Now that the Colorado Primary Election is in the rear-view mirror and party candidates are reshaping their campaigns for November, Job One for almost every candidate is to explain to voters how they would right the U.S. government ship that President Donald Trump has run aground.
Any candidate for Congress, governor or even county commissioner who stands behind the endless string of catastrophes and blunders Trump and his astonishing cabinet of misfits and incompetent posers have inflicted on the nation should be disqualified by any cogent voter.
For the past two years, Colorado and the other states have been subjected to a cacophony of distortions and outright lies hurled by Trump and his minions in a failed attempt to gaslight the nation, and the world, into believing it isn’t all that bad.
Last week, state health experts and hospital officials warned about a growing calamity that will affect everyone in Colorado, all attributable to Medicaid cuts and effects built into H.R. 1, or as Trump calls it, “The Big Beautiful Bill.”
Voters want to know how candidates will refocus the nation on addressing problems of affordability that are hugely consequential to most Americans, despite Trump’s refusing to admit or act on it.
And this week, if not for the truly conservative and logical tenor of six members of the Supreme Court — three of them usually dubbed “liberals” — the nation would have been thrown into instant turmoil had the court backed Trump’s ludicrous attack on the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.
Even as the high court was preparing to unveil its decision in the case, Trump and his compliant Vice President, JD Vance were lying to Americans about the issue. Both repeatedly have said that the United States is the only nation that allows for birthright citizenship, when, in fact, more than 30 other nations do, including Canada and Mexico.
But the sheer misery and treachery inflicted by Trump began the day he was sworn back into office. Job One for Trump was pardoning more than 1,200 convicted anarchists and insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, injuring police officers and destroying Capitol property as they went.
From that moment on, Trump has fashioned his obsession with revenge and disdain for people of color, and especially non-white immigrants, into a bludgeon that has set American progress back generations.
The United States is quickly becoming a tattered shell of the world power it once was, and we are all in great danger because of it.
Obsessed with gilt and ornamentation, Trump ignores the burgeoning financial disaster in the making, created by upside-down budget cuts and exorbitant spending, a determination to accelerate climate change rather than address it, and a nonsensical and repeatedly debunked fascination with tariffs, eating at the American economy like a cancer.
Although his untenable, unethical and nonsensical war on immigrants has myriad detrimental effects on every level and corner of the nation, the building catastrophe can’t stay in the headlines when Trump wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on a needless and losing war with Iran.
Even more dangerous right now is Trump’s obsession with the so-called SAVE Act, which feeds into his deep-seated delusion that he was cheated out of the 2020 presidential election, rather than face the truth that voters were smart enough then to cut ties with the losses the nation incurred from his first presidency.
The list of wrongs Trump has inflicted against this nation is astonishingly long and egregious. From empowering incompetent and corrupt toadies posing as cabinet members, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump has worked to undermine and seriously debilitate the U.S. military, the nation’s once superior medical science infrastructure, a once honest department of justice and even the nation’s Department of Education.
While voters should expect to hear November candidates offer ideas and plans to improve the lives of all Americans, the priority must be how each candidate plans to first contain the rogue president and his accomplices, and how Congress and other divisions of state, local and national governments can, and will, reverse the damage.
This Congress has abandoned its Constitutional responsibilities of oversight and accountability as a separate but equal part of the government.
Without doubt, holding Trump and his gang accountable for the growing list of lawless and often criminal behavior is important. Another impeachment vote, however, without a strong conviction in the Senate, will be just another Trump distraction.
Voters in Aurora, across the state, and across the nation need more than just promises to vote for legislation that seems reasonable and to fight the administration with harsh words. Voters want to know for certain that the next members of the Colorado congressional delegation will not whimper, fold or shrug the next time Trump bullies his way through the Capitol, threatening harsh words in capital letters on his social media channel or to “primary” any Republican who doesn’t do his incompetent bidding.
The primary scraps are over. Voters are deeply ready for change. Tell them how that’s going to happen.
