Donald Trump spent the last couple of days having temper tantrums and raging against those he is accusing of “Treason”.
That’s interesting considering that Trump himself has come the closest to treason of any government official in even distant memory.
The big problem with Trump isn’t his insane ravings on the tube, even if they are not in keeping with our long treasured image of an America President, it’s his complete disregard of the Constitution and the rule of law. I know many have made a big deal about this but never big enough. These violations of the Constitution attack the basis of our entire democracy and Trump’s disregard for it must eventually lead to a complete breakdown of the structure of our entire government.
That may seem like overkill to you but believe me, that statement isn’t even fractionally as important as the problem really is. Consider this. I am a habitual watcher of a TV series called The Good Fight. I watched an episode last night in which a group of women, driven crazy by the Trump administration’s complete denial of all truth and it’s total rejection of any legal authority, organize out of self protection and subsequently engage in an even more illegal activity against the administration than any perceived by Trump and his lackeys.
Sure it’s fiction. Worse it’s TV fiction. But the circumstances were eerily familiar, and the reactions to the setup absolutely believable. This is what can happen, what probably will happen and what amazingly has not happened to date as a reaction to the lawlessness and illegality of the Trump administration. If you give citizens no real recourse to law, they will create their own laws and they will defend them with bloody consequence.
Chaos begets chaos and that is exactly what the prescient writers of that show were saying. I watched as this group of progressive women committed heinous acts, excusing themselves by saying, “we had to do it to balance the other side.
We had to steal votes, hack voting machines and cause the death of another human being because the other side is already doing it. And if you don’t believe this is absolutely fated to happen, you have no grasp of the concept of human reaction. If Trump and his fellow criminals are not stopped and stopped soon, this is exactly what will happen and then the other side will strike back. Every action has an equal reaction. Basic physics, basic human nature; with the end result being the complete destruction of the greatest system of government ever established by man.
The Democrats no longer have a choice. They must impeach Trump. They have to do it to re-establish the rule of law. They have to do it to render him somewhat powerless during the process. They don’t have to convict him, but they do have to drag it out until the next election. That appears to be the only way to keep the country from slipping into chaos, the only way to preserve the nation.
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On Tuesday Trump decided he hadn’t lied enough to the American public so he went on the tube and announced that his tariffs were working big time. He bragged about all the money that the tariffs were bringing in from China. He forgot to mention that those tariffs would be passed on to the consumers in the form of higher prices. Actually he didn’t forget. It’s just that he lies.
Everyone involved with the market understands and is trying to tell the Fat Liar in the White House that these tariffs will wreck the markets. This was seen last Monday when the Dow took a 600-point dive.
Trump has always babbled about China and how we lose to them on our trade balance but as much as he’s babbled on, that’s how much he doesn’t get it. It often seems like he’s the only person in the world that doesn’t understand that a tariff on imported goods is a tax on the consumers of the nation that imports those goods.
It’s very simple. Trump lucked into a growing economy created by Barak Obama to solve Bush/Cheney’s market-shattering crash. That comeback from the Bush/Cheney disaster grew exponentially in a direct line over the last seven years of the Obama Presidency and has continued into the Trump Presidency. Trump has taken the bows for the plan’s continued success without ever understanding how it works and now with zero knowledge of international economics he is busy screwing up the whole world. It’s unfortunate but Trump still thinks that the way to economic success is screwing your contractors out of their last paycheck and then going bankrupt.
And if that isn’t bad enough the administration announced that they are moving American warships and troops toward the Middle East. This is absolutely the warmonger John Bolton at work. I know it’s hard for Trump to learn anything because he can’t read, but can’t someone in the Capital please inform him that he has a snake in his nest. Bolton was one of the foremost instigators of the Iraq war. He has hated Iran for years and his dream has always been regime change in that Shiite nation.
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The war over abortion never ends. Mike Pence finally has something to do besides pray and avoid lunch with women to whom he isn’t married. The forces that rage against a woman’s right to choose how to use her body, completely ignore the 80% of the American public that wants to keep Roe v Wade In place. But the one thing that grates against reason is the pseudo-religious bullshit that fights against man’s greatest safeguard against abortion, sex education and the informed use of contraception. These same idiots who want to force a woman to have an unwanted baby, are also against pre & post natal care or any of the other services that are necessary in the birth and rearing of children.
The pro-life plan seems to be: make sure the fetus gets born and then abandon it to whatever consequences exist to end its life. A brilliant position but only if you’re Mike Pence, the single greatest reason to keep Trump from getting impeached.
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Watched Chris Matthews Town Hall In Pennsylvania and one early speaker told the whole story. This guy was a union electrician and a Democrat and he said flat out that if the Dems want to win this election in PA there are only two issues that count; paychecks and healthcare. Both sides cheered this guy like he just caught a touchdown pass for the home team. Many of the American people are interested in many of the programs promoted by many of the Democratic candidates but nothing comes close to wages and healthcare. If the Dems want to win they have to make sure they are the heroes of these two topics.
Yes, we have to solve the immigration problem. Yes we have to upgrade our education and make it affordable. Yes we have to solve the incredibly serious problems with the climate. And yes we have to rebuild our infrastructure. But none of these important problems comes even close to wages and healthcare.
Somebody at that meeting spoke to the dignity of work. They were talking about being able to take care of your family with one job. That’s what people want and the Democrats have to grasp the fact that with all the important stuff pushing for attention nothing comes close to wages and healthcare, the basic building blocks of the “good life.”
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In 2016 Donald Trump was elected President of the United States because of the abject failure, in the decades prior to that event, of both the Republican and Democratic Parties to produce a functional government in the United States.
You can talk about hatred for Hillary, you can talk about not covering the Mid-West, you can talk about Russian interference and you can talk about the failure of Bernie supporters to come through in the end, but the real reason why an egomaniacal, racist, criminal like Donald Trump is in the White House today, is the failure of American government, over the last 40 years, to create a better life for the mass of the citizenry.
In 2016 the America people looked at the Democrats and they looked at the Republicans and they said to themselves; “These guys are busy lining their pockets and helping their buddies get richer while I have to work three jobs to keep my family alive. In addition, my kids are going to go into crushing college debt for the rest of their lives just so they can get a job that won’t pay all their bills. If one of my kids gets sick the bills will cost us our home and neither the GOP or the Dems give a shit.”
This guy understood that Trump may have been a sleaze but any chance to climb out of the barrel was worth a shot.
“He may even work out,” he said on his way into the voting booth, “I know the other guys won’t, they never have.”
And that children, is how a thief, a con man, a misogynist and a racist got to be President of the United States. It may be how he stays there. No, he hasn’t done anything for that hard working guy who voted for him in 2016 but he’s a big enough liar and a hard enough brander to sell that guy on the lie that the Democrats have kept him from accomplishing any of the stuff he promised.
The question now becomes, are the Democrats focused enough on the right issues to outsell Trump and get those 2016 Trump voters who aren’t part of the base. To do that they will have to convince them of Trump’s failures and fully illustrate how they are going to raise wages and provide universal healthcare. That is the road to Democratic victory in 2020.
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One of the biggest problems created by the ignorance and financial criminality of the Trump administration is the appointment to cabinet posts of ministers who either don’t understand the problems that their agencies face, or are too focused on creating situations that benefit either Trump or the business moguls to whom he caters.
Both these problems are exemplified in the various personae that flounder around in Trump’s cabinet. Last week we watched Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development being interviewed by a House committee and revealing himself to be not only ignorant of his duties and the requirements of his post but in addition, being an unmitigated clown. The footage of the entire interview would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic that such an unqualified buffoon should hold such an important position in our government.
At one point Carson was asked about REOs a basic element of the real estate industry and incredibly important to his job. He had no idea what this meant and after being asked about it a couple of times, mistook it for OREO, or did he mistake it?
The fact that Trump, the ultimate racist, appointed Carson, to a job for which he was seriously ill equipped, leads one to believe he had some very well thought out shameful motives.
Another of Trump’s disastrous appointments was climate denier Scott Pruitt, as head of EPA. When he wasn’t wasting taxpayer money on personal jaunts, repeated acts that finally forced him to resign, Pruitt was a lobbyist for fossil fuel interests. He was replaced by Andrew Wheeler who is as biased and ignorant of his job as was Pruitt. These are men who are supposed to be protecting our environment. Pruitt constantly attempted to roll back protective rules and to open mush needed and protected wilderness areas to oil and gas drilling.
Now Wheeler has rigged the EPA to change the air-pollution standards so as to allow the fossil fuel polluters to pump more garbage into our air, making it less safe for our children to breath. It’s one thing to try to promote businesses that are obviously bribing you in one way or another, but to kill Americans for your own profit is a despicable crime and Wheeler should be dragged out of office by his ears and stoned to death in the streets. That’s just an example of what one would suggest if he were a violent person.
I could go on, checking every Cabinet member and how they, like Secretary of education Betsy DeVos, are stains on their offices but it’s too depressing. Trump is far and away the most dysfunctional President in U.S. history. Maybe Jon Meacham can find a Cabinet more dysfunctional than Trump’s but I seriously doubt it.