By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column
Well, the inauguration is over and Donald Trump is in the White House again but this time, he is appearing with a cast of supporting feckless minions that would make even Darth Vader blush.
When Trump telegraphed to the world and to the gullible US citizens that he was their retribution and his administration would be chocked full of acts of vengeance against his perceived enemies, not enough people believed him and voted for his mental illness to return to the White House.
So now? So now the “boil” that is on the character of America due to our seemingly insatiable devouring of lies and half-truths that for years have been based upon the BIG LIE!, has had a deleterious effect on our ability to tell the truth.
As you know, with a boil, you must lance it…cut into it and let it drain out before it can be healed. With the Trump agenda starting to rumble and roar, that boil will become bigger and bigger with each lie and with each malevolently inspired executive order.
As the boil grows and grows and is painful to the touch, only the sharp scalpel edge of speaking truth to power will lance it.
Trump is the personification of that national boil on the skin of America. He has no shame about outright lying, being hurtful and grifting all that he can before he leaves the White House.
As the boil grows ever larger and larger with threats of mass deportation (for the innocent and the guilty) and grandiose ideas of a new manifest destiny of riding roughshod over the Panama Canal and saber rattling at Denmark to take their possession of Greenland, we lose more of our ability to tell the truth because truth is not highly exalted and valued as it should be.
Sadly, those people vested with scriptural authority and with the moral duty to be a reliable hedge against evil and idolatry, have been neutered to the point of being of no useful value.
When one of the founding documents of this country indicated that this was to be a government, of the people, by the people and for the people, those words fall on deaf ears with the Trump/Maga crowd.
Their default position is that might makes right and with muscle of military and money, we should not be beholden to anyone or any country! Tragically, such gibberish hijacked God and fabricated a gospel that Trump was God’s man to make America great again.
Inside secret: God, save for Israel, has no “favorites” and even Israel was duly noticed with conditions that if not fulfilled, they too would face divine chastisement.
But, I digress! Let’s get back to my boil analogy.
As the promised executive orders roll off the White House assembly line and are directed to their respective targets, America’s capacity for pain, communal or otherwise, will take a severe jolt because how much can the human psyche take repeated punches and still stand?
Only recently, Trump issued an executive order eliminating DEI in the federal bureaucracies and the military. His goal is to make it troublesome for any person who is nonwhite or a woman to advance through the ranks. For Trump, the whiter the better as to the ethnic composition of the US government workforce.
Affirmative action and equality in the federal workplace and in federal contracting will be a dinosaur in a matter of months.
Will this elimination of DEI in the federal government also affect the HBCU’s
from getting federal aid based upon their status alone? Will such an attitude influence the aggressiveness of the DOJ from examining suspect racial gerrymandering that affects housing and voting rights for Black Americans?
The boil festers bigger and bigger!
When Trump, contrary to his “promise” of doing a case-by-case analysis of the convictions of the J6 rioters, suddenly issued pardons to 1500 people including the most violent of the rioters, America slid into the muck and mire that law and order is transactional at best.
Trump’s trumpeting that he “Loves The Blue!” is farcical at best when he condones such criminality and the GOP wants to portray themselves as the party of law and order!
No, the coming years will not be the professed Golden Years for America as Trump loudly proclaims. It will be four years of outlandish and reprehensible acts emanating from the White House that degrade and diminish the truth and allows his cronies to become profiteers at the expense of the working and middle class.
But. Practically half of the voters, who voted, voted for Trump despite his telegraphing, via the Project 2025 papers, of his intents and yet those voters said, “Go ahead…it is alright with us!”
A convicted felon in the White House? Not a problem as long as Trump uses his white MAGA base to rule the roost and keep those “others” in place.
Remedy: Don’t let lies and half-truths convince you that something is wrong with you. It is not! Stay with the truth and speak audibly against the lie and support those who are in alignment with you. Fight the power!
Contact Lafe Tolliver at tolliver@juno.com