Trump’s America First Strategy: Mega-Rich Celebrate, Majority Rewarded with Self-Sacrificing Suffering

Trump’s America First Strategy: Mega-Rich Celebrate, Majority Rewarded with Self-Sacrificing Suffering

"Yeah, that’s her, with the gold. I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. I just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab them by the pussy... You can do anything." 

Donald Trump about a failed effort with a married woman, on a hot mic to Billy Bush of Access Hollywood, after visiting the set of Days of Our Lives in 2005."This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course—not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended." 

Trump, days later.

"I've known Jeff [Epstein] for 15 years. Terrific guy… He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life."

 Trump 2002 interview in New York magazine.

If the character of a presidential candidate is the principal determinant of a qualification to serve, long before the 2016 election and the “need to spin” that accompanies presidential campaigns in general, Trump defined his own chåaracter very well. His policy stand in the 2024 election is equally clearly spelled out. It’s all there in the 900-page Project 2025 manifesto, which despite Trump’s initial statements of denial, has been the sequence of step-by-step Trump 2.0 implementation supervised and architected by self-admitted white Christian nationalist, White House Senior advisor, Stephen Miller, Trumps’ Rasputin-equivalent for Russian history buffs. And despite the optics, this is not a “red assault on blue” backdoor civil war. As Americans are slowly discovering, the major victims of this assault on the American economy are its most vulnerable residents, often Trump’s MAGA followers.

Average red state Americans, particularly in largely rural districts, are being “rewarded” by Trump with losing medical coverage (while watching their closest medical facilities close), many also losing access to SNAP food support (not to mention the farmers who will lose the business of supplying that food), no longer able to count on FEMA disaster relief as the number and intensity of climate-change related disasters mount, are watching the slip-sliding quality of the schools their children attend deteriorate into among the worst in the developed world, US life expectancy still falling and prices for just about everything trending upward… fast!

Let’s make one searing fact about Trump 2.0: It is controlled by one man seeking total control of our nation. Not Congress, where the controlling GOP “whatever you want Mr President” votes are locked into a morbid fear of losing MAGA support (Trump’s powerful base of believers). And not the Trump reconfigured US Supreme Court. As of August 19, 2025, the court had issued 19 emergency orders in cases related to the second Trump administration, with two emergency applications pending and one withdrawn. The Trump administration filed 22 of the emergency applications, and two applications were filed by the other litigant. Trump enjoyed these results.

As the President has invited red state National Guard troops to assist in the reduction of “violent crime” in the nation’s capital, there’s a glimmer of the Union capital willingly requesting Confederate soldiers to enter and police its streets against criminal activity. That invitation did not include the White House, however. Was this the “test phase” of what a civil war would look like if launched in earnest? Remember that more Americans died in that mid-19th-century Civil War than died in every other war this country ever fought... combined. With absolutely no serious evidence in support, Trump even bragged about Washingtonians now going out to dinner without fear… notwithstanding an OpenTable (online reservations app) report showing a 27% reduction in DC dinner reservations.

Trump was careful to slow-walk any mandates against his administration generated by any court, and many would say that such efforts reeked of pure refusal to comply or twisted logic as to why the government did not have to comply. When it came to forecasting trends, Trump made it clear that any federal employee reporting anything but Trump-favorable statistics, stared probable termination in the eyes. When faced with numbers that suggested failed economic results – like nasty unemployment figures – Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for properly summarizing the aggregate results.

As numbers reflecting the reduction of all criminal activity (a 26% reduction in violent crime) even immediately before Trump’s 2.0 inauguration in DC, Trump carelessly suggested to members of the press that those positive numbers were way off base, rigged somehow, and suggested that the press speak to some of the victims… An old Trump standard: when statistics are bad and fabricating good numbers would be too easily challenged, always cite anecdotal evidence. It would seem safe to assume that no victim would suggest that crime in his or her area were falling. And no politician would come out as “pro-crime.”

Tariffs with many US trading partners are beginning to lock in. The TACO truck seems to have backed-up as inflation is beginning to climb. Prices are rising, as measured by key commodities (gasoline, coffee, bananas, appliances, cars, electrical power, homebuilding components, etc.) Consumer confidence is slipping, and Trump’s assertion that states that rely on green alternative energy sources have seen the greatest increases in energy … is precisely the opposite. According to the August 19th Mediate, “President Donald Trump blasted renewable energy on Truth Social Wednesday [8/19] morning, declaring wind and solar power ‘THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY’ and accusing states that rely on them of facing ‘RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS.’

“It’s a familiar refrain from the president, who has long treated wind turbines as both an aesthetic blight and a political punching bag. But when it comes to hard numbers, the evidence doesn’t support his sweeping claim… According to a recent analysis by Energy Innovation, states that have leaned heavily into wind and solar — like Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico — have actually seen slower electricity price growth compared to the national average. Iowa, which now gets nearly 60% of its electricity from wind, saw its rates increase more slowly than 42 other states over the past decade.” As US carmakers are caught between an international rise in demand for EV vehicles (with global demand for gasoline and diesel powered cars falling) and federal policy in their home country putting the kibosh on EV cars instead pushing old world fossil fuels, they have to face the reality that for every four cars Chinese automotive companies sell internationally, US companies only sell one. Layoffs across so many US manufacturing sectors are soaring.

Just to understand how desperate Trump is to erase the underlying truth to so many policy choices, just take this August 13th report from CNN to heart: “NASA is planning to decommission premier satellite missions that gather information on planet-warming pollution and other climate vital signs beginning as soon as October, sources inside and outside of the agency told CNN.

“The destruction of the satellites — which will be abandoned and allowed to eventually burn up in a fiery descent into Earth’s atmosphere — marks the latest step by the Trump administration to scale back federal climate science… President Donald Trump’s budget proposal takes a hatchet to NASA’s Earth science spending for fiscal year 2026, which begins in October… The greenhouse gas monitoring missions, known collectively as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, are some of the many Earth science casualties in the proposal.” Trump’s logic in hiding the salami, widely reported accurately everywhere else, is impeccable: If the voters do not know about the extent of the problem, perhaps they will just dry up and blow away… leaving the nation to the one-man authoritarian path has chosen for the nation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you believe even half of this Trump prop.