Trump Propaganda Marches Sideways on Health Care

The president's propaganda is increasingly transparent lies, bullshit and questionable legality. Multiple sources are reporting that he is signalling he wants to sign an executive order (EO) requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing health conditions. That requirement already exists under the Obamacare law, which the president and the GOP bitterly hate. Axios writes:

"The big picture: Even if this wasn’t already law, it’s unclear what authority the president has to unilaterally require insurers to cover pre-existing conditions. 

What he's saying: "Over the next two weeks I'll be pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions for all customers," the president said."

Such an order might be illegal because it is not clear that a president has legal authority to order this. That the law already requires this may or may not make any difference to the legality of the EO.

It is beyond bizarre that the president had tried to get rid of the requirement to cover pre-existing health conditions. Now he lies to the public yet again by saying no such law law exists. The Hill writes:

"Trump claimed such a move "has never been done before," though insurance companies are already required to cover patients with preexisting conditions under the Affordable Care Act, which was enacted in 2010.

Despite Trump's insistence he will protect those with preexisting conditions, the Justice Department argued in a Supreme Court briefing in late June that the entire Affordable Care Act should be invalidated."  

That the president believes we are stupid enough to believe this ploy to do something that people like is a blatant insult. Why millions of people continue to support this corrupt, incompetent, chronic liar is beyond reason. It reflects raw tribalism and the shocking degree of blindness to reality that it can lead millions of people into falsely seeing.

Push back Against Trump Intensifies

This is from an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer yesterday. Cramer interviewed Nancy Pelosi.

Jim Cramer: I like your spirit of being more upbeat, more optimistic, so I will offer this: Why can’t you go across the aisle and say, ‘Representative Lewis, civil rights legend, would have loved it if we could do something for the totally disenfranchised in this country. No matter what, can we give a huge chunk of money to the people who are disenfranchised, to minorities who want so badly to stay in business and can’t and to people who are trying to go to college or have student loans who are minorities who are the most affected because they had the least chance in our country?’ That’s got to be something both sides can agree to. 

Speaker Pelosi: Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn for what you just described. 

Jim Cramer: Ooh, jeez. 

Speaker Pelosi: Yeah. That’s the problem. See, the thing is, they don’t believe in governance. They don’t believe in governance, and that requires some acts of government to do that. . . . And basically, economists tell us, spend the money, invest the money for those who need it the most, because they will spend it. It will be a stimulus or at least a stabilization of — and that’s a good thing. Consumer confidence is a good thing for the economy. You know that better than anyone.

Yeah, ooh, jeez. At least some democrats are finally sharpening their rhetoric and getting to the point. The GOP no longer believes in governance. They believe in exercising power in a non-compromising, authoritarian way. They just won't compromise. The GOP is the party of HELL NO!! To hard core GOP ideologues, compromise is generally seen as treason, unlike the president's treason. That is generally seen by the GOP as patriotic.

Some context

As an update on my travels through radical right bastions such as Breitbart and Town Hall[1], the common hard core pro-Trump view is that democrats never compromise. That is cited to explain why Pelosi and democrats in congress have not compromised with the limited GOP offers so far about new coronavirus relief legislation. Compromise is in the beholder's or tribe's eye. Or the website owner's eye. What the GOP sees as compromise, the dems see as nothing of significance, and vice versa. The two sides are far apart and so far the gap cannot be bridged. The rhetoric from the radical right is super ugly. The Washington Post commented:

Meanwhile in Ohio, President Trump used an official White House visit as a forum to attack presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. The former vice president, Trump proclaimed, would “take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything.” Revealing his own lack of faith and decency, Trump added that Biden would “hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy.”

Maybe political pressure from the public will nudge a meaningful GOP compromise on coronavirus into existence. Maybe not. Regardless, if what we are hearing now is a reasonable indication, the president is probably not going to touch base with reality in his lunatic attacks on Biden.


Footnote:
1. I'm hanging on by a thread at Town Hall. The people who run that extremist right site are on to me. They are now blocking most of my comments as spam. I can still get some short comments past them, but I cannot edit my comments without the edited version being blocked. I'm still not banned or shadow banned, but I expect that is coming pretty soon. Also, I get lots of down votes and maybe that will do me in. Apparently, at least some folks there hate my guts for trying to be honest and fact-based. They really dislike inconvenient truths and reasoning.

TRUMPISM and YOUR LIFE

 GLOOM and DOOM

That is lately what I have been reading, when the subject of Trump comes up.

HE will not accept a loss if he loses the election in Nov. and if forced out may urge his followers to revolt.

IF he does win, he will create a Nazi-like regime in the U.S.

REALLY?

Without naming names I even know a few people on these forums who have said they are getting depressed over what might happen.

ME?

Well, I am more even-keeled, some would say not concerned "enough", or that I am too optimistic or see the world through rose-colored glasses.

BUT I UNDERSTAND we all internalize the world around us and react differently to stimuli, and no doubt about it:

TRUMP CAN STIMULATE!

I feel things could get a lot worse if Trump wins again, but am less likely to believe there will be another Civil War if he loses.

As for HOW BAD - no, we will not end up with another Fascist regime. We will have more protests, more riots, more mudslinging, more angst, more partisanship, our climate will decline, we will lose more respect in the world, we will bicker more with our neighbors who view the world differently than we do.

BUT brownshirts? NAH, won't happen. My life will be more or less the same as it is now, I will have my family and friends, my comfortable life, and despite Trump, weed will become more universally legal, more people will invest in solar panels and electric cars, and we will still have freedom of expression.

WE MIGHT have to adjust our travel plans though, I would be loathe to vacation in any Red state that encourages gun ownership, and I would probably be VERY upset were I female with Red states attacks on abortion rights, and we may lose Obamacare, which would be the death knell for Republicans if our health care costs go through the roof, which they will.

BUT what about YOU?

Do you really believe the world will end if Trump loses or is re-elected? IS IT really enough of a concern to keep you up at night? DOES all things Trump distract you from the joys of life?

NO VALUE JUDGMENT HERE: we are all wired differently, not everyone can be a SNOWFLAKE, but the question is a serious one:

HOW MUCH DOES TRUMPISM EFFECT YOUR LIFE? YOUR PEACE OF MIND? YOUR OUTLOOK? 

On Revolt

 I'm offering this excerpt of A Journal of Queer Nihilism for the purpose of discussion:

In No Future, Edelman appropriates and privileges a particular psychoanalytic concept: the death drive. In elaborating the relationship of “queer theory and the death drive” (the subtitle of No Future), he deploys the concept in order to name a force that isn’t specifically tied to queer identity. He argues that the death drive is a constant eruption of disorder from within the symbolic order itself. It is an unnameable and inarticulable tendency for any society to produce the contradictions and forces which can tear that society apart.

To avoid getting trapped in Lacanian ideology, we should quickly depart from a purely psychoanalytic framework for understanding this drive. Marxism, to imagine it another way, assures us that a fundamental crisis within the capitalist mode of production guarantees that it will produce its own negation from within itself. Messianic traditions, likewise, hold fast to a faith that the messiah must emerge in the course of daily life to overthrow the horror of history. The most romantic elaborations of anarchism describe the inevitability that individuals will revolt against the banality and alienation of modern life. Cybernetic government operates on the understanding that the illusions of social peace contain a complex and unpredictable series of risks, catastrophes, contagions, events and upheavals to be managed. Each of these contains a kernel of truth, if perhaps in spite of their ideologies. The death drive names that permanent and irreducible element which has and will always produce revolt. Species being, queerness, chaos, willful revolt, the commune, rupture, the Idea, the wild, oppositional defiance disorder—we can give innumerable names to what escapes our ability to describe it. Each of these attempts to term the erratic negation intrinsic to society. Each comes close to theorizing the universal tendency that any civilization will produce its own undoing.

Explosions of urban rioting, the prevalence of methods of piracy and expropriation, the hatred of work, gender dysphoria, the inexplicable rise in violent attacks against police officers, self-immolation, non-reproductive sexual practices, irrational sabotage, nihilistic hacker culture, lawless encampments which exist simply for themselves—the death drive is evidenced in each moment that exceeds the social order and begins to rip at its fabric.

- Baedan, A Journal of Queer Nihilism

For my part I find this fascinating, as it lays bare the tendency of any social system to experience periodic revolt, and this is important to understand. Revolt is an eventuality, no matter the society one lives in.

Here, in the US, I find this last paragraph to be particularly apropos despite being written in 2012.

We're seeing this happening right now, in real time.