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Trump Wants a Parade. Maybe the Kids Who Only Get Four Days of Public School Could Give It to Him.
We’re caught in a vise grip of two different ugly Americas.
MICHAEL TOMASKY
02.09.18 5:06 AM ET
God has a sense of mischief, at least. Thursday, just two days after Donald Trump started talking up his beautiful martial demonstration, North Korea held its annual military parade! Check out the minute-long clip the government released, and picture Trump watching it and telling Hope Hicks, “Yes, I want that, a red carpet; but mine has to be longer. And redder, much redder.”
Link to tweet
This parade idea is abominable, of course. All the same, it isn’t the hill that Democrats and liberals should die on. Yes, it’s authoritarian and creepy. But it’s also another example of one of these manifestations of Trumpismus that take up too much space in our brains, like his tweets. We obsess over these things at the risk of being driven insane.
Spend too much time staring at the terribleness around Trump—looking at you, Rob Porter—and you risk missing arguably bigger outrages, like the Oklahoma children going to school just four days a week, which received some fresh attention this week as the state is forced to grapple with its budget crisis.
That maybe doesn’t make our heads explode the way Trump does, but it should. While our brains are all Trump-Trump-Trump, this is the kind of horrible thing that’s going down off-camera. The four-day school week has actually been ongoing in some parts of the Sooner State for a couple years now, and it’s only part of the story. Prisons are on the edge of crisis, they’re so overcrowded. Rural hospitals and nursing homes are on the brink of closing. State highway patrol officers have had mileage limits imposed on them. Over the last several years, the state has the distinction of making the biggest cuts to education of any state in the union—nearly 25 percent per pupil.
more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-wants-a-parade-maybe-the-kids-who-only-get-four-days-of-public-school-could-give-it-to-him?ref=home
