I know it is early but here are some questions Trump supporters should ask regularly. “How will this improve my life?” He cannot get rid of corrupt politicians because you have re-elected them. His bans on immigrants do not keep you safer because few immigrants commit crimes against Americans. Immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Immigrants didn’t take your job automation did and will continue to do so. The few jobs he prevented going abroad (and there is great controversy over how many that is and whether he had anything to do with it) do not mean that your job or town will be saved. His administration is made up of non politicians sure, but they are the same bankers, corporate CEO’s and billionaires who have been corrupting the politicians. He has simply cut out the middleman leaving the 1% in control.

What about the plans coming down the road? I heard a heart rending story about how a person could not afford the health care for his mother and she died while immigrants were receiving benefits from the government when she did not. He was therefore all for restriction of immigration. Your mother didn’t die because of immigrants, she died because of her lack of access to health care and insurance. It is the Trump and Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act that you should be fighting. Plans for non taxed health accounts simply means that your savings may have to be spent on health care and one catastrophic illness will clean it out. Block grants for Medicare or Medicaid to the states mean that access to health care will vary from state to state and yours may or may not improve your health care. Privatizing Social Security puts your future at risk and is dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market.

His initiatives do not curtail government involvement in your life, they expand it. He wants the government to know your religion, intrude into women’s personal health decisions, and to initiate costly projects (e.g. the wall, increased immigration policing, expanded vetting) If you couple this with his tax cuts that will save the middle class taxpayer a couple of hundred and the 1% millions, this will explode the deficit. As Bill Clinton (the only president in the last 25 years to balance the budget) said “arithmetic.” As conservatives will tell you Trump is not a true conservative.

As comedian Lewis Black once said Democrats versus Republicans is “the party of no ideas versus the party of bad ideas.” For the prospect of actually getting their “bad ideas” passed Republicans have been willing to: weaken ethics enforcement, overlook Russian involvement in our election, ignore Trump’s love affair with Putin, look the other way about his vindictive “tweets,” discount his threats to reinstate immoral and ineffective torture, pooh-pooh his “shoot from the lip” diplomatic style, and take no notice of the sinking esteem in which the world hold the United States. It will be up to Republicans to grow some cojones and stand up for the country rather than the party. We must choose between living up to our professed ideals or just hiding a monster behind them.

What should you watch for? Watch for his attempts to muzzle the media. No other president has tried to do as much as Trump to see that even respected media outlets do not tell the truth about him. What will be the reaction of the rest of the world? Will other countries (e.g. Iran and other Muslim countries) ban Americans from travel or will other countries raise protective tariffs on American made goods to retaliate against Trump’s? Will we send more troops to fight and die abroad? We are certainly the biggest bully in the world, but there will be times when cooperation rather than conflict will be needed. Will foreign policy now be guided by the interests of major corporations rather than the American public. Will he use some incident to get you to willingly curtail your civil liberties and strengthen his powers?

Being POTUS is very different from being a CEO. For a CEO what you say goes; for a president you have to negotiate much through a Congress to pass laws or through a bureaucracy to execute policy.  I predict that Trump will try to change the system that has lasted since 1781 so he can behave more like a CEO. Eyes open and we shall see see what we shall see.

To paraphrase something I read recently, “Idealists mature badly. If they can’t outgrow their idealism, they become hypocrites or blind. Trump supporters and sympathizers have chosen blindness, fixating so much on the system’s flaws that they believes those who oppose it must be paragons. That it’s not perfect says nothing about our opponents.  As it turns out, they’re mostly bad. Bad enough that Trump’s rule is a cataclysm, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some good points about the system. It doesn’t mean that every fool who works for them is evil. It simply means they have to be stopped.”