Tomgram: John Feffer, The De-Trumpification of America

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Tomgram: John Feffer, The De-Trumpification of America
By: John Feffer - Toms Dispatch News - 06-25-20
Re: https://www.tomdispatch.com/

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Today, TomDispatch regular John Feffer, weekly columnist at Foreign Policy in Focus, considers a crucial question should all truly go well on November 3, 2020: If Donald Trump loses the presidency, how can this country be de-Trumpified, or can it?

For now, we continue to live in Trump’s “deep state” (of insanity and inanity). If, these days, you aren’t in the United States, you’re probably wondering how the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet could let the Covid-19 pandemic run quite so wild, or how its president could actually promote a disease super-spreader of a rally to be filled with MAGAmaniacs, some of whom camped out in groups for days around the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then sat shoulder to shoulder with unmasked others shouting and cheering their hero. (Fortunately, teenage TikTok users and K-Pop fans, through an online ruse, helped keep that arena more than half empty!)

Meanwhile, back in March, already in the pandemic season, Trump’s acting director of the Office of Management and Budget reemphasized to Congress the administration’s commitment to cutting budgets for health services (even as the Pentagon's continues to rise), “including a 15 percent cut of $1.2 billion to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and a $35 million decrease to the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund's annual contribution.” Talk about the deep state of doo-doo that’s America today! To give Donald Trump credit, however, you simply couldn’t make this stuff up. So, in June 2020, think of yourself as officially in the “deep state” of Donald Trump and consider Feffer’s thoughts about how we might begin to make our way out of that swamp, assuming things don’t go very, very wrong in November. Tom