Trump and the RNC

Over the next week during the Republican National Convention, we will be reminded of the devastating impact of the right-wing extremist agenda that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have forced upon the nation.

 In many ways, this is the most important week of the most important election in modern American history. And our job this week is to expose Donald Trump for the fraud and pathological liar that we all know him to be.

 This is a president, Donald Trump, who said he was going to provide health care to everyone, yet tried to throw 32 million people off of health care and continues, to this day, to try and accomplish that goal. Today, millions fewer Americans have health insurance than when Trump came into office.

 This is a president, who in his last campaign said that he was a different type of Republican who would make no cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but introduced budgets that slash all three.

 This is a president who said he was going to stand up for working families and who promised to pass tax reform legislation designed to help the middle class, yet 83 percent of his tax benefits go to the top 1 percent.

 This is a president who promised to take on the pharmaceutical companies. He said they were "getting away with murder." Yet, drug prices continue to soar and he appointed a drug company executive as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

 This is a president who promised to take on the greed of Wall Street, but then proceeded to appoint more Wall Street titans to high positions than any president in history.

 This is a president who said the coronavirus would just “disappear” and that he had a “natural ability” to understand this deadly virus, yet almost 200,000 people have died from the virus, there are tens of thousands of new cases a day, and there is absolutely no end in sight — and yet he refuses to support extending what we accomplished in the CARES Act, getting a weekly $600 check to people who desperately need it.

 This is a president who said he was going to "drain the swamp," but has used his office for blatant personal and political gain, running the most corrupt administration in modern American history. 

 This is a president who said he would do "everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens," yet has gone out of his way to attempt to deny them from getting the health care they need and allow discrimination against them in the workplace.

 This is a president who, after a number of different mass shootings, said that he would take action to keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people, but has time and time again sided with the NRA and done absolutely NOTHING to solve the epidemic levels of gun violence in this country.

 This is a president who said that if he won that America would be respected again around the world, yet as a result of his anti-democratic and incompetent policies has succeeded in significantly lowering the respect that people all over the planet have for the United States.

 The truth is, Donald Trump has sold out the working families of this country and he cannot be elected again. He is a menace to democracy whose rejection of science has cost us almost 200,000 lives and whose rejection of climate science threatens the future of this planet. We have to appreciate how unbelievably severe the current moment is.

 If Trump wins again, all of the anti-worker, anti-democratic policies he has pursued during his first term will only be magnified. We will have more racism, more xenophobia, more attempts to divided us up based on the color our skin and where we were born, more reactionary policies with regard to the economy, and we’ll continue our national march toward authoritarianism.

 We must vigorously take on the lies and bigotry we are going to see on the stage at this week’s Republican National Convention. I, like you, am frankly outraged by what Trump and Washington Republicans are doing to our country and our people.