Over the past few weeks, my life completely revolved around the Cambria Film Festival—a charming event devoted to romance, romantic comedies and the complexities of love. As the director of that festival, I had little time to be distracted by my usual diet of political talk shows. Instead I reveled in the enormous outpouring of appreciation that came with awarding depictions of love.
But Sunday the festival announced our awards. On Monday and Tuesday we put things away. Today I returned to the real world and read that the national debt has reached $22 trillion, and millions of citizens now realize their tax refunds are going to be small or non-existent.
Some time away from the daily grind of the latest outrage has given me a new perspective on just how far we have fallen into the abyss these past two years. It’s made me think I need to create a new award competition. Maybe it could be called the Trumpies and acknowledge how quickly one person can make the world worse.
I might call my first category the Broken Word award. It identifies the most significant tactic to show America can’t be trusted. Nominees include:
- Withdrawing from the ICBM treaty and allowing Russia free rein to build more nukes.
- Withdrawing from the Iran treaty and allowing Iran to start building nukes
- Withdrawing from Trans-Pacific Partnership and giving China carte blanche to turn itself into an economic nuke in the Pacific
- Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and letting the whole earth turn into a place that will look like it’s been nuked
My second category is the Let’s Die More Quickly award acknowledging efforts to make our country less healthy for our citizens. Nominees include:
- Doing everything possible to dismantle the Affordable Health Care act to result in fewer people insured at higher cost in a country, which already has lower health outcomes at a bigger price than almost every other industrialized country
- Rescinding environmental standards left and right to allow high levels of water pollution, lead, smog and other poisons so we will more quickly need those doctors that we can no longer afford or access
- Taking steps to pull back LGBQT rights while making a state of the union empty promise to do something about AIDS
- Destroying protections for our national parks, forests and recreation areas so we can’t even escape into the wilderness . . . today or tomorrow
My third category is . . . oh, why go on?
The list is endless. In the world of Trumpies, there are no winners. There are only losers. Even the one percent of the one per cent who benefit temporarily from lower taxes and looser business rules will ultimately be losers. There’s no place to spend money in hell.
I need to start planning the 2020 film festival. Help me out. Anyone got a great romance you’re working on?
My newest novel, The Long Table Dinner, is now available on Amazon in either paperback or Kindle formats. Please check out all my novels in paperback or Kindle format: Tales From the Loon Town Cafe, The Finnish Girl, and The Devil’s Analyst.
frahmannthoughts 
Dennis, you make some very good points. I have been a Republican since Ronald Reagan but have been so embarrassed and appalled by Trump that almost every day I am speechless. I didn’t vote for Trump, rather another Republican, and will not vote for him if he runs in 2020. I sorta am interested in the Starbucks guy…but holding my thoughts until the candidates finish slicing and dicing at each other. You and I differ on some stuff, but Inthink our feelings are the same about Trump. all for now.
As fact checkers have said, the talking point that refunds are lower is because less was taken out in the first place so the actual tax burden was less. As far as the last two years are concerned, certainly the last two years have shown a lot of unhinged anger by those accustomed to power not liking the fact that those nobodies in Middle America elected somebody not to their liking.. Just to comment on one other thing, your comment that there is no place to spend money in hell is a perceptive one and merits further consideration as we aging baby boomers age day by day toward our inevitable expiration date on earth and contemplate eternity. (See Chapter 3 of the Book of John).