The ever-brilliant Jon Meacham asked the most telling question this morning. “Has anyone with the possible exception of Nikki Haley emerged from being in the Trump circle with any part of his or her reputation intact?” It made this writer stop and think and then realize what a poison trap Trump really is.
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The Mueller Investigation, the upcoming mid-term election, the Khashoggi affair, the bragging about the tax cuts for the rich and the cutting of health care are all problems that Trump is facing as he tries to work his way out of a mountain of lies and bad decisions. So with disaster on the horizon he has conjured up a caravan of criminal immigrants, peppered with Middle Eastern terrorists, rushing toward our southern border, which will cascade into this country before the week is out. In order to hold the gate against this brown horde, our heroic First Liar is calling out not just the National Guard but actual military combat troops. Boy, sounds like the real thing don’t it?
Of course the last time our national security was faced with such a horde, last April, only twelve of them, yeah twelve, actually tried to cross the border and they were all arrested. Then too there’s the fact that the caravan is still over a thousand miles away and on foot, which means that at best it will be more than a month before they could possibly reach the Red River. And there’s also the all but unreported fact that the caravan is shrinking as free rides home are offered and many of others fall away and take up residence in Mexico.
Why would they stay in Mexico? Because most of them aren’t interested in getting arrested by our own, homegrown Gestapo, Ice. No, they just want a safe and peaceful place to live. They are on this arduous caravan because their own countries are no longer safe for heir children. Trump can propagate his lies all he wants but as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said. You can have your own opinions but you can’t invent your own facts. Trump lies on a minute-by minute basis. We all know that, and some of us actually understand and accept it as a part of our less than perfect world. But that doesn’t mean we are willing to accept his lies, just that we know they are lies and that he is a liar. It will be interesting to see if there are enough dumb people out there who are willing to accept his lies as truths and how it will affect the election.
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Ivanka Trump has come out in praise of her father for flying flags at half-mast in recognition of the massacre in Pittsburgh. Really? She thinks this is something special? This is normal procedure for empathetic and intelligent Presidents, but when you’re dealing with a crass slob like Donald Trump, normal behavior becomes heroic. Maybe if he skipped his rally the other night someone might have a reason to compliment him but he didn’t do that. He didn’t do it because he enjoys those rallies where the dumb followers get to cheer for him and make him feel like a big deal. There was no way Trump would pass that up just because a few Jews got shot.
At least Trump has said it’s “unfortunate,” that this happened. Unfortunate? Well, I guess that’s the best you can expect from a clown with a limited vocabulary.
What Trump hasn’t done is go after the incompetent bomber who sent bombs to 14 people who Trump had attacked or who had attacked him. He has yet to condemn the stripper from Florida. This is a bumbling clown who was obviously in dire danger of ripping off his dick every time he snapped his G-string. But Trump, who is used to incompetence, never condemned him. Instead he started blabbering about what happened when Congressman Scalise got shot on a ball field.
Trump has been very big on moral equivalency in comparing what happened after Scalise was shot and what is happening with the dumb bomber or the shooter in Pittsburgh but as usual he has the whole picture wrong. After the Scalise shooting the whole Democratic Party came out in condemnation of the shooter. No one tried to equate what he did with what some right wing white supremacist had done. All the Democratic leaders made the point very strongly that this was not the way, effective as it might be to reduce the Republican presence in congress, Americans acted This shooter was a criminal and should be treated as such. No such sentiment has come from Trump about the Stripper/bomb maker or the shooter, probably because he loves the bomb maker and the shooter.
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In the next six days Trump is traveling to ten cities in the United States. He is doing this to campaign for Republican Senate seats that are up for grabs. When the hell does he try to be President? His job is to be President, not official cheerleader for the GOP. The awful thing is that we’re probably better off with him on the road playing to the dummies rather than in the White House screwing up the economy and creating war situations all across the globe.
The fact is; Trump is a good campaigner. Unfortunately there’s really nothing else you can compliment him on. In a week where an incompetent bomber tried to kill fourteen people and sent bombs to a major cable news organization and a an anti-Semitic shooter killed 11 Jews in Pittsburgh, all Trump can say in a news conference is that the media has been attacking him too much. With all the horror around him Trump really thinks he’s the victim. He is certifiably insane.
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The other night Trump made a speech in one of the many small towns he frequents across the nation where he can find the most ignorant among us to cheer him on. In this one he attacked globalism with a vengeance. His attacks were accompanied by chants from the great unwashed of “Soros, Soros, Soros.” What Trump is too ignorant to understand, and what his audience is too stupid to even comprehend, is that globalism is the alternative to war.
Nationalism, which Trump claims to be his philosophy of choice, has always been the primary cause of wars. Globalism, which we instituted after WWII has been a very good try at reducing attacks by one nation on another. The problem with Trump is that he just doesn’t understand this. Trump understands that nuclear war is bad, but that’s about the limit of his comprehension. He is not able to grasp the concept that just on an economic basis, war costs us a hell of a lot more money than peace. He just doesn’t understand the concept of spending money on other countries to help them fit into the world in general and with their immediate neighbors in specific. He hates the fact that we are keeping about 25,000 troops in South Korea, mainly because he is too lazy to read the intelligence reports or too ignorant to understand the intelligence briefings that would tell him about all the intelligence and all the buffering those troops represent.
Trump wants to end all our alliances that cost us any money. Maybe if he wasn’t so interested in saving himself and his rich friends some tax money he might be able to absorb the concept that these alliances are what have kept Europe at peace for the last 70 years. If Trump and his rich friends were willing to pay their fair share of taxes he wouldn’t have to worry about the miniscule amounts that we shell out to build democracy and protect our allies from totalitarian invasion.
It came as a big surprise to Trump to find out we had Special Ops groups functioning all over Africa. Maybe it wouldn’t have astonished him if he’d read his reports or listened to his briefings, but he’s too busy running around the country with his “Make America Great Again” hat on, lying to his supporters.
The fact that American Presidents, going back to FDR have understood the importance of globalism is the reason we have managed to keep most of the wars that have started since 1945 to a local level. How many potential wars have been undercut because the combative leadership of the contending nations have come to realize their dependence on international trade and banking and that once they fired a shot, that prop to their economy would disappear. Some, mostly dictators, have ignored that situation to their eternal sorrow.
The leadership of this country has always perpetrated this worldview. But our current leader, because of ego or ignorance, is trying to tear this painfully constructed series of alliances down, simply because he is too ignorant to understand its value. And yet there are those who will not see And yet there are those who will not see. Those who refuse to comprehend the way Trump’s policy mirrors the Nazi policy of National Socialism that led to WWII. Trump doesn’t see it because Trump doesn’t want to see it. Trump doesn’t see it because in his heart he wants to be Adolph Hitler. Who knows, maybe he’ll end up the same way? Let’s hope he never gets to drag this nation down the same rat hole. To stop that evil scenario we must shut down all power from he nasty egomaniac and to do that we must win the House and Senate on November 6th. The House is a start and we have a reachable goal there but the Senate is the golden prize and in order to get that, we must turn out in droves to vote. The oft referred to blue wave must become a blue tsunami. With both houses of congress battling his idiotic plans to a standstill there will be plenty of time to produce legislation that could appeal to those few Republicans who are still open to bi-partisan government, and maybe we can get this already great country back n the right road.