Month: July 2020

This is the amazing thing about Donald Trump:  every time he has a bad week, you figure that he’s hit rock bottom.  That it could not possibly get any lower.

And then he has a week like the one just past that sets a new, lower bar for bad news, misjudgment and failure.  

First, it should be noted that, unlike previous presidents, he declined to pay his respects to a late congressman lying in state:  He decided not to visit the late, great John Lewis, probably because Lewis spent his life fighting against, well, people like Donald Trump.  Indeed, he fought on behalf of the voting rights of the very people that Trump and his allies have been aggressively trying to disenfranchise through everything from purging millions of voters from the rolls, to closing up four out of five polling places particularly in lower income or minority neighborhoods, to crippling the post office in order to slow down, hamper or even eliminate mail delivery.  

But not to worry, because three living ex-Presidents showed up for the actual funeral services, including George W. Bush, the man who owes Trump a tremendous debt because Trump’s imbecilities have served to get W. off the hook of being the worst president in recent memory.  Obama then delivered a forty-minute eulogy which is being lauded as a brilliant presentation that reminds us of what it was like to have a real man of intelligence in the White House.  Of course, some criticized him for bringing up political issues like voting rights being challenged at a funeral, but considering it was a subject that the deceased spent his whole life fighting for, it actually made perfect sense. 

In the meantime Trump attempted to counterprogram with a press conference that was largely ignored.  He continued to make no mention of Lewis, but he did mourn the passing of Herman Cain…without bothering to note that Cain likely contracted the Covid-19 that killed him at Trump’s own Tulsa gathering which he specifically attended unmasked at Trump’s urging.  So basically Trump killed his friend, but he failed to acknowledge that.  He also failed to present any actual plan to deal with the Coronavirus, although he continued to insist lives should be endangered by schools opening.  

Meanwhile a report was released that the economic output has tanked worse in the last quarter than anytime in the history of the United States.  Not even the great depression had a downward spiral like this.  Now it is often said that Trump is a master of distracting attention by doing one outrageous thing to draw attention away from something that’s indefensible.  Personally I don’t subscribe to that because I don’t think he’s that smart.  I think he just can’t pay attention to one thing and is already on to something else because he has no follow through and no plan to attend to it.  But I think that in this instance he did do exactly that:  within minutes after the grave economic news was released, he threw the entire news cycle into a tizzy by suggesting that this year’s election be postponed, EXACTLY as Biden claimed he would three months ago.  The timing simply cannot be ignored.

He must have been stunned at the reaction as regular allies such as Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, who traditionally move heaven and earth to find ways to either support him or at least not contradict him, immediately came forward and dismissed the idea.  In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Steven Calabresi, the founder of the conservative Federalist Society, stated that Trump’s suggestion to delay the vote was itself an impeachable offense.  When freaking Moscow Mitch says “no way” and a conservative Northwest University Law professor says you should be thrown out of office,  how far off the reservation must Trump have gone?

And then there’s Trump once again attempting to bring up hydroxychloroquine (hey, that word was in my Spellcheck!  Cool!) as a non-existent cure for Covid by furthering the ramblings of a demented spiritual “doctor” who claims that women’s medical conditions are caused by women having dream sex with a succubus.  That’s the same as a doctor consoling a grieving mother because her infant has died of crib death by saying, “If only you’d sung a lullabye to keep Lilith from coming and taking the child in the night.”

It should be noted that barely a week ago, the gullible news media claimed that Trump was changing his tone.  That he was acknowledging the devastating lethality of Covid, that he was admitting “it will get worse before it gets better.”  That after three and a half years of stupidity he was finally growing into the position.  And as predicted by many, including me, that lasted for a couple of days before he went right back to his idiocy.  I mean, what does it say when we have a president who says something correct and scientifically accurate AND THAT’S CONSIDERED NEWS?!  We’ve become so accustomed to his routine stupidity that his endorsing a woman who believes some people in the government are secretly lizards to be the normal state of things.

We are left wondering when Trump’s supporters are finally going to wake up and join the rest of us in the waking world.  Interestingly, the Lincoln Project appears to be wondering the same thing.  Check out this latest ad from them:

As Trump’s presidency crumbles all around him, it is fascinating to watch how his pathology to seek approval from racist, anti-American Covidiots is causing him, without fail, to land on the wrong side of every major issue facing this country.  His tricks are no longer working and even his attempts to try and do the things that he should have done six months ago are falling flat.  Why?  Because those who oppose him don’t believe him, and those who support him figure that he’s just saying what he thinks he needs to say to satisfy the dûmbášš libtards, so they’re ignoring him as well.  They’re too brainwashed by half a year of bûllšhìŧ to be dissuaded from believing in anything else.  

Peaceful protests about police brutality?  Pretend that random, scattered acts of violence are the norm and send in your own troops.  Masks?  Claim that people should mask up, and then be photographed at a function standing there with no mask.  Black Lives Matter?  Tear gas them in order to have a photo op.  The Yankees and the Nats take a knee?  Decry them for it (God, I’m hoping they all take a knee at the game August 15 that the Yankees unwisely invited him to come throw out the first pitch.  I wonder if they’ll have recorded boos blasting over the loudspeaker.). People are worried about sending their kids to school?  Ignore their concerns and threaten to financially punish schools that don’t open fully.  As we hit four million Covid cases, admit on one hand that “it will get worse before it gets better” but then double and triple down on magical thinking by declaring, “Sooner or later, it’s going to go away.  I’ll be proven right.”  He seriously still believes that one day you’ll be able to dispatch the Coronavirus by claiming that you don’t believe in it, maybe under the impression that it’s being spread by fairies from Neverland.  (Which I guess makes sense, actually, since it generally spares children.).  

Under the impression that they were doing him some good, he has reinstituted the insane 5 PM mini-rallies disguised as press conferences.  Devoid of the presence of anyone who actually knows anything about viruses, he tries to reinvent himself and the idiot press is actually playing along, declaring that Trump has taken a new attitude.  We all know that’s nonsense; he’s done this half a dozen times in the last three years, attempting to reinvent himself.  The press dutifully reports the endeavor as if it means something and within a couple of days—hëll, sometimes the same day—he reverts to his previous persona.  He’s not going to change because of the old saying:  The first step in solving a problem is realizing that you have one.  And Trump is psychologically incapable of doing that.  He absolutely cannot admit anything that he’s done wrong, ever.  He has literally said he takes no responsibility for the shambles that the US has made of the Coronavirus, although he is happy to take credit for the fact that Northern states, temporarily at least, have the virus under control.  Why do they? Because they ignored his orders to open the states too soon.  The states that followed his instructions are now Coronavirus hot spots.  Of course they are.

Now people are hailing his decision to cancel the GOP conference in Jacksonville as part of his maturation process in realizing how dangerous it would be to have it occur.  No, that’s not the reason at all.  He’s doing it because a sizable number of representatives made it clear they had no intention of entering the vast Covid petri dish that that assemblage would have represented.  He wasn’t worried about people getting the disease because he NEVER worries about that.  He was concerned he was going to have a replay of Tulsa.  In the US state that he switched to because the previous venue wouldn’t allow him to pack a convention center to the rafters, he was clearly worried that he was once again going to be standing on a stage facing thousands and thousands of empty seats.  Tulsa was bad enough.  If he failed to pack out the dámņëd GOP convention, it’s game over.  THAT was the risk he didn’t dare take.  So Trump now has a month to scramble and pull together a virtual convention while the Democrats have been planning theirs for four months.  So, y’know, good luck with that.

Meanwhile he’s busy wishing well Jeffrey Epstein’s handler for underage girls.  Brilliant.  Freaking brilliant.  I wonder if the same bozos who have tried to paint Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton as pedophiles have taken note.  I doubt it.  I’m sure they’ll be as aggressive about this as all the NRA members who claimed they needed their weapons to stand against the US government if it ever dispatched goon squads to round people up…and have vanished into the woodwork as those squads invade Portland and are being threatened to be turned loose on New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.  All Democrat-run cities.  I’m sure that’s just coincidence.

One thing is becoming clear:  getting him out of office will require a massive, indisputable showing at the polls.  Because any races that are close, Trump and the GOP will find some way to flip it to their side, no matter what.

PAD

Trump has had a busy week of denial.  He loudly proclaims that the polls are rising and everything is great, even as his standing in the polls continue to dwindle while he lays off his campaign manager and replaces him with the guy Chris Christie fingered over Bridgegate.  Meanwhile, in the best style of a dictator in a banana republic, the Banana Republican dispatched unidentified soldiers to Portland, Oregon, to perform the vital task of arresting people who were walking home from a peaceful protest or just shooting them in the head.  Let’s keep in mind that the party that is supposed to strongly advocate state rights is siding with Trump while the mayor of Portland and the governor of Oregon want these anonymous fatigue-clad kidnappers to stop running0 wild, grabbing people at random and throwing them into the backs of unmarked grey passenger vans.  There are rumors that Portland is a test case for this parade of neo-Nazi thugs who, in supposedly showing up to defend American landmarks, are trampling all over the civil rights of Americans who committed the foul crime of complaining.

But let’s take a break from that to focus on the release of a brand new book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” written by Mary Trump who has come to despise her surname because of who it is associated with.  This book broke S&S records, proving the ultimate example of the Streisand effect as the Donald’s attempts to shut down the book’s release kicked interest in it through the stratosphere.  I reserved a copy at my local Barnes & Noble and received a confirming email that said they would hold it for three days.  As we were driving there on the Tuesday of its release, they called to inform me that they had changed their minds and would only hold it for 24 hours, screw the email.    At 950,000 copies sold, it set a new record for Simon & Schuster for day-of-release sales, topping the snooze-fest from John Bolton that only came out a few weeks earlier.

Although the news has been focused mostly on what Mary (I’m just going to refer to her by her first name to avoid confusion; it’s not like I know her) has said about her uncle, the book is largely not about that.  It begins and ends with talking about “the world’s most dangerous man” (whom I could have sworn was James Bond, but okay)  yet much of the book focuses on Donald’s older brother, Freddy Trump, and his absolutely horrendous relationship with Fred, the pater familias of the Trump family, whose demeanor and personality was the absolute prototype for Donald.  A real estate developer with no record of army service and an aversion to paying taxes, Fred Trump expected his son Freddy to follow him into the family business.  When Freddy developed an interest in flight and became a pilot for TWA, his father continued to relentlessly denigrate him, dismissing him as a bus driver in the sky.  It drove him to drink, which eventually killed him.

Meanwhile Donald learned from his example.  Seeing that his older brother’s actions got him into trouble with his father, Donald did everything he could to do the exact opposite.  He was also a relentless bully, taking his younger brother’s toys and hiding them or threatening to destroy them, behaving like a total slob and routinely ignoring everything his mother instructed him to do.  Indeed, Trump was so accustomed to being on top all the time, that during one dinner when he was being overwhelmingly obnoxious, his younger brother dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on his head.  The family roared with laughter; it was the first time in his life that Trump had ever been humiliated.  It wounded him so deeply that years later, when the family reconvened at the White House to celebrate an aunt’s birthday, references was made to the mishap and President Trump sat there with his arms folded and scowled deeply like a wounded child.  Six decades had passed and he still hadn’t gotten over it.

An entire book of psychological essays have been written about Trump, but Mary—a doctor of advanced psychological studies—has known him literally her whole life and has seen him behind the scenes and unguarded.  So she may well be the most qualified individual to analyze the (dare I use the word) mind of the president.  She notes that he does indeed display the nine classic symptoms of narcissism, but she believes his diagnosis goes far deeper than that.  That indeed the only way to determine just how screwed up he is is to subject him to a battery of tests, which naturally he would never sit still for.

The book was written recently enough to include observations about the pandemic and Trump’s overall inabilities.  Toward the end she writes:

“Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under HAS changed dramatically.  It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count.  It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact he knows nothing—about politics, civics, or simple human decency—that requires an enormous amount of work.  For decades, he has gotten publicity, good and bad, but he’s rarely been subject to close scrutiny, and he’s never faced significant opposition.  His entire sense of himself and the world is being questioned.”

Even more enlightening was this observation which goes back to Trump’s very core:

“Donald continues to exist in the dark space between fear of indifference and fear of failure that led to his brother’s destruction.  It took forty-two years for the destruction to be complete, but the foundations were laid early and played out before Donald’s eyes as he experienced his own trauma.  The combination of those two things—what he witnessed and what he experienced—both isolated him and terrified him.  The role that fear played in his childhood and the role it plays now cannot be overstated.  And the fact that fear continues to be an overriding emotion for him speaks to the hëll that must have existed inside the house six decades ago.”

It is made clear in the book that the trauma of his relationship with his loveless father and witnessing the tragedy of his older brother destroyed whatever sense of caring or empathy Trump may have had.  If that lack of empathy were not literally costing tens of thousands of Americans their lives, we could look upon Trump distantly as a sad, tragic tale of how bad parenting can completely annihilate someone’s hope of a happy life.  The depressing truth is that Trump is someone who has spent his entire life never being loved because he has no idea how to love someone else.  That’s because the first rule of love is simple:  the other person’s welfare has to be more important than your own.  For Trump, that feeling is an impossibility.  He puts himself above everyone and everything else, and therefore cannot feel love the way most of us do.

If he weren’t running the country into the ground—if he were just somewhere on the outside living in misery—we could afford to feel sorry for him.

But we can’t.

PAD

The Republicans themselves are getting sick of Trump.

Yes, granted, he still tends to poll well among Republicans in general.  But I think it’s obvious that those individuals are people who have lost sight of what the Republican party is supposed to be.  Poisoned by everything from Newt Gingrich to Fox News to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the party is unrecognizable to those who believed it was idealized during the Ronald Reagan years.  They are appalled by the direction it is currently going and under the guise of Never Trumpers and the Lincoln Project are launching a series of ads not only to stop Trump, but to drive as many voters as possible over to Biden.  They are hoping that those people who refused to vote for Hillary because they saw her as indistinguishable from her opponent are beginning to understand how catastrophically wrong they were and will line up behind Biden.  Because they are convinced that four more years of Trump will leave the United States unrecognizable, not to mention considerably less populated.  

Indeed, the only thing they require is a kicking acronym.  Might I recommend RAFT:  Republicans Against Freaking Trump.  Want to get rid of Trump?  Jump on the RAFT.  

Meanwhile Trump continues on his roadshow of killing Americans. Because we are being forced to the conclusion that he really is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; if you view him from that perspective, then everything he does makes perfect sense.  Trying to force children to attend school as if nothing bad was happening, and ignoring CDC guidelines while doing so?  Great idea, because what else could help kill more people than clustering kids together in confined areas or riding to and from school in crowded school buses?  Upset because the CDC guidelines are too stringent?  Strongarm them into scaling them back.  Throughout the country governors are limiting the number of people who can assemble in a confined space?  Go to Tulsa and have a rally in a confined area where masks are not required.  The Tulsa government put stickers on the chairs in that arena designed to force people to sit in every other seat to at least try and social distance?  Have your staffers insist the stickers be removed so that people can get nice and intimate and facilitate the spreading of the disease.  It’s like the whole thing is being managed by Ðìçk Roman, the leader of the Leviathans from the seventh season of “Supernatural.”  Because naturally it’s two weeks later and the virus has spiked in Tulsa, as we all knew it would.  Meanwhile there are only two states that have shown a significant decrease in Covid 19 cases:  Vermont and New Hampshire.  So guess where Trump’s next rally is?  New Hampshire.  Of course it is.  Where else?  (Well, Vermont, I suppose.  That’s likely next.). 

The only thing to occupy him aside from turning arenas of people ill is complaining on Twitter, and he is doing it royally.  Naturally he had no complaints when the Supreme Court ruled that President Clinton had to testify in the Paula Jones case because no one, not even the President, is above the law.  But when the SCOTUS ruled 7-2, including his two appointees, that the New York grand jury was entitled to the documents and returns it wanted, good lord did he go out of his mind.  Endless capitalized tweets about how other presidents got much better treatment at the hands of the SCOTUS (ask Richard Nixon about that) but there was no such consideration for him.  How dare the SCOTUS not treat him with the same fabricated deference his addled imagination believes they treated his predecessors.  Remember, this is the same guy who claims he was treated worse than Lincoln, who was assassinated. Indeed, those close to him describe how he is engaged in an endless pity party, beginning meetings by delivering lengthy monologues over how badly the press is treating him, how unfair it is that the police killed a helpless black man and suddenly the country is rioting and there’s nothing he can say to stop it, how unfair it is that there is a pandemic which has killed 130,000 people and hurting him personally because it’s destroying the economy that he single handedly built.  

Everything is about him.  Absolutely everything.  

Not that he takes any responsibility for it, of course.  His denials of the virus, his magical belief that it would just vanish in April, that the handful of cases we had would quickly dwindle to zero and his complete ignoring of Obama’s playbook on how to handle a pandemic…none of that is at all related to the virus spreading like wildfire.  His attacking of peaceful protestors so he could have a photo op, his inability to present any sort of national speech on race relations, his tagging Black Life Matters and Antifa supporters as terrorists, that the BLM message NYC painted in front of his building was a “symbol of hate,” his support of Confederate statues, that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with people believing he’s a racist and a symbol of the worst America has to offer.  No, no, it’s all the fault of the lying media which continues to report the now nineteen thousand lies that he has told in the past three and a half years.

It continues to remain an irony that a man who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who was loaned millions by his father that he never compensated, who has had people covering for his mistakes and ineptitude his entire life, and who currently holds the office of the most powerful man in the world, paints himself as a victim.

Poor Donald.  One almost feels sorry for him.

PAD

Even as I write this, the population of South Dakota must be preparing itself for a new massive spike in the Coronavirus.  This evening Donald Trump is hosting a fireworks display at Mount Rushmore, and has made a point of saying that social distancing and masking will not be required.  Let us put aside that there have been no fireworks at Mount Rushmore for years because of fears that it will set off forest fires and contaminate groundwater.  It is expected that a crowd of around 7500 is going to be attending (unless K-Pop fans inflated the numbers again) and the Republican governor has stated that none of the procedures required to restrict the Coronavirus will be followed.  Meanwhile, as I write this, Herman Cain—who attended Trump’s Tulsa gathering—has been hospitalized with the Coronavirus.  But hey, he’s only a seventy-four year old black man; it’s not like there’s any threat of his dying from it, right?

Meanwhile Trump continues to help politicize wearing a mask, although he’s oddly presenting conflicting signals.  His determination to remain bare-faced inspires his idiot Trumpies to follow the lead of their moronic cult leader, except I’m reasonably sure that actor George Takei has postulated the real reason that Trump refuses to mask up.  Remember when he returned from his busted Tulsa rally looking like five miles of bad road?  Close up photos revealed streaks of his tan make-up on the inside of his collar.  Takei pointed out that that was likely why he refused to wear a mask:  Because make-up stains would be visible all over the edge of the mask, and when he took it off, the outline of the mask would be right there on his face.  His vanity won’t stop him from spray-tanning his face, and his ego will not risk him looking ridiculous as it smears visibly all over him.   So instead he insists on going maskless, millions of followers imitate him, and thousands upon thousands of people die.  

That is the mindset of the man who is sitting behind the typically clutter free Resolute desk.  Nothing matters more than his ego.  Not lives of Americans.  Nothing.

Yet curiously enough on Thursday he seemed to reverse course and claim that he was in favor of Americans wearing masks.  It’s obvious why:  enough members of the GOP must have come to him and basically said, “Dude, what the hëll?!” Trump’s relentless politicizing of something that just makes good health sense is absolutely ridiculous, and is becoming impossible for even the most devoted of his quislings to get behind.  “I’m all for masks,” he surprisingly said to Fox News, even as he continues to go maskless. 

Indeed, we are actually seeing his latest lack of priority as far as American lives are concerned as he furiously tries to deny the dámņìņg New York Times article that reports Russia offered bounties to the Taliban for any who killed American soldiers.  Trump’s response was to claim that he hadn’t been told, which is a crock of šhìŧ that absolutely nobody except his most devoted followers believes.  Does anyone think the intelligence agencies wouldn’t go to him immediately with this information?  Of course not.  Yet he asserts they didn’t tell him.  

Let us put aside the question of whether or not they did (they did.). The only reasonable response he should put forward is, Now that I know, here’s what I’m going to do about it.  Except as near as we can determine, his response to it is to deny it.   Because of course he does:  He still wants Russia to be included in the G7, and continues to maintain the insane theory that Ukraine rather than Russia interfered in the 2016 election.  

You may wonder what is going through the man’s brain.  Based on his recent interviews, that remains an open question:  even he doesn’t know.  In the past week, he was asked by two friendly Fox anchors what he wanted to do in a second term.  

Now I will admit that it’s not the easiest question to answer.  Even Jeb Bartlet, arguably the best president in American history, couldn’t come up with a good response when C.J. asked him that very question.  But one would think that Trump’s people would have come up with a response and then pounded it into him with a baseball bat.  No such luck.  Instead of answering, he rambled on for five minutes, claiming that talent was more important than experience, that he’d never slept over in Washington before, and that “What we’ve done nobody’s been able to do. But we have more to do,” without describing what he’s done or what more needed to be done.

In short, he Trumped it.  Naming speech oddities after people who display it is certainly commonplace.  Malapropisms come from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in a 1775 play, “The Rivals.  Spoonerisms come from the Reverend Spooner who would switch consonants on words.  Freudian slips are naturally after Sigmund Freud.  So I believe Trumping something is going to become a new word meaning “speaking in word salad” or providing nonsensical responses.  “Boy, he really Trumped that answer.”  “I knew what I wanted to say, but I just Trumped it up.”  

In his inability to give a reasonable, understandable response to any question, Trump will finally make the mark he’s been desperate to achieve:  His name will be remembered.  Just not in the way he anticipated.

PAD