(ThyBlackMan.com) Every time you think you’ve seen the worst of it, some new outrage or scandal arises. Whether it’s the lying, the stealing or general moral corruption, there seems to be no bottom to the depths that this administration will sink. Writer Jared Yates Sexton called it “the inevitability of the inconceivable”: the worst and most unthinkable thing will happen.
In foreign policy, America is now at odds with its closest allies and cozying up to its long-time adversaries. Curious timing, that the president would cancel sanctions against Chinese phone maker ZTE – whose products the Pentagon won’t allow on military bases because of the potential threat to national security – while a real 
estate project the Trump Company is involved in gets a $500 million loan from a Chinese bank, and Ivanka is awarded six new trademarks in China. When the president returned from the Singapore summit with Kim Jung Un of North Korea he tweeted that he had “solved” the nuclear threat they posed. This week, however, the president signed an order designating North Korea as an extreme threat to the country. When several high-ranking officials were asked to describe the president’s foreign policy doctrine it was summed up as “We’re America, Bitch”, like it or lump it.
The president’s policy positions have long been known as any reading of his past statements will tell. Thomas Wright from the Brookings Institution, writing in Politico in January of 2016, said Trump’s worldview “makes a great leap backward in history”, labeling it “a 19th century foreign policy.” This was the time of “gun boat diplomacy” and when nations pursued their self-interests with a “might makes right” attitude. We know that this led to two World Wars in the 20th century. Wright concluded his article with an eerily accurate assessment of a Trump presidency by saying, “If he did get elected president, he would do his utmost to liquidate the U.S.-led liberal order by ending America’s alliances, closing the open global economy and cutting deals with Russia and China.”
The president’s domestic policy has been equally as haphazard and bad for the country. His budget proposals would decimate social safety net programs protecting the poor, sick and elderly and his political rhetoric has had a corrosive and divisive effect on the electorate. No longer “dog whistling”, he has blatantly adopted the language of the so-call alt-right white nationalists to criticize and dehumanize African Americans, Latinos and Muslims. His latest rant that immigrants are pouring across the southern border “infesting” the country is reminiscent of Nazi’s labeling Jews as vermin.
Corporations have received a massive tax cut, and the financial industry will benefit from “deregulation”, despite both showing record profits. Meanwhile, there has been no movement on critical infrastructure improvements and his environmental and education policies are rolling back recent gains to the nation’s long-term detriment.
To the outside world and here at home, Donald Trump is the face of America. He is the man in the mirror. For many, he is their reflection and they like what they see, but for most, we are horrified. If any good can come from his tenure as president, it is that we are now confronted with a face of America that for too long has been hidden or romantically and inaccurately portrayed. The face of the Indian Removal and Chinese Exclusion Acts passed by Congress, the face of a Supreme Court who held that “black men had no rights that white men were bound to respect” in the Dred Scott Decision and the face of law enforcement that continues to kill unarmed young black men at an alarming rate. The recently released United Nations Human Rights Council (the group the U.S. just quit) report on poverty in America said that “the United States has the highest rates of youth poverty, infant mortality, incarceration, income inequality and obesity among all countries in the developed world…”
If, when you look in the mirror as an American and don’t like what you see, you have a duty, a responsibility, to change it. To not only be against this madness, but to be for policies, programs and actions that will lead to a better future for everyone. To do whatever you can, wherever you are, to make this country a better place.
Staff Writer; Harry Sewell