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

“It’s fading away.  It’s going to fade away.”

That is what Trump told Sean Hannity, the man whose lips are permanently caved into the shape of Trump’s ášš on Wednesday, about the Coronavirus.

If that sounds at all familiar to you, it’s because that’s what Trump was saying months ago, when the virus was just getting revved up.  That it was going to magically disappear, that the warm weather in April would terminate it.  Now here we are, 110K deaths later, with ten states reporting record numbers of infecitons, most of which—at Trump’s urging–have attempted to proceed as if nothing abnormal was happening, and twenty-three others reporting increases, and Trump is resorting to his typical magical thinking and trying to sell the notion that the illness will magically terminate on its own.

Indeed, he is planning to singlehandedly spike the disease in Oklahoma this Saturday by having an indoor rally surrounded by people who will not be wearing masks and be shoved in shoulder-to-shoulder with each other.  Meanwhile Jacksonville, FL—another state with spiking disease reports—has stepped in where North Carolina wisely backed off and volunteered to give Trump another mask-free assembly point in August for the RNC convention.  Somewhere two horsemen of the Apocalypse—Pestilence and Death—are looking in wonderment at each other and saying, “Really?  He’s making it THIS easy?  Is he insane?”

Well…yes.  He is.

We know he’s a sociopath; that much is indisputable.  Now he’s fallen into Albert Einstein’s famed definition of insanity:  doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.  He is once again asserting that the virus will magically fade away and is hoping that this time the disease actually listens to what he says and just departs without doing any further damage.

Meanwhile he got repeatedly pummeled by the Supreme Court this week.  First the SCOTUS, in a 6-3 decision, declared that LGBTQ citizens could not be discriminated against.  Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s OWN APPOINTEE, wrote the majority opinion.  This was quickly followed by a 5-4 refusal to dismantle the Obama-era Dreamer’s act.  Trump proceeded to rage on Twitter (“A shotgun blast to the faces”) about how we need new justices on the SCOTUS even though Gorsuch was his appointment and Chief Justice Roberts was installed by George W, the man who has most benefitted from Trump because Trump has supplanted him as the worst president in the history of the country.  It should also be noted that the two worst presidents we ever had lost the majority vote and were installed by the Electoral college, a voting device that exists in no other country that has a Constitution.  

On top of that, John Bolton’s book is getting major traction.  Granted, the New York Times gave it a bad review, which Trump should naturally dismiss since he typically disbelieves everything the “failing” Times says.  But this time he’s embracing it, loudly declaring that everyone should ignore the book while simultaneously launching a law suit against it.  Of course, anyone familiar with the Streisand Effect could have predicted how that was going to turn out:  It’s Amazon’s top seller.  Part of me is amused and part of me is furious.  Rather than reveal his knowledge back when it might have been useful, like during the House investigations, Bolton dicked around until it was too late and the hearings moved to the Senate.  By that point he was ready to talk but naturally the Senate GOP made sure that didn’t happen.  His book apparently verifies the entire case against Trump, and even adds items both big (begging China to help him get reelected) and just stupid (wanting to get an autographed CD of “Rocketman” to Kim jong un.). Bolton belatedly declares that the man whom he relentlessly supported for months is unfit for office.  I know, I know, better late than never, but Bolton could have been a major figure in American history rather than an after-the-fact addendum.

Plus Trump’s polling numbers continue to crater.  But having been burned in 2016 by polls that give Clinton a substantial lead right up to election day, every bit of reportage on Trump’s numbers are accompanied by warnings of “You never know.”  Meanwhile the GOP continues to do everything it can to make sure that the poor, students and minorities are precluded from voting, while Trump does everything he can to make the post office go away.  It’s an obvious gambit to avoid a Big Blue Shift:  That’s when the initial voting seems to be leaning Republican, but the subsequent tally of mail-in votes swings it over to the Democratic side.  Since Trump and the GOP want to do everything they can to impede the Democratic right to vote, naturally they have to target both the post office and the procedure itself, which Trump baselessly claims is rife with fraud.  

If Trump loses in November, this past week will be regarded as the beginning of the end:  when Trump’s tone-deaf response to everything from Coronavirus preparedness (he asserted that people are wearing facemasks just to piss him off) to Black Lives Matter (his fear mongering is causing armed “militia” men to harass peaceful demonstrators in small towns) to his actions on Twitter (he retweeted a doctored video that falsely depicted a non-existent CNN story which Twitter wound up labelling as such) finally turned enough people against him to make a difference.

That’s assuming they’re allowed to vote.

PAD

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – MAY 29. 2020

We all know that Trump has no understanding whatsoever of the Constitution, the document that he falsely swore to uphold three and a half years ago in front of a far smaller audience than Barack Obama drew for his inauguration.  Since then he has sworn that the emoluments clause is “phony,” has falsely claimed that Article II gives him the power to do “whatever (he) wants,” and swore that he is going to do whatever he can to narrow the freedoms that the First Amendment provides.

And this week he has renewed his assault on freedom of speech, continuing his angle that has been parroted by dictators historically:  that the free press is the enemy.  We’ve already seen him open fire on his beloved Fox News when the right wing swinging news channel dared to criticize him.  Now, however, he has opened fire on the forum that enables him to talk directly to millions of followers:  Twitter. 

Basically Twitter dared to treat him in the same way that they would treat someone else who was violating their terms of service.  Indeed, if he’d been anyone else, they likely would have blocked his account and banned him from Twitter ages ago for his incessant lies, his name calling and his threats.   They flagged one of his false tweets about voter fraud, linking it to articles from reputable sources, and naturally Trump went ballistic.  He falsely declared that linking his tweets to news sources was the same as censorship, and unlike his sluggish nonresponse to the virus, he immediately swung into action and signed an executive order that targeted Section 230 which affords Twitter protection against law suits.  So basically he screwed himself, because all he did was give Twitter MORE incentive to carefully patrol tweets and make sure they don’t violate the terms of service since their protection would be minimized or eliminated.  If they’re worried they can be sued for libel, they will naturally delete any lies that Trump posts.  That whole nonsense about a non-existent cold case against Joe Scarborough?  Gone.  His baseless claims that Biden is mentally impaired?  History.  His contention that Obama committed the greatest fraud in political history?  Adios.  Through his own actions, he is removing any incentive that Twitter has to allow him to do whatever he wants.

His latest endeavor was this morning, when he swore he was going to send the army into Minneapolis, declaring that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”  Because when White supremacists run over a helpless protestor, there are very good people on both sides.  When armed idiots waving the Confederate flag show up in droves, shut down the government and threaten the Democratic political leaders, Trump applauds them.  But the moment blacks begin to riot, he’s ready to begin shooting them down.

It should be noted that if I did a tweet that said, “I can’t stand Trump blowing his own horn.  When the tooting starts, the shooting starts,” not only would Twitter delete it, but I’d likely be visited by the Secret Service.  A threat is a threat.

I suppose I should address the whole rioting thing, because naturally right wingers are loudly declaring that liberals are perfectly okay with people rioting and stealing while we strenuously objected to armed white people showing up and shutting down the government.  And it does seem that rioting and looting is an expected reaction associated with people of color.  For instance, when the verdict of O.J. Simpson was going to be handed down, Los Angeles police were bracing themselves for rioting from blacks if he was found guilty.  When he was declared not guilty, there was zero concern that angry whites would storm the streets.  Which they didn’t.   They just sat there, puzzled, while blacks cheered that they had for once gotten “white man’s justice.”

I’m not okay with rioting and theft.  But I understand it.  The attitude is likely that if they break into a Target and steal some televisions, well, the Target will repair the damage and insurance companies will reimburse them the loss.  And of course they’re right.  They do it because it satisfies their anger and their desire to strike back at the white-run system that doesn’t give the slightest of dámņš about black life.  “You take our lives, so we’ll take your stuff.”  Meanwhile, whenever they attempted to protest in a non-violent method—whether it was taking a knee at a football game or assembling in protest with no weapons—they were greeted with condemnation.  If you’re going to despise them no matter what they do, they figure they might as well hurt whites in the only place that matters:  the pocket book.  

Meanwhile a dark skinned CNN reporter was arrested while a white skinned CNN reporter wasn’t.  If that doesn’t underscore the pure difference in how whites and blacks are treated, nothing will.

And yet Trump, who has historically supported white supremacists and registered no complaints about whites killing blacks before, suddenly decides that the death of George Floyd—killed by a white cop—is outrageous and should be condemned, that the rioters are dishonoring him, and let’s shoot them.  The leader of the free world wants to shoot some citizens while he simultaneously rages against Twitter for daring to take the slightest step in holding him to the same rules they hold everyone else.

The words “I can’t even” have never seemed more appropriate.

Oh, and he is changing an environmental rule from the Obama administration so hunters in Alaska can now go into the dens of bears and killed their cubs.  

Just in time for Eric and Don Jr. to go hunting, I suppose.

PAD

It would be easy to focus on Trump because, as always, not a week passes where he doesn’t say or do something stupid.  This week he threatened two states because their Democratic leaders were endeavoring to make sure that people could vote by mail, threatening to try and withhold financial support because of their attempts to encourage election fraud. This despite the fact that election fraud is not an issue and absentee voting doesn’t tend to favor either Democrats or Republicans.  Basically he’s renewing his whole quid pro quo, threatening to keep help out of the hands of people who need it unless those people knuckle under to his demands.  And why not?  The GOP covered his ášš in January, so he believes he can do whatever he wants with impunity.

Which, so far, he can.  Inspectors General threaten to ride herd on him?  Fire them.  People testified before Congress over his actions or reported their concerns to their superiors?  They’re gone.  Walk around in public without wearing the face mask that his own people are saying should be a part of one’s apparel in pubic?  Screw that:  the press would take delight in depicting him wearing one, so why not risk being exposed or infecting others?

Because with Trump, it’s all about weakness.  He doesn’t want to appear weak in any way, shape or form, because to be weak is to be a loser, and he absolutely cannot ever lose.  Ever.  This is so much a part of his persona that he literally could not say that the tests he’s taken for the Coronavirus were negative, because to him, a negative test was a failure, and failure is a loss.  So he actually said, “I tested positively towards negative.”  This yutz actually has the nerve to claim that BIDEN can’t speak properly when his own twisted psychology prevents him from saying, “I tested negative.”  Meanwhile he continues to attack journalists, especially female ones, who have the nerve to ask him actual questions about his contradictions and vagueness.  Indeed, for some reason he’s started talking like Yoda:  “A rude question that is.”  I know he’s been accused of being a Russian puppet, but it was never intended to be a literal charge.

But you know what?  Screw Trump.  I feel like talking briefly about his followers.  

They are the ones whom experts have been describing as being members of a death cult.  Although they claim that the left wing is viewing the pandemic through the haze of partisanship, this is actually a classic example of something Trump does all the time:  Accuse the opposition of something that you yourself are doing.  Because the fact of the matter is that it’s the Trumpies whose perceptions are being governed entirely through the haze of cult membership and tribal partisanship.  They condemn Democratic governors for the unspeakable crime of worrying about citizens’ health and obeying the advisories of medical experts and epidemiologists while lauding GOP governors who place the economy above health concerns.  Meanwhile evangelical intellectuals are loudly proclaiming that it’s silly to elevate fear of death over spiritual concerns and that people should be ready to die if it will serve the greater good, i.e., the economy and attending services so they can donate to the churches.  

And the reason I say their opinions are tribal is because we all know that if Hillary Clinton were President and she were saying the exact same things that Trump was—that the country should reopen, that doctors’ advice should be ignored—the Democrats would be appalled and the right wing’s heads would be exploding.  They’d be demanding she be impeached and loudly declaring, “That’s what happens when you put a Democrat in charge!”  But no, instead they line up behind Trump, endorse his talking points no matter how stupid they are, and oh, do they hate Democrats.  Indeed, that’s really why they love Trump:  Because they believe he irritates the left, and it’s all about aggravating the left.  Nothing else matters.

So allow me to address their perceptions, their lies, their distortions:

We wanted to be proven wrong about Trump.  We really did.

We wanted our concerns to be groundless, our worries to be misplaced.  We wanted to believe he would grow into the job, that the whole racist, brainless thing was an act to get elected.  That he would rise to the challenges of the position.  That he would protect us, and would protect the United States’ position as leader of the free world.  That he could grow to be the man we needed.

We wanted our fears that, if confronted with a genuine threat to American health and safety, he would rise to the challenge.  

Why?  

Because WE LIVE HERE, you dûmbáššëš.  Our fates are tied in with yours, and we do not benefit from friends and family members dying, jobs disappearing, and businesses go bankrupt.  

We are not so obsessed with Trump losing that we’re happy that over 100,000 people are going to be dead by June 1, that the economy has crashed, that the entire country is spiraling down the drain.  Hëll, my daughter was supposed to attend a BTS concert tomorrow; that’s not happening.  Who knows if it ever is.  No one knows anything.  We’re living on suppositions, guesses and speculation, and we’re no more comfortable than you are.  The difference between us is, our opinions are not shaped by cult like devotion, and yours are.  You can and do hate us with all your souls, and by and large, we don’t return that hate.  We just feel sorry for you and shake our heads, wondering if there is anything that can shake your faith.  Apparently the only thing that can is if you die from the Coronavirus.  

Which you’re very likely to do as you hold your idiotic protests and ignore basic safety measures, strutting around with your guns to prove how tough you are.  You’ll infect each other because the virus doesn’t give a dámņ what your political affiliations are.  It’ll just make you sick and possibly kill you.  

To quote your leader:  Sad.

PAD