Our Prime Directive

The president’s promise to help Puerto Rico, where he gave himself high praise for his response, remains cynically unfulfilled. 

Thousands still without water and power. And the GOP tax bill that just passed will unnecessarily increase the hardships being suffered by these American citizens.

Dana Milbank reminds us that there is a pattern here.

“You might recognize this pattern, even if you don’t care about Puerto Rico and the suffering of the more than 3 million Americans there.

[THE PATTERN] Trump comes in with razzle-dazzle and self-congratulation, promising great things to come. Then, when the cameras are off, comes the quiet collapse."

 

And it is both long-established and increasingly harmful.

"The prototype is the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. In April 1990, it opened with much fanfare as the world’s largest casino-hotel complex. Six months later, it defaulted on payments. Nine months after that, it filed for bankruptcy. Now this happens on a world scale.

1.     Trump promises an easy peace in the Middle East but winds up setting off a new wave of violence.

2.   He promises a tax cut for the middle class and winds up with a giveaway to corporations and millionaires.

3.   He promises to improve upon Obamacare but ravages the program with no replacement.

In business, when Trump attended the ribbon-cutting and then moved on while deals went south, people lost their investments.

But when the United States walks away from promises, people lose rather more.

Nearly a million low-income Puerto Ricans are in danger of losing health care early in the New Year….”

As Milbank points out, there are more than 5 million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland of the US and they vote. Another ally for our 2018 coalition of women, scientists, innovators, business leaders, teachers, decent Republicans and Democrats, Red Staters about to lose their health care, those opposed to a nuclear war with North Korea or fanning the flames of war in the Middle East, minorities, students, parents who value public education, immigrants (all of us), those who hope we can find a way to make democracy both possible and desirable, moderate conservatives and progressives, those who believe in the value of a free press, those opposed and offended by governance through the one-two punch of razzle-dazzle and quiet collapse....

We all share one prime directive: we must take back control of Congress or many more will get hurt.