This is a reminder, to those out there who did not vote for Trump, that there are a few pieces of reality to the plans and executive orders that he is signing. I would like to bring those pieces of reality forward for you to ponder, while reminding everyone that Donald J. Trump would say absolutely anything to get elected and stay out of prison, and he already accomplished that—so though what he says sews unrest and panic, Mr. Reality is still a-knockin’. As example:

1. Trump says he’s going to lock down the borders and send the military to do so.

Reality: Before he can arbitrarily send the military anywhere, Congressional approval needs to be taken on deploying the military. Though POTUS is Commander in Chief, the President just can’t order the military around independently, like a Dungeons and Dragons game. This isn’t Spain in 1580. (https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-ii/clauses/345)

2. Trump says he’s going to deport millions of people.

Reality: There is no infrastructure, budget, or court system currently existing to create the manpower and processing power that would be necessary for this endeavor. And no, borrowing local sheriffs and jails in Texas won’t cut it. Check out the numbers—

“A one-time operation to deport these immigrants would cost at least $315 billion, broken down as follows:

The government would have to spend $89.3 billion to conduct sufficient arrests.

The government would have to spend $167.8 billion to detain immigrants en masse.

The government would have to spend $34.1 billion on legal processing.

The government would have to spend $24.1 billion on removals.

Deporting one million immigrants per year would incur an annual cost of $88 billion, with the majority of that cost going towards building detention camps. It would take over ten years, and the building of hundreds to thousands of new detention facilities, to arrest, detain, process, and remove all 13.3 million targeted immigrants—even assuming that 20 percent of that population would depart voluntarily during any multi-year mass deportation effort.

The total cost over 10.6 years (assuming an annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent) would be $967.9 billion… Even carrying out one million at-large arrests per year would require ICE to hire over 30,000 new law enforcement agents and staff, instantly making it the largest law enforcement agency in the federal government.” (https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/mass-deportationhttps://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/mass-deportation)

3. Trump is requiring the governmental description of gender to be a person containing eggs and sperm at birth, not chromosomal breakdown.

Reality: This definition will be legally challenged as the chromosomes are the basis of all DNA blueprint, and DNA determines our physical predisposition for absolutely everything in our body. Eggs and sperm do not. Just ask science.

In addition, further mandates defining gender will be challenged under the Constitutional right to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. So this one will get hung up in court, with hordes of attorneys who have been just chomping at the bit to get going on this to defend our trans population from the “American golden age” witch-hunt. Legal reality states that just because you don’t understand someone, it doesn’t give you a right to legally categorize them as something you’re more familiar with. (https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/sites/default/files/2018-05/pfor3-1611.pdf)

These are just a few of the executive orders that Trump has pumped out on day one. He gave his supporters what they were looking for. That was the point of all of it, on day one. Remember —Trump’s a showman. He’s not a civic leader.

It’s important to recognize that NO POTUS, regardless of who they are, or what party they belong to, has absolutely power. Not even Donald Trump, as much as he would love to convince everyone that he does. Unless there is an absolute takedown of our American government, and our Constitution, checks and balances are still in place.

No matter what tech Bro Ho’s he has in his back pocket. (Even Elon can’t re-write the Constitution.)

My best observation here of people’s reactions to Trump’s declarations is that the more we start buying into the mythology that this guy can single-handedly dismantle America, the more we give him the belief that he can.

Which he can’t. He. Just. Can’t. In. Reality.

His approach is partially basic Psy-Ops—demoralize your opponent so they just lay down and die, and save you the bullet. (That comes from our CIA guerrilla warfare handbook from the 80’s. Snuggly, huh?)

Neither can his background team of lifelong attorneys behind him from the Heritage Foundation, who are actually writing these executive orders / policies, and trying to proxy-run the government, while Trump plays his role of “daddy‘s home” in the White House.

It’s a pretty brilliant performance, with a great deal of sleight-of-hand and bait and switch, if you think about it. Very psychologically appealing to many.

The reality is that he even appointed very undereducated people in the fields that they are supposed to be heading, to oversee some of the most influential organizations in our nation. It’s gonna take these poor folks at least one year to figure out what the heck is going on, even with underlings who do you know what’s going on to assist them.

Once again, his appointments are all part of the show for his base. He did this to stick with the script of “shaking things up”, and “draining the swamp” by “hiring outsiders”…as long as the outsiders are deep loyalist to him.

Just keep remembering about Trump—it’s all about the show.

And most of these poor folks (if not all) have absolutely no experience with the organizations that they’ve been placed into, so Trump is setting these folks up for incredible failure, and creating fall-guys all around him, when these people are unable to execute his wishes.

When the FBI is not gutted, or the legacy media is not expunged, or any of these super extreme things he’s been telling his base he’s going to do, when all of these things don’t happen (and he knows they’re not gonna happen)—he can then point the finger at the inexperienced people and say, “It’s them! They let you down, America!” and have someone right there to take the blame immediately.

Again, pretty brilliant. (You’d think he’s done this before, lol!)

Sure, he’s the front man for a much more nefarious churn, attempting to take over the country. I think we all know that by now, except for the folks that don’t think it’s nefarious.

And, there are still some folks out there that think Trump is actually in charge of all of this, and bless them, because that’s almost endearing, that there is that type of trust out there in the United States, still. That type of trust is not a bad thing. In fact, directing that type of trust at improving our nation, and believing in one another, is a very good thing.

I just observe that right now, there’s a bit of a divide and what folks think is “good” for the nation.

The United States is a very complex place. It just is. We souls who have come here to choose American lives during this timeframe, have chosen this conundrum to collectively work on.

If you think about it, if things were to run as the United States was designed (a true diverse salad of fabulous flavors), that takes a great deal of give-and-take from everybody in the bowl.

And over the years, especially post World War II, the United States has bloated with our sense of not only insular day-to-day awareness of how we affect the globe, yet a bit of some cultural entitlement, because we’re such a great big country blessed with so many resources.

The point is that if we just steel off against one another in the salad bowl, and all the raisins group together in one area, and all the spinach heads in one direction, all the lettuce clumps up in its own zone and all the carrots over in the other— we are defying the very spiritual and legal structure that this country was crafted upon.

We’re an experiment, a Democratic Republic, and if we don’t evolve the experiment to working with one another, instead of excluding one another, then we’re falling right back into that monarchy style, old-world-destruction, where one modality must kill another in order to survive— where there can only one king of the hill.

If we return to that ancient modality, we fail evolution, we fail the American experiment, and thus failing ourselves, as a nation.

No one group in this nation is going to get exactly what it wants, to the “T”. If we navigate this experience correctly, we’re all going to get most of what we want, as long as it serves the function, does not subjugate any one particular group, does not marginalize others, is not violent, and serves the whole.

That’s what the scaffold of the Constitution was designed to uphold. Our founders rolled the dice that we would be able to come to agreements to serve the needs of the whole country, over the needs of the few opinions. Even while they were crafting this document, fistfights broke out in our Continental Congress, with founders passionate about the way that they saw things.

Passion in our governmental system is not unusual. Turning that passion into hatred is an unnecessary step in dealing with our disappointment over not getting everything that we want to get, in one swoop.

We are in command of our own minds. We can create hell in between our ears, or we can see the opportunity that lies in the same space, by just a twitch of the thought process. I understand very well what the Heritage Foundation and other extremist organizations are planning, and what they want want to accomplish through this second Trump presidency. (I’m an optimist, yet I’m not an idiot.)

However.

I’m also highly aware that doing things twice (that don’t work) means they’re not gonna work. Civil wars don’t work. Hating others who have a different opinion than us does not work.

If we truly want to change the United States, we won’t fall into the same us-versus-them garbage that we got into in 2016. That modality blindsided everybody, and everyone was reeling from the chaos that Trump brought the first time. But now we know what he’s all about, and now it’s a very predictable show.

So, instead of falling apart over this guy, who is doing exactly what he did last time, sticking to his script to pay back favors he owes, and being the showman (this time to stay out of prison, which he effectively did, which means he has already achieved his goal, and no longer has any need to do anything else, but put other people in charge and go golfing), perhaps taking a breathe and reevaluating how we proceed is in order.

In between his golf games, periodically Trump will say and do something shocking that rattles the rafters and ruffles the social sphere of the media, and then he’ll go back to Mar-A-Lago.

You can set your watch on Donald Trump’s predictability. Especially Trump at 78.

The most important thing we can do in this timeframe is see this timeframe for exactly what it is. The old world, through extremist groups, is trying to claim back the United States. We all know this. We also all know that there are laws against many things that the old world juggernauts want to implement.

Our job in this timeframe is to not get sucked back into the hateful “us against them” narrative, as that puts us back decades.

Our job is to live our lives, work for the things we find to be right, and just be kind, create beautiful communities, uplift those who are struggling and need our help, protect those who need it, and remember that we absolutely, positively have *no clue* what someone else’s walk is in life is.

This is the most important thing of all, this suspension of judgement. Why? Because our judgement can be used against us.

When someone wants to look at a person who voted for Trump, and their “mind is blown”, and they just can’t understand it, remember that you don’t know what that person‘s background is. You don’t know what their story is. Just like someone doesn’t know what my story is, or your story is.

It’s quite easy for someone like me, a gay woman, to say that it blows my mind that someone would support someone who goes after the trans community. I’m not a trans person, but knowing many of my trans friends and watching their very difficult struggles in life, I have a different perspective than someone who potentially has never known a trans individual, and has lived a life where everyone perhaps is the same belief they are, or the same color they are, or the same sexual orientation as they are.

It’s awfully difficult to grow division and hatred in a society where diversity and independence of thought is embraced.

Think about that.

Hate is only useful for one thing, and that is aggregating people into groups. And collecting people into groups only good for one thing, and that is controlling that group through their fear. A big bonus of controlling people through their fear, is making money off of them and having them do your bidding.

So if we were to evolve our species, and evolve our government, and evolve our country, then we will have to put this type of hate and polarization out to pasture.

We can still disagree strongly with one another and not hate someone.

We can still be angry about a situation and stand up for what we think is just, without deciding that the people we are arguing against are “human garbage”. If we are to decide the latter, we are no better than the 1830s white plantation owner, deciding that the people with dark skin in the fields are less than we are.

To decide someone is “garbage” is to dehumanize them. To continue to dehumanize people through hatred, just like modalities such as racism and sexism, is deep hypocrisy.

We can disagree and voice our opinion respectfully. We have no control over whether others decide to take our disagreements with a system or a decision personally. That’s their own lesson.

So let us in this timeframe just realize what the heck is actually going on, approach this Trump presidency differently than the last, and take away that fulcrum of division that these “Strong men“ who are hiding behind Trump show rely on. Because that will really show us the true strength of whatever this “nefarious movement” is.

And my surmisal, after evaluating this for the past eight years, is that what we think is this terrifying juggernaut of 50 years’ worth of religious research and gerrymandering and legal finagling actually IS, to this country— is again nothing more than a little man behind the curtain, like the dude in the Wizard of Oz, trying to create a projection of the authority and terror that is only possible if our salad is bunched into individual ingredients all around the bowl.

In fact, the guy behind the curtain is not even a genius. He is just some stranded guy in a balloon that got whacked off course by a random weather pattern.

That weather pattern is called evolution, and change. That weather pattern is called growth and compassion.

And if there’s one thing about living in the 21st century that we can ALL agree on—

it’s that the weather is changing.