Trump's new confederacy

Sam Smith - Almost 60 years ago, when I first started covering Washington, it occurred to me that while the South had lost aspects of the Civil War, such as slavery and secession, it continued to exercise stunning power over a nation that had allegedly defeated it.  Congress at the time seemed almost a southern house party and the war, it appeared, was far from over.

While the old South has changed and no longer has the power of that era, it is fair to say that with its help, Trump has launched a new confederacy – only instead of secession, it seeks to overthrow a huge portion of the progress that country has made in the past eight decades.

In fact, Trump got 52% of his electoral support from members of the former confederacy and, in the same manner of the old South, he cons lower income whites into supporting him by blaming blacks and other minorities such as immigrants for evils that actually have their roots in policies for his fellow wealthy elite.

While he can’t be fairly accused of treason, it can be said that his goal is a personal dictatorship such as he had at his private businesses and that he is consummately disloyal to the Constitution, democracy and simple human decency.

Like earlier plantation owners, he is creating a new confederacy of evil, inequality and cruelty.

One need look no further than his new budget  to perceive  dimensions of this disloyalty to decency. Here are some of the programs, many painfully constructed over the past eight decades,  that would be deeply damaged:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public works (through the privatization of highway construction), TVA, PBS, NPR, the national endowments of arts and humanities, the Environmental Protection Agency, food stamps, Amtrak, mas transit, the Institute of Museum & Library Services, the Rural Business & Cooperative Service, the Economic Development Administration, the global change initiative, the NASA Office of Education, Obamacare, child care, and  foster care,

You do not need a war to destroy a society and Donald Trump, if he gets away with it, will have caused more damage to America than anyone since the Civil War – the most evil man to whom we tragically granted power.