Tag Archives: Trump

To the Victor Go the Spoils

Here we are, roughly a year and a half into Donald Trump’s presidency. I agree with what so many columnists have said: There is definitely a sense of outrage fatigue. Any one of the hundreds of major scandals that have rocked the Trump presidency would have taken anybody else down. Anybody. Else. I said this to my cousin and his son, who are temporarily living here before going back home to the Netherlands: Nobody else could have done what Trump has done. After I said that, I was thinking that I was a bit presumptuous in saying such a thing. But no more. There is nobody on God’s green earth that could do what Trump has done: Completed a hostile takeover of one of the major two political parties in America. Trump has the precise mix, and it is precise, of shamelessness, narcissism, showmanship, and a gut instinct, a visceral knowledge, of what the real fears and resentments of white America are. You could say that he knows many of us better than we know ourselves. He isn’t stupid, he just has a very specialized form of brilliance. The man is functionally illiterate. He lies brazenly, even though his lies are easily disprovable in this age of video. And he knows he can get away with it. But I have a feeling that he is even smarter than that. I think that Trump is working for the Russians, specifically Vladimir Putin. I think that Trump is a Manchurian president who has allegiance to one of our international enemies, and he is successfully implementing Russian President Putin’s agenda.

On the domestic side, President Trump has done since he began his campaign for the presidency has been in service of his master, Putin. He has divided our country into red and blue. Not that he started it; the division was well underway before Trump came on the scene. But he took the division and turned it into opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. He has been a virulent racist right from the start, with his well-known lie, which he didn’t invent but was the chief promoter of, that former President Obama was born in a foreign country. And Trump knows his rubes. He knows that there are many people in America who are either overt or covert racists who want to believe the worst of our first black president. Trump took the African-American football players’ quiet, Constitutionally-protected right of free speech, that of taking a knee silently instead of standing for the National Anthem, and ginned it up to the point where the NFL found it necessary to send a letter to NFL team owners asking them to come to a consensus about how to defuse the controversy, which resulted in a policy change requiring all players to stand during the anthem. Trump really couldn’t care less about this issue. He just has a way of knowing which buttons to push that will rile up his base and alienate virtually everyone else. So it really doesn’t matter what he does as long as it serves his purpose: to divide America along racial, class, education, and geographic lines. So now we are the United States in name only. In truth, we are now the Divided States of America. Thanks largely to President Putin and President Trump.

And isn’t it more than a little strange that Trump never, ever says a bad thing about Putin or Russia? Every time it is pointed out to him what Putin has done, Trump comes up with some false equivalence, like when he told a Fox interviewer, when the interviewer suggested that Putin had killed journalists, that “America isn’t so innocent”.

There is an article in the New York magazine by Jonathan Chait that makes the case much better than I can. When you have the time, read it.

 

The Law Is Not Subjective

Okay, we are living in Alice in Wonderland times. Up is down, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East, the Earth is flat, and saying something many, many times makes it true. Which is what our current president must think, because he keeps repeating the same nonsense over and over again. “There is no collusion” he bellows. Any news that casts him in a negative light is “Fake News”, a cry that has been taken up by various strongmen throughout the world. Our president Trump is giving

full-fledged (not wannabe) dictators the imprimatur of the president of the largest democracy in the world. Donald has shown no respect for the rule of law nor for the Constitution of the United States, yet he considers himself a law-and-order president.

Trump has shown no respect to the country he was sworn to represent. He consistently behaves as though he was a Manchurian president, installed by Russia and working for the Russian government. He is dragging our country’s reputation down by treating our allies like dirt, while cozying up to murderous dictators such as Duterte and Putin. They are “strong” and they command his respect, while our democratic allies who we need as much as they need us are treated like weak rulers.

Trump and his family, as well as his Cabinet, are making a joke of the emoluments clause in the Constitution. He and his family have profited to the tune of many millions of dollars from his presidency. His Republican party in Congress has thus far refused to even try to rein him in. And yet, the Republican party has traditionally considered itself the law-and-order party, as opposed to the “soft on crime” Democratic party. Which is an old canard without any factual basis.

The law of the land in America is not dependent on who you are, what you are, how much you have, or anything that makes us different from each other. We are all the same under the law. Trump and the Republican party want to selectively enforce our laws. The president can be elected with the help of a foreign power. No problem, say his enablers. He can profit wildly from his office. No comment. He can destroy our alliances that have kept the world in one piece since 1945. Change the subject. He can lie like a rug, throw our intelligence agencies under the bus while cozying up to dictatorships. He can openly advocate prison for a political opponent. He can openly ask a foreign power for help finding “30,000 emails” of Hillary Clinton’s. It’s funny how, a year and a half after the election, Trump is still talking about her. It’s because he needs a scapegoat to work his con.

Donald Trump and his attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions are viciously enforcing a law at our southern border in a way reminiscent of dictatorship policies. Taking children away from their mothers. Hey, that’s the law. If you don’t want to suffer, don’t break the law. That is what they say. But here is the truth: These men are bandits and traitors. Using racism and tribalism, Trump and his crooked administration have convinced a large number of extremely dense people that they have their best interests at heart, and that they are doing right by them and helping them. I don’t see it. Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe, doesn’t see it either. Joe is a former Republican and he is still a conservative, but the Republican party no longer represents his values. He really has a way of showing the truth.

Check it out. Also check this out:

Joe Scarborough is a well-known conservative with a real gift for oratory. He knows what a traitor looks like. He also knows what a fool looks like. He calls them out. And I am with him every single solitary step of the way. He is an American man, not a weak traitor kissing up to dictatorships or supporting those who fit that description. Trump’s base is a bunch of people who fit the categories of sucker, racist, feeble-minded, tribal, and I ain’t done yet. I could continue, but you get the picture. I am sharing the country with a whole bunch of deplorables. The people who still support Trump after all that has happened, those people, they can’t be reasoned with. They are too far gone. They can only be defeated at the voting booth. They need to have their leaders removed from power, so they can no longer damage America, so they can no longer try to pollute rivers and American skies, so they can no longer take health care away from the sick, so they can no longer remove consumer protections from predatory banking practices, so they can no longer enact tax policies that favor the wealthy and cause injury and sickness and death to the poor.

Trump, Majority Leader Sen. McConnell, and House Speaker Ryan are partners in crime. They are not working for the good of America. They are working for the wealthy and white Republicans. They need to be removed from their jobs. This article from The Atlantic has some advice on the subject. I intend to follow that advice for the rest of my life.

 

The Banality of Evil

Okay. We have had about a year and a half of Donald Trump as our president. He wasn’t elected by the popular vote; in fact, he lost the popular vote by millions. Not a rounding error. Millions. But our supposed democracy is so screwed up and mangled and twisted by powerful special interests that it scarcely resembles a democracy any more. Money in politics, gerrymandering by Republicans, a scorched-earth partisan leader Senator Addison “Mitch” McConnell. All of that is significant. But to me, the most stunning thing going on in today’s national politics is the fact that we have a bad man as our president.

This situation is unparalleled. The administration that Trump is most often compared to is the Nixon administration. But Nixon, in spite of his faults which were disabling and ultimately ended his presidency, was not a bad man. Nixon made his historic outreach to China which changed the world in a good way, opening up relations with a previously opaque dynasty. Nixon also started the process that created the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump, although he hasn’t been in office as long as Nixon was, has done nothing comparable. I think that it is clear that Trump has neither the mental capacity nor the interest in doing anything like that, which would require a lot of studying and learning (he doesn’t read), and would take time away from his golf game. Speaking of golf, Trump used to lambaste former President Obama for all the time he spent on the golf course, but Trump’s golfing time far outpaces Obama’s. In short, there is almost nothing good about Donald Trump. I think that Hillary Clinton was spot on when she said at the end of the second debate when asked to say something good about Trump, she complimented his children.

Trump has had people in his life who have been loyal to him, but he is not loyal to anybody. Except his family, and I think that he would even throw them under the bus if he had to do so in order to save himself. Trump is profiting from the presidency. He is dirtying the office of the President of the United States. What’s remarkable to me isn’t what Trump is; he’s been that way all his life. The remarkable thing to me is that he is able to inspire people to embrace him so enthusiastically. I have an old high school buddy who lives in town and works as an independent contractor. He is a Trump lover as much as anybody I have encountered, either online or in person. We had a Facebook argument about Trump. I pointed out to him that Trump frequently stiffs contractors who did work for him, and I asked him how he could justify supporting somebody who would steal from him and his family if he was given the opportunity. I haven’t heard back from him on that.

Except for Trump’s wealth, which he exploited to become a public figure, there isn’t really anything about him that would have elevated him to such high visibility. He is not known for his courage, his philanthropy, his intelligence, his great works, his empathy, his spirituality, his imagination. In short, there is nothing special about President Trump. He is a garden-variety narcissist who has been insulated from the consequences of his cruel and destructive behavior by his wealth and his team of lawyers and fixers. He was never important enough for anybody to subject him to the kind of scrutiny that he is undergoing now. That’s why, in a way, I’m glad that things worked out the way they did. If Hillary had won, which nearly everybody expected, Trump would have been successful in accomplishing his goal, which was to elevate his public profile and make more money. He never would have been under investigation the way he is now. If Trump had lost, there might still have been some activity from law enforcement regarding his Russian connections since there was evidence of it before his elevation to president, but it would be nothing like this. If he wasn’t our president, he wouldn’t be worth the money and work hours it would have taken to launch such an investigation. Paul Manafort would likely have continued in his career of high-stakes larceny and money laundering, unless he met an untimely demise at the hands of his Ukrainian business associates. And if there was a President Hillary Rodham Clinton, you know she would have had all kinds of right wing conspiracies and “select committees” of Republicans buzzing around her head like hungry house flies, looking for something, anything, to use against her in an impeachment proceeding. They would not have exposed themselves as hypocrites the way they have now, staying silent as President Trump shreds common decency and behaves like a dictator, a traitorous dictator at that. And Believe ME, Donald Trump would make one heck of a good dictator. It’s as though his personality is specially suited for that job. He is more than smart enough to be a good dictator, and his narcissism and self-seeking would be an excellent fit.

As somebody famous once said, roughly, all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to stay silent. Now, some of the Republican legislators whose silence is truly golden, are good men. John McCain comes to mind. And I’m sure there are others. And there are some really bad actors whose last names might be McConnell, Ryan, Nunes, and on and on. Trump is no Hitler and this isn’t the 1930s Germany, but that is exactly what happened. An authoritarian populist demagogue took control of a country because he wasn’t stopped by people who knew, or should have known, better. I think that the Democratic Party is going to take over the House in the midterms. The Senate is less likely, and I don’t know all the political ins and outs of that whole situation. But even with one house of congress taken away from our internal enemy, there is going to be blood. A lot of it. My popcorn machine is going to need to be replaced soon. Maybe I’ll save my weekly $1.50 tax break each week, and by the time I need a new popper, I will have enough money to buy one. Thank you, President Trump.

 

 

Othering

Okay, I try to be fair-minded, although it isn’t easy these days. I am usually not one to shy away from a fight, nor do I ordinarily have the disposition to extend an olive branch to my political rivals. Especially since I am not likely to get a positive response. Like I have said before, I can almost understand the revulsion against political correctness, where you can’t make the same jokes you made as little as ten years ago, and when children are so coddled they get door-to-door service from the school buses. By God, when I was a kid, we had a Bus Stop! We walked half a mile to get home, in spite of the dangers from tree-jumpers and diddlers everywhere you look. In all kinds of weather, too. God help you if you get behind a school bus nowadays, because they stop at every house!

A lot of what I think is going on these days is the politics of resentment. It is done on the left as well as the right, but I believe that the right is much more adept at it. The right has fewer scruples. I don’t think that the Democrats would have stolen a Supreme Court seat, for example. But anyway, it seems like it’s not so much what you are for as what you are against. Different right-wing publications and media outlets are very skilled at portraying liberals as effete, emasculated men and loud women who are so wrapped up in political correctness that they don’t know how to be human. I saw an article in Breitbart about a “typical liberal college professor” who was a caricature of a liberal who I would find a hard time liking as well.

Another hugely successful technique the right wing politicians and media outlets (these days, what’s the difference) is dividing people by ethnicity and skin color. They still like to stereotype black people and black neighborhoods, but the main focus these days seems to be Muslims and brown-skinned immigrants, both legal and illegal. They use this device I call “othering”. It makes the argument that these people aren’t like you and me. They are different. They hate us. They don’t want to assimilate. A great many of them are antisocial, “rapists” and potential terrorists.

The left does its share of stereotyping as well, depicting Trump supporters as racist morons. That is a form of othering too. While there are many white supremacists who support Trump, he never would have gotten elected by their support alone, even with the Electoral College advantage he had. I actually have a friend who is a Trump supporter, albeit not a hard-charging enthusiastic one. He fits the demographic of upper middle-aged male with a high school education. He really isn’t racist. I’ve known him for years, and he is less racist than many more liberal people. He just feels left behind and overwhelmed by societal changes, and he voted accordingly.

The bottom line is that, no matter where we are from, no matter what our skin color, we all bleed red. We pretty much want the same things for ourselves and our families. I make a distinction between people who don’t know better and people who do. The Republicans in Washington are well-educated and they know what they are doing. They are convincing people to vote against their own interests by telling them that there are these dangerous, leeching “others” that we need to protect ourselves from. They use gun rights and abortion rights as wedge issues, to make people think that any price they have to pay in less health care and a weakened social safety net is worth it. Anything to keep the “others” in their place. This conning of a huge slice of American voters has been going on for a long, long time. The culmination of the Republican efforts is our President Trump. So many conservative politicians were aghast at Trump’s lack of morality and bigotry, but they fell in line once they knew he was here to stay. Simpering, pandering cowardly Republican senators and representatives are retiring like a herd of frightened sheep. I’m sure Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows what is coming in November, so he is trying to pack the courts with as many right wing judges as he can before the hammer comes down in the midterms. Voter suppression and court-packing are the conservative right wing’s main tools to hold onto power. They have truly put the “con” in “conservative”.

Put on your swimsuits, Republicans, because there is a tidal wave coming in November. Our lying President Trump will be so busy with hearings and courts that he won’t have time to damage the economy or the environment any further, nor will he have the time to start any new wars to distract the public from his criminality. I hope.