First lady’s jacket sums up Trump administration
WASHINGTON >> In the 1992 campaign, President George H.W. Bush created an unofficial and much-mocked motto for his administration during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. “Message: I care,” he announced, as if reading aloud the stage directions.
Melania Trump did much the same last week when she went to Texas to see some of the migrant kids who were taken from their parents under her husband’s policy. The now-famous wording on her jacket made her a human billboard for what should be the unofficial motto of the Trump administration:
“I really don’t care, do u?” The administration’s cruelty is particularly prominent lately because of photos of the anguish of the migrant children — and his warning that immigrants, like insects, would “infest” the country. But the current episode, though highly visible, is hardly one of a kind. By now, the administration has amassed an extensive catalog of cruelty.
On Wednesday night, Donald Trump renewed his assault on Sen. John McCain, RAriz., as he dies from brain cancer. Trump again blamed McCain for the failed repeal of Obamacare.
The administration this month decided not to defend the law against a court challenge that if successful would end protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Trump has also ended subsidies to help insurance companies cover low-income people, and acknowledged the Obamacare repeal he championed was “mean.” He
gave a green light to work requirements for Medicaid that could deny health insurance even to many poor Americans who work.
I really don’t care, do u?
The Trump administration this month said that domestic violence and gang violence would no longer be grounds for seeking asylum in the United States.
Trump previously reduced the number of refugees from 110,000 to 45,000 per year — the lowest in almost 40 years; and even fewer are actually being admitted, forcing tens of thousands to remain in refugee camps and return to face persecution or violence in the countries they fled. This is after Trump’s travel ban on several Muslimmajority countries, which resulted in families separated and students and doctors denied entry.
I really don’t care, do u?
Lawmakers complained this past week to Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, that the administration’s haphazard implementation of trade barriers is causing havoc for farmers, small businesses and manufacturers. Ross responded by calling such notions “exaggerated” and “not our fault.”
A week earlier, Trump’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wages after inflation have fallen over the past year for 80 percent of all privately employed workers and economic “gains are going almost exclusively to people already at the top of the economic ladder.”
I really don’t care, do u?
Trump’s budget proposal this year, sensibly ignored by Congress, would have cut Medicaid by $306 billion over 10 years, food stamps by $214 billion, nutritional help for mothers and children, and heating assistance for the poor, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
I really don’t care, do u?
Trump said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville last summer. He declared a ban on transgender people in the military and later imposed a partial ban.
I really don’t care, do u?
Now come reports that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller — architects and leading defenders of Trump’s child-separation policy — were heckled in separate incidents in recent days while dining at Mexican restaurants.
I don’t like incivility, but you know what? I really don’t care, do u?