Flaws in President's "oversold" but little-noted record of achievements.
#HBCUs - President Thump said that he "saved" Historically Black Colleges and Universities, but it was a 10-year renewal of funding, and Trump continued the funding level in President Obama's 8 years in office. Michael Lomax, president and CEO of the United College Fund, warned that HBCUs are "woefully underfunded," and he wants a $1 billion grant for HBCU infrastructure, a doubling of Pell grants, and a tripling of Title III funding for the FUTURE Act.
My Comment: There was no controversy about funding the HBCUs, and the funding was at the $80-$90 million level of previous years. Michael Lomax argued that when you divide the money among the HBCUs, it isn't enough to lead to any meaningful change. Of course, Trump could have vetoed the bill, but to say he "saved" the HBCUs is an inflated claim.
#Opportunity Zones - Opportunity zones are tax incentives to encourage those with capital gains to invest in low-income and undercapitalized communities. A June Urban Institute report found that "although there are compelling examples of community benefit, the [opportunity zone] incentive as a whole is not living up to its economic and community development goals." Also, the vast majority of opportunity capital appears to be going into real estate, rather than into operating businesses.
My Comment: Whether they be called opportunity or enterprise zones, these kinds of investments are commonly used by U.S. presidents to spur investments in under-served areas. The Urban Institute findings indicate that although there are some bright spots in Trump's opportunity zones, there is an overall failure to meet stated goals.
#Saving the Suburbs - Regarding saving the suburbs, as claimed by Trump, he scrapped an Obama rule requiring localities to track patterns of segregation or lose federal funding.
My Comment: Wen Trump tweeted that he would save the suburbs, he implied that he would prevent minorities from flooding resident's living space. He obviously was trying to improve his political standing with suburban women, which polls were showing that he had a huge deficit to make up. Therefore, he was reducing his support among African Americans -- which he was claiming that he had done more for them than any prior U.S. president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln -- to increase his standing among women -- a rather questionable political calculation.
It was probably not a very smart move to address his tweet to "suburban housewives," since many of them work.
#First Step Act - As of late November, the First Step Act had released more than 3,000 federal prison inmates and had 1,700 sentence reductions. A Brennan Center for Justice report over this past summer found that "key parts of the law are working as promised, but other parts, such as expanded rehabilitation and recidivism are not."
My Comment: This was not a Trump initiative, as much of the heavy-lifting was done by others, and Trump was a "johnny-come-lately." The Koch brothers played a major role in getting the law passed, ostensibly because they thought it would lead to reduced sentences for business people involved in committing white-collar crimes.
#Minority-Owned Businesses - Many minority-owned businesses were shut out of the Paycheck Protection Program because they lacked business banking relationships with the program. This is another instance of Trump not bothering to build up minority infrastructure, if he was really interested in being the greatest friend that African Americans had throughout U.S. history.
#Complaints of housing discrimination increased by 8% in 2018, the highest level tracked by the National Fair Housing Alliance.
#Federal Death Penalty - President Trump reinstated the federal death penalty. There are now 55 death row prisoners, and 25 are African Americans. Trump has accelerated the schedule for carrying out these executions during this transition period between presidents.
##More short subjects of a varied nature.
#Potential Bribery - A heavily redacted filing in the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia, revealed on December 1, announced that the Department of Justice is seriously investigating a potential "bribery conspiracy scheme" relating to a presidential pardon. Trump's name doesn't appear in the filing, but, of course, he is the only one who can issue a pardon.
#A memorandum opinion from Chief Judge Beryl Howell suggests that the Department of Justice is investigating whether two people whose names are redacted, "acted as lobbyists to senior White House officials, without complying with the registration requirements of the Lobbying Disclosure Act."
#The EPA will keep in place existing thresholds for small article pollution for another five years. Activists and public health experts have pushed for stricter standards.
#Nearly 1 million renters will owe an average of $5,850 on back rent and utilities on January 2021, Moody's Analytics warn.
#A $4.5 billion Trump food program is running out of money early.
#In a June Pew Research Center poll, 25% of U. S. respondents agreed that there was some truth to the conspiracy theory that powerful people planned the coronavirus pandemic.
#Steve Coll, "Failure of Duty," The New Yorker, November 3, 2020. - "Leave it to Trump to manufacture a constitutional crisis that also incorporates a fund-raising con." "Now the President seems determined to put the pursuit of his invented vote-rigging before his responsibility to address the economy and health impacts of what may be the most difficult surge of the pandemic yet."
#46-Minute Video Rant - Trump said that the U.S. election system was "under coordinated assault and siege," and it was "statistically impossible" for him to have lost to Biden.
#Religious Freedom Reigns - Five members of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that New York's public health guidelines don't apply to religious organizations because freedom of religion practices trump them. The decision puts the right of churches to hold heavily populated services above the right of everyone to live safely.
#245,000 jobs were added to the economy in November, down from 610,000 in October. The unemployment rate fell from 6.9% in October to 6.7% in November, but the U.S. economy is short roughly 10 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level. More than an additional 9 million people will be left without jobs after Christmas if there will be no additional state or federal aid.
#U.S. deaths from the coronavirus topped 3,100 on December 2, a new high, with more than 100,000 Americans hospitalized with the disease, also a record, and with daily cases topping 200,000. 12 states had imposed new restrictions on businesses in the month of November, according to an Associated Press tally.
#Law professor Aaron Rappaport has said that "the framers understood that pardons must be issued for specific crimes. They are not intended to be broad grants of immunity, get-out-of-jail-free cards bestowed by presidential grace."
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