Category: Trump

I really, really hope I’m wrong about this, but it feels to me like Trump is going to be president again. The election is still 16 months away and, of course, anything might happen between now and then. But even if he doesn’t win, Congress is behaving as if he has won already. They’re obeying in advance.

This week, the Republican controlled House has presaged the coming Revenge Administration with two unbelievably cowardly and weak actions, more about which momentarily.

First, a word on why I think Tweety redux, or maybe I should say “Truthy” redux, is in the offing. His path to the nomination is clear to me – the script is the same as it was in 2016. His mesmerized and cast-in-concrete base is, say, 40% of Republican primary voters. OK, you say, so that leaves 60% who will vote against him.

Not so fast.

If there are 16 other Republican candidates, as there were in 2016, they would have to split that 60% between them, and also split the potential donor and PAC money between them. Trump would pick them off one by one as he did with Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Low Energy Jeb, Horseface Carly, and so on. But this time is different, you say, since the Super-Pacs and Dark Money forces have already come out against him, and have already run attack ads.

Well, that’s a ray of hope, I guess, but Trump doesn’t need ads and isn’t particularly hurt by them. He has social media, crazy right wing media, and “lamestream media” all to himself, each salivating to give him as much free air as he wants any time he feels like calling for the end of the constitution or referring to the Biden “crime family”. “All Trump All The Time” is their motto whenever he wants it to be. They haven’t learned a thing except Trump = ratings = dollars.

Moreover, attacking Trump is the wrong way to spend your money. The right way would be to pick an alternative and pump that person up. The anti-Trump forces haven’t done that yet, and the longer they wait, the harder it will be.

But he can’t win the general election, you’ll say. He’s a loser as everyone knows and all those independents, suburban and country-club Republicans, and Trump-haters of every ilk will stop him. Are you sure? Remember, you all said the same thing in 2016. And in 2020, it was only his mis-handling of Covid along with the usual throw-the-bums-out anti-incumbent sentiment that just barely got rid of him. And even then we almost had to have a civil war to show him the door.

I say “barely” got rid of him because, although he lost the popular vote by 7 million, it’s only the ridiculous Electoral College that matters. If he had only won Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, each of which was lost by the tiniest of margins, he would have retained office. Fun fact: Biden did not get 50% of the vote in any of those three states.

And Trump will have had four years of lying and bullying to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Election deniers have been promoted, emboldened and very nearly elected to state-wide office in Arizona. In Georgia, intimidation and voter-registration laws might be the difference this time. And in Wisconsin, well, the usual throw-the-bums-out anti-incumbent sentiment might just do it. They’re asking themselves right now, “Do we really want to see President Kamala Harris any time soon?” And if not Wisconsin, maybe Pennsylvania or Michigan, which could also be up for grabs.

And if the worst happens in November 2024? Trump’s obsession and over-arching policy will be to destroy the “deep state”, i.e. anyone drawing a federal paycheck who is a registered Democrat or even a Republican who has not sufficiently praised him. Or one that has perhaps implied at some point that Biden did actually win in 2020. This will be the first step toward achieving the Trumpublican dream of a one-party state beholden to its Supreme Leader.

This brings me back to the cowardly and despicable Republican House, which is already deeply in fear of the coming purge and feels compelled to show its loyally to the Truthy agenda now, so as to try to save their skins two years from now. They’ve obeyed in advance.

On Wednesday the House censured Adam Schiff for leading the first impeachment prosecution. Schiff also served on the committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and has been in Trump’s sights for a long time, earning the epithet “Little Adam Schitt”. He had already been kicked off the Intelligence Committee earlier this year by Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Schiff is a truly honorable and courageous man, in my opinion, and this is just a disgrace. In response to the censure, Schiff said, “You honor me with your enmity”.

And on Thursday, House Republicans moved to strip security clearance from any official who signed a 2020 statement suggesting that the release of Hunter Biden’s emails had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. This list includes more than 50 former intelligence officials, including CIA directors Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta and John Brennan. It’s really unbelievable. And just a quick reminder: the people who are deciding about this “issue” include George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz, among other leading statesmen.

Twice impeached, indicted by New York State and the Federal Government, head of an organization found guilty of criminal tax fraud, personally found guilty of sexual abuse, and still ahead of his closest rival by 30% in today’s national polling.

It’s clear that we’re never going to be rid of this cancer, and it just might be the end of our current form of government. Trump actually could be president again. It CAN happen here.

Yesterday I wrote that Trump is, in effect, above the law. My thesis was that fines and the threat of imprisonment have never had any mitigating effect on his behavior in the past, and that he simply ignores verdicts against him. I said that federal indictments wouldn’t negatively impact his plans to become president again, and will actually help him in his lifelong effort to cast himself as a victim, always being treated “unfairly”.

When I wrote that, I didn’t know what was actually in the indictment that had been handed down the previous evening, and suggested that the only real hope for some relief against Trump’s assault on the “rule of law” was that he might be charged under  18 U.S.C. § 2071(b), the penalty for which includes being disqualified from holding public office.

It didn’t happen. The indictment is now unsealed. He was charged with 37 counts of various aspects of mishandling sensitive documents, the penalties for all of which are just fines or possible imprisonment. If you haven’t figured it out yet, GOML is here to guide you: Trump isn’t going to jail for any of this, and anyway none of it will be fully resolved until well after the next election. His tried-and-true strategy of delaying, counter-suing, appealing and exhausting the resources of his pursuers will clearly prevail once more.

If a Democrat is elected, this will all be a side-show of some entertainment value, but no real impact on government (apart from any new MAGA-fueled insurrections, of course). And any Republican who gains the presidency will simply have their Justice Department drop the charges, which they are already claiming to be judicial overreach for what, in their view, is a violation equivalent to failing to return an overdue library book.

The more problematic reality if a Republican won would be that we’d have another Republican administration, with or without Trump, free to pursue all their nutty obsessions. Who knows what would rise to the top of their agenda? A war on libraries? A national dress code? Addressing climate change by deploying the Space Force to get rid of those pesky Jewish space lasers once and for all?

So what is the actual impact of these goings-on? Well, the first thing to note is that none of it will change anyone’s mind about Trump. In this already hyper-polarized environment, these proceedings are just gasoline on the fire.

The big winners? Trump and all the news outlets. Trump wins because he again has the only thing he really values – the limelight. All anybody is talking about now is Trump, Trump, Trump. Perfect bliss for the man-baby! He’s absolutely thrilled with his poll numbers now, which are spiking since the indictment.

And the news outlets win, both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump organizations, because they don’t really care about news at all or even know what it is anymore. The fact that you all know what I mean when I refer to pro- or anti-Trump news organizations is proof that “news” isn’t really what it used to be – objectively curated and reported. All they care about now is ratings because ratings translate to profits, and Trump is, in fact, a ratings machine. You may have already forgotten about the FoxNews/Dominion case, in which it was revealed that Fox knew all along that the “rigged election” story was nonsense, but since their viewers didn’t want to hear that, they promoted lies instead. This is the definition of “News” for profit.

The big losers? All the rest of us.

I’m writing this the morning after a federal grand jury indicted Trump on a number of counts of something or other, apparently related to violation of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice. Another brilliant “first” for the man-baby! The charges are connected to the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-A-Lago, and the penalty for violating the Espionage Act is theoretically up to 10 years per count, although past violators have received much less.

Details of the charges will be known at some point, but it doesn’t really matter. The case will be tried in Florida, and if you think a Florida jury is going to put Trump in jail for five minutes, I know of a fantastic digital “investment” you’re sure to be interested in.

Without jail time, any other outcome is a victory for Trump, whatever the verdict.

Even if the impossible happened and he was sentenced to jail, he would never serve time because he would be president or dead by the time the tsunami of appeals he would file had been adjudicated. Also, becoming president would give him the ability to pardon himself, as he has already claimed the power to do, or simply instruct his Justice Department to drop the case. If some other Republican was president, say Pence or DeSantis or even Christie or Haley, that president would also pardon him. They have already gone on record as saying the indictment is inappropriate to begin with, and, as a glimpse into the near future, have all voiced support in one form or another for pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists.

And penalties other than jail, such as fines, are a joke. First of all, Trump started fund-raising off the indictment news five minutes after it hit, so if he ever did pay a fine, it wouldn’t be with his own money. And, of course, any payment would be explained as a convenience settlement of a nuisance case, rather than any admission of guilt. This is how the Bragg indictments for falsifying business records in New York will finally play out, months or years from now, in the unlikely event Bragg actually wins in court.

Secondly, he typically just refuses to pay fines, like so many other debts he’s incurred, knowing that no one will enforce payment. Who is going to knock on his door and turn out his pockets? Clarence Thomas? Trump has proven himself to be above the law simply by ignoring it.

This is how it is already working in the E. Jean Carroll rape case that Trump just “lost” in New York. Trump was found guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, but, importantly, was not found guilty of raping her, and was fined a bit less than $5 million. So what does he do? The very next day he goes on CNN and defames her some more, repeating that her story is “fake”, etc., the very defamation he just got convicted of the day before!

And as for the $5 million? Carroll will never see a nickel of it. First of all his lawyers have already petitioned the court to reduce the fine to a couple of hundred thousand (which he will also refuse to pay), and have further moved to toss the whole case out. Their argument is that he couldn’t be guilty of defaming her by saying the rape story was fake since, in fact, rape was not proved at trial.

So what’s her next move – what can she do to stop the nightmare? She’s going to sue him again, this time asking for $10 million in damages. She will incur an additional metric shit-ton of legal fees, and even if she “wins” she will still be out of pocket. Trump doesn’t even pay his own lawyers, so there is no way he’ll pay hers. And then there’s the emotional cost of the aggravation and exhaustion incurred by dedicating the rest of her life to trying to get Trump to admit to anything at all.

It’s just another case of what we’ve been saying for years: Trump’s epitaph will be “Often caught, never punished”. He emerges from this stronger in the eyes of his adoring cult, a victim of headline grabbers and book floggers who are always trying to benefit from the glory of having been close to Trump, or as Trump would have it, making up a story about being close to him. And, after all, the only thing he was found “guilty” of was what he’s been bragging about doing for years, i.e. grabbing them by the you-know-what. Nothing to see here, folks, but the never-ending witch hunt. The unending persecution of Donald Trump is The Crime of the Century.

Trump is above the law. He actually revels in suing and being sued and has been involved in close to five thousand court actions in his career. You can indict him, impeach him, or whatever you want to do. He simply loves fighting, and never pays a price for it.

So is there any hope for the “justice” that many of us would like to see? Not really. Resistance is pretty much futile. I will throw out one remote possibility for you today, though. I’m not holding my breath and you shouldn’t either, but here goes.

Although threats of jail time and fines are worthless, there is one penalty that might make a difference and to which he might have some exposure. I’m talking about subsection (b) of 18 U.S.C. § 2071, which says that any custodian of a public record who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys (any record) shall be fined not more than $2,000 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” (Bolding is mine)

Wouldn’t you feel just a little bit better about the whole years-long clown show if somehow this could come to pass?

Godwin’s Law says:

“As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person’s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi reference, increases.”

The idea has a corollary in Leo Strauss’s idea of Reductio ad Hitlerum, or “Playing the Hitler Card”, which, according to the Wiki, is “an attempt to invalidate someone else’s position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. One example would be that since Hitler was against smoking, this implies that someone who is against smoking is a Nazi”.

Today, I am introducing Stewie’s Law, which says:

“When someone points out that a person is, in some important way, worse than Hitler, that person will be deemed not credible and a Nazi sympathizer, even when the point made is demonstrably true and the person making it is demonstrably not a Nazi sympathizer.  The point will therefore be invalidated and ignored”.

And, when Stewie’s Law is used to defend the abhorrent Donald Trump, a corollary idea is often in play. Let’s call it “Incrementum ad Drumpfum”, or “Playing the Trump Card” to explain and excuse the inexplicable and inexcusable, resulting in the further accrual of power and wealth to Donald Trump.

OK, enough arcane academic references and made-up Latin phrases.  Time for a little arcane history. 

The Night of the Long Knives was a three day period in 1934 Germany when then-Chancellor Hitler ordered paramilitary units loyal to him, the SS and Gestapo, to murder his political rivals to consolidate his own power, making him the “supreme administrator of justice of the German people”, as he put it in a speech a few days later.

Estimates of how many perceived opponents were murdered range as high as 800 or more, and more than a thousand arrested. Hitler planned all this in secret, of course, calling it “Operation Hummingbird”, and carried out the crimes under cover of darkness.

Trump, on the other hand, commits many of his crimes out in the open, in broad daylight, insisting he has every legal right to do whatever it is and bragging about it all the while.

On January 6, 2021 he called paramilitary units loyal to him to attack the Capitol, fight like Hell, etc. etc. or they “wouldn’t have a country anymore”. The moronic Rudy Giuliani, then threw a little gasoline on the fire by exhorting the riled-up Trumpkins to “Trial by Combat”, whatever that’s supposed to be.

As with Hitler, Trump’s targets included some of his closest collaborators, as well as those who threatened him politically. Vice President Mike Pence was at the top of the list, singled out because of the disloyalty he showed (after four years of abject boot-licking) by not proclaiming that the already-certified electoral college vote was invalid.

The mob smashed into the Capitol and battled with police and security forces, causing many serious injuries and five deaths. Two other officers committed suicide shortly thereafter. As they flooded the offices in the building, they chanted “Hang Mike Pence”, and “Naaaaancy, where are you?”.

Can there really be any doubt that, had they found their targets, many of whom where cowering just steps away, murder would have ensued? If you believe the Supreme Leader has commanded you to do it, there is no fear of negative consequences. He’d just pardon everyone anyway.

A gallows had been hastily constructed outside for the purpose of lynching Pence. Think it’s all a joke?

Within days of the riot, impeachment articles had been drawn up in the House of Representatives for presentation to the Senate. You’ve probably already forgotten what happened next. Mitch McConnell, majority leader, asserted that the Senate would consider the articles only after a recess that would end on January 19th. In other words, he forced the issue to be tabled until arguments would occur only after Trump had left office.

Why is this important? Because it gave some (extremely thin) cover to Republican senators who were then able to cast their vote for acquittal based on the unconstitutionality of impeaching a no-longer-sitting President. They all said, “yes, of course Trump was guilty, but unfortunately our hands are tied by the technicality”.

This is extra-hypocritical, even for the party of unlimited hypocrisy, for many reasons, including that virtually all constitutional scholars agree that impeachment under these circumstances was completely legal. Moreover, a vote taken by those very same senators on the first day of the trial established that, yes, it was legal to impeach a President after he’s out and the proceedings could therefore begin.

None of it matters. Everyone understood that the fear these people have of Trump would trump (see what I did there?) morality, legality, and common sense in the end. They’re afraid of losing their jobs. That’s why only seven Republicans voted to convict, and only one of those, Lisa Murkowski, is running for re-election in 2022. The others have already experienced the blowback from their vote of conscience, which includes censure by their state parties.

On the subject of the fear of job loss, Nancy Pelosi made a great point. She said when she tries to recruit really good people to run for office, she often is told that they have many better opportunities than politics, including highly paid jobs currently held. She tells them, “yes, of course we understand that – we only want people who are highly skilled and in great demand to serve. You can always return to the private sector in great shape afterwards”.

Apparently, senate Republicans really have no better opportunities. Who else is going to give them a dedicated parking space at Reagan National Airport, or fantastic health care, franking privilege, extensive staff, etc. etc. They have to do and say whatever Trump wants them to if they want to hang on to all of that, no matter how it corrupts them.

So now, finally, to the application of Stewie’s Law. How is Trump worse than Hitler?

Hitler had a vision of what he wanted to achieve for the people of Germany and how he wanted to re-shape Europe. It was an insane, racist, murderous vison, but it was more than simply self aggrandizement and self-enrichment. Those things were a nice perk that followed, more or less incidentally, but they were not the motivation for all the lawlessness and depravity.

Although Trump’s rhetoric is similar to Hitler’s in its promise to Make America Great Again, it should now be crystal clear to all that there is ultimately no great vision for America here. The only real beneficiary of Trump’s “policies” is Trump. Everything he does, every word he speaks, every idea that pops into the mind of the Very Stable Genius, is driven by the desire for “Incrementum ad Drumpfum”.

And what use will all that power and wealth be put to in the end? Maybe finding a cure for malaria? Building libraries and hospitals? Endowing institutions of higher learning? Feeding the hungry?

No, the only use Trump’s wealth and power ever serves is the punishment and humiliation of his detractors. That’s it. I mean after all the toilets in Mar-a Lago have been upgraded to solid gold, of course.

Hitler used the regular kind, by the way.

That’s the story of Donald Trump’s life and the motto he relies on as he blunders through life, always “winning”.

You might think that with Twitter, the bully’s most powerful pulpit, no longer available to him, his ability to intimidate Congress and mainline nonsense into the veins of the mesmerized MAGA masses would be reduced. You’d be wrong.

What is it about this sociopath that makes him immune to criticism and beyond the reach of the law? He is so clearly a liar, a grifter, an imposter, and a danger to democracy. And yet, on he goes.

He is, among many other things:

The “billionaire” who hides his tax returns.
The “genius” who hides his college grades.
The “businessman” who bankrupted 3 casinos and lost over $1B in 10 years.
The “playboy” who pays for sex.
The “Christian” who doesn’t go to church.
The “philanthropist” who defrauds charity.
The “patriot” who dodged the draft and attacks veterans and their families.
The “innocent man” who refuses to testify.

Trump is the fool who knows more than all the generals, scientists, and diplomats, and yet is never called to answer for his misjudgments.

Many thought that, after the dust from this election season settled, the Republican crazy fever would finally break. They were overly optimistic, as always.

I can’t remember who said it recently, but it’s an interesting insight: “My greatest fear is not what will happen if Trump runs again and wins. It’s what will happen if he runs again and loses.”

The precedent has now been accepted. Whatever Trump commands, legal or illegal, is what we must accept. All bets are off.

Or as Kurt, friend of the blog, recently put it, “Tweety est mort”.

Leaving

Today, it was the best of times. The perpetually aggrieved man-baby skulked off the presidential stage in a fog of fury, resentment, choler, and confusion. His Twitter, the bullhorn-sized baby-monitor from which there has been no escape or peace for over four years, had finally been disconnected. If only this had been done when we first called for it here three and a half years ago, perhaps the country would be a bit less inclined towards self-immolation now.

Biden managed to remain standing until inauguration day. Sadly, there were times when I wondered if he could or would.

His team is assembled and ready for work, chock-a-block with highly visible (and competent) LGBQT* folks, People of Color, and myriad others from the various veins and factions of political identity that have been flailing helplessly against the constant insults and mockery of the Trump “administration”.

Signals have been sent that many of Trump’s most misguided policy initiatives will be reversed on day one of the new administration. We will rejoin the Paris climate accords, rescind Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and so on. These “policies” achieved nothing of substance, yet somehow burnished Trump’s credentials among his huge cult as a heroic force, fighting against the feminization of all aspects of culture and for the reclamation of America’s lost freedoms. They were the refutation of Obama-era inclusiveness, one-worldism and concomitant loss of American Exceptionalism that had ruined the country from their point of view. Trump had “corrected” this for them, at least temporarily.

The incoming administration is setting the table anew for the accusations that the country has been stolen from its “rightful owners”, those middle-aged white men who, in a long lost and mostly-imaginary Eden, could feed their families with a single blue-collar paycheck without any needless back-talk or sass from the little woman, and without being called deplorable or racist or homophobic or anything else by people who never built anything with their own hands in their miserable, liberal lives. Only Trump understood them, they thought, though they never understood what he thought of them.

And it was the worst of times.

Gone, but not forgotten. Gone, but not gone. Trump is now more than ever the undisputed God of his mesmerized minions. Where he goes, they go. What he says he wants, they are commanded to do.

He leaves the stage with 400,000 already dead from Covid-19, clearly another media hoax meant to take him down, and one that he both scrupulously and unscrupulously ignored in the months after his election loss. Of course, he pretty much ignored it before then as well, apart from inciting violence against those who tried to fight the epidemic as best they could. Hard to remember now, but it was only one year ago that he confidently and condescendingly asserted that we had it under control, and that it was only one person coming from China. “It’s going to be just fine” he said then and many, many more times since.

Very early on, even before his 2016 election victory, we agonized here that the advent of Trump was the end of the thing that was America’s most important contribution to worldwide democracy and the rule of law: the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. He asserted that the election was rigged and would not accept the results (if he lost). When he won the electoral college vote but lost the popular vote by three million, he asserted that all those three million votes and many more had been illegally cast and that he actually won the popular vote as well. He launched an election fraud investigation to prove it all, which, two years later, of course yielded nothing. Remember, I’m talking now about the election he WON.

This time, he lost by over seven million votes and lost the electoral college vote as well by the same margin he called a “landslide” and a “shellacking” when it was in his favor. So the same fantasies and lies and poison from 2016 were amplified and refined, and injected into the bloodstream of not only the MAGA crazies, but also more than 75% of all previously “normal” voters who identify as “Republican”, not to mention their elected representatives in congress and their favorite infotainment outlets.

The handshakes, well-wishes, hopeful words, and many other traditions of continuity between administrations, large and small, have been trashed by Trump. In his final days, he did as much to impede the new administration and set it up for failure as he could think of to do, even sending the White House staff home so that there was no one to unlock the door when the Bidens arrived there. Trump remained true to himself, petty and vindictive until the last second.

There is no longer any reason for a foreign power to negotiate any sort of treaty with the U.S., as they now understand that what is agreed to by one administration is readily tossed out by the next. Same as in every war-torn kleptocracy around the world.

Russia has succeeded beyond its wildest imaginings in its project to discredit the idea that the U.S. is a shining example of democracy and that democracy is a system preferable or superior to any other.

Need some visual proof that the peaceful transfer of power is no more? On inauguration day, D.C. is an armed camp with more of our uniformed forces keeping people away from the “celebration” than are deployed around the world trying to keep peace in all the countries previously thought to be irredeemably hopeless and backward. Seven people are already dead from the rioting called for by Trump just two weeks ago while his own vice-president, absurdly loyal, obsequious and subservient to the end, was presiding over a ceremony to record the already-finalized electoral votes. That loyalty was rewarded by chants of “Hang Mike Pence” from the Trump-fueled mob, while the pathetic Pence cowered near by. His crime? He tried vainly to point out to Trump that he did not, in fact, have the authority to disenfranchise 150 million voters with the dropping of his gavel. Not good enough.

What now, now that the conspirators, instigators and enablers have been pardoned? What’s the next act in the ongoing tragicomedy that is Donald John Trump? I’m almost afraid to hit the “Post” button when I’m done writing this because of the strong possibility that, by the time you read it, something so much worse than what we’ve already seen will have rendered my words quaint and dated.

All I can tell you is that two things are certain. The first is that we will have no permanent relief from Trump and his incitement, with or without social media. The second is that the motto that Trump has lived by and cherished all his life and the one that really should be emblazoned on his family coat-of-arms will be shown to be true once more: “Often caught, never punished”.

I’ll leave you with this today. When Kurt said, “Tweety est Mort”, my first thought was what Eddie (Walter Brennan) asks Slim (Lauren Bacall) in “To Have and Have Not”:

“Was you ever bit by a dead bee?  You know, you got to be careful of dead bees if you’re goin’ around barefooted, ’cause if you step on them they can sting you just as bad as if they was alive, especially if they was kind of mad when they got killed.”

We need to be careful where we step.

If anyone reading this thinks Donald Trump will not occupy the oval office on January 21, 2021, they just haven’t been paying attention.  One way or another. Watch.

There’s a scene in ‘Goodfellas’ where the young Henry Hill tells his mob bosses that he can’t work for them any more. His parents got his school report card in the mail, and they want him to concentrate on schoolwork.

If the U.S. Postal Service delivers something the bosses don’t like, solving the problem mob-style is simple: make sure the post office doesn’t deliver any more bad news.  Sound familiar?

We’re now living in a country where everything you do is a referendum on Trump. There is no more objective medical advice or science or even “facts”.  Only what Trump says counts.  If you want to wear a face-mask during the pandemic in the hopes of dodging a bullet, you are signaling disapproval of Trump.  God help you over the next four years (and very likely beyond that) after you’ve taken this “stand”.

Remember those chants of “lock her up”, during the 2016 campaign? You thought that was all theater of the absurd, right? Just a wink-wink clown-show for the rubes, right? Nuh-uh.  Locking up his “enemies” is what Trump surely wants to do for real, and he will shortly be free to start in on the project.  Virtually everyone who doesn’t publicly and loudly worship him is fair game.  Maybe you should have thought more about it before putting on that damned mask?!

The Justice Department is now completely under Trump’s thumb, eager to do his bidding. Is that thumb going to point up or down for you?  Depends.  If you’re “loyal”, you can confess to seven felonies, including threatening the lives of a witness and his dog, and still skate. Step one is to have your already absurdly-light sentence reduced, and step two is a presidential commutation of the sentence before you spend a minute in jail.

On the other hand, if you have an attack of scruples and decide to say something that is actually true about Herr Drumpf, you’re going to prison.  Even if you’ve been his closest confidant and conspirator for decades.  And if someone lets you out early for good behavior or because you’re a high risk for Covid-19 while incarcerated, or for whatever reason, well, that doesn’t matter.  Back you go.  Lock him up.

And the poor fool in the penal system who thought he was acting on his own authority and just doing his job when he let you out?  Well, he’ll find out soon enough what that kind of “deep state” disloyalty can do to a career.

It should be obvious to everyone at this point that we’ve elected a straight-up mob boss as leader of the free world, and there is absolutely nothing he won’t do to hold on to this position.

Sowing seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of mail-in votes is just Standard Operating Procedure here.  And if mail-in voting has to be stopped because of all the “fraud”, doesn’t in-person voting also have to be stopped?  You haven’t forgotten those millions of illegal votes that were cast for Hillary in 2016 already, have you?

Shhh! Let’s not give anyone any ideas here.

What exactly do you imagine this guy wouldn’t try?  Declaring martial law?  Starting a war?  Assassination?  And, as we’ve said here before, the truly shocking thing is 60 million Americans think it’s all just great.

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. If you think life will return to “normal” any time soon, here’s my advice: fuggedaboutit!

 

 

 

It’s official. After years of breathless anticipation, John Voight has finally revealed his official assessment of President Donald John Trump. And, guess what? Turns out Trump is the best president since Abraham Lincoln!

Voight, who starred in a good movie 5o years ago, has expressed his admiration for the tiny-handed, revoltingly-fat, extremely stable genius a few times in the past. For example, in a March 2016 Breitbart interview, he said

 

Right on.  I, too, believe it’s Trump’s level of honesty that is his most important and distinguishing characteristic.

Voight now says,  “Trump has made his every move correct”, and “This job is not easy, for he’s battling the left and their absurd words of destruction. Our nation has been built on the solid ground from our forefathers, and there is a moral code of duty that has been passed on from President Lincoln.”

Trump, never one to let flattery influence his thinking on who the most qualified and deserving candidates for various positions might be,  announced the appointment of Voight as a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, serving through 2024.

Of all the various attributes that Trump has in common with Lincoln, I think it’s actually his debating style that most clearly mirrors what Honest Abe was really all about.

On July 26, 2017, President Donald J. Trump woke up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and tweeted,

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you”

It caught everyone by surprise – the generals in question, congress, his own White House staff, and everyone else, especially currently-serving transgender military personnel.

At the time, I wrote that we were now entering uncharted waters, that our current form of governance was something new and in need of a new descriptor, as “democracy” didn’t quite describe it anymore.

I said,

“Please be advised…? Thank you.” That’s it? That’s all it takes now to disrupt the lives of thousands? That’s all it takes to change policy? No bills passed in congress after a spirited debate? Not even an Executive Order? Just 140 characters randomly blasted out to the world?

But even I didn’t think anyone would confuse this egregious example of Trumpian chaos-creation with anything that actually had legal standing. Like everyone else, I figured the other two branches of government would play their assigned roles and remind everyone what was actually necessary to make law. And Trump wouldn’t really mind, since he has no real convictions on the subject and only wants to “win”. It would be just another chance to show his base that he believes as they do and that it’s the congress, media, liberals, political judges, etc. who are standing in their way.

How wrong I was.

Trump’s two Supreme Court appointees, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, joined the other “conservatives” today to rule 5-4 that the tweet is law until some other court says it isn’t. And, of course, if some other court does reject the tweet-law, it will ultimately find its way back to the same crew that ruled on it today.

So now the precedent is set. Trump tweets and we must obey. Can’t wait to find out what’s next.

 

During the run-up to the election, when so many people just didn’t believe they would ever have to say the words “President Trump”, many agonized over Tweety’s comments about the election being rigged, that there was massive voter fraud, that he may not accept the results, and so on. It was clear that his millions of followers were breathlessly awaiting his every Tweet, and eager to show their support for whatever he wanted them to do.

The legitimate fear throughout the land was that when he lost, he would rally the worst of them to violence in the streets. After the shocking election result, some took bitter consolation in thinking that at least this scenario was averted. It was also a given that impeachment proceedings would have immediately begun against President Crooked Hillary Clinton. Benghazi! Emails! So we were also spared that protracted convulsion.

What no one ever dreamed of was that even if he won, Tweety would continue to provoke violence in the streets. The Tweety era is proving to be far worse than we ever thought it would be, and we thought it would be pretty bad.

It’s very hard to understand Trump’s motives and behavior at this point, except if you embrace the notion that he is, in fact, deranged. He seems determined to fight with everyone, including loyalists, allies, and friends. He seems completely disinterested in the job of President. He seems to think his current role is an extension of his TV show, the ultimate purpose of which was to attract as many eyeballs as possible to publicize the brand and increase revenues.

During the campaign, Trump’s posture as provocateur and outsider helped distinguish him from a large field of aspirants. When the nomination was apparently in hand, all talk turned to when Trump would “pivot” from the vulgar flame-thrower to the serious candidate for office – when would he start to show he could be “presidential”? It seemed clear to everyone that his antics were inappropriate once he was the official standard-bearer of the Republican party.

Tweety himself often repeated the promise that he could be very presidential, “more presidential than anybody”, the most presidential except Lincoln.

Although he assured us of this capability repeatedly, he never acted on it during the campaign as he cruised to the nomination. He equated being presidential with being boring, and he isn’t boring.

It turned out he was on to something. The crazy-pants chaos candidate never wavered and actually won the election. It was stunning. Then all the talk turned to what would happen next – it was one thing to be so crazy before becoming the nominee, another to be so crazy before the election, and yet another to be so crazy while president! Something had to change. Obviously.

Many of us took comfort in President Obama’s serene assurances that the power of the Oval Office itself had a way of exerting itself on whoever sat there. Once in the job, any president would immediately be moved by the awesome responsibility and weight of the surroundings, and the reality that every word and gesture would now reverberate throughout the world, perhaps with terrible consequences. Obama said January 20, 2017 would be the day of a wake-up call for Trump.

But just as Trump refused to be presidential as a primary candidate, and just as he refused to be presidential as the nominee, and just as he refused to be presidential as President-elect, he has also refused to be presidential as President.

In fact, it isn’t a question of “refusing” to do it. He simply can’t be presidential. This is because he is and always has been manifestly unsuited to the role and because he can not rise to the challenge. The fact that he cannot “fake it”, which would be easy enough to do by simply surrounding yourself with professionals and keeping your mouth shut, speaks to his mental state.

He is who he is. There is nothing to be done about changing that. Only the 25th Amendment can help us now, and that is the longest of long-shots.

Section 4: Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Too much would have to happen that almost certainly won’t, starting with a Mike Pence mutiny.  I don’t think so.

And it is not completely clear that we can ever go back to “normal” again when Trump is finally gone. The damage done by this man may well be permanent.

The In-House Corporate Counsel here at GOML has issued a strongly worded memo which will shortly be sent to Omid Kordestanti, the Executive Chairman of Twitter, and Jack Dorsey, its C.E.O.

The memo points out that the President of the United States is in clear violation of the Twitter Terms Of Services (T.O.S.) agreement that all users must abide by, and should have his account de-activated immediately, not only for the protection of the innocent people he routinely harasses using the social media site, but also to prevent further de-stabilization of the U.S. political and social landscape, and to improve the diplomatic climate on which world peace depends.

The memo sites the T.O.S agreement, noting particularly the “Abusive Behavior” element of the “Twitter Rules”:

We believe in freedom of expression and in speaking truth to power, but that means little as an underlying philosophy if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, we do not tolerate behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice.

It is a regular and predictable event that when someone is mildly or even inadvertently critical, or is simply perceived to be critical of the President, that person will certainly be attacked and insulted via Twitter. Those attacks are exactly “behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice.”

Before yesterday, the most recent example had been Mitch McConnell, who made the mistake of mentioning that the President was new to the job and may not yet fully appreciate what’s involved in getting laws passed. This is something the Trump camp itself has repeated often as a way to emphasize Trump’s “outsider” bona fides, so McConnell certainly wouldn’t have thought himself to be attacking Trump. But Trump turned on him using Twitter.

But there’s no need to dissect that particular instance. The New York Times has kept a running account of Trump’s Twitter attacks on others.  There are hundreds and hundreds.

There is no question that these attacks are meant to silence criticism, and no question that they do so effectively. After the Alt-Right violence in Virginia a few days ago, Trump’s tepid and inappropriate response resulted in several CEO’s leaving his Management Advisory Counsel, starting with Merck CEO, Kenneth Frazier, followed immediately by the predictable Twitter attack-tirade from Trump.

Frazier was soon followed out by the Intel and Under Armor CEOs, but others stayed with Trump, not wanting to jeopardize their relations with a business-favoring White House, and, more importantly, not wanting to incur the Twitter-wrath of the POTUS. Who would want to be the subject of an attack-tweet from the leader of the free world?

Even Mrs. Stewie Generis, sipping coffee across the table from me as I write these words, is warning me to be careful what I write as there is a possibility that Trump could single us out and we wouldn’t want that!

In explaining why other CEOs and business leaders, e.g. Michael Dell, Jeff Immelt, and Richard Trumka, have issued statements abhorring racism but stayed with Trump and not endorsed Frazier’s actions, Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said,

“I’m sure that corporate leaders feel some reticence to speak out because they’re afraid of being attacked by the president by name.”

Exactly! And exactly what violates the Twitter T.O.S.

So what should you do to support the effort to ban the President from Twitter? Spread the word. Write a letter to the Twitter management team. Carry signs. Get a bumper sticker made. Start an online petition at Change.org. Get involved!

You are hereby granted permission to cite the GOML legal team in your efforts and you should know we’ll be right behind you every step of the way.

Right up until that first attack-tweet hits us – then we’re out. I’m sure you understand.

When your president impulsively blasts out some crazy nonsense via twitter, there is a certain amount of comfort to be taken in knowing that whatever it is can’t and won’t happen because it’s, well, crazy.

But he’s the President. He tweeted it. It’s not nothing. It’s what was going through his tiny orange brain at that instant, even if he contradicts it the next. And even though tweets don’t (yet) have the force of law, or even an Executive Order, they do have an effect. At the very least, they can be a not-so-subtle, direct, and important threat. At worst they may have real consequences, possibly unintended.

Tweety often threatened to arrest and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, mainly through Twitter. None of these threats took the form of any formal policy (though he did sign some Executive Orders, which provide “guidance” on enforcing current regulations), much less law, and it was unclear how much of the bold talk could ever really be implemented or pass legal muster.

But simply tweeting about it bypassed all that messy debate that goes with making law, and all that messy paperwork and interaction with agencies that are supposed to be part of making regulations. The President had tweeted something, and this was good enough for Immigration officers and police, many of whom agreed with the sentiment behind it. From this February  NYT piece:

Gone are the Obama-era rules that required them to focus only on serious criminals. In Southern California, in one of the first major roundups during the Trump administration, officers detained 161 people with a wide range of felony and misdemeanor convictions, and 10 who had no criminal history at all.

“Before, we used to be told, ‘You can’t arrest those people,’ and we’d be disciplined for being insubordinate if we did,” said a 10-year veteran of the agency who took part in the operation. “Now those people are priorities again. And there are a lot of them here.”

Interviews with 17 agents and officials across the country, including in Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona, Washington and California, demonstrated how quickly a new atmosphere in the agency had taken hold. Since they are forbidden to talk to the press, they requested anonymity out of concern for losing their jobs.

The hoped-for effect was achieved just that quickly: illegal immigration apparently declined as many people feared heavy-handed treatment, legal or not.

When Tweety gives a speech to police about treating people they arrest less gently – don’t worry if they get a little bruised as you put them in the squad car – it has an effect. A lot of people wanted to hear something like that. Even if it’s followed by few hours of outrage on MSNBC and a few clarifying interviews with police chiefs assuring us that their policy will remain as respectful of law as always, you can bet there will be a few more bruises now. It’s inevitable.

When Tweety preposterously decreed over Twitter that transgender people will no longer be welcome in any role in the military, generals of all descriptions immediately emerged to explain that nothing will change until due process takes its course. But something will change. A chilling effect immediately takes effect and trans people will be less inclined to begin or continue a military career. Their numbers will be reduced simply by virtue of a tweet or two.

Tweety blames China for the rise of North Korea’s nuclear program. In a tweet. He thus creates a diplomatic problem. China will not ignore Presidential tweeting. They will adjust their behavior one way or another, irrespective of the diplomatic protocols of the past. Even if everyone agrees that such tweeting is not a substitute for the State Department, or treaty obligations, or existing back channel communications, tweeting is not nothing. It has a disruptive and possibly unintended effect.

Tweety is furious that the A.C.A. has not been repealed. He has repeatedly tweet-threatened to withhold payments known as “cost sharing reductions” to the insurance companies. This threat alone can de-stabilize the insurance markets and possibly have devastating effects on millions of people.

Tweety is upset so it’s time to threaten the insurance companies, congress, and those who rely on their health insurance, in some cases to simply breathe.

And in this case, it is something that’s actually within the power of the president to do. It’s not an empty threat. And, as is his custom, Tweety tells us he’ll let us know what he’s going to do later in the week and that we’ll just have to “see”. No need for Congress or the Supreme Court. Just “we’ll see”.

Tweets are not nothing.  A few crazy tweets is all it takes to make a mess.

When I was a little kid, presidents were expected to be role models for our behavior. It seems quaint now, doesn’t it? And we were taught that there were two presidents above all that represented the ideal: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. They were so far above everyone else, that we actually celebrated the birthday of each, and some states actually had a state holiday for each.

That practice later morphed into one day, President’s Day, and the things that made Abe and George so important started to get lost in the mists. But I still remember clearly what exactly made those two special.

It was honesty.

The first and most important thing we learned about Lincoln was that he was “Honest Abe”. For Washington, it was that he “could not tell a lie”. When he was six he had to confess to the crime of using an ax that he had received as a gift to damage his father’s favorite cherry tree. This inability to tell a lie was what qualified him first and foremost to be president and to set the example that we kids must try to follow.

I’m not sure when we stopped requiring the president to set an example. Maybe J.F.K. was the last – the war hero and dashing young king of Camelot. We now know that Kennedy engaged in a lot of the same behavior that only a few years later led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

But that’s my point. The people who knew about J.F.K.’s private life bent over backwards to keep it private, and the press went along with it, even though many knew the truth. It was important to preserve the president’s good-guy image, because the youth of the country required it. You couldn’t expect tens of thousands of them to sign up for the Peace Corps, say, on the suggestion of a philanderer on pain meds, but they would go if a dashing young  patriot asked them to.

It goes without saying that no president ever has used a speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree to bad-mouth other presidents or whine about the lack of personal loyalty of those around him, but that is yet another shard that Tweety has managed to slice off the social contract that used to bind all of us together despite our differences. They’re just kids, for God’s sake. I get that we’re past requiring the president to be a role model, but are there really no conventions left that this president should be expected to honor?

But it’s the lying thing I can’t stop thinking about. The new acceptance of the ideas that lying doesn’t really matter, or that everyone does it, or that it’s not actually lying if you believe it, or that we all know what was really meant, etc. etc. is profoundly disturbing.

Words used to matter, but no more. When Tweety said, “On 9/11, I saw thousands of Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey”, it was a lie. Or at least it was a “lie” using our previously accepted definition of the word, which was “not true”.

But it was true enough for Tweety and therefore true enough. What you have to understand to appreciate the new standard is to know that in this example, “I” meant “Someone”, that “saw” meant “thought”, that “thousands” meant “some”, that  “dancing in the streets” meant “were not unhappy”, and that “New Jersey” meant “somewhere”.

In other words, if Tweety or one of his family members were to say, “I did not chop that cherry tree down”, we all can understand that he probably did, and should be commended for his honesty in getting out in front of the whole controversy.

In any case, it no longer matters.

 

OK, it’s getting a little scarier now.

Your president is bigly honked off about his most recent abject failure, i.e. to deliver on the inane, empty, foolish promise (i.e. “lie”) he blathered on the campaign trail.  “You’re going to have such great healthcare at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it’s going to be so easy”, he confidently told adoring acolytes at an October rally in Florida.  “It begins with immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare”.

Wow.  “Tiny fraction”?   Count me in.  The Dealmaker in Chief will probably pull this off before breakfast on January 21.

By now, I’m sure you’ve all seen Tweety saying that Republicans aren’t going to own this and he’s not going to own it, and we’ll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats will come to “us” asking how to fix it.

Is there any point in reminding him that he’s president of all of us now?  That the “us” vs. “them” dynamic of the campaign is no longer in effect?  That actively wishing for tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance doesn’t make him look “presidential”?  It actually makes him look like a jackass.

According to this FNYT piece, entitled “Trump vows Revenge”, Tweety has the power to do more than just wish for the failure of the A.C.A.  He can actively work towards it by refusing payments to insurers, failing to enforce the individual mandate, and continuing to speak publicly about how he wants the A.C.A. to fail.

Maybe he should take a second to read the fake news.  No, wait.  He’s not going to actually read anything.  Let me try that again: maybe he should take a second to have someone read to him a thought from today’s Washington Post: Why can’t the Senate repeal Obamacare?  Because its policies are actually popular.

But, Tweety prefers the Russian approach, enunciated so well at Stalingrad in the infamous Order 227: Ni shagu nazad.  Not one step back.  It cost them hundreds of thousands of lives there – as any commander who dared make a strategic retreat in order to fight more effectively another day was subjected to a military tribunal (or simply shot).  But, in the end, they prevailed.

Mitch McConnell will now go to Plan C, which we might as well refer to as “Ni shagu nazad”:  to force a vote in the Senate to simply repeal the A.C.A. with no replacement.  It is understood in advance that such a vote will fail, but McConnell wants his troops to be on the record as having voted to repeal or not, so that they will have to explain themselves to a tribunal of their constituents back home, which will be held at the polling place in 2018.

It really wouldn’t be that hard to do for an honest person.  All they’d have to do is say something like, “We Republicans promised you something that we shouldn’t have.  We told you the A.C.A. was a job-killer.  It wasn’t.  We told you there would be “death panels”.  There weren’t.  We told you we had a better idea.  We didn’t.”

We’ll now see how many of them are actually honest.

Or, they could just go home and simply say: “We repealed Obama, but we’re going to keep the care. Win Win”.  That should satisfy the “Lock her up” crowd.

That’s basically the President’s only platform and message. You could sum it all up in two words: “Nyah nyah”.

He doesn’t know what’s in the Republican Health Care bill or care. He doesn’t know much of anything except “I won!”.

He thinks the presidency has two purposes only:

1. to punish those that dare to defy or criticize him in any way. He takes the “bully” part of “bully pulpit” literally, and
2. to enrich himself. No wonder he admires Putin so much.

At this point, the blame is squarely on FoxNews and the Republicans in Congress who keep pretending this is all normal, and in any way good for our country.

They have no reason not to push back now. FoxNews is in a ratings decline, now trailing CNN and MSNBC, and the congressman’s fear of losing to the riled up voters of Trump’s “base” should be diminished as even the low-information voters are tiring of Tweetin’ Donny’s antics.

It can’t go on this way.

We’re only five months into Trump’s Make America Great Again project and the damage is enormous. It’s far greater than just what has resulted already from Trump’s attacks on our environment, our educational system, our health care system, our judicial system, our security services, our legislative processes, our independent media, and a wide range of individual citizens who have been reproached, vilified, and ridiculed.

It’s our place in the world that has suffered most.

Our allies don’t trust us. Our treaty commitments are up for “re-negotiation”. The “soft power” we have exercised worldwide through the example of our institutions, political culture, educational opportunities, and our economic and philanthropic outreach is diminished.

This WaPo piece describes the precipitous decline of our status in Western Europe and our tremendous surge of esteem in Russia. It offers some explanations, including,

What is surprising, said Frank G. Wisner, a former diplomat who served under Democrats and Republicans, is the degree to which Trump has scorned principles the United States has not only long espoused but also helped to define in the previous century. These include democratic governance, free markets, collective security, human rights and the rule of law — commitments that together, Wisner said, delineate the liberal international order.

This Pew Research Center piece describes a poll of 37 nations, summing it up by saying, “Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe, and ratings for the U.S. have declined steeply in many nations.”

There is a  ton of information and detail in the Pew study – well worth a look. Here are a couple of highlights:

The image, esteem, and power of the U.S. has been enormously diminished in just a few months, but it’s Trump himself that takes the biggest hit:

A median 22 percent are confident that Trump will do the right thing in global affairs, down from 64 percent who had confidence in Obama.

The Failing New York Times rated Trump’s first 100 days as the “Worst On Record”, but that’s the sort of fake news that explains why they’re failing.

Trump’s view of his own success is, of course, entirely different. In that “cabinet meeting” he held recently, where the agenda consisted of each cabinet member in turn describing how unbelievably great Trump is, he said,

“There has never been a president, with few exceptions, who has passed more legislation, done more things.”

Way to go, man-baby. And thanks for nothing.

No, not that one.  A new “War Between the States” has been brewing for a long time and it’s heating up.

Your President was calling for “unity” at the congressional picnic the other day. He was referring to the baseball field shootings that seriously wounded Representative Steve Scalise, and the many expressions of bi-partisan feeling that followed. The message was certainly appropriate and much needed, particularly coming from this president, who seems to enjoy fighting with everybody more than just about anything else. Except maybe eating. (Yes, I know fat-shaming is a no-no, but I’m making an exception here. OK?)

So diplomatic. So presidential. So hypocritical.

The man who so solemnly called for much-needed unity had just come from taunting Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (on Twitter, of course), for losing the special election in Georgia. Not that she was running for anything in Georgia, but that doesn’t matter. The election had been thought of as a referendum on Trump’s popularity, but somehow turned out to be a referendum on Pelosi. At least it did in the estimation of FoxNews and, therefore, the man-baby.

She lost. So, of course, a good presidential twitter-taunting was in order as it always is for any loser. He could have simply praised and congratulated the winner, Karen Handel, but apparently that wouldn’t have been very satisfying.  Or, apparently, very unifying.

But zinging Pelosi wasn’t enough. He had to include a dig against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who will now be forever known as “Cryin’ Chuck”.

Anyway, none of this is really new – we’re all now inured to Trump’s bullying and bellicosity. Amazing, but it’s true. We’re just worn down by it all and no one in Congress or on Foxnews will admit it’s a bad thing. They’re all abetting it and must share the blame for allowing it all to become “normal”.

Which brings me the the War Between the States. Texas vs. California, that is.

This article reports that California has now declared that it will not support travel to Texas. It says,

Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed controversial legislation into law that allows child welfare providers — including faith-based adoption agencies — to refuse adoptions to hopeful parents based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

In response, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Thursday that his state will prohibit its employees from traveling to Texas because Texas has enacted laws that, he said, discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals and their families.

Texas, home to the nation’s second-largest economy, joins California’s growing list of states — Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota were added at the same time — to which state-sponsored travel has been curbed because of similar legislation.

The Blue vs. The Gray was bad, but we can at least understand why it happened. The Blue vs. The Red is just baffling.

Is this how we want to live? Who does it help? Can you imagine this happening during the administration of any other president?

So today the man-baby came clean about not having any recordings of his conversations with James Comey.  That in itself could be newsworthy, as Trump virtually never “confesses” to anything.

Actually, he didn’t “confess” this time either, but rather indicated that it was all a bluff to influence Comey’s testimony before congress – meant to keep him “honest” – and he bragged about how well it worked.

Hang on a second while my head stops spinning. There, OK. Let’s see if I have this right.

1. The President of the United States fired the Director of the F.B.I., James Comey, and then explained on national television that he did so because he was unhappy with the investigation of Russian meddling in the election, and wanted to somehow end it. He thereby confessed to committing Obstruction of Justice.
2. The President of the United States then tweeted a veiled threat about having recordings of his discussions with Comey before Comey was to testify before Congress.
3.  The President of the United States is now bragging about not actually having any such recordings after all, but being successful in his attempt to influence Comey’s testimony (by “keeping him honest”), thereby committing Obstruction of Justice. Again.

The President of the United States appears to be a bit clueless about some of the basics of what is and is not appropriate for him to say. Actually, he appears to be a complete jackass.

As always, though, the people who need to understand this don’t care and aren’t listening.

 

Trump’s proposed budget includes steep cuts for many programs designed to help low-income Americans, the homeless, and others who need shelter. It keeps one program, though, and of course that program benefits Trump personally.

It’s a housing subsidy that pays landlords directly, and Trump has a 4% stake in a Brooklyn building that’s part of the largest subsidized housing development in the country. According to his recent financial disclosures, this position earned him $5 million between January 1, 2016 and April 15, 2017.

It doesn’t matter whether Trump is still personally involved with this investment in any way or whether he personally saw to it the subsidy wouldn’t be cut, though I would imagine that both are true given his long track record. What matters is that this is the very definition of “the appearance of a conflict of interest”, and the reason it is so important that elected officials avoid it by divesting such holdings. Except Trump, who has divested nothing.

Starrett City, Brooklyn

I simply do not understand why this one crazy bully is immune from standards that everyone in this country has been held to for years, irrespective of political affiliation.

Some prescient fretting about Trump’s “divestment” strategy in this WaPo piece from just before inauguration.

Another potential boost for Trump’s revenue could come if HUD reverses a 2007 decision in which the agency blocked owners from selling the property as Brooklyn’s real estate market boomed.

Trump clashed at the time with Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other opponents of the sale, who accused owners of seeking to make money at the expense of poor tenants. “You can’t stop free enterprise,” Trump told the New York Daily News. “This is not Communist China.”

It’s the weekend and Trump just woke up. You know what that means, kids – right? It’s crazy-tweet time!

So at about 7:00 A.M. today, the man-baby started tweeting about accomplishing all those fantastic accomplishments he’s already accomplished – more than anyone else ever has. It’s historic! And it’s all happened “despite the distraction of the witch hunt.”

And, best of all, his popularity is now higher than Obama’s!

Except, of course, that it isn’t true.   After the same amount of time as President, on June 18th 2009, President Obama had an average approval rating of 59.8. This is 9.8% higher than Trump’s Rasmussen approval, and 19.8% higher than Trump’s overall average approval rating this week.

But the story here isn’t Trump’s crazy-tweets or his tenuous connection to the world of facts, much less “truth”. No one takes seriously anything the President of the United States says or tweets anymore. Everyone has already accepted that and moved on.

The real story here is that our President is obsessed with his poll numbers, and with Barack Obama, to the point where doing the actual work of governing has been pushed aside. There’s just no time for it. Making up stuff to brag about and watching TV to see how you’re doing is a full-time job.

Stewie invited me to add my comments today, so here goes.

Thoughts about the Shakespeare in the Park controversy:

Donald Trump’s behavior is disrespectful, vicious and mean spirited. He is delighted to sink to the lowest level, demeaning former presidents, former candidates for president, government officials and helpless private citizens.

He selects his victims randomly for ugly attacks that inflame and infuriate. The bar for civilized behavior no longer includes “civilized” and is so low that even reasonable, ethical people jump into the fray and begin mimicking his despicable behavior. He has crossed the line so often that he has taken the rest of us firmly with him.

When he dismembered our government, did he take our common sense and respect for others away too? I think so.

A case in point is Shakespeare in the Park’s production of Julius Caesar. Delta Airlines and Bank of America have withdrawn their sponsorship because the current presentation “depicts the assassination of a Trump-like Roman ruler.”

If this is a metaphor for our times, and I believe it is, portraying Julius Ceasar as Donald Trump is unnecessary. I haven’t seen the production, but perceptions can often be more powerful than reality.   Creation of a violent image of a sitting President of the United States being assassinated is never appropriate. There are arguments on both sides of the question, “Does art inspire behavior?”, but the question I have is whether our society wants to own this image and whether it will be too late to leave all this behind A.T. (After Trump).

Everyone knows that Trump is a “ratings machine”, and he is very proud of that. Whatever show he appears on gets great ratings, and whatever event he attends becomes the center of news coverage, obscuring any other that might be happening at the same time, even a Presidential Primary debate.

It’s always struck me that he is discounting the “rubber-necking” effect. Have you ever been in a traffic jam on an Interstate, wondering what’s going on and speculating that there must an accident up ahead, only to find out that there was indeed an accident, but on the other side of the road that shouldn’t have impacted you at all? Everyone on your side slowed down to gawk. or rubber-neck, as they drove by, creating an annoying delay.

Well, I often tune in to see Trump as well, just to see what kind of accident he’ll cause, or to get my adrenaline going if I’m feeling lethargic. I’m contributing to his great ratings, but not in the way he thinks.  I’m just rubber-necking.

This Quinnipiac Poll, done on May 10, has a lot of interesting information about the man-baby’s approval ratings, for example:

• 61 – 33 percent that he is not honest, compared to 58 – 37 percent April 19;
• 56 – 41 percent that he does not have good leadership skills, little change;
• 59 – 38 percent that he does not care about average Americans, compared to 57 – 42 percent April 19;
• 66 – 29 percent that he is not level-headed, compared to 63 – 33 percent last month;
• 62 – 35 percent that he is a strong person, little change;
• 56 – 41 percent that he is intelligent, compared to 58 – 38 percent;
• 64 – 32 percent that he does not share their values, compared to 61 – 35 percent.

From the text:

“There is no way to spin or sugarcoat these sagging numbers,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

“The erosion of white men, white voters without college degrees and independent voters, the declaration by voters that President Donald Trump’s first 100 days were mainly a failure and deepening concerns about Trump’s honesty, intelligence and level headedness are red flags that the administration simply can’t brush away,” Malloy added.

But of all the information in the poll, my favorite is the answers to the question, “What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump?”

Before you check the result below, let’s play a quick game of “Family Feud”. Think about how you would respond to this question. How does your guess compare to the most popular ones in the survey?

Remember that one? At the end of March, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (a.k.a. Mrs. Mitch McConnell), assured us that the Trump administration would be unveiling its $1 Trillion dollar infrastructure plan in 2017.

No details, though.

Welp, the Trump team has come up with its proposed budget, and guess what? There are $200 Billion in infrastructure cuts in it. Huh?

Yeah, it’s shocking. Or it would be if you’re still capable of being shocked by anything these idiots do. Given Trump’s limited attention span and minimal grasp of public policy, I think we can assume the budget reflects Steve Bannon’s wish list  as much as anything else.

This short video clip is kind of funny I think. Trump actually seems to be reading about his priorities for the first time when explaining them to some governors in February. He seems genuinely surprised by what’s written down for him. “Can you imagine that”, he marvels when reading about our $20 trillion debt.

In this budget, there are deep cuts for Medicaid and anti-poverty efforts, huge cuts for science and medical research, the complete elimination of 66 programs, a historic reduction in federal employees, a huge increase in military spending, and so on.

Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and top economic adviser to President Obama, says the whole thing is built on an egregious accounting error.

Anyway, about that infrastructure program. Turns out the plan is for states and municipalities to sell off their “assets” – you know, bridges, airports, stuff like that –  to “unlock” their value.  Trump (or someone who has his ear) wants to spend $200 billion over 10 years to “incentivize” private, state and local spending on infrastructure. They sell their assets to private investors and the government pays them a bonus for doing it! Chao explains it this way: “You take the proceeds from the airport, from the sale of a government asset, and put it into financing infrastructure”.

Get it? Easy peasy.

They’ve figured out that privatizing public property turns out to create a better world.   Sell the airports to the Russians. The ports to the Chinese. The roads to the Kochs. What could go wrong?

Can’t wait to find out what kind of problems Trump will be causing for us and for himself on his first trip abroad. He’ll be visiting Saudi Arabia and Israel, and, of course, has put forward many nonsensical opinions about both in the past.

He is supposed to be giving an “inspirational” speech to the Saudis about moderate Islam. Last year, his Facebook page said, “Saudi Arabia wants women as slaves and to kill gays.”  And during a presidential debate, Trump said Saudis were “people that push gays off buildings” and “kill women and treat women horribly.”

As we have often been told in recent months, Trump is not “ideological”, but “transactional”. This is supposed to be a good thing for us because it frees him from the constraints of protocol and history, and allows him to exercise his purported greatest strength, that of master negotiator.  He’s a businessman, you see, not a politician. What a crock!

In fact , this “transactional” nonsense is just another way to say he has no principles, doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about from minute to minute, and certainly can’t be held to any past statements because he didn’t really mean them the way you thought and anyway they were just opening gambits in some fantastic negotiation he was conducting on our behalf.

Trump reverses course and contradicts himself so often that he ultimately takes all sides of every question. The beauty of this approach is that you can brag that you were “right” all along when whatever happens happens. It also helps him to speak in a weird kind of gibberish, never using complete sentences, and ignoring the usual subject-and-verb conventions of English language communication. He can rightly say that everyone misunderstood what he was really saying,  got it all wrong, and are criticizing him for political reasons and because they’re all losers.

Part of being “transactional” is to criticize every action and statement of your perceived enemies, the list of whom becomes longer every day. During the Obama administration, there was basically nothing that happened, big or small, that Trump didn’t find fault with. The simple explanation for this, of course, is that his “views” are just the parroting back of whatever he sees on FoxNews.

Anyway, when Obama went to Saudi Arabia in 2015 to attend the funeral of Saudi King Abdullah , Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf. Many people applauded her for this, including both yours truly, Stewie Generis, and my cousin Screwie. There are limits to how far the First Family of the Free World should have to go to accept customs that are in opposition to our own values, and maybe we should be “leading” in this area by setting an example.

Of course,  citizen Trump was outraged by the First Lady’s “insult”. He was worried about creating enemies, a subject about which he is truly an expert. He tweeted,

Can’t wait to see Melania and Ivanka in head-scarves.

 

We mentioned it as kind of a throwaway at the end of this post the other day, but it actually merits a lot more attention: all of Trump’s campaign promises have been deleted from his website, where they had been prominently featured since before the election.

The website still invites you to buy merchandise and sign up to join his “movement”, but it’s no longer clear exactly what that movement stands for. Other than firing people, of course.

Since nothing is ever really deleted from the internet, his nutty campaign promises can still be found elsewhere, in archives, mirrors and the like. Although the man-baby would like us to forget all about it, we still have what we need to remember. Not that anyone was really going to hold him to any of this nonsense to begin with.

He deleted the call for a ban on Muslims entering the country “until we figure out what the Hell is going on”. That’s been a mainstay of the “movement” since 2015.

He deleted the promise that a southern border wall would be built and that Mexico would pay for it. That one was huge.

His boasting about his “very good” economic speech is gone.

His campaign speech to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare is gone. That’s the one where he said,  “No one even read the 2,700-page bill”, and promised to convene a special session of congress to get it done:

When we win on November 8^th, and elect a Republican Congress, we will be able to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare. I will ask Congress to convene a special session.

“Donald J. Trump’s New Deal For Black America” is also gone. That’s the one that had a “10-point plan for urban renewal”, including:

3. Equal Justice Under the Law. We will apply the law fairly, equally and without prejudice. There will be only one set of rules – not a two-tiered system of justice. Equal justice also means the same rules for Wall Street.

The “America First Energy Plan” is gone. That’s the one where he promises,

“We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”

The “Drain the swamp” plan is gone. That’s where he promised to propose a Constitutional Amendment to set up term limits on members of Congress.

It goes on and on. You can read more about it here.

The thing that stays on the site, though, is the opportunity to contribute to the “movement” because “together, we are re-building our nation”.

And if you want to hear more about the inspiring story of the people that made the “Make America Great Again” hats, they’ve got you covered.

I’m thinking maybe it’s time for a GOML “movement” hat, as well, but I’m having trouble figuring out the best slogan. Right now, I’m leaning towards this one:

It’s been said that there are three captions that you could apply to any cartoon in the New Yorker that would make it funny in cases where you don’t get the original joke. Maybe one of them would make a good hat for our new GOML “movement”:

Do you have another idea? Let’s hear it.

As always.

There is never a case where someone gives an account of a meeting or discussion with Trump that reflects negatively on him that Trump doesn’t give a completely opposite account of it. Essentially, he constantly is calling everyone else a liar. And even if you know he always does it, it still puts you in the position of playing, “Who you gonna believe: it’s he said, she said”. The actual truth is no longer clear. It’s now a question of belief.

One week after Trump became president,  he summoned James Comey to a private dinner with him. After some small talk, Trump asked Comey if he would “pledge his loyalty to him”.  Wow. Is this something any other president, even Nixon, would ever do? A führer, maybe, but not a president. The F.B.I., as everyone knows, is supposed to be independent and fair, and take pride in that. In fact, if anyone else was asking, you’d be tempted to regard it as a trick question, meant to test your integrity.

According to the NYT, Comey “declined to make that pledge. Instead, Mr. Comey has recounted to others that he told Mr. Trump that he would always be honest with him, but that he was not “reliable” in the conventional political sense.” They went back and forth on this point with Trump finally extracting a pledge of “honest loyalty”.

Trump, as always, has a different account of the dinner. Interviewed on NBC yesterday, he  said Comey requested the dinner and the subject of loyalty never came up. Comey’s apparently a liar. The NYT article goes on,

Comey described details of his refusal to pledge his loyalty to Mr. Trump to several people close to him on the condition that they not discuss it publicly while he was F.B.I. director. But now that Mr. Comey has been fired, they felt free to discuss it on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Comey’s associates said that the new president requested the dinner he described, and said that he was wary about attending because he did not want to appear too chummy with Mr. Trump, especially amid the Russia investigation. But Mr. Comey went because he did not believe he could turn down a meeting with the new president.

Who you gonna believe?

Anyway, none of it matters. With Trump, it never does. Consider:

1. By next week it will all be forgotten, replaced in the “news” by stories about the selection of the new F.B.I. director, who, by the way, will certainly be loyal to Trump. Or by some other craziness, maybe the new investigation into voter fraud, led by a proponent of Voter ID laws. Or more likely by something we just can’t see coming right now. Your assignment: come back here in a week and add a comment about what it turned out to be!

2. Trump’s supporters out there in Trumpland DO NOT CARE. Last night, amidst all the Comey coverage, tons of Trump voters in state after state were interviewed about Comey and the Russia investigation. They asked the question, “If it turns out that the President colluded with the Russians during the campaign, does it change your view of him?” Guess what they all answered? Every one of them.

These are the people that Republican Congressmen have to please in order to keep their jobs, and if these people don’t care, Congress doesn’t care. If Congress doesn’t care, the “media” is howling in the hurricane, and it’s all further evidence that they are the enemy of the American people.

 

It’s hard to know how to describe Trump’s behavior these days. Is he in a defensive crouch? Or is he Thor,  atop a mountain, laughing and hurling thunderbolts down on his enemies?

A couple of months ago, we were all outraged when reporters from the New York Times, CNN, and others were excluded from a White House press briefing. It came on the heels of one of the man-baby’s regular episodes of “lashing out”, in that case against his “unfair” treatment in the media.

At the time, Dean Baquet, executive editor at the NYT,  said that “nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties.” The Wall Street Journal was allowed in, but said they hadn’t known about the exclusions, and “had we known at the time, we would not have participated, and we will not participate in such closed briefings in the future.”

In other words, Trump crossed a line that no other president had ever come near.  And, of course, he was unrepentant, shrugged it all off, and ignored the howls from critics, who, after all, he had already identified as the enemy of the American people.

The precedent was set, and yesterday he upped the ante. It was unfortunate timing, coming on the heels of the shocking firing of F.B.I. director James Comey, but Trump entertained Russian officials at the white House, including Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to the United States.

Not wanting to answer any potentially embarrassing questions, Trump decided to exclude all American media, even FoxNews, and allow only the Russian media in to record the event. To repeat: the event was covered by the Russian state-controlled media, while the  independent American media was shut out.

TASS photograph

I’m pretty sure there is now nothing Trump could do that would cause his supporters to demand that he follow any of the conventions of the presidency, or of a democracy for that matter.

It’s as if the country is now divided not between Republicans and Democrats, or Liberals and Conservatives, but between two opposing tribes who are locked in an all-out battle for supremacy. On the one hand, you have people who believe in the rule of law, the tripartite system of checks and balances, a free press, minority rights, and a government working for the benefit of all its citizens.

On the other, you have people who don’t care about any of that, or about conflicts of interest, or officials using their power for self-enrichment, or to benefit the few at the expense of the many. They only want to punish the other side, even if it means their own lives will be diminished as their “leaders”  enjoy the spoils. Every abandonment of normal behavior or slap in the face to a perceived enemy is fully justified and a triumph.

The two sides can no longer agree on facts, or even history.

Until very recently, just months ago in fact, Americans understood their enemy to be the totalitarian or authoritarian governments around the world, with the Russians at the head of the line, and were united in our struggle to protect the “American Way”.  But now, overnight, our government has aligned with the Russians and has identified the enemy as the American system itself, and those who want to protect it.

And the truly befuddling thing about it is that half the American people seem to be cheering it.

In related news, this week all of  Trump’s campaign statements have quietly been removed from his web site. You can still buy his merch there, though.

There is not a day that passes now without some news of the Trump administration undoing something that was done during the Obama administration. It might be a big, important thing like consumer protections in the financial industry or oil pipeline construction, or it might be a smaller thing that, on the surface, seemed like a good idea that would benefit all of us and that no one could really object to, like the designation of a National Monument.

But it is now clear that the principal objective of the current administration is to remove any evidence or traces that Barack Obama was ever the President of the United States. Rather than moving forward, Trump is focused on moving backward eight years.

Yesterday, it was the “rollback” of Michelle Obama’s healthy lunch initiative, which was aimed at reducing childhood obesity by implementing better standards for school lunches.  The “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act” was signed into law by President Obama in 2010.

Huge victory over the forces of evil, apparently, as Sonny Perdue, our Secretary of Agriculture, vowed to “Make School Meals Great Again.” Seriously. That’s what he said.  And, “schools will no longer have to try so hard to cut the salt in students’ meals or work in whole grains and non-fat milk.”

Margo Woota, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said, “It’s discouraging that just days into his tenure, one of the first things that Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue will do is to roll back progress on the quality of the meals served to America’s children.”

I have a Hungarian friend who moved to Spain several years ago because the “conservative” government in Hungary was driving him crazy. He explained that even though they controlled everything in Hungary and have everything they want, they still had to do some small but awful thing virtually every day just to antagonize their opponents on the left and rub their noses in it. It might be something like reducing support for the arts, making some rule that irritated bicyclists, or simply insulting some public figure for no real reason.

He said he thought it was just to keep everyone on the left, or, as he put it, anyone with a little heart, on the defensive and in a state of anxiety and upset. He said he thought Trump was behaving similarly because if things were just quiet and normal for a while, there might be a breather in which people would wake up and actually get together and impeach the guy. His theory was that as long as everybody was running around madly reacting to daily outrages, no organized effort to hold Trump accountable for ethics breaches or other impeachable offenses could really get rolling.

I don’t know if Trump can really be that devious. He just seems like an impulsive, ignorant, unprincipled man-baby to me. It would be far simpler to just be a good leader, to be the President of everyone including his enemies, as a way to avoid problems, even if it was nothing more than a cynical tactic to raise his approval rating. It would be easier just to do the right thing once in a while, rather than to pounce on every opportunity to punish your detractors.

But it just isn’t going to be that way, and with the likes of Perdue and Betsy DeVos making policy for our kids, it seems like the children are destined to be fat and dumb, while the corporate elite will be happy.

 

 

 

I read an article in the L.A. Times the other day about how Trump voters in Pueblo County, Colorado, are loving Trump’s first 100 days and all the accomplishments he has accomplished, because he accomplishes so much every day.

The point of the article was that Trump won there, although it has been a Democratic “stronghold” in the past, and that those who voted for him have no regerts. Er, I mean, no regrets.

A lot of it was the paper asking, “Well, what about how Trump said such-and-such during the campaign and is now saying the opposite?”, and the people answering, “What about it?”

In other words, there is nothing Trump can say or do that’s going to change anyone’s mind here.

Proud Trump supporter

One sentence fairly early in the piece pops out at me as the actual explanation for the whole Trump phenomenon:

In short, if all those people in Washington and places like Hollywood and New York are so riled up, Trump supporters suggest, that means he must be doing something right.

It’s just hard to know what to say in response. These people are saying they’d rather have no health care than see someone who is actually qualified in the White House if that person is a “liberal”. They’d rather have dirty air and water than listen to one more argument about someone in North Carolina who isn’t happy with the bathroom they’ve been using. They’d rather embrace anti-democratic “strongmen” around the world and alienate our historic allies than be “pushed around” and condescended to anymore.

One person says,  “What happened to the eight years Obama was in office? Promise, promise, promise, and the only change under Obama was that things got worse.” Someone else talks about how, since Trump’s election, business confidence has increased and the stock market has “soared”.

There is really no point in showing them anything like this. They just don’t care:

In other words, FoxNews is doing very well in Pueblo County.

I used to try to minimize the Fox effect in my own mind by thinking, “You can fool 47% of the people all the time and that’s a great business model – but it’s not enough to win an election”.

How wrong I was.

I used to think, OK, you’re tired of political correctness like a lot of people are, but how can you be taken in by this dishonest, unprincipled con-man?  It turns out that even Trump voters don’t believe a word he says, but they love to hear him say it.

Where is it all leading? How will it end? One thing is becoming clear to me: whatever disaster our toxic President Crazy-pants brings down on us, the people of Pueblo County and many other places in Trump Nation will regard it as a move in the right direction and a great accomplishment.

 

Which of these photos says “President” to you, and which says “Pig”?

I’ve been doing my best to ignore Trump lately, but it’s not easy to do.

The Super Bowl champion N.E. Patriots had their White House visit and photo-op this week. It turned out to be the same day as their former Tight End, convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez, killed himself in jail. The simple juxtaposition of those two events should have been enough to make some sort of point about “Winners” and “Losers” sufficient to support the perpetually aggrieved man-baby on his favorite subject, winning. But it wasn’t.

When you’re a pig, you must wallow in mud no matter what the occasion.

The Failing New York Times published the team photo along with the previous one from the last Patriots victory visit two years ago (Winning!), which seemed to show that more Patriots visited when Obama was president than now. But it wasn’t true – the Trump version had the non-football staff seated on the lawn, while the Obama version had them joining the players on the stairs, so in fact there was no real “story” here.

OK, maybe someone needs to straighten that out, especially in the Twitter era, because you wouldn’t want fake news to be created out of nothing, would you? But that person should not be the President of the United States. It just shouldn’t. Leave it to the surrogates – it’s right up Kellyanne Conway’s alley, so let her do it. But no.

Failing @nytimes, which has been calling me wrong for two years, just got caught in a big lie concerning New England Patriots visit to W.H.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2017

Today’s Twitter feed has this, which you may file under the heading “Sad Pig”:

No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2017

I particularly liked the accomplishment of misplacing a “very powerful” armada on its way to the Korean peninsula. The Chinese laughed about it. The South Koreans didn’t think it was funny at all.

But his greatest accomplishment of all is just wearing everyone else down to the point of surrender. Resistance is futile.

It took a while, but “Obama tapped my wires” is gone! Just gone. It had a little bit more staying power than the previous record-holder, “Pussy-Grabbing”, but, in the end, outrageous as it was, the man-baby just ground everyone else down by repeating and extending the lies, moving the goalposts, claiming victory, deflecting, bullying, ignoring evidence, and attacking anyone who tried to shed any light on it. Winning!

And let’s not forget the total success of the whole “tapping” thing in the first place – getting Jeff Sessions lying to congress about meetings with Russians off the news. Hard to even remember that one. Not that anyone really cares about the Russians running our government – that one’s apparently gone as well.

And now we have that very same Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States, saying he doesn’t think a judge on an island in the pacific should over-rule Trump. Yup, the Attorney General thinks our court system and the separation of powers is pretty bogus.

But that “Mexican Judge” won’t ultimately get in the way of Trump’s Muslim Ban, because Our Man on the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, will make it right.

Some of the man-baby’s as yet-unaccomplished accomplishments:

But these things will be “accomplished” very soon. In fact any one of them could be “accomplished” today, simply by having the man-baby tweet that it is “accomplished”. Who’s going to refute it? A congressional committee? The Attorney General? The Supreme Court?

When pigs fly.

So the man-baby’s Muslim travel ban 2.0 has once again been blocked by a federal judge, this time in Hawaii. US District Court Judge Derrick Watson pointed out that the intent of the ban is clear from the statements Trump made as a candidate, i.e. to stop all Muslims from coming into the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Trump is furious and lashed out, as is his wont. In a speech in Nashville yesterday, he (again) vowed he’ll go to the Supreme Court, insisted the courts are political, claimed Our Country is unsafe, yadda yadda yadda.

For good measure, he whipped up the crowd for some lusty and prolonged chants of that old favorite, “Lock Her Up”.

Here’s the thing: Do we really want a president who is routinely furious when something doesn’t go the way he’d like? Do we  want a president who is always lashing out? Don’t we want a president who is calm at all times and keeps his angrier thoughts to himself?

In short, Mr. President, it would be a blessed relief to all of us, and perhaps do you some good as well, if, for at least one day, you would just calm down and shut up.

The question: How can we better understand Trump’s dealings with Russia?

Every Republican presidential nominee for the last nine elections released his tax returns. Before that, Gerald Ford (1976) released a summary showing total income and tax paid, though not the detailed return.

Nixon (1972) did not release his returns at first, but released a lot of information, including the previous four years of tax returns, in  December of 1973, after the I.R.S. began an audit based on allegations of his trying to game the tax code with questionable charity donations, according to a paper prepared for the United States Capitol Historical Society

Nixon tried to quiet criticism by asking that a congressional committee examine the returns as well. Unfortunately, that committee found that Nixon owed $476,431 in unpaid taxes and accrued interest, which in today’s dollars is over two million.

Note that Nixon released his returns while under audit. Trump’s favorite excuse for not releasing his returns was that they were under audit, which as has been pointed out over and over, is a completely made-up smoke screen.

Trump repeatedly promised during the campaign to eventually release his returns. Some quotes from the campaign trail:

February 25, 2015: “I would release tax returns….I would certainly show tax returns if it was necessary….I have no objection to certainly showing tax returns.”

January 24, 2016: “We’re working on that now. I have very big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful, and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time….We’re working on it right now, and at the appropriate time you’ll be very satisfied.”

February 25, 2016: “I will absolutely give my return, but I’m being audited now for two or three years, so I can’t do it until the audit is finished, obviously.”

May 10, 2016: “I’ll release. Hopefully before the election I’ll release.”

September 26, 2016: “I don’t mind releasing—I’m under a routine audit. And it’ll be released….As soon as the audit’s finished, it will be released.”

October 9, 2016: “As soon as my routine audit is finished, I’ll release my returns. I’ll be very proud to. They’re actually quite great.”

Here’s a more complete list, pre-dating the campaign, which includes a promise to release his returns when Obama releases his long form birth certificate.

OK, so Trump is a liar. Big whoop. Tell us something we didn’t already know.

But what exactly is in those tax returns that makes the man-baby hang onto them like grim death? Wouldn’t it be easier to resolve all the Russia questions just by releasing them? Is it so awful that he’d rather start a democracy-destabilizing Twitter war over made up wire-tapping accusations before showing them?

There are several things that Trump really doesn’t want you to know, that would be revealed in his taxes.

One of the less consequential is that we’d see how really uncharitable he has been, especially compared to other national figures, for example Barack Obama, who in 2009 gave over 30% of his income away, including the entire $1.4 million Nobel Prize.

But we kind of already knew Trump was not a generous or compassionate person. Small potatoes.

Much more interesting would be the revelation that he doesn’t actually own much property at all, just partial stakes in three buildings, and he has 500 million in debt obligations on those. Everyone would finally see that he isn’t what he claims to be in this area.

But the big revelation would be where his money actually comes from, and the huge scam he’s been running for years. Remember the scam in  “The Producers”? You sell a 50% stake in a show you knew was going to fail to as many people as you can. You pocket the money and hope the show fails right away. Then you tell the investors, “Aw, tough luck, partner – we’ll get ’em next time.”

Well that’s what Trump did with the banks during his casino-failure heyday. He was Max Bialystock times a million. When they finally wised up and stopped lending him money in the 1990’s, he turned to Russia and China, and now is deep in debt to them. Just how much is what we might learn from his tax returns.

Maybe someone in the “deep state” will help us out here. It’s our best chance at getting rid of this toxic clown. Where is Wikileaks when you really need them?

For disagreeing with the tiny-handed man-baby on matters of etiquette.

Well, OK, not yet.

Or maybe she’ll quit first. Stay tuned.

No.  You inherited a fortune. You’re creating a mess.

Anyone who watched Trump’s “press conference” yesterday should be able to see now that the man is unhinged and almost surely ill. When I say “anyone”, I mean anyone who isn’t in some FoxNews-induced trance.

There is no question you can ask him that will be answered directly. Instead, the response will always be about his own greatness, the hugeness of his victories, the failings of his critics, or the conspiracies aligned against him. No-one who disagrees with him does so in good faith – all are lying, crooked, failing, losers, sad, fake, and so on.

Ask him what explains the rise in antisemitic incidents since the election, and he’ll answer that he’s the least antisemitic person anyone will ever meet and also the least racist. That is, if you can tease out an “answer” from the incoherent word salad he serves up. OK, we believe you – now answer the question if you would.

I can’t think of a single thing he’s ever said that wasn’t an exaggeration or distortion of the actual facts. And if you call him on one, he will insist he was right or tell you that you misunderstood, or, if absolutely necessary, say the words came from someone else. In this last resort,  his favorite locutions are some form of “A lot of people are saying…” or “This is what I’ve been told…”, etc.

In short, there is no use challenging him. You will never get a satisfactory answer and, if your words or ideas gain enough traction with others, you will be personally attacked, possibly sued, and made a sworn enemy of the lunatic fringe. Who needs it?

Of all the crazy shit he blathered about yesterday, the thing I find the most insulting is the idea that he inherited a mess. The Obama presidency, in addition to being the most ethical and scandal-free we’ve had in decades, made tremendous progress cleaning up a real inherited mess. Do you even remember the financial crisis of 2008?

Here are a few facts about the nature of the “mess” Trump has inherited.

One of the things Trump bragged about in the presser was how well the stock market is doing since he was elected. Obama knew better than to brag about it because it could easily come back to bite you if you did, though he really did have something to brag about. But Trump’s bragging is especially funny if you remember that during the campaign he said stock prices were artificially high due to incompetent and biased Federal Reserve policy. He said Janet Yellen was “doing political things” by keeping interest rates low.

But what bothers most people, I think, is that we’re starting to realize there will be no actual governing over the next four years, only “campaigning”, by which I mean Trump ceaselessly proclaiming his greatness, denigrating others, and making up “facts” along the way.

The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017

 

Also, buy Ivanka’s stuff. It’s great, too!

Google it.

The man-baby is always lashing out. If you google it today, you’ll find a few new “lashing out” stories on the first page. This is just the lashing out of one day.

First, he “lashed out” at Nordstom department store for dropping Ivanka’s line of whatever the fuck she has a line of. Really, didn’t we just hear about how he was going leave the running of all the family’s businesses to his kids? See, he didn’t have to divest any of his holdings because there would be no conflicts of interest as long as the kids took care of all the business. He’d stay completely out of it.

Apart from the conflicts of interest, though, there is the issue of using the bully pulpit to attack or praise individual businesses based on whether he thinks they support him enough. It’s an entirely new thing for a president to be doing. Trump has praised L.L. Bean (board members contributed to him), caused some firings at Wynn casinos (someone said something about Melania), has continued to criticize “Celebrity Apprentice” after promising not to (Schwarzenegger didn’t support him), and on and on and on. Anyway, let’s all go on a shopping spree at Nordstrom today.

Then there’s the story of Trump “lashing out” at Senator Richard Blumenthal, who revealed that the man-baby’s Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, said Trump’s war on the judiciary was disheartening and demoralizing. This one’s kind of funny not just because it’s a great example of Trump shooting the messenger, but because this particular lashing was attacking Blumenthal for misrepresenting his Viet Nam service (Trump was a draft dodger).

Sen.Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie),now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017

Then there’s the link to Trump “lashing out” against the judge who ruled against his Muslim travel ban. You know, the “so-called” judge that was appointed by W. At least he didn’t accuse this one of being a “Mexican”.

If you go past the first page of search results, you’ll find links to Trump lashing out at Vanity Fair because they published a negative review of his restaurant, Trump lashing out at John Lewis, lashing out at “professional anarchists” who joined protest against him, lashing out at the Failing New York Times, CBS,  and even FoxNews for suggesting Steve Bannon is calling the shots, lashing out at the Australian P.M. in a phone call, etc., etc. etc.

One that didn’t make the list today, but should be there by tomorrow is Trump lashing out at McCain for questioning the “success” of the Yemen raid.

As Trump himself has told us, he’s the best at many things. But when it comes to lashing out, no one even comes close.

So unifying. So presidential. So insane.

I’m often struck by how much more people in other parts of the world know about what’s going on here than we do ourselves. And how seriously they take the blatherings and tantrums of President Man-baby, while we, here in the U.S.,  are becoming inured to them.

Want to know how we’re doing in Australia? A good friend of the blog in Melbourne emailed us his thoughts under the subject heading, “An ignorant piece of work”:

Most Australians viewed his election with some amusement – happy to see a country that is weirder than us and makes for interesting newspaper reading. He never had much support here but now he would have a popularity rating of way less than 20%. I don’t suggest he try and visit here anytime soon – there would be large and active demonstrations. There would certainly be very little respect. Even the far right that were all over his win have disappeared – no mileage in being associated with him. The Govt had been taking a fairly conciliatory line to things up to now. “The American alliance is an enduring one and we will work respectfully with whoever the American people chose” sort of thing. Now I hear people ask “why would I go to the US for a holiday?”. All he has managed to do is drive people away and make it politically difficult for our govt to support the US in anything. So when they need support he will have to give back way more than he will want. And our Prime Minister was a pretty successful business man and has a healthy ego so he is going to give as good as he gets. The satire on TV here makes Saturday night live look tame!

I would have thought someone would have briefed the US president on these fairly basic facts before he gets cranky on a call and then has it leaked to show how tough he is!

Binyamin Appelbaum of the Failing New York Times, @BCAppelbaum, made this great map showing the countries Trump has pissed off in his first two weeks. Don’t want to think about what it might look like four years from now. If we’re still here, that is.

It’s getting worse.

Remember when the Republicans criticized Obama for not “working with them” (as if that was possible!), not compromising, and doing things on his own? Those were the good old days.

The man-baby isn’t going to work with anyone, not even Republicans. He stirs up his base and looks for fights. What he loves more than anything else is fighting – he constantly pokes his finger in the eyes of his “opponents”, i.e. anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep behind him. Obviously, ridiculing and intimidating critics is not a strategy meant to win people to your cause. It’s a strategy meant to silence any form of dissent and consolidate power.

Less than two weeks in and it’s getting scary.

According to Press Secretary Sean Spicer, “career bureaucrats”, like acting Attorney General Sally Yates, “should either get with the program or they can go.”  She’s fired.

And, for Trump, it’s not enough just to fire someone who disagrees with you. In the corporate world, you thank someone for their service, make up some bullshit about how they want to spend more time with their family, give them a nice letter of recommendation, and walk them to the door. In Trump’s world, you use the office of the presidency to call them a traitor in the hopes that their lives will be made miserable forever and that no further criticism from them will be possible.

It’s fascinating to watch the people around Trump regrouping and doubling down every day. I just can’t decide who the biggest problem is here. I mean, apart from Trump himself. Some are just enabling him by nodding, some are whispering new craziness in his ear, and some clearly have no courage and no soul. There are quite a few to choose from. You tell me.

Check out our previous thoughts on Trump’s love of firing.

Oh, and now you can follow @StewieGeneris on Twitter.

So the first few days of the Trump administration are in the books and it’s pretty much what we knew it would be.

In meeting with lawmakers, he repeated the preposterous nonsense, or, if you prefer, “lie”, that he actually won the popular vote, and that it only seems like he didn’t because of the millions of illegal immigrants who voted for Hillary.

Sean Spicer, the new press Secretary, had a couple of meetings with the press that gave us a pretty clear indication of how it’s going to be. In the first, he asserted that the crowds for Trump’s inauguration had been the biggest ever (more preposterous nonsense) and, gave us a clear indication of Trump’s highest priority: constant affirmation of his popularity, legitimacy, and greatness. Who beside the man-baby really cares about the size of the crowd?

The second Spicer performance was the first actual “press briefing” (full summary here). It was notable for some revelations about how we’re ready to fight in the South China Sea, how we’ll be working with Russia in Syria, how they’re actually serious about moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (not just posturing like everyone before them), and so on.

It was also notable for who he called on and in what order. Tradition requires the first question to go to the Associated Press, seated in the front row, center. But it didn’t. The first question went to the New York Post, a Murdoch-owned tabloid of little journalistic repute. The New York Times was finally called on at the end of the session. In other words, screw protocol, it’s my way or the highway. CNN better shape up or suffer the consequences.

Spicer also basically stuck to his guns about the crowd sizes. He said the unfair coverage of Trump in the press was “demoralizing”. Actually it’s the fair coverage of who Trump is and what he says that’s demoralizing, but never mind.

Where’s the fantastic Trump health plan that was “almost ready” last week? No one actually believed there was a health plan (there wasn’t), so we’ve moved on from that, apparently.

The first few days of Trump included no softening or reconciliation for those he trashed and railed against during the campaign.  No indication that he understands the campaign is over and he is now president of all of us, not just his Twitter followers. It’s as if he’s starting his re-election campaign now by hardening the appeals to his base. Make America Even Greater in 2020.

There was plenty of repetition of the “America First” slogan in the first few days. Not only is Trump now the president of all of us, he is, in a very real sense, now the President of the World. But just as he doesn’t care what the Americans who didn’t vote for him think, he also doesn’t care what the concerns of others around the world might be.

It might be fun to revisit the political cartoons from around the world that we collected before the election. But, to get an idea of what some of our friends think of Trump now, check out this Dutch video, made in the Trump style so as to better resonate with him:

“I can be more presidential than anybody. Other than the great Abe Lincoln – he was very presidential.”

Trump spoke these words in March, after winning the Michigan Republican Primary. He was responding to questions about his behavior during the campaign: his coarseness, his preference for personal attacks, his name-calling and so on.  He and his surrogates repeated the sentiment often during the campaign, even as the field thinned out. Trump never showed the slightest inclination to change the tone of the meanest campaign ever run.

When he finally won the  nomination, we were told things would certainly be different from that point on. He would compete against Hillary Clinton on the issues. All the personal attacks, crazy accusations, threats, and venom would recede. He would “pivot”, meaning he would transform into a more suitable version of a likely nominee and turn  his attention away from his hard-core base of loyalists in order to win over the broader general electorate.

But it never happened. He was the same. Worse, even. Some expressions of dismay from various quarters, just to show I’m not making it up:

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/08/donald-trumps-campaign-and-the-media-are-still-wondering-when-hell-pivot-to-the-general-election/

https://heatst.com/politics/watch-republicans-keep-insisting-donald-trump-will-start-acting-more-presidential-but-he-wont/

http://www.weeklystandard.com/trumps-pivot-to-normality-isnt-coming/article/2003599

Well, he won the election without pivoting. I guess he felt he still needed to be the combative man-baby to win and maybe he was right.

Now, he’s president-elect, and this week he’ll be president. He doesn’t need to pick fights with people who don’t like him, particularly when you realize he’ll be inaugurated with the lowest approval rating of anyone since they started keeping track. That’s a lot of fight-picking.

https://qz.com/885286/presidential-inauguration-donald-trump-has-the-lowest-approval-ratings-of-any-president-elect-in-recent-history/

This week he picked fights with several people, just to keep in fighting trim I suppose. Meryl Streep, John Lewis, NATO,  and Angela Merkel were among his targets.

The Lewis fight is particularly appalling. There is no upside for Trump in this, and there is certainly no upside for America. Trump rallied his 60 million against Lewis, who had said Trump wasn’t a legitimate president, given the Russian interference. They said things like, “He did something 50 years ago – so what!” Well what he did 50 years ago was literally put his life on the line for other people and a cause he believed in. What Trump did 50 years ago, conversely, was dodge the draft, acting, as always, for himself and risking nothing.

Or they said, “he’s a poor congressman – his district is in terrible shape”. Lewis represents most of Atlanta, which in Lewis’ thirty years of representation, has done very well. But that’s not the point. Whether you want to argue with Lewis’ talents or record as a congressman or not, you can’t argue that, in the same thirty year period, Trump represented anyone but himself.  In fact, he has never held any public office or even played any private role representing the cause of anyone else.

Our next president, who has made a career of selfishness, is criticizing someone who has made a career of selflessness.

Why does he do it still? There are two possible explanations, and you’re not going to like either of them.

The first is that when he tweets, he is not tweeting at you and me. He doesn’t care that we’ll be outraged. He doesn’t care what we think at all. He is tweeting to the 60 million that voted for him and they absolutely love the fights he picks. Of course, it makes no sense at this point, since they already have the president they want and that’s that. From here on, Trump will be the President of those who “up-vote” him. This is not good for the rest of America, and absolutely horrible for the rest of the world.

The second explanation is that all this fighting is not a choice he’s making.  He can’t help himself. He is who he is. There are not “two Trumps“.  This is not good for anyone, either. And the rest of the world knows it better than we do.

These last four links were all to my own musings on the subject. I’m repeating myself. I can’t help it. I blog to those who up-vote me. I am who I am. Also sprach Stewie Generis.