Trump signs executive order expanding Medicare, saying Democrats are 'stealing' health care

[morvoran]

I remember hearing from some liberals a while back about how Trump was planning on cutting funding to programs such as Medicare. Funny thing is that he just signed an executive order expanding it, today, while Democrats running for president are trying to destroy it while leaving many senior citizens without the proper care they need in their golden years.

This is just another step Trump has taken to lower healthcare costs for many Americans without destroying our economy where his opponents are wanting to use our taxes to subsidize medicare for all which would destroy medicare and our economy.


Trump signs executive order expanding Medicare, saying Democrats are 'stealing' health care

Source: Here

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that he said would improve private Medicare plans for seniors, slamming Democrats for what he described as putting health care “under threat” with “Medicare for All” proposals.

Trump, speaking for an hour at a campaign-style rally at a retirement community in Florida, offered few details on his executive order and spent most of his speech attacking the health policies of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders. He said as long as he’s president, “no one will lay a hand on your Medicare benefits.”

“Medicare is under threat like never before,” Trump told the crowd. “I will never allow these politicians to steal your health care and give it away to illegal aliens.”

Shortly after Trump’s speech, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the president has “directed HHS to take a number of specific, significant steps that will meaningfully improve the financing of Medicare, advance the care American seniors receive from their doctors, and improve the health they enjoy.”

Azar said those steps including lowering costs in Medicare Advantage, making changes to Medicare payments and accelerating access to the latest medical technologies.

Earlier Thursday, senior administration officials said Trump was expected to issue an executive order making changes to the Medicare program to “protect” Americans from Democratic health-care proposals they said would “destroy” coverage for seniors.

The executive order is intended to bolster Medicare Advantage, private Medicare insurance for seniors, senior officials said on a call with reporters. The plan would also offer more affordable plan options, increase use of telehealth services and bring payments in Medicare fee-for-service program in line with payments for Medicare Advantage, officials said.

Trump has made lowering health-care costs one of the key issues of his administration as health care remains a top issue for voters in the 2020 elections.

The executive order takes direct aim at 2020 Democratic candidates who advocate for changes to the U.S. health-care system through some version of Medicare for All.

Arguably the most drastic proposal is from Sen. , I-Vt., who is calling for eliminating private health insurance and replacing it with a universal Medicare plan. Proponents say it would help reduce administrative inefficiencies and costs in the U.S. health-care system. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has backed Sanders’ proposal.

During the speech in Flordia, Trump described “Medicare for All” as a massive “government health-care takeover” that would “obliterate” coverage for seniors.

“They want to raid Medicare to fund a thing like socialism,” he said. “Today we’re creating a health care system that protects vulnerable patients.”

Spokespersons for Sanders’ and Warren’s campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.

 

[billapong]

Wasn't Obamacare supposed to be the answer to the problem and it was supposed to fix everything? Fast forward some years and it didn't, yet now we more politicians saying we need more laws and that the new laws will fix the problem. Anyone see a pattern?

Hint - New laws don't fix shit and they're lying to us.

 

[morvoran]

Wasn't Obamacare supposed to be the answer to the problem and it was supposed to fix everything? Fast forward some years and it didn't, yet now we more politicians saying we need more laws and that the new laws will fix the problem. Anyone see a pattern?

Hint - New laws don't fix shit and they're lying to us.

I agree that laws (other than the don't murder, rob, or maim others laws) only make law-abiding citizens into criminals. This is especially true with Obamacare.
Obamacare was a partisan plan created by the dems (with some Republican involvement, mostly RINOs) in collaboration with the health insurance industry that had no transparency to the public or Republican voting for it to pass. It was a law created that said, "Here's your new insurance. Either you use it or we'll fine you for not bending to our will". This is not how new laws should be made. This is close to how tyrannical dictatorships are ran.
This new executive order is intended to prevent the Dems from interfering and destroying a much needed insurance plan for our senior citizens while expanding and making it cheaper in the long run for those that need it.
This is how laws should be made. To enhance the lives and care of our citizens while lowering their burdens without using the intimidation of taxes and jail to make people subservient to the government's rule such as the Obamacare mandate.
If people paid more attention to the accomplishments of Trump rather than just judging him through the intentionally misguiding opinions of him from the lame stream media to influence the left, maybe more people would see that he isn't as bad as people have been told.

 

[slaphappygamer]

How many executive orders is that now? Surely he know republicans and everyone else are stealing/using health care too. How is this isolated to one specific group?

Also, I don’t think that article is real. I mean “Berkeley Lovelace” sounds fake to me.

 

[morvoran]

How many executive orders is that now? Surely he know republicans and everyone else are stealing/using health care too. How is this isolated to one specific group?

Also, I don’t think that article is real. I mean “Berkeley Lovelace” sounds fake to me.

What does the number of executive orders matter? How many hoaxes to try to impeach Trump has the Dems tried? Berkeley Lovelace, Jr was the author of the article. What do you mean by, "Surely he know republicans and everyone else are stealing/using health care too."? Did you bother to read the article or just the title? It's obvious you're not informed on this situation. Please only respond if you can add to the conversation.

 

[yuyuyup]

Hey why doesn't your original post mention how much Trump is gonna slash out of Medicare in his 2020 budget? OH, I guess you just saw fit as to leave out that LIL' DETAIL, I mean, who really cares how many hundreds of billions of dollars will be gutted, certainly not you, you're just not a "details" kind of guy I guess ROFLMAO

 

[Arecaidian Fox]

I remember hearing from some liberals a while back about how Trump was planning on cutting funding to programs such as Medicare. Funny thing is that he just signed an executive order expanding it, today, while Democrats running for president are trying to destroy it while leaving many senior citizens without the proper care they need in their golden years.

This is just another step Trump has taken to lower healthcare costs for many Americans without destroying our economy where his opponents are wanting to use our taxes to subsidize medicare for all which would destroy medicare and our economy.


Trump signs executive order expanding Medicare, saying Democrats are 'stealing' health care

Source: Here

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that he said would improve private Medicare plans for seniors, slamming Democrats for what he described as putting health care “under threat” with “Medicare for All” proposals.

Trump, speaking for an hour at a campaign-style rally at a retirement community in Florida, offered few details on his executive order and spent most of his speech attacking the health policies of 2020 Democratic presidential contenders. He said as long as he’s president, “no one will lay a hand on your Medicare benefits.”

“Medicare is under threat like never before,” Trump told the crowd. “I will never allow these politicians to steal your health care and give it away to illegal aliens.”

Shortly after Trump’s speech, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the president has “directed HHS to take a number of specific, significant steps that will meaningfully improve the financing of Medicare, advance the care American seniors receive from their doctors, and improve the health they enjoy.”

Azar said those steps including lowering costs in Medicare Advantage, making changes to Medicare payments and accelerating access to the latest medical technologies.

Earlier Thursday, senior administration officials said Trump was expected to issue an executive order making changes to the Medicare program to “protect” Americans from Democratic health-care proposals they said would “destroy” coverage for seniors.

The executive order is intended to bolster Medicare Advantage, private Medicare insurance for seniors, senior officials said on a call with reporters. The plan would also offer more affordable plan options, increase use of telehealth services and bring payments in Medicare fee-for-service program in line with payments for Medicare Advantage, officials said.

Trump has made lowering health-care costs one of the key issues of his administration as health care remains a top issue for voters in the 2020 elections.

The executive order takes direct aim at 2020 Democratic candidates who advocate for changes to the U.S. health-care system through some version of Medicare for All.

Arguably the most drastic proposal is from Sen. , I-Vt., who is calling for eliminating private health insurance and replacing it with a universal Medicare plan. Proponents say it would help reduce administrative inefficiencies and costs in the U.S. health-care system. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has backed Sanders’ proposal.

During the speech in Flordia, Trump described “Medicare for All” as a massive “government health-care takeover” that would “obliterate” coverage for seniors.

“They want to raid Medicare to fund a thing like socialism,” he said. “Today we’re creating a health care system that protects vulnerable patients.”

Spokespersons for Sanders’ and Warren’s campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.

I really just fail to see how on the face of this, that it helps anything more than a small amount of Americans. To compare it against plans that literally open up vast amounts of entire population to medical care (whether you agree that is a good idea or not) is more than somewhat disingenuous.

I agree that laws (other than the don't murder, rob, or maim others laws) only make law-abiding citizens into criminals. This is especially true with Obamacare.
Obamacare was a partisan plan created by the dems (with some Republican involvement, mostly RINOs) in collaboration with the health insurance industry that had no transparency to the public or Republican voting for it to pass. It was a law created that said, "Here's your new insurance. Either you use it or we'll fine you for not bending to our will". This is not how new laws should be made. This is close to how tyrannical dictatorships are ran.
This new executive order is intended to prevent the Dems from interfering and destroying a much needed insurance plan for our senior citizens while expanding and making it cheaper in the long run for those that need it.
This is how laws should be made. To enhance the lives and care of our citizens while lowering their burdens without using the intimidation of taxes and jail to make people subservient to the government's rule such as the Obamacare mandate.
If people paid more attention to the accomplishments of Trump rather than just judging him through the intentionally misguiding opinions of him from the lame stream media to influence the left, maybe more people would see that he isn't as bad as people have been told.

I really feel like I need to point out here, you are celebrating Trump's use of Executive power, which eliminates voting and democratic process when abused, in the same breath that you're decrying talking a lack of transparency and democratic process during the creation of the Affordable Care Act. I don't think that can really stand on its own.

 

[morvoran]

I really just fail to see how on the face of this, that it helps anything more than a small amount of Americans. To compare it against plans that literally open up vast amounts of entire population to medical care (whether you agree that is a good idea or not) is more than somewhat disingenuous.

Figuring that the US population had an explosion after ww2 and that those children are now our elderly, keeping Medicare from being destroyed by adding everybody else to it is helping a large chunk of the citizens. For now, the remainder of the population (that are able bodied) can get insurance through the ACA until Trump's admin comes out with their solution which will be similar but will be fairer to everybody without the unconstitutional mandate.

I really feel like I need to point out here, you are celebrating Trump's use of Executive power, which eliminates voting and democratic process when abused, in the same breath that you're decrying talking a lack of transparency and democratic process during the creation of the Affordable Care Act. I don't think that can really stand on its own.

Was it fine for Obama to have so many executive orders as well? He made 276 orders during his two terms vs Trump's 126 so far. I don't remember Obama fighting against Congress trying to impeach him his whole time in office while not working on any other policies to help their constituents.
Trump is trying (& succeeding) to make positive changes for all of us in the US, but he can't do it through the normal process with the House fighting against him on every little thing he says. He can't even fight against corruption without being called corrupt himself. As far as transparency with the ACA, if the Dems allowed that to be a true bipartisan matter, we might not even need to revise it or have any desire for a Medicare-for-all solution.

 

[Kraken_X]

"The executive order is intended to bolster Medicare Advantage, private Medicare insurance for seniors, senior officials said on a call with reporters. The plan would also offer more affordable plan options, increase use of telehealth services and bring payments in Medicare fee-for-service program in line with payments for Medicare Advantage, officials said."

The article is low on facts and details, but it appears that all this order does is give more tax dollars going to private insurance companies that run Medicare Advantage (and who bribe politicians) and cause further cuts to the government run Medicare.

The way insurance works is that it costs less for everyone the more people that pay in. Everyone paying in is mathematically the way to get the lowest cost. Obviously it could be mismanaged, but it can't get much worse than private insurance. Every other developed country has nationalized healthcare and spends half of what the USA does for better outcomes. Maybe you assume that the government of the USA is incompetent compared to Canada, Australia, the UK, Norway, etc., and can't run anything right, but maybe instead of suffering under greedy insurance companies, we should demand a better government that actually works.

Plus employer provided healthcare makes owning and running a small business very difficult and gives big companies a ton more control over their employees. Separating healthcare from employment is great for the free market.

 

[AmandaRose]

.
Trump is trying (& succeeding) to make positive changes for all of us in the US,

What positive changes has he made for the trans community oh thats right absolutely fuck all. Let's have a look at his record shall we.

Since the day President Trump took office, his administration has waged a nonstop onslaught against the rights of LGBTQ people. In order to keep the administration accountable for its policies and help transgender people keep track of actions taken against them, here are the major changes implemented or attempted by the Trump administration:

Anti-Transgender and Anti-LGBTQ Actions

September 19, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services cancelled a plan to explicitly prohibit hospitals from discriminating against LGBTQ patients as a requirement of Medicare and Medicaid funds.

August 16, 2019: The Department of Justice filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that federal law “does not prohibit discrimination against transgender persons based on their transgender status.”

August 14, 2019: The Department of Labor announced a proposed rule that would radically expand the ability of federal contractors to exempt themselves from equal employment opportunity requirements, allowing for-profit and non-profit employers to impose “religious criteria” on employees that could include barring LGBTQ employees.

July 15, 2019: The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced an interim final rule that would block the vast majority of asylum-seekers from entering the United States, with deadly consequences for those fleeing anti-LGBTQ violence.

July 8, 2019: The Department of State established a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” aimed at narrowing our country’s human rights advocacy to fit with the “natural law” and “natural rights” views of social conservatives, stating it would seek to “be vigilant that human rights discourse not be corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes.” (Shortly thereafter, the State Department official tasked with coordinating the new commission was fired for “abusive” management including homophobic remarks.)

July 3, 2019: The Department of Housing and Urban Development removed requirements that applicants for homelessness funding maintain anti-discrimination policies and demonstrate efforts to serve LGBT people and their families, who are more likely to be homeless.

May 24, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule that would remove all recognition that federal law prohibits transgender patients from discrimination in health care. Courts across the nation have ruled otherwise.

May 22, 2019: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a plan to gut regulations prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in HUD-funded homeless shelters.

May 14, 2019: President Trump announced his opposition to the Equality Act (H.R. 5), the federal legislation that would confirm and strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ Americans and others.

May 2, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services published a final rule encouraging hospital officials, staff, and insurance companies to deny care to patients, including transgender patients, based on religious or moral beliefs. This vague and broad rule was immediately challenged in court.

April 19, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Service announced a proposed rule to abandon data collection on sexual orientation of foster youth and foster and adoptive parents and guardians.

April 12, 2019: The Department of Defense put President Trump’s ban on transgender service members into effect, putting service members at risk of discharge if they come out or are found out to be transgender.

March 13, 2019: The Department of Defense laid out its plans for implementing its ban on transgender troops, giving an official implementation date of April 12.

January 23, 2019: The Department of Health & Human Services' Office of Civil Rights granted an exemption to adoption and foster care agencies in South Carolina, allowing religiously-affiliated services to discriminate against current and aspiring LGBTQ caregivers.

November 23, 2018: The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) erased critical guidance that helped federal agency managers understand how to support transgender federal workers and respect their rights, replacing clear and specific guidance reflecting applicable law and regulations with vaguely worded guidance hostile to transgender workers. While this guidance change did not change the rights of transgender federal workers under applicable law, regulations, Executive Orders, and case law, it is likely to cause confusion and promote discrimination within the nation's largest employer.

November 19, 2018: The Department of State appealed a court order directing it to issue a passport with a gender-neutral designation to a non-binary, intersex applicant.

October 25, 2018: U.S. representatives at the United Nations worked to remove references to transgender people in UN human rights documents.

October 24, 2018: The Department of Justice submitted a brief to the Supreme Court aruging that it is legal to discriminate against transgender employee, contradicting court rulings that say protections under Title VII in the workplace don’t extend to transgender workers.

October 21, 2018: The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services proposed in a memo to change the legal definition of sex under Title IX, which would would leave transgender people vulnerable to discrimination.

August 10, 2018: The Department of Labor released a new directive for Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) staff encouraging them to grant broad religious exemptions to federal contractors with religious-based objections to complying with nondiscrimination laws. It also deleted material from an OFCCP FAQ on LGBT nondiscrimination protections that previously clarified the limited scope of allowable religious exemptions.

June 11, 2018: Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that the federal government would no longer recognized gang violence or domestic violence as grounds for asylum, adopting a legal interpretation that could lead to rejecting most LGBT asylum-seekers.

May 11, 2018: The Bureau of Prisons in the Department of Justice adopted an illegal policy of almost entirely housing transgender people in federal prison facilities that match their sex assigned at birth, rolling back existing protections.

April 11, 2018: The Department of Justice proposed to strip data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity of teens from the National Crime Victimization Survey.

March 23, 2018: The Trump Administration announced an implementation plan for its discriminatory ban on transgender military service members.

March 20, 2018: The Department of Education reiterated that the Trump administration would refuse to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity, countering multiple court rulings reaffirming that transgender students are protected under Title IX.

March 5, 2018: The Department Housing and Urban Development Secretary announced a change to its official mission statement by removing its commitment of inclusive and discrimination-free communities from the statement.

February 18, 2018: The Department of Education announced it will summarily dismiss complaints from transgender students involving exclusion from school facilities and other claims based solely on gender identity discrimination.

January 26, 2018: The Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that encourages medical providers to use religious grounds to deny treatment to transgender people, people who need reproductive care, and others.

January 18, 2018: The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights opened a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" that will promote discrimination by health care providers who can cite religious or moral reasons for denying care.

December 29, 2017: President Trump fired the White House Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. The transgender community isdisproportionately affected by HIV.

December 20, 2017: President Trump nominated Gordon P. Giampietro to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Giampietro called marriage equality “an assault on nature.” Giampietro's nomination was eventually withdrawn.

December 14, 2017: Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed not to use the words “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based” in official documents.

October 6, 2017: The Justice Department released a sweeping "license to discriminate" allowing federal agencies, government contractors, government grantees, and even private businesses to engage in illegal discrimination, as long as they can cite religious reasons for doing so.

October 5, 2017: The Justice Department released a memo instructing Department of Justice attorneys to take the legal position that federal law does not protect transgender workers from discrimination.

October 2, 2017: President Trump nominated Kyle Duncan to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Duncan has dedicated his career to limiting the rights of transgender people, and even defended the anti-trans parties in the North Carolina’s infamous HB2 debacle and the school district that discriminated against Gavin Grimm.

September 7, 2017: The Justice Department filed a legal brief on behalf of the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing for a constitutional right for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and, implicitly, gender identity.

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Gregory G. Katsas to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Katsas played a central role in helping Trump ban qualified transgender people serving in the miiltary.

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Matthew J. Kacsmaryk to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Kacsmaryk opposes LGBTQ protections in housing, employment, & and health care, and called transgender people a “delusion.”

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Jeff Mateer to become a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Mateer called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan” and openly supported debunked and dangerous “conversion therapy.” Mateer’s nomination was eventually withdrawn.

August 25, 2017: President Trump released a memo directing Defense Department to move forward with developing a plan to discharge transgender military service members and to maintain a ban on recruitment.

July 26, 2017: President Trump announced, via Twitter, that "the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military."

July 26, 2017: The Justice Department filed a legal brief on behalf of the United States in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, arguing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or, implicitly, gender identity.

July 13, 2017: President Trump nominated Mark Norris to the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. Norris has worked to make it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ people, and even worked to discriminate specifically against transgender kids.

June 14, 2017: The Department of Education withdrew its finding that an Ohio school district discriminated against a transgender girl. The Department gave no explanation for withdrawing the finding, which a federal judge upheld.

May 2, 2017: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a plan to roll back regulations interpreting the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination provisions to protect transgender people.

April 14, 2017: The Justice Department abandoned its historic lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s anti-transgender law. It did so after North Carolina replaced HB2 with a different anti-transgender law known as “HB 2.0.”

April 4, 2017: The Departments of Justice and Labor cancelled quarterly conference calls with LGBT organizations; on these calls, which had happened for years, government attorneys shared information on employment laws and cases.

March 31, 2017: The Justice Department announced it would review (and likely seek to scale back) numerous civil rights settlement agreements with police departments. These settlements were put in places where police departments were determined to be engaging in discriminatory and abusive policing, including racial and other profiling. Many of these agreements include critical protections for LGBT people.

March 2017: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) removed links to four key resource documents from its website, which informed emergency shelters on best practices for serving transgender people facing homelessness and complying with HUD regulations.

March 28, 2017: The Census Bureau retracted a proposal to collect demographic information on LGBT people in the 2020 Census.

March 24, 2017: The Justice Department cancelled a long-planned National Institute of Corrections broadcast on “Transgender Persons in Custody: The Legal Landscape.”

March 13, 2017: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that its national survey of older adults, and the services they need, would no longer collect information on LGBT participants. HHS initially falsely claimed in its Federal Register announcement that it was making “no changes” to the survey.

March 13, 2017: The State Department announced the official U.S. delegation to the UN’s 61st annual Commission on the Status of Women conference would include two outspoken anti-LGBT organizations, including a representative of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM): an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

March 10, 2017: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it would withdraw two important agency-proposed policies designed to protect LGBT people experiencing homelessness. One proposed policy would have required HUD-funded emergency shelters to put up a poster or "notice" to residents of their right to be free from anti-LGBT discrimination under HUD regulations.

The other announced a survey to evaluate the impact of the LGBTQ Youth Homelessness Prevention Initiative, implemented by HUD and other agencies over the last three years. This multi-year project should be evaluated, and with this withdrawal, we may never learn what worked best in the project to help homeless LGBTQ youth.

March 8, 2017: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removed demographic questions about LGBT people that Centers for Independent Living must fill out each year in their Annual Program Performance Report. This report helps HHS evaluate programs that serve people with disabilities.

March 2, 2017: The Department of Justice abandoned its request for a preliminary injunction against North Carolina’s anti-transgender House Bill 2, which prevented North Carolina from enforcing HB 2. This was an early sign that the Administration was giving up defending trans people (later, on April 14, it withdrew the lawsuit completely).

March 1, 2017: The Department of Justice took the highly unusual step of declining to appeal a nationwide preliminary court order temporarily halting enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination protections for transgender people. The injunction prevents HHS from taking any action to enforce transgender people's rights from health care discrimination.

February 22, 2017: The Departments of Justice and Education withdrew landmark 2016 guidance explaining how schools must protect transgender students under the federal Title IX law.

January 31, 2017: President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has a history of anti-transgender rulings.

January 20, 2017: On President Trump’s inauguration day, the adminstration scrubbed all mentions of LGBTQ people from the websites of the White House, Department of State, and Department of Labor.

Other Harmful Trump Administration Actions
The Trump administration has taken many other actions to roll back civil rights and health care protections and target vulnerable communities. While not specifically directed at transgender people or gender identity protections, we list them here because it is critically important that we view our quest for transgender equality as intertwined with other social justice movements. These include attacks on reproductive rights, the Affordable Care Act, refugees and other immigrants and the enforcement of civil rights laws. Many of these actions will also disproportionately harm transgender people. These are just a few examples:

Kicking Americans off Medicaid and Food Stamps: The Trump Administration has taken numerous actions to kick Americans in need off of Medicaid and SNAP coverage. On April 10, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to push for work requirements for low-income people in America who receive federal assistance, including Medicaid and SNAP.

Targeting Reproductive Rights: On October 6, 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation allowing employers and insurers to deny coverage for birth control, as long as they can cite religious reasons for doing so. In April, President Trump and Congress overturned a regulation that protected Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s largest providers of care for transgender people, and other family planning clinics from funding discrimination by states.

Harming Sexual Assault Survivors. On September 7, 2017, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced she would withdraw historic guidance on schools' and universities' responsibilities to address sexual assault and sexual harassment. On September 27, 2017, the Department replaced this guidance with flawed and dangerous “interim guidance” tipping the scales against student survivors seeking protection on campus. This is especially dangerous for transgender students, because 47% of transgender adults in the US Transgender Survey were sexual assault survivors.

Cruel and Relentless Attacks on Immigrant Communities. On September 5, 2017, President Trump acted to strip hundreds of thousands of Americans and their families of security, stability, and safety by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. On April 6, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy that separated hundreds of immigrant children from their families. On April 10, a federal official announced that the Department of Justice was halting the Legal Orientation Program, which offers legal assistance to immigrants. On June 11, Attorney General Sessions ruled that domestic or gang violence are not grounds for asylum in the United States. These are just a few of many anti-immigrant actions that are especially dangerous for many LGBT immigrants who could face life-threatening violence if deported.

Putting Health Care Out of Reach: On April 13, 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services rolled back numerous Affordable Care Act rules to reduce protections for people seeking and using health insurance. These actions make it harder to enroll in health care plans, allow plans to sharply raise deductibles, and weaken requirements for insurance plans to have in-network providers that serve low-income communities. These changes disproportionately affect people of color and any one with lower incomes, including transgender people. These changes make getting health care coverage harder for people who lose coverage or who depend on community clinics.

Expanding Immigration Detention: The Department of Homeland Security is vastly expanding the number of immigrants held in immigration detention centers nationwide, while also eliminating protections for health and safety in detention centers. Reducing these protections for immigrants who are being detained is wrong, and it's especially dangerous for vulnerable transgender immigrants, many of whom are asylum-seekers who risk extreme abuse.

Banning Muslims and Refugees: On January 27, 2017 and again on March 6, President Trump signed executive orders seeking to ban entry by refugees and travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries and drastically reduce the number of refugees allowed to seek safety in the United States. We cannot stand for a world where people in danger are denied entry because of who they are, including where they come from or whether they are Muslim or any other religion. LGBT refugees are among the many who are fleeing life-threatening persecution because of who they are or what they believe. While the bans were allowed to take effect by the Supreme Court, court cases challenging them continue.

 

[Arecaidian Fox]

Figuring that the US population had an explosion after ww2 and that those children are now our elderly, keeping Medicare from being destroyed by adding everybody else to it is helping a large chunk of the citizens. For now, the remainder of the population (that are able bodied) can get insurance through the ACA until Trump's admin comes out with their solution which will be similar but will be fairer to everybody without the unconstitutional mandate.

Was it fine for Obama to have so many executive orders as well? He made 276 orders during his two terms vs Trump's 126 so far. I don't remember Obama fighting against Congress trying to impeach him his whole time in office while not working on any other policies to help their constituents.
Trump is trying (& succeeding) to make positive changes for all of us in the US, but he can't do it through the normal process with the House fighting against him on every little thing he says. He can't even fight against corruption without being called corrupt himself. As far as transparency with the ACA, if the Dems allowed that to be a true bipartisan matter, we might not even need to revise it or have any desire for a Medicare-for-all solution.

Your failure in addressing any of my statements directly is not encouraging.

 

[Xzi]

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that he said would improve private Medicare plans for seniors

What the fuck is a "private" Medicare plan? Private insurance is not the same as Medicare, and attempting to privatize that system can only cause an increase in premium and deductible costs. Sounds like yet another con job by the greedy dipshits in charge of government currently.

 

[Josshy0125]

What positive changes has he made for the trans community oh thats right absolutely fuck all. Let's have a look at his record shall we.

Since the day President Trump took office, his administration has waged a nonstop onslaught against the rights of LGBTQ people. In order to keep the administration accountable for its policies and help transgender people keep track of actions taken against them, here are the major changes implemented or attempted by the Trump administration:

Anti-Transgender and Anti-LGBTQ Actions

September 19, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services cancelled a plan to explicitly prohibit hospitals from discriminating against LGBTQ patients as a requirement of Medicare and Medicaid funds.

August 16, 2019: The Department of Justice filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that federal law “does not prohibit discrimination against transgender persons based on their transgender status.”

August 14, 2019: The Department of Labor announced a proposed rule that would radically expand the ability of federal contractors to exempt themselves from equal employment opportunity requirements, allowing for-profit and non-profit employers to impose “religious criteria” on employees that could include barring LGBTQ employees.

July 15, 2019: The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced an interim final rule that would block the vast majority of asylum-seekers from entering the United States, with deadly consequences for those fleeing anti-LGBTQ violence.

July 8, 2019: The Department of State established a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” aimed at narrowing our country’s human rights advocacy to fit with the “natural law” and “natural rights” views of social conservatives, stating it would seek to “be vigilant that human rights discourse not be corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes.” (Shortly thereafter, the State Department official tasked with coordinating the new commission was fired for “abusive” management including homophobic remarks.)

July 3, 2019: The Department of Housing and Urban Development removed requirements that applicants for homelessness funding maintain anti-discrimination policies and demonstrate efforts to serve LGBT people and their families, who are more likely to be homeless.

May 24, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule that would remove all recognition that federal law prohibits transgender patients from discrimination in health care. Courts across the nation have ruled otherwise.

May 22, 2019: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a plan to gut regulations prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in HUD-funded homeless shelters.

May 14, 2019: President Trump announced his opposition to the Equality Act (H.R. 5), the federal legislation that would confirm and strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ Americans and others.

May 2, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services published a final rule encouraging hospital officials, staff, and insurance companies to deny care to patients, including transgender patients, based on religious or moral beliefs. This vague and broad rule was immediately challenged in court.

April 19, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Service announced a proposed rule to abandon data collection on sexual orientation of foster youth and foster and adoptive parents and guardians.

April 12, 2019: The Department of Defense put President Trump’s ban on transgender service members into effect, putting service members at risk of discharge if they come out or are found out to be transgender.

March 13, 2019: The Department of Defense laid out its plans for implementing its ban on transgender troops, giving an official implementation date of April 12.

January 23, 2019: The Department of Health & Human Services' Office of Civil Rights granted an exemption to adoption and foster care agencies in South Carolina, allowing religiously-affiliated services to discriminate against current and aspiring LGBTQ caregivers.

November 23, 2018: The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) erased critical guidance that helped federal agency managers understand how to support transgender federal workers and respect their rights, replacing clear and specific guidance reflecting applicable law and regulations with vaguely worded guidance hostile to transgender workers. While this guidance change did not change the rights of transgender federal workers under applicable law, regulations, Executive Orders, and case law, it is likely to cause confusion and promote discrimination within the nation's largest employer.

November 19, 2018: The Department of State appealed a court order directing it to issue a passport with a gender-neutral designation to a non-binary, intersex applicant.

October 25, 2018: U.S. representatives at the United Nations worked to remove references to transgender people in UN human rights documents.

October 24, 2018: The Department of Justice submitted a brief to the Supreme Court aruging that it is legal to discriminate against transgender employee, contradicting court rulings that say protections under Title VII in the workplace don’t extend to transgender workers.

October 21, 2018: The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services proposed in a memo to change the legal definition of sex under Title IX, which would would leave transgender people vulnerable to discrimination.

August 10, 2018: The Department of Labor released a new directive for Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) staff encouraging them to grant broad religious exemptions to federal contractors with religious-based objections to complying with nondiscrimination laws. It also deleted material from an OFCCP FAQ on LGBT nondiscrimination protections that previously clarified the limited scope of allowable religious exemptions.

June 11, 2018: Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that the federal government would no longer recognized gang violence or domestic violence as grounds for asylum, adopting a legal interpretation that could lead to rejecting most LGBT asylum-seekers.

May 11, 2018: The Bureau of Prisons in the Department of Justice adopted an illegal policy of almost entirely housing transgender people in federal prison facilities that match their sex assigned at birth, rolling back existing protections.

April 11, 2018: The Department of Justice proposed to strip data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity of teens from the National Crime Victimization Survey.

March 23, 2018: The Trump Administration announced an implementation plan for its discriminatory ban on transgender military service members.

March 20, 2018: The Department of Education reiterated that the Trump administration would refuse to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity, countering multiple court rulings reaffirming that transgender students are protected under Title IX.

March 5, 2018: The Department Housing and Urban Development Secretary announced a change to its official mission statement by removing its commitment of inclusive and discrimination-free communities from the statement.

February 18, 2018: The Department of Education announced it will summarily dismiss complaints from transgender students involving exclusion from school facilities and other claims based solely on gender identity discrimination.

January 26, 2018: The Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that encourages medical providers to use religious grounds to deny treatment to transgender people, people who need reproductive care, and others.

January 18, 2018: The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights opened a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" that will promote discrimination by health care providers who can cite religious or moral reasons for denying care.

December 29, 2017: President Trump fired the White House Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. The transgender community isdisproportionately affected by HIV.

December 20, 2017: President Trump nominated Gordon P. Giampietro to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Giampietro called marriage equality “an assault on nature.” Giampietro's nomination was eventually withdrawn.

December 14, 2017: Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed not to use the words “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based” in official documents.

October 6, 2017: The Justice Department released a sweeping "license to discriminate" allowing federal agencies, government contractors, government grantees, and even private businesses to engage in illegal discrimination, as long as they can cite religious reasons for doing so.

October 5, 2017: The Justice Department released a memo instructing Department of Justice attorneys to take the legal position that federal law does not protect transgender workers from discrimination.

October 2, 2017: President Trump nominated Kyle Duncan to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Duncan has dedicated his career to limiting the rights of transgender people, and even defended the anti-trans parties in the North Carolina’s infamous HB2 debacle and the school district that discriminated against Gavin Grimm.

September 7, 2017: The Justice Department filed a legal brief on behalf of the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing for a constitutional right for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and, implicitly, gender identity.

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Gregory G. Katsas to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Katsas played a central role in helping Trump ban qualified transgender people serving in the miiltary.

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Matthew J. Kacsmaryk to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Kacsmaryk opposes LGBTQ protections in housing, employment, & and health care, and called transgender people a “delusion.”

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Jeff Mateer to become a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Mateer called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan” and openly supported debunked and dangerous “conversion therapy.” Mateer’s nomination was eventually withdrawn.

August 25, 2017: President Trump released a memo directing Defense Department to move forward with developing a plan to discharge transgender military service members and to maintain a ban on recruitment.

July 26, 2017: President Trump announced, via Twitter, that "the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military."

July 26, 2017: The Justice Department filed a legal brief on behalf of the United States in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, arguing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or, implicitly, gender identity.

July 13, 2017: President Trump nominated Mark Norris to the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. Norris has worked to make it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ people, and even worked to discriminate specifically against transgender kids.

June 14, 2017: The Department of Education withdrew its finding that an Ohio school district discriminated against a transgender girl. The Department gave no explanation for withdrawing the finding, which a federal judge upheld.

May 2, 2017: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a plan to roll back regulations interpreting the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination provisions to protect transgender people.

April 14, 2017: The Justice Department abandoned its historic lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s anti-transgender law. It did so after North Carolina replaced HB2 with a different anti-transgender law known as “HB 2.0.”

April 4, 2017: The Departments of Justice and Labor cancelled quarterly conference calls with LGBT organizations; on these calls, which had happened for years, government attorneys shared information on employment laws and cases.

March 31, 2017: The Justice Department announced it would review (and likely seek to scale back) numerous civil rights settlement agreements with police departments. These settlements were put in places where police departments were determined to be engaging in discriminatory and abusive policing, including racial and other profiling. Many of these agreements include critical protections for LGBT people.

March 2017: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) removed links to four key resource documents from its website, which informed emergency shelters on best practices for serving transgender people facing homelessness and complying with HUD regulations.

March 28, 2017: The Census Bureau retracted a proposal to collect demographic information on LGBT people in the 2020 Census.

March 24, 2017: The Justice Department cancelled a long-planned National Institute of Corrections broadcast on “Transgender Persons in Custody: The Legal Landscape.”

March 13, 2017: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that its national survey of older adults, and the services they need, would no longer collect information on LGBT participants. HHS initially falsely claimed in its Federal Register announcement that it was making “no changes” to the survey.

March 13, 2017: The State Department announced the official U.S. delegation to the UN’s 61st annual Commission on the Status of Women conference would include two outspoken anti-LGBT organizations, including a representative of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM): an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

March 10, 2017: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it would withdraw two important agency-proposed policies designed to protect LGBT people experiencing homelessness. One proposed policy would have required HUD-funded emergency shelters to put up a poster or "notice" to residents of their right to be free from anti-LGBT discrimination under HUD regulations.

The other announced a survey to evaluate the impact of the LGBTQ Youth Homelessness Prevention Initiative, implemented by HUD and other agencies over the last three years. This multi-year project should be evaluated, and with this withdrawal, we may never learn what worked best in the project to help homeless LGBTQ youth.

March 8, 2017: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removed demographic questions about LGBT people that Centers for Independent Living must fill out each year in their Annual Program Performance Report. This report helps HHS evaluate programs that serve people with disabilities.

March 2, 2017: The Department of Justice abandoned its request for a preliminary injunction against North Carolina’s anti-transgender House Bill 2, which prevented North Carolina from enforcing HB 2. This was an early sign that the Administration was giving up defending trans people (later, on April 14, it withdrew the lawsuit completely).

March 1, 2017: The Department of Justice took the highly unusual step of declining to appeal a nationwide preliminary court order temporarily halting enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination protections for transgender people. The injunction prevents HHS from taking any action to enforce transgender people's rights from health care discrimination.

February 22, 2017: The Departments of Justice and Education withdrew landmark 2016 guidance explaining how schools must protect transgender students under the federal Title IX law.

January 31, 2017: President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has a history of anti-transgender rulings.

January 20, 2017: On President Trump’s inauguration day, the adminstration scrubbed all mentions of LGBTQ people from the websites of the White House, Department of State, and Department of Labor.

Other Harmful Trump Administration Actions
The Trump administration has taken many other actions to roll back civil rights and health care protections and target vulnerable communities. While not specifically directed at transgender people or gender identity protections, we list them here because it is critically important that we view our quest for transgender equality as intertwined with other social justice movements. These include attacks on reproductive rights, the Affordable Care Act, refugees and other immigrants and the enforcement of civil rights laws. Many of these actions will also disproportionately harm transgender people. These are just a few examples:

Kicking Americans off Medicaid and Food Stamps: The Trump Administration has taken numerous actions to kick Americans in need off of Medicaid and SNAP coverage. On April 10, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to push for work requirements for low-income people in America who receive federal assistance, including Medicaid and SNAP.

Targeting Reproductive Rights: On October 6, 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation allowing employers and insurers to deny coverage for birth control, as long as they can cite religious reasons for doing so. In April, President Trump and Congress overturned a regulation that protected Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s largest providers of care for transgender people, and other family planning clinics from funding discrimination by states.

Harming Sexual Assault Survivors. On September 7, 2017, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced she would withdraw historic guidance on schools' and universities' responsibilities to address sexual assault and sexual harassment. On September 27, 2017, the Department replaced this guidance with flawed and dangerous “interim guidance” tipping the scales against student survivors seeking protection on campus. This is especially dangerous for transgender students, because 47% of transgender adults in the US Transgender Survey were sexual assault survivors.

Cruel and Relentless Attacks on Immigrant Communities. On September 5, 2017, President Trump acted to strip hundreds of thousands of Americans and their families of security, stability, and safety by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. On April 6, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy that separated hundreds of immigrant children from their families. On April 10, a federal official announced that the Department of Justice was halting the Legal Orientation Program, which offers legal assistance to immigrants. On June 11, Attorney General Sessions ruled that domestic or gang violence are not grounds for asylum in the United States. These are just a few of many anti-immigrant actions that are especially dangerous for many LGBT immigrants who could face life-threatening violence if deported.

Putting Health Care Out of Reach: On April 13, 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services rolled back numerous Affordable Care Act rules to reduce protections for people seeking and using health insurance. These actions make it harder to enroll in health care plans, allow plans to sharply raise deductibles, and weaken requirements for insurance plans to have in-network providers that serve low-income communities. These changes disproportionately affect people of color and any one with lower incomes, including transgender people. These changes make getting health care coverage harder for people who lose coverage or who depend on community clinics.

Expanding Immigration Detention: The Department of Homeland Security is vastly expanding the number of immigrants held in immigration detention centers nationwide, while also eliminating protections for health and safety in detention centers. Reducing these protections for immigrants who are being detained is wrong, and it's especially dangerous for vulnerable transgender immigrants, many of whom are asylum-seekers who risk extreme abuse.

Banning Muslims and Refugees: On January 27, 2017 and again on March 6, President Trump signed executive orders seeking to ban entry by refugees and travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries and drastically reduce the number of refugees allowed to seek safety in the United States. We cannot stand for a world where people in danger are denied entry because of who they are, including where they come from or whether they are Muslim or any other religion. LGBT refugees are among the many who are fleeing life-threatening persecution because of who they are or what they believe. While the bans were allowed to take effect by the Supreme Court, court cases challenging them continue.

What the FUCK are you doing?!?! You know he doesn't understand facts!

 

[morvoran]

What positive changes has he made for the trans community

Oh, I don't know. Maybe, increased wages, lowering unemployment to the lowest it's been in over 50 years, protecting the borders to prevent criminals like MS-13 members from killing our citizens, lowering medical costs, etc.... All the positive things he has done has also helped the lgbtq, trans, blah, blah, blah whatever other identity politics words you want to use. I don't understand why people on the left always want to separate people into groups to give them "special attention" when they are all "Americans" or citizens of their country and should be treated equally as all other citizens that don't belong in these "special" groups. Just get over it.

I also don't understand why you folks can't stay on topic.

Here is a list of his accomplishments so far:
Trump Administration Accomplishments

• Almost 4 million jobs created since election.
• More Americans are now employed than ever recorded before in our history.
• We have created more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs since my election.
• Manufacturing jobs growing at the fastest rate in more than THREE DECADES.
• Economic growth last quarter hit 4.2 percent.
• New unemployment claims recently hit a 49-year low.
• Median household income has hit highest level ever recorded.
• African-American unemployment has recently achieved the lowest rate ever recorded.
• Hispanic-American unemployment is at the lowest rate ever recorded.
• Asian-American unemployment recently achieved the lowest rate ever recorded.
• Women’s unemployment recently reached the lowest rate in 65 years.
• Youth unemployment has recently hit the lowest rate in nearly half a century.
• Lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for Americans without a high school diploma.
• Under my Administration, veterans’ unemployment recently reached its lowest rate in nearly 20 years.
• Almost 3.9 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps since the election.
• The Pledge to America’s Workers has resulted in employers committing to train more than 4 million Americans. We are committed to VOCATIONAL education.
• 95 percent of U.S. manufacturers are optimistic about the future—the highest ever.
• Retail sales surged last month, up another 6 percent over last year.
• Signed the biggest package of tax cuts and reforms in history. After tax cuts, over $300 billion poured back in to the U.S. in the first quarter alone.
• As a result of our tax bill, small businesses will have the lowest top marginal tax rate in more than 80 years.
• Helped win U.S. bid for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
• Helped win U.S.-Mexico-Canada’s united bid for 2026 World Cup.
• Opened ANWR and approved Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines.
• Record number of regulations eliminated.
• Enacted regulatory relief for community banks and credit unions.
• Obamacare individual mandate penalty GONE.
• My Administration is providing more affordable healthcare options for Americans through association health plans and short-term duration plans.
• Last month, the FDA approved more affordable generic drugs than ever before in history. And thanks to our efforts, many drug companies are freezing or reversing planned price increases.
• We reformed the Medicare program to stop hospitals from overcharging low-income seniors on their drugs—saving seniors hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone.
• Signed Right-To-Try legislation.
• Secured $6 billion in NEW funding to fight the opioid epidemic.
• We have reduced high-dose opioid prescriptions by 16 percent during my first year in office.
• Signed VA Choice Act and VA Accountability Act, expanded VA telehealth services, walk-in-clinics, and same-day urgent primary and mental health care.
• Increased our coal exports by 60 percent; U.S. oil production recently reached all-time high.
• United States is a net natural gas exporter for the first time since 1957.
• Withdrew the United States from the job-killing Paris Climate Accord.
• Cancelled the illegal, anti-coal, so-called Clean Power Plan.
• Secured record $700 billion in military funding; $716 billion next year.
• NATO allies are spending $69 billion more on defense since 2016.
• Process has begun to make the Space Force the 6th branch of the Armed Forces.
• Confirmed more circuit court judges than any other new administration.
• Confirmed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
• Withdrew from the horrible, one-sided Iran Deal.
• Moved U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
• Protecting Americans from terrorists with the Travel Ban, upheld by Supreme Court.
• Issued Executive Order to keep open Guantanamo Bay.
• Concluded a historic U.S.-Mexico Trade Deal to replace NAFTA. And negotiations with Canada are underway as we speak.
• Reached a breakthrough agreement with the E.U. to increase U.S. exports.
• Imposed tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum to protect our national security.
• Imposed tariffs on China in response to China’s forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, and their chronically abusive trade practices.
• Net exports are on track to increase by $59 billion this year.
• Improved vetting and screening for refugees, and switched focus to overseas resettlement.
• We have begun BUILDING THE WALL. Republicans want STRONG BORDERS and NO CRIME. Democrats want OPEN BORDERS which equals MASSIVE CRIME.

All these things benefit all citizens of the US.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Your failure in addressing any of my statements directly is not encouraging.

If you read what I said in comparison to what you said, you would see that I addressed most, if not all, of your statements.

 

[billapong]

What positive changes has he made for the trans community oh thats right absolutely fuck all. Let's have a look at his record shall we.

Since the day President Trump took office, his administration has waged a nonstop onslaught against the rights of LGBTQ people. In order to keep the administration accountable for its policies and help transgender people keep track of actions taken against them, here are the major changes implemented or attempted by the Trump administration:

Anti-Transgender and Anti-LGBTQ Actions

September 19, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services cancelled a plan to explicitly prohibit hospitals from discriminating against LGBTQ patients as a requirement of Medicare and Medicaid funds.

August 16, 2019: The Department of Justice filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that federal law “does not prohibit discrimination against transgender persons based on their transgender status.”

August 14, 2019: The Department of Labor announced a proposed rule that would radically expand the ability of federal contractors to exempt themselves from equal employment opportunity requirements, allowing for-profit and non-profit employers to impose “religious criteria” on employees that could include barring LGBTQ employees.

July 15, 2019: The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced an interim final rule that would block the vast majority of asylum-seekers from entering the United States, with deadly consequences for those fleeing anti-LGBTQ violence.

July 8, 2019: The Department of State established a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” aimed at narrowing our country’s human rights advocacy to fit with the “natural law” and “natural rights” views of social conservatives, stating it would seek to “be vigilant that human rights discourse not be corrupted or hijacked or used for dubious or malignant purposes.” (Shortly thereafter, the State Department official tasked with coordinating the new commission was fired for “abusive” management including homophobic remarks.)

July 3, 2019: The Department of Housing and Urban Development removed requirements that applicants for homelessness funding maintain anti-discrimination policies and demonstrate efforts to serve LGBT people and their families, who are more likely to be homeless.

May 24, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services published a proposed rule that would remove all recognition that federal law prohibits transgender patients from discrimination in health care. Courts across the nation have ruled otherwise.

May 22, 2019: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a plan to gut regulations prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in HUD-funded homeless shelters.

May 14, 2019: President Trump announced his opposition to the Equality Act (H.R. 5), the federal legislation that would confirm and strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ Americans and others.

May 2, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Services published a final rule encouraging hospital officials, staff, and insurance companies to deny care to patients, including transgender patients, based on religious or moral beliefs. This vague and broad rule was immediately challenged in court.

April 19, 2019: The Department of Health and Human Service announced a proposed rule to abandon data collection on sexual orientation of foster youth and foster and adoptive parents and guardians.

April 12, 2019: The Department of Defense put President Trump’s ban on transgender service members into effect, putting service members at risk of discharge if they come out or are found out to be transgender.

March 13, 2019: The Department of Defense laid out its plans for implementing its ban on transgender troops, giving an official implementation date of April 12.

January 23, 2019: The Department of Health & Human Services' Office of Civil Rights granted an exemption to adoption and foster care agencies in South Carolina, allowing religiously-affiliated services to discriminate against current and aspiring LGBTQ caregivers.

November 23, 2018: The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) erased critical guidance that helped federal agency managers understand how to support transgender federal workers and respect their rights, replacing clear and specific guidance reflecting applicable law and regulations with vaguely worded guidance hostile to transgender workers. While this guidance change did not change the rights of transgender federal workers under applicable law, regulations, Executive Orders, and case law, it is likely to cause confusion and promote discrimination within the nation's largest employer.

November 19, 2018: The Department of State appealed a court order directing it to issue a passport with a gender-neutral designation to a non-binary, intersex applicant.

October 25, 2018: U.S. representatives at the United Nations worked to remove references to transgender people in UN human rights documents.

October 24, 2018: The Department of Justice submitted a brief to the Supreme Court aruging that it is legal to discriminate against transgender employee, contradicting court rulings that say protections under Title VII in the workplace don’t extend to transgender workers.

October 21, 2018: The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services proposed in a memo to change the legal definition of sex under Title IX, which would would leave transgender people vulnerable to discrimination.

August 10, 2018: The Department of Labor released a new directive for Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) staff encouraging them to grant broad religious exemptions to federal contractors with religious-based objections to complying with nondiscrimination laws. It also deleted material from an OFCCP FAQ on LGBT nondiscrimination protections that previously clarified the limited scope of allowable religious exemptions.

June 11, 2018: Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that the federal government would no longer recognized gang violence or domestic violence as grounds for asylum, adopting a legal interpretation that could lead to rejecting most LGBT asylum-seekers.

May 11, 2018: The Bureau of Prisons in the Department of Justice adopted an illegal policy of almost entirely housing transgender people in federal prison facilities that match their sex assigned at birth, rolling back existing protections.

April 11, 2018: The Department of Justice proposed to strip data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity of teens from the National Crime Victimization Survey.

March 23, 2018: The Trump Administration announced an implementation plan for its discriminatory ban on transgender military service members.

March 20, 2018: The Department of Education reiterated that the Trump administration would refuse to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity, countering multiple court rulings reaffirming that transgender students are protected under Title IX.

March 5, 2018: The Department Housing and Urban Development Secretary announced a change to its official mission statement by removing its commitment of inclusive and discrimination-free communities from the statement.

February 18, 2018: The Department of Education announced it will summarily dismiss complaints from transgender students involving exclusion from school facilities and other claims based solely on gender identity discrimination.

January 26, 2018: The Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that encourages medical providers to use religious grounds to deny treatment to transgender people, people who need reproductive care, and others.

January 18, 2018: The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights opened a "Conscience and Religious Freedom Division" that will promote discrimination by health care providers who can cite religious or moral reasons for denying care.

December 29, 2017: President Trump fired the White House Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. The transgender community isdisproportionately affected by HIV.

December 20, 2017: President Trump nominated Gordon P. Giampietro to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Giampietro called marriage equality “an assault on nature.” Giampietro's nomination was eventually withdrawn.

December 14, 2017: Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed not to use the words “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based” in official documents.

October 6, 2017: The Justice Department released a sweeping "license to discriminate" allowing federal agencies, government contractors, government grantees, and even private businesses to engage in illegal discrimination, as long as they can cite religious reasons for doing so.

October 5, 2017: The Justice Department released a memo instructing Department of Justice attorneys to take the legal position that federal law does not protect transgender workers from discrimination.

October 2, 2017: President Trump nominated Kyle Duncan to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Duncan has dedicated his career to limiting the rights of transgender people, and even defended the anti-trans parties in the North Carolina’s infamous HB2 debacle and the school district that discriminated against Gavin Grimm.

September 7, 2017: The Justice Department filed a legal brief on behalf of the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing for a constitutional right for businesses to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and, implicitly, gender identity.

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Gregory G. Katsas to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Katsas played a central role in helping Trump ban qualified transgender people serving in the miiltary.

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Matthew J. Kacsmaryk to serve as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Kacsmaryk opposes LGBTQ protections in housing, employment, & and health care, and called transgender people a “delusion.”

September 7, 2017: President Trump nominated Jeff Mateer to become a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Mateer called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan” and openly supported debunked and dangerous “conversion therapy.” Mateer’s nomination was eventually withdrawn.

August 25, 2017: President Trump released a memo directing Defense Department to move forward with developing a plan to discharge transgender military service members and to maintain a ban on recruitment.

July 26, 2017: President Trump announced, via Twitter, that "the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military."

July 26, 2017: The Justice Department filed a legal brief on behalf of the United States in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, arguing that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or, implicitly, gender identity.

July 13, 2017: President Trump nominated Mark Norris to the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. Norris has worked to make it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ people, and even worked to discriminate specifically against transgender kids.

June 14, 2017: The Department of Education withdrew its finding that an Ohio school district discriminated against a transgender girl. The Department gave no explanation for withdrawing the finding, which a federal judge upheld.

May 2, 2017: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a plan to roll back regulations interpreting the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination provisions to protect transgender people.

April 14, 2017: The Justice Department abandoned its historic lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s anti-transgender law. It did so after North Carolina replaced HB2 with a different anti-transgender law known as “HB 2.0.”

April 4, 2017: The Departments of Justice and Labor cancelled quarterly conference calls with LGBT organizations; on these calls, which had happened for years, government attorneys shared information on employment laws and cases.

March 31, 2017: The Justice Department announced it would review (and likely seek to scale back) numerous civil rights settlement agreements with police departments. These settlements were put in places where police departments were determined to be engaging in discriminatory and abusive policing, including racial and other profiling. Many of these agreements include critical protections for LGBT people.

March 2017: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) removed links to four key resource documents from its website, which informed emergency shelters on best practices for serving transgender people facing homelessness and complying with HUD regulations.

March 28, 2017: The Census Bureau retracted a proposal to collect demographic information on LGBT people in the 2020 Census.

March 24, 2017: The Justice Department cancelled a long-planned National Institute of Corrections broadcast on “Transgender Persons in Custody: The Legal Landscape.”

March 13, 2017: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that its national survey of older adults, and the services they need, would no longer collect information on LGBT participants. HHS initially falsely claimed in its Federal Register announcement that it was making “no changes” to the survey.

March 13, 2017: The State Department announced the official U.S. delegation to the UN’s 61st annual Commission on the Status of Women conference would include two outspoken anti-LGBT organizations, including a representative of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM): an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

March 10, 2017: The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced it would withdraw two important agency-proposed policies designed to protect LGBT people experiencing homelessness. One proposed policy would have required HUD-funded emergency shelters to put up a poster or "notice" to residents of their right to be free from anti-LGBT discrimination under HUD regulations.

The other announced a survey to evaluate the impact of the LGBTQ Youth Homelessness Prevention Initiative, implemented by HUD and other agencies over the last three years. This multi-year project should be evaluated, and with this withdrawal, we may never learn what worked best in the project to help homeless LGBTQ youth.

March 8, 2017: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removed demographic questions about LGBT people that Centers for Independent Living must fill out each year in their Annual Program Performance Report. This report helps HHS evaluate programs that serve people with disabilities.

March 2, 2017: The Department of Justice abandoned its request for a preliminary injunction against North Carolina’s anti-transgender House Bill 2, which prevented North Carolina from enforcing HB 2. This was an early sign that the Administration was giving up defending trans people (later, on April 14, it withdrew the lawsuit completely).

March 1, 2017: The Department of Justice took the highly unusual step of declining to appeal a nationwide preliminary court order temporarily halting enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s nondiscrimination protections for transgender people. The injunction prevents HHS from taking any action to enforce transgender people's rights from health care discrimination.

February 22, 2017: The Departments of Justice and Education withdrew landmark 2016 guidance explaining how schools must protect transgender students under the federal Title IX law.

January 31, 2017: President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has a history of anti-transgender rulings.

January 20, 2017: On President Trump’s inauguration day, the adminstration scrubbed all mentions of LGBTQ people from the websites of the White House, Department of State, and Department of Labor.

Other Harmful Trump Administration Actions
The Trump administration has taken many other actions to roll back civil rights and health care protections and target vulnerable communities. While not specifically directed at transgender people or gender identity protections, we list them here because it is critically important that we view our quest for transgender equality as intertwined with other social justice movements. These include attacks on reproductive rights, the Affordable Care Act, refugees and other immigrants and the enforcement of civil rights laws. Many of these actions will also disproportionately harm transgender people. These are just a few examples:

Kicking Americans off Medicaid and Food Stamps: The Trump Administration has taken numerous actions to kick Americans in need off of Medicaid and SNAP coverage. On April 10, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to push for work requirements for low-income people in America who receive federal assistance, including Medicaid and SNAP.

Targeting Reproductive Rights: On October 6, 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation allowing employers and insurers to deny coverage for birth control, as long as they can cite religious reasons for doing so. In April, President Trump and Congress overturned a regulation that protected Planned Parenthood, one of the nation’s largest providers of care for transgender people, and other family planning clinics from funding discrimination by states.

Harming Sexual Assault Survivors. On September 7, 2017, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced she would withdraw historic guidance on schools' and universities' responsibilities to address sexual assault and sexual harassment. On September 27, 2017, the Department replaced this guidance with flawed and dangerous “interim guidance” tipping the scales against student survivors seeking protection on campus. This is especially dangerous for transgender students, because 47% of transgender adults in the US Transgender Survey were sexual assault survivors.

Cruel and Relentless Attacks on Immigrant Communities. On September 5, 2017, President Trump acted to strip hundreds of thousands of Americans and their families of security, stability, and safety by ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. On April 6, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy that separated hundreds of immigrant children from their families. On April 10, a federal official announced that the Department of Justice was halting the Legal Orientation Program, which offers legal assistance to immigrants. On June 11, Attorney General Sessions ruled that domestic or gang violence are not grounds for asylum in the United States. These are just a few of many anti-immigrant actions that are especially dangerous for many LGBT immigrants who could face life-threatening violence if deported.

Putting Health Care Out of Reach: On April 13, 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services rolled back numerous Affordable Care Act rules to reduce protections for people seeking and using health insurance. These actions make it harder to enroll in health care plans, allow plans to sharply raise deductibles, and weaken requirements for insurance plans to have in-network providers that serve low-income communities. These changes disproportionately affect people of color and any one with lower incomes, including transgender people. These changes make getting health care coverage harder for people who lose coverage or who depend on community clinics.

Expanding Immigration Detention: The Department of Homeland Security is vastly expanding the number of immigrants held in immigration detention centers nationwide, while also eliminating protections for health and safety in detention centers. Reducing these protections for immigrants who are being detained is wrong, and it's especially dangerous for vulnerable transgender immigrants, many of whom are asylum-seekers who risk extreme abuse.

Banning Muslims and Refugees: On January 27, 2017 and again on March 6, President Trump signed executive orders seeking to ban entry by refugees and travelers from certain Muslim-majority countries and drastically reduce the number of refugees allowed to seek safety in the United States. We cannot stand for a world where people in danger are denied entry because of who they are, including where they come from or whether they are Muslim or any other religion. LGBT refugees are among the many who are fleeing life-threatening persecution because of who they are or what they believe. While the bans were allowed to take effect by the Supreme Court, court cases challenging them continue.

The Left's non-issue of Transgender rights pales on comparison to something like health care. I can understand it's a sensitive issue to like, what, 0.30% of the population in each state? It's not like the oppression of an entire race. The last time I checked Obamacare was a tax on an entire country that anyone who refused to pay would be penalized and it effected every single USA citizen.

I guess if you get caught up in the emotional aspect of transgender rights (this is what the Left is after) or if you're transgender yourself it would be an issue, but if you compare it to other things that effect a larger percentage of the population (like drug use or homelessness) it's really not a big deal. The Left can keep trying to push their agenda on people like me, but I don't care and I'll push right back.

People can do whatever they like to do, but I don't want to know about it. Keep your personal affairs to yourself and don't try to force me to accept you. If you believe in something that's fine, just understand that I could care less about the entire non-issue.

 

[morvoran]

I guess if you get caught up in the emotional aspect of transgender rights (this is what the Left is after) or if you're transgender yourself it would be an issue, but if you compare it to other things that effect a larger percentage of the population (like drug use or homelessness) it's really not a big deal. The Left can keep trying to push their agenda on people like me, but I don't care and I'll push right back.

People can do whatever they like to do, but I don't want to know about it. Keep your personal affairs to yourself and don't try to force me to accept you. If you believe in something that's fine, just understand that I could care less about the entire non-issue.

This is one of the issues with some on the left and their "identity politics". Trump is doing all he can to help everybody in this great nation, while fighting back the dems wanting to undo our last election just because they don't like who won by constantly trying to impeach him for every phone call, twitter comment, etc. he makes that they can twist to look bad. All the while, they want to be treated as "equal" by getting special privileges over everybody else. If a new law is made, such as this medicare expansion, and they are not giving special treatment, then it isn't good enough. This is regardless if the law does a lot of good for them, their family members, etc., they just can't be made happy.

 

[WeedZ]

So quickly this thing derailed into offtopic posts and personal attacks.