Making Sure I Blame Trump For the Right Things

Let's start with: I hate President Donald Trump.  The man is crushing the ideals of our country and lying about helping anyone but the super-rich.  He's an awful president, and an awful human.  I hope he lives out the rest of his life in unending despair over the realization that he IS actually as bad as most of the country knows him to be.  I want him to suffer complete depression to the point of sobbing until his eyes sting and his throat is raw and in pain... multiple times per day.

The man is a piece of garbage for a human being that deserves to suffer for all the misery and destruction he is raining down on this country and the world too.

I hate President Donald Trump.

With that out of the way, I saw an info-graphic that at first I was just going to re-post on Facebook, and then I remembered that I should fact check things.  So, here's the info graphic, followed by a point by point investigation.

Most Days Vacationing
He hasn't reached the end of his 4 years yet.  Hopefully he won't get 8.  But, it seems that while he takes more vacation per unit of time, he hasn't reached the point of taking the most in total yet.  So, we should be clear: the image isn't exactly correct in its word use.  My source.

While the image doesn't address this specifically, I think it's worth mentioning that while the numbers are apparently unsupported in other memes, Trump does seem to spend the most of our tax money on his trips too.  And the fact that he goes to his own resorts is objectionable for two reasons: 1) As president and by constitutional law, he's not supposed to have business interests anymore because it's a conflict of interest between his profit and the people he's supposed to represent, and 2) he's spending unnecessary amounts of our tax money on his own luxury.  The additional source.


Most Games of Golf Played
Well... it's funny that there's a website dedicated to the topic of how much golf he plays.  Here's an ABC News article about it.  And here's a CNN article about it.  After all the bluster Trump made about Obama playing golf, it's a little funny and a little annoying that Trump is doing more than what he complained about when it wasn't him doing it.  This one seems to be true, even though he hasn't completed a term yet.


Least Amount of Bills Signed
So... here's a good article about this being true... but I'm not sure I care about this one.  More bills signed means more destruction of the American Ideal when it's Trump doing the signing.  He's ruining things... I don't want him to sign more bills.  So, I guess I'm trying to point out that the number of bills doesn't matter as much as the quality of the bills.  But then... by my measure, Trump is failing hard too.  And this does still count as an example of Trump's ignorance or lies depending on why he made the statement that he signed the most bills since Truman.


Lowest Approval Rating
Not sure I need to look this one up.  Well, that's surprising.  Wall Street Journal says that his approval rating is going up after the Putin thing... but is still the lowest approval rating.  I'm not surprised it's the lowest... just that it is going up.  His supporters have no idea what they're doing I think.  His supporters make claims of patriotism, and then support Trump more for betraying our country?  I don't get it.  Anyway... verification of the above findings from the Hill.  And an interesting and in-depth look at the numbers on Vox.  All together, we have verification that he does in fact have the lowest approval ratings of any president in recent history.  No surprise... since he's the worst president ever.


Most Provable Lies Told
Holy crap this one is easy.  The man is a pathological liar.  I remember the first one I noticed still.  It was during the presidential debate.  In reaction to someone accusing him of not paying taxes, he responded that not paying taxes made him smart.  Then immediately after (maybe next day), he denied he said it.  He said it on national television during the presidential debate, and he claims the next day that he never said it.  It's astoundingly stupid.  And the people who voted for him didn't care I'd guess... despite one of the biggest problems in our economy being that rich people avoid paying taxes.  So many of the programs that we all use and rely on are paid for by taxes... and rich people avoiding them keeps huge amounts of money out of the tax system... so we can't afford as much.  Trump is part of the problem and he was proud of it.  And all the rest of us who are scraping by suffer for it.

Here's the snopes article about the lie I remembered.

And here's the politifact article about him being a ridiculous liar.

Trump is such a piece of garbage.


Most Cabinet Resignations
I don't know what to think of this one either.  The people he put in power are (except for one-exception I can think of) horrible people that have no skill related to the position they were put in and in many cases have conflicts of interest that would make them work against the best interest of the organization/department they took control of.  Scott Pruitt comes to mind as the head of the EPA.  I hate Pruitt too.  If I saw him on the street I'm not sure I could stop myself from beating him until he needed a visit to the emergency room.  That man did so much damage and is so obviously evil (destroyed environmental protections to allow big corporations to pollute more freely and therefore have bigger profits) that I'm glad he resigned.

Anyway, I don't know if it's the most, but there are plenty of ways to see that there are a lot...
- wikipedia
- nytimes
- NPR (this one supports the "most resignations" claim)


Most Criminal Indictments
I'm having a hard time finding a source for this one because most of the pages coming up are about the specific Mueller indictments of Trump.  I am failing at verifying or denying this one.  Maybe with more time.  But instead I'm going to suggest you do your own research on this one.  It's easy to find that he's being accused of lots of things, and has been for years.  His shady business practices are easy to find, including his racial discrimination for renting out his apartments when he was younger, and plenty on how Trump likes to screw over investors: Vox (I like this one) & USA Today for example.


Final Thoughts
Trump still has supporters.  People who believe he is good and that he will help them.  Except during his tenure so far ALL of his actions have been to support the super-rich or to be able to make claims.  And example of that is giving the coal industry help so coal miners can keep their jobs.  But even IF he did make a difference for people who have depended on being a coal miner for their profession... what he did was the wrong thing.  Keeping those people dependent on an industry that SHOULD die is awful.  What should have happened is using tax money to help transition those companies and the employees to something better.  Anything better.  Any type of alternative energy would have been better, and provide training for the coal miners to have a skill that's useful in the future.

But his supporters are going to cling to things like those new stories about him helping coal miners while ignoring the down-sides of the same story, and ignoring that things like Trump's tax plans being tricks.  Think we're getting money back because they're cutting taxes?  Did you get your $100 or so?  Hooray for you.  Now when you retire there won't be any money in the programs we pay into to have money for retirement.  Now programs that we depend on won't have enough support.  Guess who REALLY benefits from that tax plan...

go ahead.  Guess.

I'm sure you realize that the richest people in the country get the most money from that tax plan.  If our taxes get cut by 1% and the average salary of $40,000 per year would mean getting back $400, what does that mean for the CEO who makes on average 300 times what their average employee makes?  Are you really happy about your $400 a year when the people at the top are getting back $120,000 per year based on a 1% tax cut?  That tax cut would be three times what you make on average.  The programs our government runs for us... like the military, law enforcement agencies, schools, public works (road maintenance and so forth), fire departments, and so on... all depend on taxes.  I'm not suggesting our government spends taxes well right now... but I am suggesting that tax money is necessary for us.  While we're getting back $400, we're losing things that we need.  And those rich assholes are getting enough money to pay for whatever they need, and possibly buy a boat too.

Trump is so bad for us.  I hate that man.

d20 vs 3d6 re-hash

I've written about this before, but it was an emotional reaction to a bad experience.  I'd like to try again with less emotion and more numbers.  To get there I'll need to tell you what I'm writing about.  As the title mentions, this is meant to be a comparison of 1d20 versus 3d6.  What the heck does that mean?  If you're a table top role-playing game (TTRPG) enthusiast, you probably know, but I'm trying for a wider audience.

The comparison is between two resolution mechanics for table top role-playing games.  In those games, most of the participants control characters in a setting, and they try to accomplish goals.  For example a character named John might be trying to shoot a target with a bow and arrow.  Do they hit the target?  The resolution mechanic decides for you.  If we left that decision up to the story-teller (game master), it has a strong chance of degenerating into arguments about fairness.  Instead, you use dice to allow a fairly random number decide for you.  And this blog is meant to compare and judge two of those dice mechanics.


Basic Explanation of the Two Dice Mechanics

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The 1d20 mechanic refers to using a single twenty-sided die to get your random number.  This comes from a large pool of games that fit into the "d20" category, and started with Dungeons & Dragons.  If I refer to a d20 game specifically in the future in this post, it'll probably be Pathfinder (PF), because that's the only d20 game I play these days.  Your character will have a number (often called a modifier) that you add to the result of your 1d20 roll.  That number is compared to a difficulty score of some kind.  An important point is that a 1 on the die can be an automatic failure and a 20 on the die can be an automatic success.  I'll clarify using the example of John the Archer shooting a Target.

John is a fairly average person with a little skill at archery.  For the example, let's say that when he takes a shot with his bow, he has a +4 attack modifier.  When he rolls his d20 to see if he hits a target, his possible results are 5 to 24.  The target will have an Armor Class (AC) which is a number that represents how hard it is to hit.  In this case it's primarily based on how small the target is.  Let's say for ease of example that the AC is 15.  I chose that number because it means John has a 50% chance of hitting the target.  If he rolls a 10 or below, he misses.  If he rolls an 11 or above he hits.  As something that will become important later, D&D and PF use a 6-second round that abstracts some of the action.  In that 6 seconds, John shoots once, so the effort of aiming at the target and even possibly moving to a firing position are included in that time.  It'll become clear later why I mention this.

The 3d6 mechanic refers to using three six-sided dice to get your random number.  I know of this choice from GURPS.  But really, this can represent any dice mechanic where you use multiple dice to get your number.  The important aspect is the multiple dice.  And lots of good TTRPGs use multiple dice in their resolution mechanics.  I just chose GURPS because I LOVE GURPS (Steve Jackson Games).  And I am very familiar with the math around the GURPS die mechanic.  In this case, your character will have a skill instead of a modifier like in Pathfinder.  Whatever that number is, is the number you have to roll less than or equal to in order to succeed.  There are modifiers too, but they refer to something different in GURPS, usually around outside factors that affect the outcome (PF has those too, but uses the word modifier to refer to the "skill" number as well).  I'll make it clearer with John the Archer shooting a target...

John is a fairly average person with a little skill at archery.  For the example, let's say that his bow skill is 11 (ever so slightly above average).  In GURPS, one round of action is one second.  There's no abstraction of action.  Each second you say what your character does specifically, so for purpose of making this roughly equivalent to the D&D/PF mechanic, we have to say John is aiming for 3 seconds with his bow (3 seconds of aiming gets you the highest bonus possible).  This will get John a +5 to his skill for the attempt for an effective skill of 16.  But GURPS does like its modifiers.  Instead of the Armor Class of the target representing an abstraction of how hard it is to hit, GURPS has modifiers for how far away it is, and how small the target is.  So, for matching the examples, let's say the target is far enough away and small enough that John has a -6 to hit from where he is, resulting in an effective skill of 10.  John has a 50% chance of hitting his target because half the possible results on 3d6 are 10 or below (3 to 10) and the other half are above (11 to 18).

Hopefully that gave you a good foundation.  I see two factors as being important to the comparison: Reliability of Skill and Improvement of Skill.  Actually... here's a collection of diagrams you might find useful in understand the linear probability versus the bell-curve.

The bottom two charts show the probability of each result.  You can see that on 3d6, the probability is higher in the middle, and low on the ends.  On a d20, the probability is the same across all results.

The top two charts show the same orange line for individual result probability, but includes a line for rolling less than or equal to that value in yellow.



Reliability of Skill

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What I mean by reliability of skill is how much your character can depend on their skill.  If a character spends resources getting "good" at something like archery, what does that mean in the game?  If a character in Pathfinder spends character resources like feats or improves their dexterity to get a higher bonus on ranged weapon attacks, does it make a difference?  If a character in GURPS spends character resources, like character-points, to improve their dexterity or their skill with a bow, does it make a difference?  Does having a higher mod or skill make the skill more reliable than having an average mod or skill?

In d20, if I use feats and attributes bonuses to get my attack modifier from +4 to +7 at first level, that's 3 points higher, which means a 15% better chance of hitting a target because three of the twenty possible results just switched from being a miss to being a hit.  In our example, we go from a 50% chance to a 65% chance.  That's pretty good.

In 3d6, if I use character points to improve my bow skill from 11 to 12, so that in our example my effective skill is 11 instead of 10, the probability goes up from 50% to 62.5%  The jump in percentage is close enough, and 62.5% is still a lot better than 50%.

But are those percentages reliable?  The Law of Independent Probability means that each die roll has an equal chance of coming up on any value, regardless of any rolls before.  So, saying something like "come on... I'm due for a 20" makes no sense.  Just because you haven't rolled a 20 on a d20 in a while, doesn't mean you are more likely to roll one now.  It is possible for a person to roll five or under for twenty rolls in a row.  Just because you rolled low doesn't mean you're due for rolling high.  With that +7 modifer trying to hit the AC 15 target, you only have to roll an 8 or above to hit it... but the d20 makes up for 20 possible points of your roll.  It is responsible for 20 points.  Your attack mod of +7 is only responsible for 7.  So, there's no guarantee at all that you're going to hit because every value has the same chance of coming up on the die, and the die is responsible for more of the needed final result than your skill is by a wide margin.

With 3d6 we have the introduction of the bell curve.  On 3d6, there are 16 possible values, but the combinations that result in them are counted at 216 possible combinations of the three dice.  Only one of those combinations can make the result of 3.  And only one can make the result of 18.  So, each of those results has a 1 in 216 chance (0.46%) of being the result of rolling 3d6.  A result of 10 or 11 however each has 27 combinations that can result in that number.  So, a 10 or an 11 has a 27 in 216 chance (12.50%) of being the result of rolling the dice.  You might already have figured out what this means, but just in case: rolling any extreme result is far less likely.  If my effective skill for shooting that target with a bow is 11 instead of 10, the probability the dice will result in a number 11 or lower is actually 62.5% because of that lovely bell curve and the normalization of results by multiple dice.

A modifier in Pathfinder using the d20 system that has similar probability to a skill in GURPS is not as reliable because 1d20 has an equal chance of coming up as any result.  Working your butt off to make a character with a high attack modifier (which they don't make easy) does not mean your skill will be reliable because of the d20.  Making a little effort to make a character with a high attack skill in GURPS makes a noticeable difference in reliability.  You get more from your effort as the player.

I suppose I'm diverging from objective comparison at this point.  My personal experience with trying really hard to make a character in Pathfinder who has a great skill at using a weapon in hopes of not really missing has been that even if you make every choice to make that character's attack mod huge, the whim of the d20 has more sway over what actually happens than all the effort I put in.  I find it frustrating when I go on a bad rolling streak and end up missing four attacks in a row when I was supposed to have an 80% chance of success.  Doesn't the +7 to hit mean that person is noticeably better at hitting a target than the person with a +1?  But the d20 matters more than the skill in the final result, and it is perfectly possible for four rolls in a row to just suck horribly.

For player satisfaction with their character, I believe it is important for the player to feel like their choices in building the character matter and have an effect on things like their ability to use a skill they put some effort into.  In that scale, I feel like 3d6 is leaps and bounds better than 1d20, because of the tendency to roll a result as the bell curve predicts.  If I get my character's skill up to 14 for example, the probability of rolling that or less is 90.74%.  And when you roll dice in practice, they really follow that probability.  So, I feel like I accomplished something by getting the skill up to 14 instead of 10.  It makes a real difference.  Even if I got an attack mod up to +7 (for a 90% chance against an AC of 10), there's no tendency by the single die to be a 3 or above.

An easier way to think about the difference between 3d6 and 1d20 as it relates to reliability is this: The d20 has 20 possibly combinations, and 3d6 has 216 combinations.  With a +0 attack mod in d20 against an AC of 10, you get 10 results out of 20 that are successful.  With a +5, you get 15 results out of twenty.  It's a linear progression.  With a skill of 10 in 3d6, you have 108 out of 216 that are successful (50%).  With a skill of 14 (one quarter of the way through the possible values like an increase of 5 in d20) you have 196 out of 216 (90.74%); The improvement on the bell curve is better, and therefore more reliable.


Improvement of Skill

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I would say that one of the reward feelings that makes playing the game fun is the feeling that your character became stronger in some way.  In Pathfinder that means when your character gains a level.  A few things change and your character is stronger in a few ways than they were before.  If we're talking about a character where your attack modifier is important, it usually means your attack modifier goes up by 1.  So your chances to hit go up by 5%.  BUT... the way Pathfinder is (and its relatives are) designed, the challenge increases at the same rate.  That Armor Class number goes up on the bad guys too.  So, you're not getting a 5% boost.  You're breaking even.  Maybe the game tricked me into being happy about the level up in that way, but really, the attack modifier changes (and saving throws, and skills, and so on) don't really matter.  The game is designed to maintain the same level of probability of success for all 20 levels.  And if you reach level 20, and have a +20 attack modifier (or likely +30 with magic, high stats, etc), the die still accounts for most of whether or not you'll hit a foe because their AC is probably going to be 40 or above.

Sure if your character went back to face some of the same kinds of foes they did when they were level 1, they'd crush those foes easily.  But the game generally keeps you looking through the keyhole where your challenges are equal to you.

In GURPS, when you spend character points that you earn, you pick what gets better, and if your combat skill to attack with is what you choose, even going up by one can make a big difference.  If you bump your skill from 10 to 11, you're getting a 12.5% boost, AND it's more reliable that you'll roll 11 or below on 3d6 than it is that you'll roll 9 or above on a 1d20.  Get your skill up to 16 and you've maxed out your probability without considering negative modifiers at 98.15% chance of success.  Anything above 16 is beneficial mostly to deal with negative modifiers.  But when you increase a skill in GURPS, you're actually making a noticeable difference.

Part of the strength here is that attack and defense are handled differently in GURPS than in Pathfinder. You roll to see if you succeed.  The defender might have the option of rolling to see if they can defend.  So, your skill at attacking doesn't have to reach a ever increasing goals of difficulty.  If your opponent is particularly good at defending though... you might have to get clever by maneuvering them to a position where they can't defend for some reason (there are rules for this in GURPS combat).  Or you might have such a high skill that you can use fancier attacks like a feint to make it harder for them to defend against the next attack.  Or you might work with a friend to flank them, making it harder for them to defend.  Or you might use some other tool in your arsenal.  But for progress in the difficulty of the challenge, GURPS relies on the cleverness of the players instead of keeping the probability essentially the same for everything you try.



Final Thoughts

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It's very difficult to keep emotion out of writing this because I enjoy playing in a good campaign, and when the play experience is a negative one, I become frustrated that my precious small amount of free time I can give to TTRPGs just got so thoroughly abused.  I prefer the bell-curve to the linear distribution because it makes me happier about the character I created, and it makes me happier about how sessions go.  Sure... things can still go wrong, but it's rarer and more meaningful (in my opinion).

Make America Great Again: the Broken Slogan

On the surface, it sounds like a nice slogan.  It sounds hopeful of repairing damage and doing good things to make this country great.  Again.

But the slogan suffers from a couple big problems.  First is that it's unclear about when in United States history it was great that we're trying to go back to.  Is it when slavery was legal?  Is it when black folks and women couldn't vote?  Is it when government stopped representing the people and became a plutocracy?  Is it when we made the mistake of including religious language in anything legal (like when "under god" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, or when "in god we trust" was added to coins)?  Is it the great depression (because we do seem to be trying for that one)?  What point in our history are we actually trying for?

The second problem is that the person who is using that slogan for his presidential theme is not only failing at making this country better, he seems to be actively working against the country.  He's not trying to make America great.  He's trying to make money for himself and for other super-rich people in this country at the cost of our environment, our economy, our foreign relations, our internal relations, and our future.  There are three big things this country was pretty great about at some points in our history, but he's definitely actively working against those.

#1: Religious Freedom
This country was never a Christian nation... nor should it be.  The founding fathers were building something intended to be free of government sponsored religion.  Government is specifically supposed to be agnostic to religion.  I put the link there so people understand what agnostic means.  Actually, I'll explain too: It just means in this case that government can't acknowledge religion; support religion; oppress religious belief; or in any way favor one religion over another.  It has to act like there's no religion.  And that's a really good thing.

If somehow, the country decided that Ancient Egypt had it right, and passed law that we all had to pay homage to the sun god Ra on a weekly basis, and that all churches would be torn down, and rebuilt as places of worship for the various Egyptian gods... Christians would be pissed off.  So would I really... but I'm trying to make the point that while many vocal Christians seem to think this country is a Christian nation and would be better if more of their religion were applied to government and public services (for example in public school).  But that's absolutely false.  Christianity is not deserving of favoritism.  No religion is.  Any religion that becomes a state religion would mean government is suddenly not representative of the people, and it would mean that it is unfair to everyone who doesn't believe in that religion.

But vocal Christians: take heart.  Separation of church and state is good for you too.  You just don't realize it because you think your religion should have favor and that laws should be made to favor your beliefs.  But separation of church and state (part of the first amendment) protects you from having to deal with someone else's religious beliefs.  It means that government is a body that tries to be fair to all of us.  And you can practice your religion at home or at church or where ever you like as long as you don't infringe on anyone else's rights.  That's a really good thing.  You just need to really think about the fact that Christianity has held a place of favoritism and that it shouldn't.

Now how does this relate to MAGA?  Between having Pence as his Vice President; playing up his religious side; and putting the religious fanatic DeVos in charge of Education in the country, Trump is sending the message that he's trying to put religion into government.  If DeVos and people like her succeed, this country will get worse in terms of its ideal, and in terms of education.  Forcing (for example) science teachers to teach that intelligent design is as valid an explanation for the universe as the Big Bang, Abiogenesis, and Evolution means the dumbing-down of our children.  When a child is told that Intelligent Design is how the universe came about without any evidence of that being the case (and no: the Bible is not evidence.  It does not have supporting evidence itself.  Faith is not a valid source of evidence), that child is taught that believing things an authority figure tells you is necessary and to not question it.  If that child asks for evidence, the only thing that can be offered up is faith.

Then when that child is faced with having cancer, faith is the tool they turn to.  Faith that God will get them through it.  The people who will actually try to get them through it are medical professionals from researchers to nurses to doctors.  Without people looking for evidence based knowledge in our world, we wouldn't have medicine (even old world medicines were scientifically discovered... it worked or it didn't, and the things that worked stuck around); we wouldn't have electricity to use; we wouldn't have cellphones; we wouldn't have cars; we wouldn't have air planes; and we wouldn't computers or the internet.  Pushing faith on our children ruins the inquisitiveness children naturally have.  It tells them to shut up and just believe what they're told.  Faith is a crutch and an anchor.
Don't get me wrong.  I believe in an individual's right to have faith in their religion so long as it doesn't infringe on anyone else's rights.  And I understand how having faith in a higher power can console a person dealing with rough circumstances.  But making faith into a value for our government and public schools is horrifyingly damaging to all of us.

And if Trump's goal is put more religion into our country, I dislike his version of making America great.

#2: Inclusiveness
We proudly called ourselves the melting pot nation.  We had immigrants from all over the world and that was a good thing.  Our strength came from diversity.  We all worked together to make something better.  Now... I'm not pin-pointing this because there's almost always a nationality or categorization that got stepped on.  Africans (including Americans with ancestry from Africa today), Mexicans, Irish, Japanese, Jewish, LGBTQ, and probably more I'm not thinking of at this moment.  But this country's ideal of being inclusive and being strong by its diversity is awesome.  And it's one way we should be trying to make this country great.

But in Trump's MAGA plan, we have the demonization of Muslims, Mexicans, the Media, and Science (and anyone who values science).  I'll talk more about science in the next section, but instead of Trump being a leader who tries to bring people together, he's doing everything he can to divide us.  Our government is set up currently to help him starting with the two party system.  If you're a Republican, you hate everything the Democrats stand for, and if you're a Democrat, you can't believe the stuff the Republicans are doing right now with their majority in every part of government.

Trump is talking up the problems with people coming here illegally and distorting it wildly so he can use it as a flash-point with his followers.  He's suppressing the research his own people did as best he can about how good illegal immigrants are for our economy.  Not only that, he plays up the lie that they are a drain on the economy.  He's also claiming that the people coming here are criminals of the worst sort when evidence of crime research suggests that illegal immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than citizens.

What does Trump get out of this?  He gets to have a topic he can work his followers up about at any time he likes to distract from other awful stuff he's doing.  He's using it as a tool to divide us.  And what harm is there in being mad at people coming here illegally?  The people coming here are human beings... like us.  They have crappy circumstances and they're asking for help.  Where is our compassion?  Where is the compassion that Christians are supposed to have those in need?  It's really weird to see heavily religious people taking the exclusionary stance of kicking out people that need help.  But Trump is managing to play the religious card and the callousness card at the same time.

Why aren't we looking at our immigration policy?  Why isn't that the bad guy here?  Does anyone really think that immigration policy is protecting us from terrorist attacks?  Really?

And if you want to say that allowing more people into the country means a drain our economy... look again at the research.  Here's an article that goes over it.  Make sure to read the whole thing.  Or do your own research.  A Google search for something like "illegal immigrant effect on economy" should bring up a number of sites you can check.  Doing your own research is better than taking my word for.  But the point is that our economy is not suffering from illegal immigration.

To make this country great, we need to make our immigration policy less complicated and time-consuming.  And we need to stop being racist or discriminatory.  No more trying to make it legal for Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ in business.  No more shouting about illegal immigrants.  No more blaming all black people just because some black people commit crimes.  White people commit crimes too.  They're just favored in our justice system and they get away with it more.  Like Brock Turner because of Judge Aaron Persky.  That's flat out bullshit is what that is.  Oh here we go... what I was looking for.  You can do searches to verify the facts yourself, but here's an article comparing Turner to Cory Batey.  In one case we have a white guy serving three months for the same crime a black guy is serving 15 to 25 years for.  Unacceptable.

And Trump is pushing for divisions.  He's actively telling his followers to hate the media, to hate illegal immigrants, and to hate democrats.  It's in televised lives speeches.  He's not even trying to hide it.  He's just a power for dividing us, when we should be standing together against him.  What a piece of crap our president is.

#3: Science
We used to be a super power in the world due to science, technology, and education.  We led the world.  We put a man on the moon.

But now we have people like Trump and Scott Pruitt (who thankfully has left the EPA) who are actively denying science in favor of loosening restrictions on polluting industries... so they can make more money.  The coal industry?  Really?  Let them pollute more so they can continue being profitable?  Sweet Baby Jebus on a Stick... what kind of dumb ass solution is that?  I know there are coal workers who's jobs depend on those companies.  But what about a government offered amount of money (we're doing bailouts all over the place, why not do it this way?), that comes with the requirement that the company transition to clean energy.  Pick a different energy source like wind, water, geothermal, solar, or whatever qualifies as clean energy, and the company gets money to support the pay of its workers and to support learning the new technology.  All its workers get training in something they think they can do and want to do in the new company.  It's scary but the transition has to be made.  It's not an option.

Anthropogenic (Human Influenced) Climate Change is real and it's a danger to us now, to our children, and to future generations.  The denial of it only benefits the super-rich assholes that own and run the fossil fuel industry.  Here are a couple NASA articles: Consensus and Evidence.  As always though... do your own research.  The only people denying it are those with something to gain from the truth being hidden.  And Trump wants the money that comes with supporting big-oil.

So, instead of a country excited about science and making leaps and bounds toward a brighter future, we have an administration that denies science in favor of profits for the super-rich, and pushes religion in school instead of critical thinking.  The MAGA plan is to stop people from trusting science.  This is horrendously bad for us.  When fanatically religious parents of sick children let their children die because medicine is against their religion... we've hit a terrifying low for faith versus science.  This shouldn't be a thing.  But you can find plenty of news stories about it.

And that's the America Trump is pushing... he's pushing for people to lose trust in science, and he put the idiot DeVos in charge of educating our children.

Conclusion About MAGA
The MAGA agenda and strategy is terrifying because people seem to think Trump is doing good things.  It's astounding to me that his actions and their results are being ignored by his supporters.  And I didn't even talk about his awful tax plan.  A brief mention of it: It benefits the super-rich.  It give the middle and lower classes a tiny amount of money back, but hamstrings government programs that middle and lower finance people need.  So, for those super-rich assholes getting millions back to hide overseas and take out of the economy, we get an illusion of benefit covering up a big loss in support.  The man is a slimy car salesman, and he sold his supporters on a lie.  It's the entire basis of MAGA.  Tell people something they want to hear or give them an enemy to be angry about, and then do things that benefit the people in power at the cost of the people our government is supposed to represent.  It's big damn lie.