Trump

30 V 2018: “Poor little innocent guy!”

President Trump is using the occasion of Roseanne Barr’s fall from grace to complain of the unfairness of the media to HIM. His tweet for Memorial Day became a celebration of his glorious achievements, and now his tweet about Roseanne is a lament for “the media saying the most horrible things about this president,” to use the words of his mouthpiece, Sarah Sanders.

Really? Trump says in public the sorts of things Nixon used to say in private and then resents the fact that he is criticized! Trump acts the bully when he can get away with it and indulges in self-pity when he can’t. I imagine our President was a bully/sissy bipolar when he was a little boy, and he relies now on what he learned then.

27 V 2018: Oh, just ignore him, because he’ll never shut up.

I am puzzled and, indeed, quite angry at the way the news media keep falling into the traps Trump sets for them. It is, I think, clear that Trump’s principal tactic is to drive attention away from one outrage by committing another outrage that will be snapped up by the media and fill the news until Trump’s next offense. These maneuvers of Trump’s are the real “fake news,” and the media should be ashamed that they are treating them as something real.

How about a boycott of Trump’s lies and stunts? He needn’t be excluded from the news altogether, but reports might be limited to, e.g., “President Trump Twittered three times this weekend,” and the curious or naive sent off to hunt up Trump’s tweets for themselves.

Most of what Trump does and says is calculated to deceive, is demonstrably in one way or another a lie. By reporting Trump so assiduously the media are complicit in distributing “fake news,” are enabling deceit.

24 V 2018: Biggest political scandal in history?

President Trump has boasted that “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!” This is wonderful not only because of the originality of the coinage Spygate, but also because yet again he is claiming a superlative for himself, even as he describes everything that has to do with him in superlatives: the most votes, biggest crowd at inauguration, biggest number of accomplishments in first year of presidency, probable winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, etc., etc.

This reminds me of the Elder Seneca’s (d c39 A.D.) story of a remark he made when he heard Lucius Cestius (a vainglorious orator) boasting that he would be the best in any field: “‘If I were a Thracian gladiator, I would be Fusius; if I were a pantomime dancer, I would be Bathylus; if I were a racehorse, I would be Melissio.’ I could not contain myself and shouted: ‘If you were a sewer, you would be the Cloaca maxima!’,” sc., the “Biggest Sewer,” the name given to the principal sewer of ancient Rome.

“Biggest political scandal in history” is not applicable to Spygate, whatever that is, but would fit the President & Co. perfectly and so Trumpy can claim yet another superlative for himself.

28 IV 2018: The King of Tarts

We’ve now seen what I’m sure is only the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s bought and paid for love affairs. Some Trumpites from the mega-churches assert that Trump has been born again and has been forgiven all his past sins. I cannot imagine how they know. But whatever the state of his soul, more and more evidence of Trump’s serial polygamy is coming to light and fleshing out what we already know of this weak, impulsive, and mendacious character. Forgiven or not, Trump’s fundamental character remains unchanged and renders him unfit to hold the office or President. If he truly has had a change of heart, he should follow Richard Nixon’s example and put himself where he will no longer be a danger to others.

8 IV 2018: U.S. is committing suicide??

Back again after a long hiatus … Not much has changed fundamentally since last August. But we’ve seen more, learned more of Trump and his ménage. Trump clearly needs psychiatric treatment (or to be put in prison) so that he does no more harm to himself and others. His family, friends, and appointees have proven to be wannabe plutocrats who are, if not criminal, at least sleazy through and through. Why don’t the American people and their elected representatives do something about this. Perhaps Mr. Jimmy Carter is right; maybe the American people want a jerk for president, someone as ignorant as they, someone as selfish as they, someone as hypocritical as they, someone as irresponsible as they. Unless the course of things changes soon, I have to conclude that the United States of America has a death-wish.

How will it die? It could wait and die of greed and the surfeit attendant upon it; it could die of sentimentality; it could die from ignorance. Or Americans might lose patience and slaughter one another, since we hate each other so. How could they accomplish this slaughter? The easiest way would be with firearms. There are plenty of them around.

As several investigations get closer and closer to Trump, he will surely try to distract us with a war. If we survive the war, maybe we will be chastened and move towards democracy. Perhaps we will have enough new citizens, young people and immigrants, whom the plutocrats have not yet seduced with their K-Mart, television, sports, and scandals, to find our way back to our ideals.

11 X 2017: A day without Donald

I have to admit that I, along with the media, mainstream and fringe, devote too much time to Trump’s uncivilized behavior. Clearly, we are being played. His behavior and rudeness are so shocking, no, not shocking, so repulsive, that it is hard to let them go by without some sort of comment. But I believe that is what he intends. We spend so much time complaining about what a perverse little shit he is that we fail to measure what a sneaky bastard he is also.

What I want to propose is this. Let’s have a day without Trump and see how it feels. Let all the news and non-news media boycott what Trump says for one day. No news of his speeches, no word of his tweets, and let’s see how it feels. We might enjoy it so much, and benefit from it so much, that we could go for a week or more without listening to Trump.

Let’s ignore what he says, but pay close attention to what he does, and fails to do. Popular superstition imagines a “Black Mass,” one in which all that is done and said in the real Mass is done backwards in adoration of the demons. Trump and his minions are celebrating their own black mass. They are doing just the reverse of what sound government and the good of our Country require. Let’s take note of what they are doing, in every detail, let’s work hard to thwart them, and then hold them to strict account when the reckoning finally comes.

10 X 2017: Imagine Trump in the honky-tonk of life

Trump’s recent tweets prompt me to wonder how things would go for Trump if he were not rich, to imagine how a belligerently vocal coward and bully like him would fare in the favored milieu of many of his base, the roadside beer joint. Yes, Mr. Trump is said to be a teetotaler, but his behavior is that of an chronic dry drunk.  I think that in any of the drinking establishments that have common sense, he would long ago have been forbidden entry as a chronic trouble maker, a danger to himself and to others. In less well-run bars, he would have been punched out so often that he’d have learned to hold his tongue.

24 IX 2017: Podex maximus?

I saw in a news report that footballer Sean McCoy has given voice to the feelings and pereption of most of the nation when he tweeted: “It’s really sad man … our president is an assh-e.” He might have made his observation more palatable to Trumpy by saying that “our president is the biggest asshole.” But of course such a term is not fitting to the dignity of Trump’s office. So let’s fall back on Latin and call him “Podex maximus.”

Doesn’t Trump remind you of Nero?

8 VI 2017: Who you gonna believe?

Trump has denied some important charges in Mr. Comey’s testimony, and, as predicted, the case is now one of “he said” vs. “no I did not.” So it comes down to credibility. Which one can be trusted to tell the truth?

5 VI 2017: Reading skills challenged

Trump has again tweeted his wrong-headed criticism of the Lord Mayor of London. Clearly Trump mixed up or deliberately blurred the difference between two different parts of the text. Here we see his attention deficit disorder, disinclination to read, and anti-muslim bigotry all at work in two tweets.