The Unraveling Begins

So, the unraveling begins. A lot of people saw it coming, or at least saw signs that it might be coming, but I don’t remember any dead-on predictions on how and why and just where the Trump regime would start falling apart.

It seems to be falling apart at the edges. A comment here, a misplaced fact there. A lie or two, an error or three, and all of a sudden, there are so many tears and pulls around the edges - good grief, does that man have no center - that it’s as hard to know if his core principals are eroding as it is to know what those core principals really are.

But, we have no budget in Congress, only a continuing resolution to keep doing what we have been doing, which is pretty much what President Obama was doing, executive orders excluded of course.

We have a ruling Republican Party that is at war with itself, and we have a lesson in basic human nature.

Human beings have evolved over millennia as a species which is hot-wired to make divisions. It is one of our survival skills.

Socially, we rapidly developed an "Us vs. Them" viewpoint. Our family has food, or our family can take food from them. Our tribe has food, or we can take food from them. Our nation has food, or we can go to war and take it from them.

Over and over again, down through the centuries, from the warlords in China to the Greek city states to the trade wars of the 18th and 19th centuries to the lobbying in Congress for federal aid for specific industries today.

It explains why so many baseball and football teams have faithful fans, even when the teams are terrible. Losing record? "That’s when the True Fan steps up,” and you can fill in the team.

So, what does this mean for us?

Well, the Republicans in Congress were fine as long as the divide they saw was Republicans and Democrats. Now, that they are totally in charge, the division becomes which Republicans will get their way. The Freedom Caucus people who don’t believe in big government, or the moderates who strongly believe in government help for their states.

Soon, about the time that Congress is forced to deal with a real budget that covers spending for a whole year, we will start to see another split - Republican governors who need federal aid to keep their own taxes down and Republican Congressmen who feel that any aid to a state they do not represent is a waste of money.

So, just how much money should we spend on aid to states that are facing erosion problems? Much of the nation is not on the ocean, and even states like New York and Florida are starting to realize they can not hold back a rising ocean forever.

How much should we tax people who do not have trains running once an hour connecting their cities in order to provide affordable public transportation in New York or Atlanta or even Washington, D.C. And just why do we have to impose a tariff that makes corn more expensive just to keep corn growers in Iowa happy?

Us vs. Them is hard when you control all of government.

Leadership from the White House might help. It has helped a lot of times before. Lyndon Johnson’s grade as President keeps going up and up, although he did lose the solid south for Democrats by insisting that integration was important, ethical and - more to the point - something that should be done right away.

But we have Donald Trump in the White House. And, while he is running ads telling us that his promises were kept, it’s hard for me to figure out just which promises those were.

I’m still looking for the jobs his administration has actually created.