Well, Tuesday sucked.
Badly.
I’m still wrapping my head around it. Still in shock.
There’s a pretty large share of blame to spread around. We could have been blind to the depth of anger and frustration in the white working class. There was an enthusiasm gap. There was a depression in the Democratic turnout. There were the emails. The Comey press conference. The Comey letter with nine days to go. The revelations from the DNC hack of bias against Bernie Sanders. “Pay for play” allegations. Wikileaks. Hacking by Guccifer 2.0 on behalf of the GRU, FSB and Putin. Voter suppression. Closed early voting locations. Long lines at polling stations. Jill Stein and third party-ism. People writing in “Harambe” for president. The fact that every poll, each and every one, got it wrong and made everyone overconfident by assuming that the electorate of 2008 and 2012 was still the electorate of 2016. Lots of fingers, lots of ways to point. Post mortem still pending.
But in the near term we have a more pressing problem.
President Drumpf.
The calls have come out for civility. For giving Donald a chance. For not being petty and small and instead rising above and respecting the process. For respecting the vote, respecting the Constitution, respecting the presidency. Sure, fine.
But here’s one simple question: When exactly did Donald Trump respect any of that?
As I type this on Thursday morning, there are protestors lining the streets of downtown Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Seattle, and other major cities. If there’s now a civility problem, that problem started with Donald Trump himself and is now coming back to bite him—big league.
Case in point: this protester shouting “Grab Donald Trump by the pussy” live on Fox News.
Juvenile? Sure, but it also makes a salient point. Why should Trump expect better treatment than he’s given to everyone else?
Trump surrogates, like Michael “Says who?” Cohen, have argued that Trump shouldn’t be considered a bigot or a racist because he—yes, Cohen actually said this—just doesn’t speak well. Yeah, seriously.
“He’s been called every negative word in the American dictionary, and then in other dictionaries, as well,” Cohen said. “They think he’s a sexist, misogynist, racist, Islamophobe.”
...
“I think that he made statements and, again, he’s not a politician — now he is, clearly — but he speaks off-the-cuff, he speaks from his heart, and it was never coming, or supposed to come out, as an animus towards a group when he was talking about (how) we need to stop the Syrian refugee influx because we don’t know who they are,” Cohen said. “That’s not being an Islamophobe, that’s not anti-Muslim. It’s pro-American.”
Actually that’s the definition of being an Islamophobe, because for one thing the people fleeing ISIS in Syria are mostly Shia, while ISIS itself is Sunni, so they aren’t technically even part of the same religion. It’s like treating Catholics and Protestants as the same thing, which they aren’t. Also, refugees go through an 18-month vetting process, so it’s already “extreme.”
And no, Trump wasn’t misconstrued by the “liberal media.” They just quoted him. But then again, they didn’t even get to the worst stuff—because this guy believes in eugenics.
The Frontline documentary “The Choice,” which premiered this week on PBS, reveals that Trump agrees with the dangerous and abusive theory of eugenics.
Trump’s father instilled in him the idea that their family’s success was genetic, according to Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio.
“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” D’Antonio says in the documentary. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”
The fact that Trump has gay people who work for him, or Latino and black people that work for him (he has to by the way, because it’s the law), doesn’t mean that he respects them. He’s been documented as saying he likes his money counted by “men in yarmulkes” and that he doesn’t like black people “touching his money” because they have a genetic inherent trait for “laziness.” And he did say, “It’s a bad idea to put your wife to work.”
On top of the allegations of sexual assault following his taped Access Hollywood confession and reports of his repeated personal humiliation of women, there are also dozens of complaints about his behavior. They include bursting into the dressing room of the Miss Universe contest, when many of the contestants were undressed. Even when some of them were teenagers. He really did call for the execution of innocent children in the Central Park Five case, and still to this day refuses to believe they weren’t the perpetrators, never mind the DNA match with the guy who finally confessed. And his comment about “Mexican rapists” being sent to America wasn’t just racially inflammatory, it was grossly incorrect. The original report he was referring to didn’t make a claim anything like that.
This is who is “doing the raping.”
Perpetrators can be coyotes, other migrants, bandits, or even government authorities.
“We have active cases here of officials who’ve been detained and are facing criminal proceedings… for abusing the vulnerable migrant women specifically,” said Alejandro Vila, head of a special prosecutor’s office in Chiapas dedicated to investigating and prosecuting crimes against migrants. “We’ve seen that for woman crossing alone, the risk of becoming a crime victim increases significantly.”
Sex is also seen as an economic exchange or form of payment; a physical “currency” for those women who lack the cash needed to pay bribes or “protection” fees on the journey north.
...
That’s why the statistics for rape and sexual assault are so fuzzy. Almost all migrants crossing north don’t have permission to be in Mexico, so reporting a crime to the authorities means risking deportation. Other victims are ashamed to admit they’ve been brutalized.
This story was about women being forced into prostitution on the southern border of Mexico, not about a steady stream of predators being imported across our border. These women were the victims, not the the perpetrators.
The “liberal media” didn’t blow this issue out of proportion: they didn’t even really address it. It’s not just that he got this one issue wrong—he got dozens of issues wrong. Severely wrong. He had a habit of this, and has a clear pattern of failing to fully comprehend an issue and then twisting it inside and out to fit his own selfish paranoid bigoted worldview. He’s done that with Mexicans, he’s done that with Syrian refugees (none of whom have been connected to terrorism), and he’s done that by falsely claiming the crime and murder rates in New York have gone up since “stop and frisk” was found unconstitutional, when they haven’t. He’s done that time and time again.
As I wrote last week: the media failed us. And as I wrote two days before the election, most of the media didn't respond to the amazing reporting of Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald on Trump’s character and business practices.
He documented how Donald Trump’s organization repeatedly deleted emails and destroyed documents that were under discovery and court orders.
Six months after the original filing, the case was nowhere because the Trumps had repeatedly ignored the deadlines to produce records and answers to questions, known as interrogatories. When a government attorney finally telephoned a Trump lawyer to find out why, he was told the Trumps had not even begun preparing their answers and had no plans to do so. The Trumps also postponed and blocked depositions, refused to provide a description of their records, as required, and would not turn over any documents.
Finally, under subpoena, Trump appeared for a short deposition. When asked about the missing documents, he made a shocking admission: The Trumps had been destroying their corporate records for the previous six months and had no document-retention program. They had conducted no inspections to determine which files might have been sought in the discovery requests or might otherwise be related to the case. Instead, in order to “save space,” Trump testified, officials with his company had been tossing documents into the shredder and garbage.
He also has a history of grossly lying under oath.
What is most disturbing in Trump’s sworn statements is the amount of nonsense he spouts as he mangles the English language into meanings no rational person could accept. An unsuccessful “development by Donald Trump” is not a “development by Donald Trump.” A successful project built by another developer who paid to have Trump’s name on the building is a “Donald Trump development.” A payment of $400,000 equals a payment of $1 million. An ownership stake of 30 percent is actually a 50 percent stake. In a single sentence, he says he knows some people’s names but not their identities, as if talking about Batman and Superman. He studied résumés, but he only glanced at them. The list goes on, with one point in common: Every one of his answers, while under oath, depends not on the truth but on whether it makes him look good.
This guy, this fracking guy, just got elected president.
And what’s worse is that he expects to be granted the benefit of the doubt now. Seriously? He thinks he should be granted a “chance”? After all the shit he’s said to and about people? Now, he wants unity and harmony and “One America”—something that Barack Obama was calling for four years before he ran for president.
Seems to me that giving the “benefit of the doubt” is exactly what he didn’t do with President Obama. He was the guy who wouldn’t let the bogus birth certificate issue go. He's the guy who made the first black American president show. his. papers.
How about this deal: I’ll give Donald Trump a “chance” after exactly the amount of time it took for him to admit the Barack Obama was a native born American citizen and legitimately president of the United States. That should take only a mere seven-and-a-half years.
These are the seeds that he himself has sown.
He was the one who made all this uncivil. He’s the one who jumped to unfair conclusions and accusations about Muslims, Mexicans, blacks, and women. When exactly did he give any of them the “benefit of the doubt?” Has he ever?
The fact is that this isn’t new. President Obama was also the target of massive protests—they were called the “tea party.” When they went out screaming about “death panels” and “Social-Kenyanism” or whatever, they were called patriots. They were true Americans exercising their rights under the Constitution. There were people who were convinced Obama was going to implement some kind of military coup with Jade Helm 13. They were those who went on and on about the FEMA camps. People have said Obama has said he would “refuse to step down” if Trump was elected, even though that claim came from a satirical website. It was a joke, intended to be funny because it was just so ridiculously implausible. Yet the Obama haters still took it seriously, completely missing the irony and the humor.
So, consequently, I don’t find any of Donald’s little remarks funny. Or cute.
The difference is that these people were afraid of Obama based on paranoid fantasies. None of that was real. People are afraid and terrified by Trump—because he’s Trump.
Those people flipped the Congress red and then proceeded to block every budget and every serious presidential proposal from Obama’s infrastructure bill to the American Jobs Act and then—and THEN —complained and whined about “Obama’s ineffective policies” and “weak recovery” after they effectively crippled government, shutting it down and driving it nearly over a fiscal cliff to the brink of collapse, stopping it from doing anything to help the America people in any way whatsoever.
They still haven’t even passed a bill on Zika funding.
They don’t get to kneecap America then #BlameObama for it all and “Mwah ha ha” into the sunset, because the fact is this was all the plan from the beginning. On the day of Obama’s inauguration the GOP plotted to sabotage his presidency, and hence the nation.
For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.
“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes McCarthy as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”
The conversation got only more specific from there, Draper reports. Kyl suggested going after incoming Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for failing to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes while at the International Monetary Fund. Gingrich noted that House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) had a similar tax problem. McCarthy chimed in to declare “there’s a web” before arguing that Republicans could put pressure on any Democrat who accepted campaign money from Rangel to give it back.
…
“You will remember this day,” Draper reports Newt Gingrich as saying on the way out. “You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.”
This was the plan. It’s just that those seeds didn’t come to fruition until 2016.
But what Donald has said and done isn’t a fantasy. It’s not an exaggeration. It’s not a caricature. He did say he was going to implement a “deportation force.” He did say he was going keep Gitmo open and bring back torture and “worse than torture.” He did say that he’d bomb the families of suspected terrorists—which is, to put it bluntly, mass murder. He did say he’d have a “total, complete ban of all Muslims.” This is not overblown, it’s who he’s shown us he truly is.
And now that Drumpf is president-elect after the GOP sabotage plan finally worked, we’re supposed to just sit down and take it quietly?
Fuck no.
This is where we start taking America forward.
Mistakes were made. Lots of them. Sure. But It’s now time to stand firm and do everything we can to change the system from the inside if we can, and from the outside where we must. Trump has to be stopped. Cold. We have to lobby Democrats, we have to lobby Republicans, we have to be the ones that phone all our representatives on each and every bill or initiative Trump tries to ram through. We have to file FOIA request to reveal what he’s doing behind the scenes. Anybody who runs his businesses with this kind of shady bullshit is definitely going to repeat those shady practices over and over, including now in the White House, and he’s still connected to dozens of overseas governments with incredible conflicts against American interests. We need to be dedicated to catching him in the act. We have to take to the streets, we have to fill the National Mall and stalk the White House gates. We have to organize, mobilize, plan, and implement. Run for dog catcher, run for controller, get involved, drop the cynicism and despair. Get fucking active.
America isn’t over. It’s not time to run away. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and fix this shit. It’s time to fight back.
I’m not willing to play the, “gee,he meant this inflammatory bullshit, but he didn’t really mean that” game. I don’t care if he now decides to be on his best behavior because frankly, his best is still pretty fucked up and clueless.
This man is dangerous.
The potential survival of 22 million people whom the private health insurance agencies had totally, completely failed for decades is at stake. If you think that’s hyperbolic, please remember that Trump didn’t want any of the Americans infected with Ebola to return home for treatment, without which they absolutely would have died.
Two years ago this month, the Ebola crisis in West Africa burst into American consciousness when a pair of U.S. health workers became critically ill battling the epidemic and health officials raced to bring them home for treatment.
The pair, physician Kent Brantly and nurse Nancy Writebol, almost surely would have died if they hadn’t been airlifted from Monrovia, Liberia, to a special facility in Atlanta, where they eventually regained their health. Or if U.S. officials had listened to one of the loudest voices of opposition to that move: Donald Trump.
That right there is who this guy is. He’s a coward with the human empathy of tree lice.
If Trump implements the tax plan he’s proposed, it’s likely to throw us into a deep recession. He’s threatened to kneecap the NATO nations for a financial shakedown. He says he knows more about ISIS than the generals. He has already rejected what his briefers have told him about Russia being involved in the Democratic hack, even though they’ve now admitted it. How much intelligence information is he going to flat-out make up because “Some people say...” and “I’m hearing…”?
Is he going to implement this fucked up clueless plan, or that even more fucked up plan?
The point is that no one knows. No one has any freaking clue. Even if you ignore the fact that he’s the KKK’s new favorite president and you assume that most who voted for him didn’t do it for that reason, they still did it. At best, people voted for a FUCKING SLOGAN—they didn’t vote for a plan, or for policy. He won because of marketing and packaging.
Government brought to you by the marketing team at Pepsi. Pfizer. Geico. Burger King and McDonalds. Taco Bowls courtesy of Denny’s.
This isn’t an attempt to bring people down, but I’m not in a mood to do what the (real) president and Secretary Clinton did on the day after the election. I’m still pissed. I can’t paper over this turd. It truly stinks. And even though I am fully sympathetic and agree with Michael Moore that we may have failed to appreciate the depth of economic angst coming from the rust belt, I don’t believe this man was ever a legitimate viable solution to that problem. They deserved to be heard, but so do we. He’s the kind of guy who helped cause their problems. He’s not capable of taking any responsibility and truly fixing it—all he can do is blame others. Others in China. Others in Mexico. Others in Syria. And others in America, particularly if they’re not his kind of American.
He can’t possibly unring all those bells. He can’t make all of this right—the hole is too deep. Ghandi himself isn’t saintly enough to rebalance these scales.
This orange cheeto jesus doofus is not my president.
He’ll never be my president.
Monday, Nov 14, 2016 · 3:53:30 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
So Trump has already blown his first “chance” by appointing the guy who publishes this digital fishwrap to a senior White House position.
And then he goes on 60 Minutes and says this clueless ignorant bullshit.
When we interviewed him on Friday afternoon Mr. Trump said he had not heard about some of the acts of violence that are popping up in his name… or against his supporters.
Nor he said had he heard about reports of racial slurs and personal threats against African Americans, Latinos and gays by some of his supporters.
Donald Trump: I am very surprised to hear that-- I hate to hear that, I mean I hate to hear that--
Lesley Stahl: But you do hear it?
Donald Trump: I don’t hear it—I saw, I saw one or two instances…
Lesley Stahl: On social media?
Donald Trump: But I think it’s a very small amount. Again, I think it’s--
One or two instances? Raw Story has already recorded over 139 incidents including a group of white men who physically assaulted a black female student at Villanova while shouting “Trump Trump Trump!”
Phlly.com, the unnamed woman was walking through a SEPTA tunnel on campus — which is located north of Philadelphia in the township of Radmor — when the men attacked her.
Chanting the name of the president-elect, the men knocked the woman down, causing her to strike her head on the pavement. Her current condition is unknown and the names of the attackers have not been revealed.
So he hasn’t heard? He was “surprised”? The fact is that he fomented this shit. He stirred the pot and spilled it all over the nation, now he’s “Surprised?” But he still doesn’t think it’s a big deal. Nope. Even though he would like a word with those people.
Lesley Stahl: Do you want to say anything to those people?
Donald Trump: I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, ‘cause I’m gonna bring this country together.
Lesley Stahl: They’re harassing Latinos, Muslims--
Donald Trump: I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, “Stop it.” If it-- if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.
“Stop it.” Yeah, ok, I’m sure they’ll get right on that ASAP. Any second now they’ll be about the stopping it. It’s not like you could say that intimidation, harassment, assault and vandalism are anti-American. it’s not like you could say this. will. not. be. tolerated. That any persons, either pro or anti-Trump who engages in intimidation or violence will be pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law as Hate Criminals and Terrorists or anything like that? Just...stop it.
Ok, after Bannon, that’s strike two. And it hasn’t even been a week yet. This man is hopeless.
