About a year ago around this time, you would have been remiss if you didn’t take now-president Donald Trump seriously.
Remember when Donald Trump said he would build a wall and no one took him seriously? He just signed an executive order to get the ball rolling on just that. Remember when he said he was going dismantle Obamacare upon taking office? He’s moving forward on that one too. Of course, who can forget when he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” a year ago? Well, he just signed an executive order that banned immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days and banned all new refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days.
Thus far, Donald Trump is like the child who ran for class president in Grade 7 by promising to put a Coca-Cola machine in every classroom once elected. The difference? Unlike most child winners, Trump has called Coca-Cola himself and has the pop machines already on the way!
It’s something truly remarkable when it comes to the world of politics; not once has he toed the line with a former campaign promise. In fact, Trump is literally doing exactly what he said he would.
That’s why it’s both heartwarming and heartwrenching to see the crowds of people who have protested some of the callous acts of America’s most powerful man in the past two weeks. Just after a disappointing turnout for the Presidential Inauguration, hundreds of thousands packed the streets in cities across North America in support of women’s rights before flooding the streets and airports days later to show their disapproval for the Muslim ban.
On one side of it, you have to feel good about humanity coming together to protest such unethical, racist and morally expugnable acts with such overwhelming support. When Mr. Trump was elected into office, many feared the worst for the world. Countless people thought we were heading for world war with chaos being the only dominant feature to daily life. Instead, in times of hatred and despair, people are joining together to fight. It’s inspiring really when you look at the amount of people who are joining the fight back against a tyrannical leader.
That said, you can definitely see there are two sides to this coin. The sentiment is undoubtedly present that if this amount of people had acted in early November in the polls, the world wouldn’t have to deal with this calamity. If people had acted before it was too late, society would have saved themselves from Mr. Trump and his discriminatory policies.
But they didn’t. They voted in Mr. Trump and this is what the world has to deal with, presumably, for the next four years. The only way Congress could usurp him from office would be to invoke the 25th amendment, which outlines the succession of a president for the eventual impeachment.
Given that it’s only happened two times, each time a matter of hours while a president underwent a colonoscopy, and can only happen with the authorization of the vice-president, Senate and House of Representatives who would have to deem the president unfit to discharge the powers and duties of his office.
There is also the avenue that the VP and a majority of the president’s 15 cabinet ministers can vote a president as “mentally incapable” and vote him out of office.
Do you really see vice president Mike Pence taking a turn down either of these roads?
It’s probably best you don’t hold your breath on that one. Instead, society will have to collectively figure out how to rebound after hitting rock bottom. With Trump having already laid out his game plan for the future during his campaign to “make America great again,” there shouldn’t be a ton of surprises from hereon out with the idiocy of his policy decisions or what his press secretary Sean Spicer says.
That doesn’t mean we have to agree with it though.