Trump, the most charitable president.

The world is much simpler now since Trump took over 4 months ago. It is clearer and less complicated. 

It is essentially divided into love Trump or hate Trump, believe he's God's chosen or the Devil's spawn, and embrace his personality and charm or reject it with disgust. 

Other issues are also clearer. The rich and poor divide is no longer a blur. The climate change issue is no longer an issue. And his campaign promises to make America great again is coming to pass. 

The only question is, who is benefitting from this great America that he is remaking (or unmaking)?

In 4 months, disregarding his tweeting mania, his shoving of a minister and his senseless bravados in public, Trump has done a few things that effectively pass the key to the city to the rich and elitist members of the city (himself most included). 

As a President who boasts about dodging taxes, his tax relief package will deny the majority poor of US$992 billion in tax revenue from now to 2026. This would mean that the poor will have less in essential services that they are in desperate need of. 

Most importantly, it is estimated that "the uninsured may increase by 23 million by 2026." Alas, one major illness and they will be destroyed financially, physically and spiritually. 

So the rich pays less while the poor pays for them. 

And to make America great again, Trump has plonked in US$52 billion to increase defence spending, and made decisive cuts in other crucial areas for the poor. Again, the rich arm-dealers will be laughing their way to the bank. 

In today's article "Donald Trump and the surrendering of US leadership", Martin Wolf wrote about these cuts:- 

"These include a $13bn (16 per cent) cut to health and human services; $12bn (29 per cent) to the budgets of the state department and the international development agency; and $9bn (14 per cent) to education. The diplomatic capacity of the US would be devastated."

Then, the greatness of America also translates into withdrawing from the Paris climate pact. The rich will be rejoicing here. No more carbon emission restriction for them. And no more obligations to keep the global temperature rise below 2 deg C.

Now, rich industrialists will be chugging off to a few money-making years of carefree and expense-free pollution at the expense of the poor who will see more devastation to the estate of the commons like ocean, sky, weather, trees, forests, park and rivers. 

The mayor of NYC Bill de Blasio said: "The President withdrawing from the Paris Agreement would be horribly destructive for the planet, the country and this city."

Of course, Trump has not done so yet and he will make a decision in the next few days. But for someone who thinks climate change is a hoax and appoints a climate sceptic as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, I guess it is a no-brainier where his buttons and heart lie. 

Lesson? Just one. It's about irony, and the world lacks none of it. 

The worse ones are when we prostitute the good, the virtuous and the redeeming so as to perpetuate the fraud, the disgrace and the unseeming. It is not apparent to us because we refuse to accept the grim reality of it. 

Like ICU patients, we are hooked onto false hopes like we are hooked onto insulin and glucose jabs. 

Trump came into the Whitehouse in palm-Sunday-like fashion with a belly-full of promises to make America great again. 

But what he has done - ignore the controversies he had created with the Russian and the ex-CIA director in just 4 months - is to make it great for himself and the top echelon of the society. That's the ironically unseeming part.

The one thing he did right was the stir up the emotions of the poor who voted for him because he knows that people's emotions are stirred more quickly than their intelligence. 

Emotionally speaking, he is rich, famous and fabulous. That should be enough to make America great again right?

Let me end with the words of Oscar Wilde about perverted good intention: 

"Accordingly, with admirable intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of the aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good. Charity degrades and demoralises."

...and Trump is our century's most charitable President. Cheerz.