The column is a year-end review for President Trump . Maybe he has earned high grades for accomplishments and exemplary character.
Compassion and Understanding : President Trump demonstrated compassion when he pardoned Changpend Zhao , billionaire founder of Binance crypto currency company. Zhao had pleaded guilty to money laundering. According to Archives of the US Department of Justice , Zhao’s clients were “ terrorists, cyber-criminals and child abusers”. According to our president “ I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.” Not knowing Zhao was a surprise to many because Binance had struck a business deal involving the Trump family crypto venture.
Trump’s compassionate heart pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who was a the center of “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world”.
In January our president also pardoned former Proud Boys leader Henry “ Enrique” Tarrio who had been sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy. But our president was more understanding. Trump explained that the sentence was “ ridiculous and excessive” , that Tarrio and his group “ actually love our country”. Trump characterized his pardon as rectifying a “grave national injustice” and promoting “ national reconciliation”.
Munich Redux Most of us didn’t experience the Munich agreement of 1938 . Britain’s PM Neville Chamberlain forced a democratic country Czechoslovakia, to cede its most defensible border, the Sudetenland, in in order to appease the dictator of Germany. Six months later Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Ukraine is also a democracy that has been fighting for its survival since Russia invaded it (for the second time) almost four years ago. Based on his 28-point peace plan our president wants Ukraine to cede territory it has successfully defended and reduce the size of its army to appease the dictator of Russia. Thanks to our president, if we missed the original Munich we may now see Munich II as it unfolds in real time. Hopefully the continued courage of Ukrainians in defending their country and the support they are receiving from European countries will mean that another Munich can be avoided
New values for Americans. An Afghan immigrant shot two members of the National Guard, killing one of them .Our president has decided that based on one person’s crime many people can be punished. The immigration status of about 150,000 Afghans, many of whom had worked with our military in Afghanistan, is being reexamined. Processing immigration applications from nineteen countries has been paused.
Punishing an entire group of people for the actions of one person is a dramatic violation of American values. Don’t worry. President Trump will give us new values like calling human beings “ garbage” if they are from Somalia. Then there’s The Great Replacement” conspiracy to replace real Americans , namely White Christians, with black and brown people from other countries. Home land security adviser Stephen Miller has said, “ You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies…At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions and terrors of their broken homelands.”
America as a role model. MAGA is becoming a Shining City on the Hill and A Light unto the Nations . According to Foreign Affairs magazine, our president has supported far right governments in Europe ( e.g Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban) and extremist parties that are striving to come to power (e.g. Alternative for Germany , Spain’s Vox party and Nigel Farange’s Reform UK.) They have formed a transnational front called the Patriots of Europe . According to their website this group has fourteen delegations in the European Parliament accounting for one- third of the EP’s total seats. Their slogan is “Make Europe Great Again” .
You’ll Never Drive Alone. According to the Associated Press
“ US Customs and Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious… A network of cameras scan and records vehicle license plate information and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious.” Apparently you can be pulled from your car if a CBP officer suspects you of being suspicious. No warrant is required.
You may live in the border area in which the CBP can operate. Under long established law, the border extends 100 miles from what people typically think of as an external boundary. The ten largest cities in our country and 213 million Americans fall within that area.
The good news is that American drivers will never need to feel alone because the CBP may be tracking them.
Here is the basis for the column’s A+ grade: The A is for arrogant, abhorrent and autocratic. The plus is because our president has laid the groundwork for even worse to come.