Trump is showing the world how to destroy a country through Executive Orders. He is using Executive Orders to weaken us in many areas that made America Great or could make America Great. He has hit our country from multiple directions simultaneously. I swear it looks like his Executive Orders are meant to destroy our environment, destroy our alliances, destroy our economy, destroy the rule of the law, and destroy our standing in the world. He has shown the world that they can’t depend on America. He has shown that you can’t trust America. He has shown that he will put profit ahead of the future of our children and grandchildren. He has demonstrated that his hatred, racism, and bigotry are what will be driving the nation while he is in power. He has shown that he will defy the courts. He has shown he doesn’t believe in our Constitution. In reality, he has shown that he doesn’t believe in America. What saddens me even more is the number of people who think just like him. They will fly the American Flag, they will sing the National Anthem, and they will say the Pledge of Allegiance while not believing in what they stand for. I worry about the Country we are leaving our children and grandchildren.

Right after Trump took office, he signed a slew of Executive Orders, with one being a withdrawal from the World Health Organization. The world gets smaller every day as travel around the world gets faster and faster. We are no longer protected from the huge oceans that took months to cross. Now they are traversed in just hours.  COVID-19 proved just how fast a disease can travel and devastate the world. Withdrawing from the one organization that works to keep us safe from future devastating health crises just shows me that Trump doesn’t plan on letting another pandemic wreak havoc on our economy; he will instead let people die. It shows me that the Trump administration will always put money before the health of our nation, and mostly the health of our children. It also shows me an administration that looks for people and countries to blame and not one that wants to work with the world to solve the problems.

Right along with the withdrawal of the WHO, Trump was also rolling back many of the climate initiatives that were enacted by both Biden and Obama. One of the biggies is that they are rolling back emissions standards that were established by the Obama Administration. They will allow cars to emit billions of tons more of carbon dioxide over the lifetime of vehicles manufactured in the United States and hundreds of millions of tons more than will be emitted under standards being implemented in Europe and Asia. Simple physics will tell you that there has to be a reaction to this, and that reaction will be the warming of the planet. Will that affect the future for our children and grandchildren? Yes, it will, and it affects the poor the most.  Who benefits? Oil companies mostly, and American Car manufacturers short term. I say that the short term for American Car manufacturers is because it will affect the ability to export these cars to countries where the cars don’t meet the standard. It will make it so that in the long run, we will lose all competitive advantages we may have had.

Trump has promised us the cleanest water and the cleanest air. I don’t know how you accomplish that by rolling back environmental standards. I will tell you it is impossible to have the cleanest water and the cleanest air while rolling back environmental standards. What we put in the air eventually falls to the ground and gets in our water supply, and that is a fact that Trump is never going to reverse. In my youth, I saw the effects of acid rain that devastated so many of the lakes in Wisconsin. I remember when Lake Erie was so polluted that it was declared dead. Again, we have the action and reaction on display. You can’t allow more emissions into the air and allow more emissions into our water and expect a cleaner, safer environment for our children. These standards were put into place to protect our environment and our children. They are not meant to punish businesses. I feel that in the long run, it is going to do great harm to our businesses because they will be falling behind the rest of the world as they use technology to wean themselves off the fossil fuel that Trump and his administration will not let go of. Oil is like heroin that we keep on injecting into the blood supply of our economy, which will eventually kill us.

What does it take to leave a strong country for our children and grandchildren? First, it will take building an economy that is built on innovation and vision toward the future, with products and services that help us survive that future. To cling to old products and old technology while the rest of the world moves forward just hurts our future. Ignoring climate change while the rest of the world works to fix it hurts our environment, but also hurts our economy in the long run because we are staying stagnant while much of the world is moving forward with new technologies and a new vision for a green, sustainable future. We need to be educating our children to be able to survive in that constantly evolving future. We talk about going back to the Moon and going to Mars. We will never do great things in our future if we aren’t preparing now instead of when it is too late. We need to think that the future is right around the corner, and we must be working towards it and beyond. Only with progressive work and new ideas will that ever happen. That will never happen is a world that has no vision, like the world that Trump creates.