Man, oh man – where to start.
There were enough egregious lies in his inauguration speech
yesterday, and egregious acts in his first half day of office to write about
for a month. I’ll pick out two things from the speech and will try to pick up
on a few others such as tariffs, Federal disaster aid and the LA fire,
inflation, and political corruption later, time and Trump permitting.
First the weaponization of the Department of Justice.
The vicious, violent and
unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.
Under my leadership, we
will restore fair, equal and impartial justice under the Constitution and the
rule of law.
This was just a quick mention near the beginning of the speech,
and picked up again near the end, but it’s a mantra that the MAGA Trumpians
have been expounding for years. He’s trying to imply that the many charges
against Trump, including the two impeachments, were “witch hunts” with no basis
in law. This completely ignores the fact that no other presidential candidate or
sitting president has committed the number or types of crimes that Donald has,
and that the DOJ has bent over backwards to accommodate him. The other
high-profile Republicans who have been charged, and mostly convicted, were also
guilty of serious crimes and deserved everything they got. I will expound on
these another time for those aren’t convinced.
The second part of this short sentence is Trump’s promise that
such weaponization has ended and that his government would never do such a vile
thing as charge an opposition politician with a crime. But that is exactly what
he has been promising to his followers “I will be your retribution”. Kash
Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI Director, even has a long list of names of Trump’s
enemies that he intends to go after, whose only crime is opposition, or
insufficient loyalty, to Trump. And it doesn’t matter if an honest judge exonerates
them, the harassment and the monetary cost of the charges and court case will
be devastating. And if that’s not enough to satisfy Trump he can always sic his
informal “army” on them (remember Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss?). And Trump just
let another 1,500 of them out of prison. So, will Trump keep his promise not to
weaponize the DOJ? I predict that we won’t have to wait long to find out.
Secondly, freedom of speech. Here is what Trump said near the
end of his speech.
After years and years of
illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I
will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship
and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of
the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. Something I know
something about. We will not allow that to happen. It will not happen again.
Two things here –
what Trump means when he complains about government censorship and restriction
is that he hasn’t been able to lie with complete impunity. People have been
(gasp!) fact-checking and correcting a few of his many lies. That, he says,
must stop!
Trump’s version of
free speech is to attack anyone in the media who criticizes him. That’s what
the FBI and DOJ are for, after all. Refer back to point #1.
One more quick item –
inflation.
Next, I will direct all members of my cabinet
to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record
inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices. The inflation crisis was
caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices.
I was pleased to see that he hasn’t forgotten his election
promise to bring down inflation on day one. I expected he would just drop it
and hope his followers forgot all about it. Never mind the lies about the cause
of inflation or about how bad it is. Trump’s two major promises – tariffs and
deportation – if allowed to be carried out to the extent that he has promised –
would lead to double digit inflation and possibly recession as well, something
that even his most die-hard followers would notice. Anyway, I wish him luck
with that.
You can read his entire speech here (if for some strange reason
you want to) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-trump-inauguration-speech-2025/
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