Government Shut Down Shows How Disconnected the White House is from Reality

Reggie Fullwood
Reggie Fullwood

The new calendar year has officially kicked off, but it is hard to feel like it’s a fresh start with so many lingering issues from 2018.

One of the most prominent challenges facing America is the government shut down and the continued political turmoil in Washington DC. The man who claimed that he would drain the swamp has actually made it smellier and more “bogged” down than before his tenure.

President Trump talks about the government shut down as if it’s some simple piece of legislation that eventually needs to get passed by Congress. However, we all know that the shut down is much bigger than some liberal or conservative piece of policy – it affects real people with families and bills.
It’s senior citizens waiting on their social security checks and low-income families waiting on monthly assistance payments. It’s also professional government employees who don’t make a lot of money working in the public sector, but they work hard and need their paychecks on time. The shut down is basically affecting people that rich elitists can’t relate to (Not saying any names of course).

By the way, Trump is asking Congress for $5 billion for his silly wall at the U.S./Mexico border. How soon we forget, but remember that Republicans controlled the House and Senate for two years and Trump never got his wall money from a GOP led Congress either.

Here’s what is even scarier to me than the White House not caring about how the shut down would hurt people – not knowing. Over the weekend, the Washington Post detailed just how ignorant the Trump administration was about the shut down. According to the news source, the administration did not realize that 38 million Americans lose their food stamps under a shutdown, nor did it know that thousands of tenants would face eviction without assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

In a tweet right after Christmas, Trump wrote, “Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?” Wow! How out of touch can one be? So are we to assume that the President of the United States of America feels that because government jobs don’t pay very well that most federal employees are Democrats?

Hmmm…. I can’t write what I really want to say so I will just move on to my next point.

The longer the shut down goes, the worse all sides look – especially Trump. Less than a week after his ridiculous government workers are Dems comment, Trump “said he’d keep the government closed for a very long period of time — months or even years,” according to Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.

Here’s the reality of this shut down situation – all is ok right now. Government agencies figure out ways to stretch their budgets to make sure that essential functions are done, but at some point, their capacity to maintain services just runs out. The effects of a shutdown compound over time, and for the President to brag that he can keep the government shut down for weeks, months or years is just flawed and insensitive to the real lives being affected.

And then there was last Friday when Trump said that several former U.S. Presidents told him that they should have built the wall when they were in office. Just when you thought that your cousin Mike Mike was a big “story teller,” also known as a “liar,” the guy in the White House may be worse.
He said, “This should have been done by all of the presidents that preceded me. And they all know it. Some of them have told me that we should have done it.”

The love the work that The Washington Post puts into their journalism. An article by Eli Rosenberg this week captures the ridiculousness of Trumps chronic “story telling.” He wrote, “The president has made 7,600 false or misleading statements since he became president, and some have proved more difficult than others to fact-check. This one was not.”

He added, “There are only four living ex-presidents. The Washington Post reached out to them to see whether they ever told Trump that a border wall should have been built before he was in office: All said they hadn’t.” Surprise, surprise.

The bottom line is simple – this shut down needs to end immediately. The notion of a border wall is nonsensical and unnecessary. Let’s spend $5 billion on services that might actually help Americans.

Signing off from the Supervisor of Election Office in the Rights Restoration Line,

Reggie Fullwood

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