The Sins of The Donald!

Allan:

Regarding your question about Trump's behaviour during his just concluded trip abroad, he was certainly rude, and the optics of it weren’t very good. It makes him seem less like a leader and more like a regular guy who is only thinking about himself.
 

That said, I pick my battles when it comes to Trump. If I complain about every single thing he does I won’t have time for anything else.

As of right now, my battles are the travel ban, which selectively (it seemed) did not even target the countries where the 9/11 hijackers came from, not that I’d necessarily agree with it if he did. But if we’re about security, why avoid the source of our greatest threat so far? I’m glad the travel ban keeps getting defeated.

When the President succeeds we all succeed, is only true if the thing he’s trying to succeed at is a good thing. When it makes no sense, a victory for its own sake isn’t good, and it will hurt people. I’d need better reasons.

His budget proposal is also dead on arrival, elected republicans known for being willing to save every possible federal dollar they can thought the cuts were too draconian. As such, it’s not a workable budget for the country. 

Slashing the SNAP food assistance program in particular makes no sense, because the primary benefactors of the plan are hundreds of thousands of school age kids who need nutrition. It’s a bit like denying kids a school lunch if their parents don’t have 10 or 15 dollars a week. It doesn’t make fiscal sense. Even if I accept the premise that we need to cut our budget, and I don’t, why would you start by cutting food for children?

Call me a bleeding heart liberal if you want but that’s one of the last things we should ever cut. If we want to balance the budget and school lunch or food for kids is the issue, you raise taxes. And given what we spend money on, there’s no need to raise taxes. Cut elsewhere, not from school children. Leave the elderly alone too.

Then, the brewing saga with all his ties to Russia. I’m keeping an eye on that. 

Some of his cabinet have already committed perjury and obstruction of justice.

Those are just some of the battles, but they’re important ones, and when we focus on his Ramadan speech or him being rude to another world leader, I mean, you’re not wrong, but most people only have so much attention span.

I focus on the big ticket items, where a reasonable conservative could even agree with me that hey, Donald doesn’t have the best idea here.

Any random mainstream conservative in the country and I could agree on these issues, it’s the extremely far right that we can’t find common ground on.

That’s why we should try to find a more centrist president. Wing opinions are already represented in Congress, and you need someone with broad appeal and the ability to compromise to be able to make everything work.

Donald Trump is in his own way. If he’s not successful, it’s because he’s so far off course on some issues that his own party can’t follow him.

It’s a bad leader that can’t even lead his most loyal and most closely aligned thinkers. A leader with no followers is not relevant, and I want a relevant president. If Donald wants to be relevant, he’s gotta learn how to compromise.