(the following is a letter to the friends and acquaintances of mine who have admitted to voting for the Idiot in Chief for their various reasons. It is the promised follow-up to my original post in which I wondered if anybody I knew had)
Hey gang! I just wanted to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all of those who supported and elected Donald Trump! For one reason or another, you went out of your homes and into your polling places and voluntarily voted to elect the most abysmally unqualified, horrifically bigoted, transparently corrupt, intellectually vapid, worst excuse for a human being to ever run for the office of the President of the United States of America. I’m certain that your reason or reasons for electing this 1946 pro-abortion poster child are perfectly valid to you but humor me and let’s explore why you preferred an orange faced, used car salesman, representing the very worst a shitgibbon has to offer to an actual, you know, SANE person.
Some of the people I’ve talked to have said they voted for the Gropenfuhrer because they hated Obama so very much. That's valid. After eight years of not taking anybody’s guns away, I’m sure he would have gotten around to it in his third term. Maybe you were asleep in middle school when you were supposed to be reading about the 22nd amendment of the constitution, the one that prohibits anyone from serving a third term as President. That’s perfectly understandable. After all, reading is hard work, (just ask Cheeto Jesus, who prefers his Presidential Daily Briefings to be on one double spaced page with lotsa pictures and graphs) and I’m sure you had better things to do with your time, like trying to get away with applying a little illegal lip gloss or vainly attempting to cover up your illegal cigarette breath with equally illegal chewing gum. Priorities, damn it!
Others I’ve spoken with had visions of fat income tax refund checks rolling toward them in the mail! Yay! No more Obamacare! You can be just as irresponsible as you want and eschew health insurance. After all, you’re young and healthy and if you get into an accident, you can go to the emergency room. Nobody pays those ER bills anyway! Why should you be bothered with trifles like “health care” and “social responsibility”? Except, nope. That ain't gonna happen. Not anytime soon anyway. I’m afraid you’ll be paying that penalty a minimum of this year and next as well. “But, but” you sputter, Dampnuts Trump promised good, affordable health insurance for everyone, right? Let’s look at the quote, shall we:
Trump said his plan for replacing most aspects of Obama’s health-care law is all but finished. Although he was coy about its details — “lower numbers, much lower deductibles” — he said he is ready to unveil it alongside Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
Wow! Lower costs and much lower deductibles! I can’t wait for that! Except not so much. It turns out that his plan allows insurance companies to charge much higher deductibles for much worse coverage. It raises costs on consumers and pretty much eviscerates any oversight and regulation that’s supposed to prevent the insurance companies bilking us. But, hey, you can just go back to being uncovered and relying on emergency rooms for your healthcare, right? Sure! What do you pay taxes for anyway? Certainly not so any of those people can get away with free shit!
A few people I know couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton for one reason or another. I heard about “Goldman-Sachs speeches” until I wanted to throw my television and computer out the window. Oh, we can’t have someone who gave a speech at Goldman-Sachs! Corruption! More of the same!® Benghazi! (Oops. Sorry, that last one just slipped out.) Better to have someone who has never been anywhere near Wall Street in the Oval Office! As a stock market investor who lives in New York City, I’m sure Donald Dirty Old Man never would have gone there. Trump Tower is on Fifth Avenue after all, not Wall Street. Why, that’s practically Queens or Brooklyn or even Dogpatch. And at least we won’t have to worry about any of those awful Goldman-Sachs people hanging around the Oval Office in the White House! Well, apart from Steven Mnuchin, I mean but he only worked for them for 17 years. Seriously. It’s not like he gave them a speech. And as Secretary of the Treasury it’s not like he’ll be in a position to enrich himself or others, right? Nah, we can trust a guy who didn’t give speeches at Goldman-Sachs.
I was warned how much of a warhawk Clinton was and how terrible it was that she voted for war in Iraq. Yes, I agree. That was a stupid vote and anybody who didn’t realize what the wanking chimp was going to do with that authorization was asleep at the wheel. Good thing we didn’t wind up with her! She might have threatened Iran or insulted our allies or flippantly talked about using nuclear weapons! Whew! Dodged a bullet there.
Still others accused her of being homophobic based on the Don’t Ask, Don't Tell policy of her husband’s administration, (if you really think that wasn’t a huge improvement over what we had before, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about), or about a really stupid comment she made about Nancy Reagan. Oh, they’re so right! Despite the fact that she immediately apologized for the faux pas, it’s much better to have a “decent man” who turns out to be a huge misogynist and brags about attempting to seduce married women and committing sexual assault and an Attorney General who immediately upon confirmation moved to roll back protections for LGBTQ Americans, especially trans kids, than a woman who sometimes makes boneheaded, off the cuff comments about dead people. Better to have a known homophobe in the White House than someone who possibly could look like one if you squint in just the right way, am I right?
Maybe you wanted to make America great again®. I’m sure Trump and the Republicans will get around to that after they’ve finished selling the country to the fucking Russians, which Republicans won’t investigate because they have more important things to do and people to impoverish. Maybe you wanted a “decent man” in the White House or to improve education with a woman who wants to bring Jesus into a classroom near your children or perhaps you thought that an oil company executive would make an awesome Secretary of State or that an unreformed racist would be a really good attorney general or that a guy whose stated goal is to obliterate Social Security and Medicare should be trusted with overseeing…. Social Security and Medicare. I can’t even guess why you might want to have a fucking moron in charge of the Department of Energy, which the idiotic baboon in question said he wanted to abolish and then promptly forgot exists. Maybe you admire the way he’s a denier of science and an anti-vaxxer. No problem that it got up to 100 degrees in Oklahoma in fucking February! I’m sure Sen James Inhofe will find another snowball to throw soon, though he may have to go to Svalbard to find one.
Maybe you’re one of the people who told me about all of the “fiscal discipline” and “manufacturing jobs” he’s going to “bring back”. Well those manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back so Emperor Ming Trump’s Wall is more likely going to be used to keep American emigrants out of Mexico, where so many of those jobs went. As for the fiscal hawks, I have just one question: How do you feel about footing the bill for the Trumpster to fly to Florida every fucking weekend? And this weekend he’s going BACK to Florida yet again for a 3 years premature campaign rally that he insists his campaign will pay for but guess what? We’ll still be paying to operate that enormously expensive to operate aircraft, Air Force One. It will cost you, the taxpayer, millions of rubles dollars down the toilet just so your “decent man” can stroke his own ego with a campaign rally three years before any campaign kicks off.
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But let’s forget about all the whys for now. The point of this post is not to figure out why you were so colossally stupid but to thank you for taking those first steps in making me unemployed and homeless. Not happy with just hating brown people, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has come out of the closet as quite the homophobic pygmy. Not only has he ordered all schools that receive federal money to segregate transgender students, (Sessions certainly does love him some segregation!), he has also promised to pursue a euphemistically named “religious liberty” policy, which is nothing more or less than permission for citizens both public and private to freely discriminate against people they don’t like, especially LGBTQ people, under the guise of religious liberty. The thing is, the Constitution already protects your religious liberty:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
Recognize that? Probably not because it doesn’t say:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
For the edification of those of you who are still unclear, the first quoted sentence is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and as you can plainly see, you already have the absolute constitutionally by God protected right to practice your religion as much as you want, even though it doesn’t grant you carte blanch to be a raging asshole. So let’s be clear once and for all: these laws have nothing to do with “religious liberty” and everything to do with an official okey-dokey to engage in hate based discrimination. Denying me the right to use the potty when I have to isn’t about “religious liberty”, it is about plain, damned discrimination based on an inborn trait that some people find creepy. It is about causing me and others like me to suffer because these people get their jollies by bullying others. But like all bullies, they are cowards so they have to bully those whom they perceive to be the weakest, most vulnerable people they can find. The whole myth that these are just laws aimed at allowing people “freedom of religious expression” represents more of those infamous “alternate facts”.
“Alternate facts” aside, engaging in anti-LGBTQ discrimination isn’t “practicing religion”, even when it’s disguised as such. It’s still just being a giant, bigoted asshole and it’s going to cost me my job, my home and possibly my life if it’s up to Derp the Clown and his entourage of haters and idiots, who are about as religious as I am. Because if they were actual Christians, who want to live their lives more like Christ, I would think they would be all about helping the sick and the hungry and the homeless and the poor and the vulnerable. I mean, it’s been a while since I read the Bible but they seem to be doing exactly the opposite thing of what Jesus would do. Maybe they are practicing some form of Alternate Christianity.
The good news is that there are homeless shelters, the bad news is that I, as a transwoman, am only welcome in one (1) homeless shelter in the entire country and that one is in new York City. All I have to do is travel 1,800 miles and hope they have an open bed. But what about public assistance? Surely if I am rendered unable to support myself as a consequence of public policy, I could get public assistance? Don’t be ridiculous, if you can possibly help yourself! Of course I won’t be eligible for any assistance, however limited because these people think that being trans is a choice I made. They think that I woke up one morning and was bored so I consciously chose to make my life as difficult as I can imagine it being, short of being buried in an ant hill so I embarked in a diabolical plot to pretend I’m a woman in order to peer at young girls in bathrooms.
That’s something else you voted for, by the way, did you know? You voted for an administration that includes Mike Pence, who believes that I am a depraved man who presents as a woman solely to spy on little girls in the restroom. Because what better way to spy on little girls than to disguise oneself as a woman 24/7 for decades and hope that eventually you’ll find the only ladies room in the United States without opaque stall doors? Guys, I’m here to tell you that those things are as fictional as those new coal mining jobs in West Virginia.
I can’t understand for the life of me how an otherwise rational and in many cases, loving person could look at that small handed, pot bellied howler monkey for ten seconds and then select his name on a ballot. I’ve had people vehemently deny that they voted for the hatred and LGBTQ phobia that these people center their lives around and I’m sure some of them even believe it. Know what? Bullshit. You can’t separate the specific, (and moronic) reason(s) that you elected the worst President ever from the policies I am now going to have to somehow survive. Some have even scoffed at me and told me that never in a million years will I be made an official social pariah. Guess what? It’s happening right now and while you scratch your head and wonder how in hell those less than pleasant aspects of the shitgibbon escaped your laser focus, I’ll be living under a bridge somewhere because along with my job and my home, they are determined to destroy any social safety net that is now in place.
Unless shit gets really bad, you’re probably not going to be much affected. The people who will have to live with your choice are those of us with a giant rainbow or Islamic Crescent target on our backs while you go on eating mashed potatoes and gravy in air conditioned comfort. Unless of course you’re one of the few homocons I know, in which case no doubt you’re looking forward to collaborating with our oppressors and becoming an enforcer within our segregated ghetto. By all means, keep fantasizing about the “special privileges” you’re going to earn by doing their dirty work but let’s not forget the words of Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Didn’t think about that in your rush to stick it to Obama, (who couldn’t be President again anyway), did you? Did you have one rational or unselfish thought when you were doing that? Did you even consider how monumentally stupid, dangerous and inflammatory some of the shit that candidate Bad CombOver said is? How it might affect people who are not you? Did you even remotely consider how closely his violent, nationalistic rhetoric resembles that of any given 20th Century dictator in your admirable haste to “make America great again®”? Think I’m unnecessarily going Godwin? I hope you’re right but in my gut I feel that you are not. If left to their own devices, the fake Christians and real Fascists that whisper in the shitgibbon’s ear will pass anti LGBTQ laws that make the ones in Uganda look like high school prom rules of etiquette.
Guess what? ALL of you, every last one of you are in exactly the same position you were in prior to electing President Shitweasel. You’re still looking for that elusive, (not to mention fictitious) manufacturing job, you’re still having to pay a penalty to the IRS because you don’t have the freedom to get your medical care at taxpayer expense in the Emergency Room, you’re still shelling out tax money into the DC political feeding trough, neither Clinton nor Obama are going to go to jail and Glenn Rhee is still dead. Spending is up, the climate is warming faster and faster, the Doomsday Clock has been advanced, thanks to the election of a mentally unstable, thin skinned egotistical man-child with access to nuclear weapons, those much vaunted jobs that Trump claimed to have saved at Carrier are going away anyway, since Carrier is using the enormous tax breaks they duped President Dumbass out of conceding to them to automate their factory and your dog still craps on the rug, no matter how often you swat him on the nose for it!
About the only thing you’ve accomplished is making the world less safe for vulnerable and already under represented people and ensured that nothing will be done to alleviate the crises we all commonly face. Like climate change, (which is a problem), the national debt, (which is not), and an unstable world. Far from being ameliorated, those things are being exacerbated. Civil rights* will be set back decades, churches, already far too influential in government will become even more so and on a more personal level, I might as well be wearing a pink triangle with the letter “T” in it. I wonder if you will cry when I’m beaten to bloody rags by some hyper macho Trump devotee? I wonder if you will miss me when I’m being forced to live in Europe or Latin America? I wonder if you’ll attempt to visit me in whatever gulag your {{{Dear Leader}}} designates for transgender Americans? I wonder if you personally will ever accept any responsibility at all in making Pennywise the President of the United States? I doubt it. You’ll still be living in denial that these things are taking place. No doubt when I’m dragged off and my cat is left to fend for herself, you’ll blame “liberals”.
So thanks and congratulations! You’ve made America great hate again. Thank you so very much for indefensibly electing this monstrously disgusting piece of crap but do us all a favor in the future, won’t you? Voting is your sacred duty as an American citizen. But it’s not just your duty to enter a voting booth and push a button, hell anybody can do that. The reason it’s reserved for adults only is because it is also your duty to inform yourself on issues and policies and to educate yourself about how government works and what its functions are and what they are not. It’s your solemn duty to KNOW what candidates stand for and what they represent, beyond your own stupid fucking prejudices. It’s your duty to weigh the bad with the good, to see the whole picture, not just some bellicose cartoon caricature at a campaign rally who gives you a bit of rare, middle aged wood be endlessly repeating a stupid slogan that doesn’t mean shit. If you’re going to do that, then I implore you, don’t ever vote again. You’re not doing it right. You might as well have driven a car off a cliff just because it’s easier to go straight ahead than to turn the steering wheel.
*those rights that belong to others not just white and male