrorists while simultaneously pardoning a notorious drug trafficker
said he would bring down prices but wants to place 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, two of our largest trading partners
is preventing government agencies from making public health announcements, such as bird flu outbreaks, so when your eggs jump in price again, you won’t know why
Trump already had one horrible presidency and has been ranked the worst president in history. He lied on average over 20 times per day during his first term, sank the economy, lost jobs, spiked up crime, drug smuggling, overdoses, and mass shootings, and increased the national debt by 40%. Everyone who voted for Trump, no matter the reason why, knew full well who Trump was, and they must take ownership of electing him, but so must every one who didn’t vote.
You can say you voted for Trump because of how you felt about the economy, and I wouldn’t claim that you didn’t. But you also knew who Trump is and what he wants to do. You heard him say he would be a dictator on day one, that he could terminate the Constitution, use the military on civilians, seek retribution against his political opponents, and even heard him publicly tell Putin to go ahead and attack our allies. If you voted because of the economy, you also decided all that was acceptable.
Everyone knows Trump lies. It is no surprise that while he has already signed an executive order attempting to override a Constitutional Amendment, he has done nothing to help prices go down, or your wages go up.
Eggs, gasoline, and coffee prices have all increased since Trump took office. He signed an executive order to undo the lower prescription drug prices that Biden had enacted.
At the same time, Trump’s migrant roundups have been a spectacle designed to instill fear, which has caused migrant workers to not show up to their jobs. That means prices for other goods and services will increase as well. To top it all off, despite countless economists telling Trump that tariffs are a tax on Americans, Trump has announced that he intends to start using them on Feb 1st–another price increase.
Some voters refused to vote or voted for Trump because they felt that Democrats hadn’t done enough for the Palestinian people. That makes zero sense because Trump was always going to be worse for Gaza and Palestinians.
Trump said he doesn’t expect the ceasefire that Biden brokered to last and nominated someone for the UN who specifically said she believes Israel has a biblical right to the West Bank. Israel expects Trump to end the hold on 2,000 lb bombs that Biden enacted to stop Israel from razing the last civilian city to rubble, which would cause a tragic amount of civilian casualties while leaving them nowhere to go. It is also expected that Trump will end sanctions against Israeli settlers who were committing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. How does punishing Democrats by letting Trump take office help these people?
Then, there were the claims that Trump would bring peace. People seem to forget that America was at war throughout Trump’s first term, and under Biden, US forces weren’t directly involved in war for the first time in decades.
Enough voters believed Trump when he said he’d end the Ukraine war after being elected, even before taking office. They still believed him when he changed it to within 24 hours of taking office. Then, his team claimed within the first 100 days. And now, when Trump was asked if the war would still be ongoing a year from now, he said to ask Russia because Putin won’t agree to any ceasefire deals. As it turns out, and as everyone should have known, ending a war, particularly one your nation isn’t involved in, is not easy.
Surely, the border was a valid reason to vote for Trump, right? Trump has already sent 1,500 troops to the border, declared an emergency, and is rounding up migrants for deportation, which sounds like taking action unless you have been paying attention to what is happening at the border.
Biden already had over 2,200 active duty military personnel at the border and thousands of additional National Guard troops. Border crossings are over 33% lower than when Trump left office. And in 2024, Biden deported more migrants than in any year of Trump’s first term. The difference is that Biden didn’t treat being president like a reality TV show, creating a spectacle for every action he took. He just did his job. Sadly, in modern times, that is a political mistake. People aren’t paying attention, and the media isn’t reporting, so without the spectacle, disinformation determines the narrative.
Trump is making immigration worse. He shut down legal avenues of immigration, like he did during his first term, and is attempting to make any claim of asylum impossible despite it being US law. If people can’t make an appointment to hear their asylum claim at ports of entry, they’ll cross the border. And if border patrol won’t let them claim asylum, they’ll avoid border patrol. You can’t make hardship and desperation disappear by pretending it doesn’t exist.
Elections aren’t a game, and democracy does not defend itself. If you’ve fallen into the trap of believing both sides are equally bad or that voting doesn’t matter, it is time to snap out of it. If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain about what is happening. You not voting made it so. If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to act surprised by what he’s doing. He told you, he showed you, you knew.
Citizenship in a democracy comes with the responsibility of staying informed about the issues, not just one issue: the candidates, the government, all of it. It doesn’t matter if people don’t go out of their way to inform you personally; you must ensure you are informed and vote. Anything less, and your rights, your freedoms, your prosperity, will be eroded away until our nation ends up just like Russia–a fake democracy with a tyrant for a leader who runs the country into bankruptcy while making dissidents disappear or “fall” out of windows. One Republican member of Congress has already introduced a bill to try to allow Trump to run for a third term as president.
It is time to get past the culture war nonsense, see past the lies, and realize that America is as good as you make it be. Get informed, get involved, and turn this around in 2026.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-admin-accused-using-ai-191117579.html