{"id":38333,"date":"2026-04-30T11:13:03","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T16:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38333"},"modified":"2026-05-04T14:46:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T19:46:42","slug":"38333","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38333","title":{"rendered":"Trump as all four horsemen of the Apocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last Post: <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38319\">Living the Pura Vida &#8211; my latest Reader column<\/a><br \/>\nNext Post: <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38348\">4 days past May Day<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/55099597489_cd28819125_t.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/> <strong>Donate to, Support or learn about the last lincoln republican. Click here:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/weltyforcongress.com\">Weltyforcongress.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been reading <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38278\">The Age of Eisenhower<\/a> a little slower now that I&#8217;m not waiting at airports and flying. I&#8217;m about 3\/5ths finished with it.<\/p>\n<p>Last night I finished a fascinating chapter I was aware of but not with the detail supplied by author Hitchcock. It was about the Suez crises of 1956 which coincided with the crises of the Russian reinvasion of Hungary to keep it in the Soviet block followed by a five month health crises for President Eisenhower. Despite knowing the end of each of these stories I was on the seat of my chair as Ike proved himself brilliant compared to our hapless idiot in chief who has cut off one fifth of the world&#8217;s oil supply through sheer incompetence. The same thing happened because the Brits and French thought they could preserve their empires when an Egyptian nationalist took over the Suez canal that transported a lot of the oil Europe needed and the Brits and French secretly encouraged Israel to start a war they thought they could finish. They lied through their teeth to Ike and Egypt though under fire from Israel crippled oil transport while its ally Syria destroyed three massive pipelines that carried oil to the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, Trump is firing any scientist or legally trained or historically knowledgeable Federal employee and replacing them with 20 year old Musk know-it-alls so the better half of the American economy is at good fortunes mercy. <\/p>\n<p>I will say I was warned by ChatGPT when I asked its advice for a book to read on Ike that this book I already had on my shelves was more a study of Ike&#8217;s times (and  my first ten years) than it was a full fledged biography which is just what I wanted after reading Truman by McCullough. And so I noticed a massive omission I had been interested in following up. There was no mention of immigration policy on Ike&#8217;s watch. The bracero program that had Ike sending hundreds of thousands of Mexican&#8217;s back to Mexico wasn&#8217;t even listed in the index. <\/p>\n<p>So, I paused my reading to ask chat to give me a history of illegal immigration to the US since 1913 to the present. I&#8217;ve written before that we as a nation purposely encourage people to come illegally to the US to do work Americans were not willing to pay for while they were so vulnerable they didn&#8217;t dare form unions or try to boost their wages. As a bonus in Texas the Texas Oil Millionaires and ranchers paid these illegals five buck to vote in Texas elections for candidates the millionaires wanted elected. I got that from Robert Caro&#8217;s first installment of the Power series about LBJ. Every AI app that I&#8217;ve consulted about great histories lists the Caro books.<\/p>\n<p>So, this is another element of Trump&#8217;s stupidity that is grinding America&#8217;s economy down along with massive oil increases and threats against the Federal Reserve and massive grifting and giveaways by Trump and military expenditures on nonsense wars.<\/p>\n<p>I linked an earlier post to this attack on migrant labor and found an excellent description of what&#8217;s happening <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/2026\/04\/30\/low-immigration-means-more-americans-must-work\/\">in today&#8217;s NY Times oped ed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Here&#8217;s a sample of its reasoning:\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>The American economy has so many challenges right now that keeping track of them all can be exhausting. But here are a few: The price of gas is soaring, no one really knows if President Donald Trump\u2019s tariffs are legal or illegal, an artificial intelligence bubble is running out of control on Wall Street, and the budget deficit is so large no one wants to think about it.<br \/>\nAnd yet the biggest challenge is structural. The United States is running out of workers at the same time that it decided to close its doors to the immigrants who traditionally kept the whole machine running.<\/p>\n<p>Construction sites are in need of laborers, farms can\u2019t find pickers and restaurants are short of kitchen staff. None of these are glamorous jobs, but they are essential ones. The economy does not run on chief executives and software engineers alone. It runs on the vast, unglamorous army of people who build things, move things, clean things and serve things.<br \/>\nThat army is shrinking.<br \/>\nIt is not hard to see why. An economy where nearly one-fifth of the labor force is foreign-born has suddenly decided to cut off the supply of new workers. Net immigration fell from 2.7 million people to about 1.3 million between July 2024 and June 2025<\/em><\/p>\n<p>All of this reminds me of the many foreign workers where my Mother was first placed in long term care. And it reminds me of <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38302\">the latest crises in Minnesota&#8217;s long term care system<\/a> which I also posted about recently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last Post: Living the Pura Vida &#8211; my latest Reader column Next Post: 4 days past May Day Donate to, Support or learn about&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,127,42,168],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38333"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38353,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38333\/revisions\/38353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}