Did Trump Lose His Mandate On Friday 12/20/24?

By Donald A. Collins | 23 December 2024
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

The plethora of Washington Post December 21, 2024 stories might answer this headline’s question.

Let’s start here.

Acting as if he was already in office, Trump extolled his mandate for raising the debt limit in the 12/19 version of the temporary budget spending bill. This was in line with what his unelected best buddy Elon Musk had hours before demanded!

Opps! The interim bill that passed the Congress early on Saturday, December 21st did not contain their provision.

And ironically nowhere did I read about Trump’s first term major benefit to his neo-Gilded Age billionaire corporate backers with his 2017 corporate tax cut from 37 to 21 percent.

Now the prospect looms for more austerity on the backs of our less affluent citizens since he sees the need for their further austerity since our National debt is now $36 trillion!

On December 21st on a website known as Trades Prophet we are told “Both President Trump and Elon Musk are warning about something that could send the market down 50%, real estate down 40% and savings accounts down 30%.”

But scary language doesn’t prove anything so all we can do is to watch what happens. Most respected economists predict his proposed tariffs on imported goods will produce high inflation.

Meantime, in a 12/20/24 column by Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, Trump “the incoming president, is hawking Bibles in an ad on Fox News; Donald Trump’s myriad side deals were odd when he was a candidate. They are downright bizarre — and disconcerting — when he’s the incoming president.”

In more detail:

Viewers tuning into Fox News on Thursday afternoon were treated to an ad that was unquestionably well-targeted: former president Donald Trump, the man who will be president again in one month, encouraging them to spend $60 on the “God Bless the USA” Bible.

The ad, shared by journalist Aaron Rupar on social media, can most concisely be summarized as “schlocky.” It centers on Trump speaking directly to the camera, using his sedate, reading-from-the-teleprompter voice to encourage Fox News viewers to buy what was once presented as the “ultimate American Bible.”

“We love God, and we have to protect anything that is pro-God,” the infamously areligious former president asserts as a plinky piano version of “O, Come All Ye Faithful” plays in the background. “We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor or discriminate against us. We have to bring Christianity back into our lives and back into what will be, again, a great nation.

Read it in full here.

Of course that great nonnative unelected Best Buddy on October 17th (in an America PAC town hall in Folsom, Pennsylvania reported by Reuters’s Bryan Pietsch) “Elon Musk praises far-right German AfD party the far-right Alternative for Germany party classified by German intelligence as a suspected extremist organization.”

Musk tweets frequently, opining on politics and business, posting memes or sharing praise from fans. But recently, as he has grown cozier with President-elect Donald Trump, his opinions have carried more weight in the offline world: On Wednesday, he tanked efforts in Congress to pass a spending bill aiming to avert a government shutdown.

In the weeks before Trump takes office, Musk has become a close adviser to Trump, often spending time with him at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s Florida residence. He has joined Trump’s calls with foreign leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Read the full 12/20/24 Washington Post article By Bryan Pietsch and Trisha Thadani here.

Bryan Pietsch also noted that “Globally, Musk has also used X to show his support for some of the most prominent and polarizing figures of the right. He frequently posts about his support for Argentine President Javier Milei, whom he met with at a Tesla factory in Texas. He was invited to a live online appearance with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and said on X this summer that he plans to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (though no date was announced). Each are populist figures, who are bolstered by online armies that have been accused of spreading disinformation.”

Remember how in Trump’s first post-election interview with Host Kristen Welker on Meet the Press he admitted getting food prices down wasn’t simple? But polls show that one third of his 2024 votes came from those for whom high food prices were their main reason for their support.

This past year has been very good for those in the stock market.

In a December 19th Real Clear Markets piece by Elizabeth O’Brien entitled “Farewell to the Smooth Ride for Stocks. How to Prepare Your Portfolio for a Bumpy 2025” she writes “The question now: Will markets resume their climb, and will the policies of President-elect Donald Trump help or hamper things in 2025?

Many investors expect that Trump 2.0 will be different. Trump’s agenda for his second term is more ambitious than it was for his first term in 2016. But even if the president-elect were to follow the same playbook, “the economy and the markets are in a different spot than last time,” says Eric Kelley, chief investment officer at UMB Bank.

Who knows but S&P 500 index’s 23% rise this year’s market rise didn’t hurt Trump’s election campaign.

That Trump’s picks for key Cabinet and administrative positions have so far met with only one outright rejection, Goetz, but growing concern by both parties about RFK Jr, Hegseth and others will likely in light of the above Trump Musk arrogances put backbone into many GOP members whose constituencies voted for cheaper groceries not less regulation or taxes or doing away with the IRS as Musk has suggested.

Trump’s unrestrained arrogance has finally alienated even many elected Trump supporters as his last-minute demands against a reasonable congressional interim funding package were rejected by many Republicans.

In one week, the supposedly indestructible, unconvictable Donald now faces huge challenges to his authoritarian rule as he takes office.

Trump’s impregnable mandate? He exposed himself to many more voters as a greedy power mongering huckster. Then Musk with his fascist biases made one too many postings for power.

The debt limit is a false hurdle but in this case it makes my point that Trump got disobeyed by his elected GOP colleagues who now they can go against his demands!

Trump actually lost his mandate in the wee hours of Saturday December 21st when the interim funding act passed without including his request for unlimited additions to our National Debt!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

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