6 Things I Wouldn't Do If I Were President

The first thing I swear I won’t do, if the American people were to elect me (at 82 years of age) president of these (dis)United States of ours is to put any more algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC, or, for that matter, any more millions of (our tax) dollars into making it ever greener (as Donald Trump has already done with $16.4 million of them).

Oh, and talking about that presidential algae, there may be a second thing (not) to do if Donald Trump manages to take away birthright citizenship from Washington’s algae, or for that matter if he manages somehow to get congressional Republicans to do the same for children born of immigrants to this country (despite the Supreme Court and our Constitution). Of course, that document couldn’t be clearer on the subject, though obviously not clear enough for “our” president. (”All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”)

As Trump put it recently, “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship.” And it’s a good point, right? Who wants the kids of immigrants born here to become citizens? In fact, inspired by Trump, I should email my long dead immigrant grandfather, who came from what’s today Ukraine, in heaven (or, for all I know, hell) and tell him not to have my dad because Donald Trump would never have considered him a citizen of the United States and would have expelled him—and, had that happened, who knows where I might have been born (if I were born at all). Of course, the same could be said for Donald J. Trump, since his mother was indeed an immigrant and, had he had the chance, he might well have chucked her out of the country, too (though, since she was a white Scottish immigrant, given how he feels about white South African immigrants, maybe he would have welcomed her instead).

Oh, and sorry, but here’s a third thing that came to mind not to do (if I were president): It’s not just a matter of being born here, according to the United States Constitution. Plenty of American citizens of every imaginable sort are going to suffer miserably from the fact that “our” president and congressional Republicans have managed to cut an estimated $536 billion (or is it a full trillion dollars?) from Medicare over the next decade. Of course, what could possibly go wrong with that, since it’s estimated that less than 12 million Americans, a mere drop in the bucket, will lose their Medicaid coverage and a mere 5 million more their health insurance in the years to come?

And on that he’s been proven right, I guess. It’s not an endless war (not yet anyway), just an endless mess, imperiling the global economy, and what in the world could be the harm in that?

And let me add something else as the fourth thing I wouldn’t do (or in this case, wouldn’t have done): I wouldn’t have attacked Iran out of the blue and for no imaginable reason, ensuring that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed and the global economy sent into a fossil-fuelized free fall (even if that free fall has, at least, lent a hand to a future green economy). I mean, honestly, how dumb was that for the man who once swore that “under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all”? I’m talking about the fellow who not so long ago walked out of an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, when faced with such statements of his own, saying, “First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war.” (Yes, he did!) And then, when it came to his war on Iran, he added, “So when you say I promised—I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war.”

And on that he’s been proven right, I guess. It’s not an endless war (not yet anyway), just an endless mess, imperiling the global economy, and what in the world could be the harm in that?

As for the fifth thing I wouldn’t do—that I wouldn’t, in fact, have been faintly capable of doing—as The New York Times recently reported, Donald J. Trump pulled in approximately $2.2 billion as president in 2025 from the Trump family’s cryptocurrency businesses, his real estate holdings, and who knows what else (more money, in short, than he had been making as a private citizen). As the Times noted, “One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.” Oh, and don’t forget those “hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.” Clearly, my problem is that I don’t own any cryptocurrency. In fact, I’m so old that, unlike Donald Trump, who just turned a youthful 80, I’m at a total disadvantage, since—and I just checked my pockets—I don’t seem to have a single bit of cryptocurrency around. Of course, since I basically don’t know what cryptocurrency is, I have no idea whether it could even be in my pocket. (Sigh.)

Oh, yes, and here’s one more thing, a final sixth thing I wouldn’t do as president: On a planet where Europe has been sweltering; the world’s ocean surface temperatures have hit record highs (and last year, as The Guardian reported, “the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about... 11 Hiroshima explosions a second”); and Central Park in my own city of New York just officially hit 100°F as July began, I wouldn’t go out of my way to up the level of fossil-fuel use and take out after every windmill in sight.

But of course, that’s me and it’s true that I didn’t win the election of 2024 and become this country’s president a second time around. No such luck. So, of course, it matters not at all what I wouldn’t do on this distinctly imperiled planet of ours. Sigh...