Trump

Sunday July 19, 2020

105 Days until the election on November 3^rd

185 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

One friend texted me saying he noted a bit of optimism in one of my latest screeds.

Another sent me tweets about Federal agents snatching people off the streets in Portland.

All this in the background while I try to read Mary Trump’s book.

Some have said they read it at one sitting. That they couldn’t put it down.

I’m the opposite. I find it so familiar and so disturbing that I can only read a few pages at a time.

“How did we get here?” I keep asking. The parallels and warnings about Germany and the rise of Hitler are striking and very scary. It seems the clearing of Lafayette Square and the guarding of Federal buildings by unidentified men in some sort of police uniform was merely a dress rehearsal for what we are now experiencing in Portland. 

What is happening in Portland seems reminiscent of what happened on the famed Ukrainian phone call between our president and theirs. Fueled by a wild conspiracy lie our president asked their president to hand over a non-existent server. This lie was started by Putin’s GRU. I wonder what Putin thought when he heard what Trump was asking for? Maybe, it was something along the lines of – “This guy is a bigger idiot than I thought. He doesn’t know he’s not supposed to believe that crap.”

The confluence of these sorts of random disturbing things is of great concern to me. As a friend of mine who owned a boat once told me – with a boat you can withstand one thing being wrong, even two; it’s the third one that gets you. 

And that is why he reasoned you fix the first little thing as soon as possible, to prevent it from growing to two little things.

Of course, we are way passed the point of two little things. One of the things reported about Donald Trump is that he wears you down with the constant morass. Eventually, people have given up. The bankers in New York did, then internationally, that is until they got financing from the Russian mob/government, which bought Trump.

By my count we have 185 days to withstand this assault, and if we are lucky we will be done with him and his gang. I say lucky because there is speculation and talk that he will not go – willingly.

This narrative, of not going willingly, has manifest itself in two ways: one spoken and one only dimly imagined, but is now taking shape. 

The first way is rigging the election to win. There are two possibilities here

 This could happen by voter suppression and fraud with the help of the Republican Party and the Russians. In other words an attack on our election both from within and without.

Or by an executive and congressional coup d’etat. This would involve the president doing something to prevent the electoral college from meeting in December with enough votes to elect a President. This would throw the election into the House that would then elect a President by state vote. Each state gets one vote. There are 26 Republican states. He could win the election 26-24.

The second way that Trump could hold onto the office is by revolt. We are now seeing that he and his henchmen are not above using unmarked vehicles and unmarked policemen to steal people off the streets in Portland. Certainly, with everything we know about Trump, he will not stop unless forced to stop, be it via force, court decision, or public humiliation. 

This snatching of people may be the start of either the revolt he is formulating or the coup d’etat mechanism. Whatever it is. It is not good. 

It is not who we were; it is who we have become.

105 Days until the election on November 3^rd

185 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Meat and Potatoes 

Saturday July 18, 2020

106 Days until the election on November 3^rd

186 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

We are learning what we already knew. That Donald Trump is a racist sociopath. Mary Trump’s book adds family background and detail, which allows for more understanding and analysis.

There are several new phrases that she uses which makes things clearer than before. “Learned Disability” is, apparently, a psychological term and if I understand it, speaks to the idea that in an abusive relationship there are abusers and the abused. One learns to be psychologically impaired to allow the dysfunction to continue and for the abused to survive. This speaks to the idea of intergenerational abuse. Fred Trump, Donald’s father was abusive in that he berated and scolded his children in such a way that they learned to be submissive and abusive. It was and is a survival technique. The family was dysfunctional and it was passed along to Donald.

Mary Trump also talked about the casual and assumed way “the older generation” as she put it talked about black people and Jews. They used the N-word and spoke of Jews in discriminatory ways. She heard Donald use those terms (and the N-word). She spoke of it in terms of the casualness and acceptableness of it all. Some people now seemed shocked. I’m not and I’m surprised others are. Jews were discriminated in WWII, not just by Germans but here in America. There were tacit understandings about African-Americans and Jews at that time. One of the houses I bought in the 1980s the owners showed me the covenants their old title had. It included two large paragraphs that took up most of a page outlining whom they agreed not to sell to. This included: Jews, negroes, Arabs, Muslims, and the list went on and on. My point being that this kind of accepted discrimination wasn’t that long ago. 

The issue of how could Ivanka marry a Jew was brought up in an interview of her by Rachel Maddow. The explanation by Mary was “they had money.” This is the essence of the nature of prejudice. You may not like all people of a particular race or religion, but you are willing to make exceptions for ones you actually know because they are different from the stereotype you have in your mind. 

The other thing about prejudice is that the persons you make exception for may indeed be different than the people you don’t like of that religion or ethnicity, and that gets into a question of class. Many black people in the U.S. were of a lower class, and by that I mean what they valued was different, therefore white middle class people upon seeing a black person assumed they were lower class. Class in this sense is a question of values. Much of that is driven by education, economic conditions, and environment. 

The Jews living in Vienna Austria in the 1930s were aghast when they saw the peasants from the rural areas of Russia moving in following the pogroms of that country. The city folks had nothing in common with the Jewish people who showed up in donkey pulled carts.

I mention that example to try to illustrate that this kind of behavior is universal. Not that it should be condoned. The only way to ameliorate the situation is to bring both sides into equal status conditions, and that, is very hard to do. It requires being aware – constantly.

I think there’s another reason why Ivanka and Jared were accepted within both families and that is that both families were (and are) dysfunctional in similar ways. The Kushner family had to escape the horrors of the Jewish ghettos of Poland. They lived in the forest in winter, emigrated to Italy, hoping for passage to Italy (good thing Trump wasn’t president then!), made it to New Jersey where they began building houses. 

There’s a story about someone complaining that their life was so hard and being screamed at by one of the survivors of the escape from the ghetto where they literally had to burrow under the wall to get out. (“You think this is hard?” I can hear it.)

This also meant both in the Kushner family and in the Trump family that making the sale was important. So what if you stretched the truth? You did what you did to survive. The problem is that those behaviors become ingrained and then you have, as Mary Trump wrote “cheating as a way of life.”

Cheating, bullying, lying, intimidating are part of the shtick. 

Rachel asked Mary about another incident where Donald in introducing her to Melania said that Mary had overcome a terrible drug problem. Mary had never done drugs and said as much to Donald. Donald doubled down and insisted, all the while smiling slightly to Mary. It was as if to say, “I know, that you know, that this isn’t true.”

So why do it? Mary explained. Remember, she’s a clinical psychologist. At the time of the incident Mary was gathering material to write a book about Donald. She explained that for Donald it sounded better to say that she was in this pathetic drug abused state “and then I gave her a job,” and miraculously she is all better now (due to my munificence.) 

Oh boy.

So we know, once again, that Donald is a lying abusive sociopath. Great. Now what?

We have to get him out and all his enablers. They’ve been abused. They need help, but they don’t need to be running our country.

106 Days until the election on November 3^rd

186 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Big Rock Candy Mountain (?) 

(No, Somewhere in Angkor)

Tuesday July 14, 2020

110 Days until the election on November 3^rd

190 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

Donald Trump Jr. Has a new book coming out.

LIBERAL PRIVILEGE “Joe Biden and the Democrat’s Defense of the Indefensible”

That’s the title and subtitle. It’s self-published, and thank god for that, because any editor worth a nickel would not publish it. Not with that title.

Okay. Let’s give Junior the benefit of the doubt. Maybe, he is only talking about one democrat, in which case the apostrophe is correctly placed. Then he must mean Joe Biden. Donnie J has said that this book is driving Libruals crazy (or however he spells Liberal) and I guess so.

Oh for Bill Buckley and Crossfire now. “Mr. Trump which democrat did you mean?” (open mouth tongue waggle from side to side.)

“I meant all Democrats.”

(Tongue waggle.) “You clearly did not or you would have placed the apostrophe on the other side of the ’s’ wouldn’t you? So did you mean Joe Biden?”

…

Yeah, well. It’s only English. What’s he going to do, claim he’s an immigrant and this is his second language? That he speaks ‘Merican? 

I think I’ll go get Mary Trump’s book, which is out today after her uncle lost his law suit to stop it.

Maybe Don junior should write another book “Dad’s terrible awful, very bad day”.

I don’t know. Just sayin’

(OMG! He (Junior) and his girlfriend are going to take turns reading the chapters for the audio book. Can’t wait. I hope she doesn’t have to be intubated after testing positive for Covid. That would make her reading really hard to understand.)

111 Days until the election on November 3^rd

191 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Hang On.

Monday July 13, 2020

111 Days until the election on November 3^rd

191 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

And oh yes there’s that other pandemic caused by the coronavirus, but the two I mentioned in the title: stupidity and idiocy are self inflicted.

We can stop the Covid-19 pandemic, but the other two? Right now it seems hopeless.

I have a friend who lives in Florida who kept saying that Florida only had 20 deaths per 100,000 while New York had more. So he asked where would you rather be? He seemed to miss the point that New York got hit hard at first, but their governor took steps to stop the virus while the Florida governor did not. Now Florida broke it’s all time high and just before that it’s seven day average of new cases was 9087 per day versus New York at 634. When I went to comment I found he had taken the post down, but not before several people managed to ascribe political motivations.

Then I have the friend who keeps posting stuff from PragerU. The latest was that the Constitution never mentions “blacks” when they talk about the 3/5s of a man rule. No shit. The term “blacks” didn’t come into vogue until centuries later. The Constitution did mention “slaves” and what was the color of the skin of most of those people? Don’t worry old PragerU says there were white slaves too. Of course, the very name is a con. It’s a right wing disinformation site and has no credentials and is not a university. But my friend says, well of course not, everyone knows that. Yeah? Then why the con? 

If you want to know about Prager look him up along with Samantha Bee who did a report on him. He slices and dices the truth to make it seem, via the headline my friend posts, like this is normal stuff. It’s not. 

Then there’s the guy I went to high school with who posts the really outrageous memes. The ones that show Hillary and Comey should be indicted. Or a post of a policeman posted like he’s armed for combat and it says something like “Bet you won’t repost this”

Damn right I won’t. Remember when the cop was Officer Joe Bolton and he made the rounds of downtown checking locks? What happened? Officer Joe knew everybody in town. 

I saw a thing on the Sunday Morning show about the city of Shreveport. Terrible crime and violence twenty years ago. Then this native of the city started going door to door meeting his neighbors. Crime is down 50%. They have houses that serve as community centers. A couple lives there and takes in kids who need to get out of their own house. They have teen counseling. High school graduation is up. Kids are healthier. All from meeting your neighbors.

Maybe it’s time to get out and socially distance and meet your neighbors. Wearing a mask.

In other news, this is a weird fact. States where the governors listened to the health professionals and followed their advice have fewer cases of corona virus. States that listened to the politicians have out of control epidemics. Hum, maybe there’s a connection?

When did we get to this anti-science place? When did stupid become a thing? 

111 Days until the election on November 3^rd

191 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Bryce Holliwell, my alter ego, reporting from Paris for WhaDaFoook radio/cable/TV 

(Well it was before green screens, so it’s almost Paris.)

Saturday July 11, 2020

113 Days until the election on November 3^rd

193 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

The other day Trump commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, and why not? He’d only been charged with seven Federal crimes and found guilty of all seven. I mean how bad were they? Witness Tampering including threatening to kill the guy’s dog. And the crimes didn’t even get to the heart of the matter. Stone was the conduit directly to Trump on what Wikileaks was doing with the Russian stolen emails. This was testified to by Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, among others. Stone even admitted that he kept loyal to Trump in such a way as to imply that he had evidence directly linking Trump to these activities. 

So he gets out basically Scott-Free. Had Trump pardoned him then he would have immunity and be forced to testify. Not to worry because Bill Barr has finished decapitating the three Federal prosecutorial offices going after Trump with his removal of the head of the Eastern District of New York. Don’t you wonder what Barr’s motivation is? To so debase himself and the Department of Justice so much? Why? To get a pat on the head from Trump? 

It is stunning.

Is there reason to impeach Trump? I’ve heard good reason. And that is that being impeached would prevent him from running for office again. I can’t find the wording anywhere yet. Does it mean he can’t run for president or for any public office?

Then there’s the pardon business. Some have speculated that he will pardon himself and his kids and anyone else on his last day in office. I have to ask, “Can he do that?” and “Will it stick?” I mean to be pardoned you’d have to be charged. I would think. Hopefully, I’ll get more clarification on this point.

So the worst may have come to pass. The very thing the Founding Fathers were worried about and tried to prevent. The idea of two systems of justice: one for the rich and powerful, and one for everyone else. We are closer to this with Trump’s actions.

Meanwhile, the corona virus has infected over 70,000 people yesterday. Last week it was 50,000 new cases. At 50,000 it was estimated that that would represent 7,500 deaths of older people or 500 of younger people. Or 10,500 older folks at the 70K mark or 700 young folks. That’s just daily death toll from that day’s infection.

Hey, Mississippi’s governor even thinks it might be a good idea to wear a mask. Yeah, you’re not New York. Remember you saying that? No? Maybe, it wasn’t you but that idiot governor in Florida, who along with Kemp in Georgia stole their elections. Can you imagine if Florida and Georgia had the opponents in office what would have happened? I tell you what. They would have locked down the state and stamped out the virus. But instead you got these no-nothings who gosh gee-wilikers maybe we outta wear a mask? Types running the state governments. Now their hospitals are over run. Their staffs still don’t have proper protective equipment and it’s going to get worse. Doctors are now having to decide who lives and who dies. Good job guys!

PS Picasso, Man with Sheep (maybe?)