Crashing the Plane of Government

I saw this graphic shared on Facebook this morning:


Okay.

So, leaving aside the fact that many in the Republican party and right wing wished very strongly for Obama to fail and worked to make that as true as they could…

I don’t wish for President Trump to fail "as a good president," even though I disagree with the analogy that being president of the United States is like piloting a plane. I don’t understand thing one about piloting a plane, but I do understand a lot about governing. Probably more than Trump does.

I will be glad to support him if he:

• Makes good on his promises to make health coverage cheaper and better. Those are quantifiable outcomes though, so we will be able to tell whether they are true.
• Leads to more and better jobs for lots of people in ways that make the country stronger, especially in real infrastructure and clean energy.
• Keeps us out of wars and strengthens our alliances so that we stay out of wars.
• Gets more help to veterans who need it.

However, I will not support him and I hope he fails miserably if he:

• Is involved in any kind of unavoidable war…and yes, I get to define “unavoidable.” Especially a nuclear war. (Although in that case, he will have already failed and I just hope it’s quick for all of us.)
• Makes our climate change problems worse, especially through drill-baby-drill, deregulation because "job growth," and pulling out of international agreements.
• Repeals the Affordable Care Act without a replacement or with a worse replacement.
• Loosens regulations not just on climate change but actual pollution.
• Sells off large amounts of public land to private interests.
• Repeals the Endangered Species Act.
• Guts the public schools (not a great topic for Obama either).
• Makes homelessness and our unaffordable housing problems worse than they are.
• Deports people who have committed no crime other than entering this country without proper papers.
• Does anything like a Muslim ban or registration of Muslims (let alone detaining people based on religion).
• Violates treaties with Native American nations more than we already do, instead of making progress toward rectifying that sorry state of affairs.
• Destroys the Department of Justice, leading to voter suppression, a green light to cops to be even worse to citizens than they already are, more mass incarceration, and a host of other travesties.
• Signs any of the possible Republican bills that tell women what they can do with their bodies.
• Undermines science, from cutting funding to vaccine denialism.
• Doesn’t enforce labor laws, allowing for wage theft and exploitation.
• Guts the open internet.
• Does anything to violate the Constitution (thinking especially of the 1st, 4th, and 14th amendments, but he can probably surprise me).
• Nominates people to the Supreme Court similar to or worse than Antonin Scalia.
• Does anything to roll back the progress we’ve made protecting people from discrimination based on who they are.
• Guts the few financial controls that came into place after the 2008 crash or kills the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• Defunds or undermines science, including the important statistics gathered by the federal government (hello, 2020 census!).
• Undermines the social safety net, whether Social Security, Medicare, SNAP…

(These may be famous last words, but I don’t think Trump can make our gun situation much worse than it already is. The states can — Stand Your Ground was recently reintroduced in the Minnesota legislature, for instance — but not really the feds.)

See, to me, supporting Trump on anything from that second list of topics is what constitutes crashing the plane, some more obviously than others. (Nuclear war, hello?)

And people who support him unconditionally are saying they’ll be on board his plane if he does any of those things.