Is the old television sitcom “All in the Family” the real reason more than 60 million American voters preferred Archie Bunker for President, as well as a Republican rubber-stamp Congress? (“Donald Trump is Archie Bunker with more money — but it’s not funny,” U.S. News & World Report, Nov. 6).

Although awareness of reality is not President Trump’s strength, with the passage of his tax bill, he has kept his promise to Make America Great Again, because his perception of American greatness matches many of the lyrics of the theme song of that old satirical sitcom.

Candidate Trump packaged and sold Archie Bunker’s bigoted world views about welfare recipients, women, and minorities with Herbert Hoover’s unregulated capitalism, an economic theory that eventually led to our Great Depression. He then sold the package as a great society that existed before Democrats ruined our great country by giving women the right to vote, established FDR’s welfare state, made a mockery of our great white nation by LBJ’s Civil Rights Act, and burdened taxpayers with the welfare programs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.

Lyrics from “Those Were the Days”:

“Didn’t need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight” (men worked outside the home; women worked in the home).

“And you knew who you were then. Girls were girls and men were men” (women were playthings, men were players).

“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.”

“Hair was short and skirts were long” (gender identity was clear by hair length and dress).

“I don’t know just what went wrong.” (How did we get into this mess?)

“Those were the days.”

These lyrics reveal the heart of Bunker’s values, which Trump successfully sold to a partisan Republican Congress controlled by rich donors. Candidate Trump promised to get people off welfare and back to work; older Trump voters didn’t dream that welfare included Social Security recipients and Medicare patients. Younger Trump voters didn’t realize the value of paying it forward; both young and old will soon realize they, along with working-class voters, were punked into more taxpayer-supported corporate welfare by a President whose faith in television reality is personally profitable and, therefore, unshakable.

Isn’t it great that every day we can now all laugh at our creation of a real-life All-American sitcom again?

Tom Driscoll
Poulsbo