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Are We Now the Bad Guys? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-21

This question was asked on February 19, 2025, by Adam Kinzinger in a Substack article: “Are We Now the Bad Guys?” Survey Says: OMG Yes!

I hate it. I am ashamed. I can say that Trump is not my president, and although that is true, “We” means America. Of course, America once had other faces like USAID, foreign aid, and the Peace Corps. USAID is dead, and Trump has frozen foreign aid. Despite legal challenges, those funds are still not flowing well, and no one knows what lies ahead for the Peace Corps.

Now America is Trump—the ugliest American ever stands between us and the world. Trump is the man who wants to buy Greenland—ugly. Trump is the person who thinks that Canada should be America’s 51st state—ugly. Trump is the one who wants Panama to give the Panama Canal back to America—ugly. And now Europe understands that it has a new threat—America. How much of the world will now turn from America to China—ugly.

Oh, wait. Maybe Panama has avoided that fate. Panama’s President, Jose Raul Mulino, has agreed with Trump to take deportees who are not Panamanian. So, the U.S. has shipped 299 people to Panama, including people from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. All violent criminals? Hardly! And 99 of those political prisoners—what else should we call them—have been shipped from the capital to a “shelter” in the Darien jungle region in the lawless south of the country.

Other migrants have been transferred to the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba because cruelty is the point of everything Trump does. Of course, Trump has solved America’s immigration issue. When he is done no person in their right mind would ever want to come to America.

He has Chainsaw Musk cutting employees from one federal agency after another with abandon—Twittering America. For all of those who were critical of the federal government, they haven’t seen anything yet. By the time Trump is done, America will work about as well as Russia does. Ugly.

Trump’s DOJ will no longer prosecute bribery. They paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits companies from bribing foreign officials. Trump loves bribery. And, of course, Trump gave a blanket pardon to the J6 felons. It’s okay to be a violent criminal if you’re Trump’s criminal. Ugly.

Trump’s White House has banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One indefinitely because they are still calling Trump’s beloved Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico. There was no strike by the other reporters protesting this because that would actually take courage, despite the fact there is so little value to cover at these daily roundups of lies and malfeasance. Ugly.

Since the U.S. controls 40% of the Gulf and Mexico 60%, the AP should use both while making the font size of the Gulf of America very little to reflect how little Trump is.

Not only has Trump declared that Ukraine started the war against Russia, a ridiculous assertion, but Trump is also demanding that Ukraine allocate 50% of its revenues from natural resources, including rare earth minerals, oil, and gas, as well as income from ports and infrastructure, to the U.S. to repay for America’s support of the war. The U.S. was fighting Russia through its proxy, Ukraine; now, Trump is siding with Russia against Ukraine. It was not Trump’s or America’s blood that was shed in Ukraine, bloodshed in towns and on battlefields. That should be reparation enough. But no—ugly, so damn ugly. A Ukrainian soldier, speaking about this situation, said that sometimes when you are between two evils, you have to take the lesser evil—America, the lesser evil. How sad.

Trump, who cares so much about the stock market, will soon learn the law of unintended consequences. With all that he is doing, it seems clear that the world will no longer see America as a safe place to invest. Then things will really get ugly.

America is Trump. No other President has done this. And because Trump is ugly, America is ugly. I hate this America. And the world will, too, except for the dictators who will celebrate America’s fall. Of course, Trump’s favorability is already underwater by 6 to 8 points because, in just four weeks, more than half of Americans hate everything he is doing. There is nothing good about this America, which is why we must rename it on the maps—Amerika, to remind us that for the next two years, the bad guys are winning. It is also to make clear that Trump is, as Hillary Clinton said many years ago, Putin’s puppet.

History will not be kind to this moment. The world once looked to America as a beacon of hope, democracy, and stability. Now, under Trump, it sees corruption, cruelty, and self-interest. The question Adam Kinzinger posed is no longer rhetorical. If we do nothing, if we simply accept this transformation, then the answer is yes: we are the bad guys. But history is not yet written in stone. America has faced dark times before, and it has risen from them. The question remains: will we rise again, or will we let Trump bury us forever—America or Amerika?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/21/2305216/-Are-We-Now-the-Bad-Guys?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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