There were many who hoped/feared that Donald Trump would be a transformative figure in our nation's politics. As I'm at the broken-record point of saying though, he's really, really not; he's too stupid and pathetic to change much of anything with his non-existent force of personality. As the last few months have demonstrated, now that the dubious shine of his victory has worn off, he's going down the exact same roads any other Republican President (and some Democratic ones) would've traveled with only an embellishment of incompetence to separate him from the pack.
On the foreign policy front, Trump has pulled back from his initial brand of unique idiocy and settled in for the comfortable, mainstream D.C. approved flavor instead. Remember how we were worried he'd start a war with North Korea in the long long ago of April? Well, that's not really a thing anymore, now we're just looking down possibly fighting Russia in case we shoot down one of their planes or they shoot down one of ours in Syria. This is, effectively, a no-fly-zone and is just as insane and reckless as when Hillary Clinton proposed it. Can you imagine the diplomatic pressure crisis that would result from the Russian military shooting down a United States bomber? While I'm sure there are those delusional enough to think Trump is up to the task to diffuse such a hypothetical, the only real way I do see a situation like that playing out is if Trump actually is Putin's rent boy and backs down when daddy says so.
Trump has also made a commitment to being all buddy-buddy in public with Saudi Arabia again, which, is also not all that unusual, in context. Some people have been claiming the relationship is a reversal of Obama's position to the House of Saud, but that's more than a little bullshit. Sure, Obama wasn't going to pose for a Evil League of Evil photo-op complete with glowing orb of doom, but Obama was more than happy to provide the Saudi's everything they needed to bomb children's hospitals and institute a famine in Yemen and then quite noticeably do nothing to stop it.
The other factor at play in the Trump's press storm with the Saudi's is their ever increasing affinity with Israel. The Saudi's and the Israeli's seem like unnatural allies, given that the Saudi's are the chief architect of pretty much every terrorist organization that wants to drive Israel into the sea, but, why should any of that matter when they have the far more important matter of hating the shit out of Iran? The resurgence of Iran in the wake of the U.S. eliminating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein has put the ability of the Saudi's and Israeli's to dictate U.S. positions in the region; the rather sudden bus-throwing of Qatar is mostly an attempt by the Saudi's to flex their muscles and reestablish their dominance in the region with the aid of our stooge president.
On Friday the ultimatum demands of the Saudi's, Arab Emirates, and Egypt were leaked to the press. And sure, the cessation of any and all funding to ISIS and Al-Nusra were included, but they were hardly the most important. The ultimatum also demanded Qatar shut down the news network al-Jazeera (a news network that is coincidentally highly critical of all the governments demanding its closure), expelling all Turkish troops, the immediate end to all diplomatic and economic ties to Iran, and monthly "compliance" audits for the first year and quarterly audits in the second to make sure the al Thani family is following through on their commitments.
What this amounts to is the Gulf Monarchies and Egypt demanding Qatar cede all its sovereignty to their interests, and to end any and all independence Qatar has from them. The main reason Qatar has a relationship with Iran is that the two countries share a massive shale-oil field in the Persian Gulf that is a primary source of wealth for both countries. Obviously, Qatar doesn't have the option to just take its ball and go home and give Iran the finger because they'd be sabotaging their own welfare in doing so; the audits are also a fantastic example of demanding a country humiliate itself and its citizens by granting the right of any of the Gulf allies to put their boots on the country's neck in the name of diplomatic relations.
It should also come as no surprise that the military and theocratic despots of the Arab world are more than a little desperate to shut down the main news source in the Arab world that unabashedly and consistently points out what massive piles of shit they all are, either. I mean, since they've all shut down dissenting voices in their own countries, can't really blame them for trying it out on one outside of their normal grasps.
So if the goal was to shut off Qatar from any outside influence, how's that going? So far the blockade has driven Qatar deeper in its relationships to both Iran and Turkey, which one might call the exact opposite of what they wanted to happen. It's sort of weird how abusing and exploiting your position in a relationship doesn't actually make people want to stay in that relationship. Who knew? And then there's the somewhat unsettling similarity to when Austria-Hungary sent a similar non-negotiable set of humiliating demands to Serbia: they too were backed by a clueless and indifferent superpower and given carte blanche to pursue the matter however they saw fit. The Serbians agreed to all but one of the demands, the Austrians were less than pleased. It didn't end well.
Depressing historical analogues aside, at least we get the amusing spectacle of watching James Mattis and Rex Tillerson desperately trying to diffuse the situation and work out a compromise while Trump blathers on about how great the blockade is. It's actually amazing that the two main representatives of U.S. power abroad are very delicately, but firmly, telling everyone to ignore whatever is coming out of their bosses mouth. I wonder what will happen once one of the office troglodytes clues Trump in that his two most powerful Secretary positions are under-cutting him.
Sadly, we don't have the luxury of people ignoring Trump on his domestic agenda, since it's no different from what the Republicans have been doing for decades now. Also on Friday the Republicans unveiled the healthcare plan they were keeping locked up tighter than a chastity belt and it's just as horrific as you would expect. The bill cuts Medicaid, allows states to opt-out of the essential coverage provisions, and ends federal funding for Planned Parenthood, among other shitty things. I singled those three out because of all the onerous bullshit in the bill, they have the potential to have the worst long lasting effects.
We'll start with the defunding of Planned Parenthood, since the Christian Right can't shut up about how it just fucking loves life so much, you guys. Ending women's primary access to abortion services is the real point here, obviously, and there will be much crowing about all the precious whittle babies lives they're saving by bankrupting the evil planned parenthood. To see how well this goes, we just have to look at what happened in Texas, which shut down most of their Planned Parenthood clinics with bullshit building regulations and also refused the Medicaid expansion in the ACA then not so coincidentally had their maternal death rate shoot to the highest in the developed world; an honor they've held for last four years. Odd how people start dying when you remove their access to medical care, isn't it?
But don't expect any "pro-life" organizations to kick up any fuss over that at all, they've never cared about people dying outside the womb so they sure as shit aren't going to start now.
The other fun thing that won't cause any problems for anyone is that one of the essential services insurers were required to cover under Obamacare was, drum-roll please, pregnancy. Along with all the pre- and post-natal services that come with growing and expelling another human from your body. Under the proposed law, each state would have the ability to opt-out of those essential services. So, if you get knocked up, hope you can pay for those riders or cough up the $10,000 out of pocket costs, it's not like you're going to need any of that money with another to feed or anything.
Insurers could also opt out of if the law goes into effect, they could also go back to denying people coverage for pre-existing conditions, they could also go back to instituting a coverage cap that once you passed you no longer had insurance any more. It's a good thing that we don't have a significant part of our population with chronic, expensive diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes; it's also awesome that we don't have a massive drug epidemic on our hands or else cutting out drug counseling and recovery programs from insurance coverage would be something of a dick move. Yup, it's great to live in the land of clean healthy living, that's for sure.
Even with that, though, the Medicaid bit is really the worst part of this whole story. You can really tell they took extra care to completely screw over as many people as they could with the Medicaid thing, because it's got the most layers of bullshit to go through. It starts with ending the payments to the states for the Medicaid expansions, which is expected to kick 15 million people out of their medical coverage alone by 2022. And then, it gets worse. The bill would also put a benefits cap on every Medicaid recipient to keep costs down; this is going to be a problem for the disabled adults who make up a large part of Medicaid spending since they obviously can't work or get any insurance with pre-existing conditions screening, either. So... I guess they'll just die, then.
Continuing our way down, starting in 2025 the cap for your Medicaid services would stop rising with the medical costs they're paying for and instead rise with the overall cost increases in the wider economy. That sounds like a dry, academic point, but medical costs always rise higher and faster than everything else, so what that translates to is Republicans will set a cap on how much the government will spend on keeping you alive and then switching the metric they use to measure that cost so the government short changes your medical expenses. This basically amounts to an almost $500 billion cut in federal Medicaid spending that will cost who knows how many more people their medical coverage.
In its own horrific genius way, the Republican health plan seeks to lower the cost of insurance by making sure that insurance only covers the absolute bare-minimum of patients. On a separate, but related, note, you kinda have to admire the sheer dedication Republicans have to being the worst thing to ever happen to so many people year-in, and year-out. It takes a special sort of character to plan in such exacting people the best way to condemn so many people to bankruptcy, illness, and death all in the name of a $600 billion tax cut to the richest echelon of society. Truly, they are something to behold.
Sad thing is, if you plug Hilary Clinton into all of this, not much changes. There is no way in hell you can say with a straight face that the woman who never met a war she didn't love would be jumping at the same chances for war in Syria that Trump is doing right now. She's already tried before, so it's only natural she would continue that trend. I also have no doubt that she'd be planning another surge operation in Afghanistan, either; she probably wouldn't let the generals run the whole show, but if two runs for president have taught s anything is that she has a natural affinity for terrible plans that no one should ever act on.
Ironically, though, if Hillary was president I have no doubt that the House and Senate would've passed at least one Obamacare repeal law if not six, one for each month she was in office. They had no problem doing it 60 times under Obama, so may be if Republican voters wanted to see some fire, spirit, and transparency from their lawmakers in repealing the ACA, they should've pinched their noses and voted for their own personal Whore of Babylon. It is more than a little sad though when you consider that a government that would've accomplished absolutely nothing is the better option than the one that is currently flailing about on every single move.
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