Category Archives: Donald Trump

09/27/2025
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Caligu-lite, Donald Trump, Li'l Duce

528 Words: Struggling

I’ve gone back and forth on this more times than I can remember. That is, my feelings about how I should look at and treat those who voted for Li’l Duce.

The night he was elected the first time, back in 2016, I wrote on FB, “America, you disgust me.”

That hasn’t changed. There are some 75 million voters in this holy land who’ve consistently demonstrated they don’t give the slightest damn that their candidate once mocked a disabled person.

If your kid did that while talking about a disabled classmate, you’d whack him one. A grown man did it and has been elected President of the United States of America twice.

I’ve detested Donald Trump since the mid-1980s when he was first making waves as the playboy real estate magnate of New York City. The magazines Vanity Fair, New York, and Spy covered him like a blanket back then, portraying him as a psychologically damaged clown — which he is. In fact, back then I used to say if I were king I’d decree that every single human being has to scrub his or her own toilet. It’d be the ultimate and just imposition of humility on those who make “little people” do those kinds of things for them. Every time I said it, I had Donald Trump in mind.

When he became a presidential candidate, I thought his campaign would be comic relief during the endless 2016 election cycle. Then came the dark night of November 8th and 9th nearly a decade ago.

Yeah. I’m still disgusted.

I’ve struggled to think and do the right things vis à vis the MAGA cult and the few tens of millions more who weren’t similarly deluded or outright racist/misogynist/transphobic/white supremacist/xenophobic/just plain lunkheaded but voted for him because prices were high, or they wanted to see “change,” or whatever bullshit reasoning they gaseously expelled from the wrong orifice.

The cultists, I quickly concluded, were beyond me. No way could I ever understand or hope to engage them. I remember that street corner preacher who used to rant about the abomination of homosexuality up and down State Street in Chicago’s Loop, waving his Bible and using a mic and portable amp. No one ever thought to stop and say, My good man, what say we have ourselves a lively debate on the topic?

What would be the use?

Same with the MAGA cult.

But how about those few tens of millions who felt the American system is broken and that’s why they pulled the lever for Caligu-Lite?  Perhaps I could — perhaps I should — try to reason with them. Perhaps we all should. After all, I think the American system is broken, too. We’ve got common ground.

Yet, every time Li’l Duce pulls off one of his Führer-esque stunts — and they seem to be pouring down on us like a summer thunderstorm now — I find that nice-guy, bipartisan, kumbaya approach to Trump voters harder and harder to pretend to. Those voters’ll tell me I’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, that comparing him to Hitler is the primary symptom thereof, but, for pity’s sake, the dude’s got Hitler’s playbook down, people.

It’s a struggle, I tell you.

07/26/2025
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Donald Trump, Hulk Hogan

Words: Carnival Barkers

Hulk Hogan died a few days ago. He played a bit part in the first article I ever wrote for pay.

It was back in the fall of 1983. I was chomping at the bit to write for the Chicago Reader, at the time one of the two most respected alternative newsweeklies in the country along with the Village Voice.

I had an idea for a story. Professional wrestling was just about to explode onto the national scene. Prior to that time, it existed only in the nowheresville of National Guard armories, small town theaters seating a couple of hundred people at most, and sometimes even high school and junior college gyms. You could catch it on TV if your broadcast area had UHF stations. Channel 26 carried pro wrestling in Chicago, its sponsor a used car lot.

I found pro wrestling fascinating, the cartoonish characters both good and evil (the Iron Sheik, for one, called for Eye-ran to kick America’s ass). Hulk Hogan was one of the good guys.

So, I caught wind of an upcoming pro wrestling event to take place that September at the Rosemont Horizon, a second level arena that was home to the DePaul Blue Demons men’s basketball team. It’d be called the Battle Royal and every big name wrestler, including Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and other luminaries would be there. The evening’s festivities would culminate in a free-for-all, 25 wrestlers all in the ring at one time, trying to brain, maim, and heft their opponents over the ropes.

To tell the truth, I forget who even won. I may not have even revealed the night’s victor in the story I wound up writing. I was far more taken by the fans who’d packed the place and the wrestlers themselves. How, I wondered, were the grapplers able to leap off the turnbuckle and land with both feet on an opponent’s chest (without a single rib cracking)? What was it like to be the recipient of a pile-driver (and not suffer quadriplegia)? As for the fans, I was fascinated by their buy-in to the theater of it all.

That braining and maiming? Any sentient human could see, even on those fuzzy UHF telecasts, that the mayhem was staged.

I could see how the wrestlers, when they slugged an opponent, pounded their feet loudly on the mat in order to produce concurrent pows. I could tell that when one wrestler smashed another over the head with a folding chair, he did it in such a way that no physical harm could result. If a guy caught a forearm to the head, his whole upper body would vibrate, the way, say, Tom’s would when the big dog conked him with a garbage can lid in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Watching pro wrestling on TV, I could see that the fans were totally into it. They bought every slam, every conk, every folding chair bash. They cheered for the good guys and booed the bad guys — and they meant it.

Who were these people? I wondered. That was my story and that’s what I wrote.

It indeed turned out to be my first professional writing. I was hooked. I’ve done it now for the last 42 years.

In any case, Hulk Hogan played, as I say, a bit role. After the Battle Royal concluded, I went to the Air Host Motel on Mannheim Road near O’Hare Airport, where the wrestlers were staying. The wrestlers all were drinking and relaxing together, no longer blood enemies, but really, co-workers.

Or should I say co-stars?

I remember one of the Bad Guys, in backless slippers, coming down to the tiny lobby, picking up the Sunday Chicago Tribune, and climbing back up the stairs to his room, as if he were a traveling sales rep out on a trip drumming up business in the suburbs.

Then, the magnificent Hulk Hogan entered the lobby. Already, he was hip to the notion that he should never appear in public out of character. That was a Vince McMahon commandment. McMahon, of course, was the wrestling impresario whose wife is now Secretary of Education in the Trump Administration.

McMahon crafted and manged the professional wrestling demimonde back then. He knew the growth of the sport was dependent on audience buy-in.

The 15,000 or so jammed into the Rosemont Horizon that Saturday night all believed in their hearts in the goodness or badness of the characters, in the folding chair smashing, and in the countless vibrating upper bodies after head clunks.

Again, wrestling was theater. But so is Shakespeare. Yet, when Shakespeare fans go to see “Julius Caesar,” even thought they feel a tinge of terror when Brutus plunges his dagger into Caesar’s chest, they walk away from the performance knowing that the guy who played Caesar was not really dead.

That kind of willful leaping from fantasy to reality wouldn’t do for wrestling fans. McMahon knew it. Hulk Hogan knew it. The fans really thought Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik hated each other.

Pro wrestling was the start. In the forty-plus years since that Battle Royal, Americans have come to believe in the most outlandish bullshit imaginable. Jonathan V. Last wrote yesterday in a post on one of The Bulwark’s newsletters: “You cannot understand the world we live in, right now, unless you understand Hulk Hogan.”

Hogan and the McMahons created an existence, a world, based on what they dubbed kayfabe — “the pretense,” Last writes, “that unreality is, in fact, real.”

Merriam-Webster defines kayfabe as “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc. are genuine.”

The tacit agreement.

Wrestling fans know they’re buying into horseshit but they do so because they want to. The kayfabe universe is more comfortable. Good and bad are clearly defined. Heroes are on my side; villains must be defeated. Nuance? Contradiction? What the hell are those things?

Some sources say the word originated among carnival barkers. People didn’t actually eat fire. There were no bearded ladies. But the barkers’d drum up so much anticipation, so much excitement about them that their marks, the ticket-buying rubes, wanted so badly, needed so badly, to believe they were seeing what they were promised that the unreality became their reality.

Carnival barkers and pro wrestlers understand that they have to control — to own — their marks’ emotions and desires. Make their tongues hang out and they’ll eat slop.

It’s nothing at all like real life. So, to hell with real life! I’m gonna make my own reality.

Donald Trump and Vince McMahon were friends and business partners. They have a long history together.

Make no mistake: Li’l Duce was listening when Vince McMahon was speaking. The showman in the White House brought with him the lessons he’d learned from the showman in the squared circle.

When news broke that Hulk Hogan had died earlier this week, the White House issued a teary statement saying Hogan was “Strong, smart, but with the biggest heart.”

You’d have thought some ex-senator or noted philanthropist had died.

Li’l Duce knows who his people are.

Hogan, back on that Saturday night, strode through the Air Host Motel lobby, still clad in all his wrestling regalia. He spoke to no one. No one spoke to him. Except me.

“Hulk!” I called out. “Hulk! Do you have a minute?”

No response.

“Hulk, Hulk! Can I have just a short interview?”

Nothing.

He headed, regally, toward the second floor. At the top of the stairs, he spun around, stared at me, and then puffed out his chest and flexed his biceps. I stopped dead in my tracks, my mouth open.

Hogan spun around and stalked off to his room.

As my friend and podcast colleague Tristra Newyear observed, that was the most dramatic no-comment she’d ever heard of.

Kayfabe.

Vince McMahon got it. Hulk Hogan got it. And President of the United States of America Donald J. Trump gets it.

07/01/2025
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Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani

393 Words: Somebody Else

It appears that lots and lots of people who voted for Li’l Duce for president in last November’s election turned around and voted for Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last week.

Zohran Kwame Mamdani.

A kid, really, at 33 years old.

Born in Uganda.

The son of an academic and an artist.

His middle name was given him in honor of Ghanaian president Kwame Nkumah.

In college, he co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Holder of a bachelor’s degree in Africana from Bowdoin College.

A composer and producer of hip-hop music.

He has fought to prevent foreclosures and evictions of non-white homeowners.

An avowed Democratic Socialist.

The most imaginative novelist — not Ursula K. Le Guin, not Stephen King, not Lewis Carroll or Franz Kafka — could have conceived of a character more in contrast to the Mad King.

Let’s break it all down. Everything about him is the devil to 45/47 and Company. He’s a foreigner. Dark skinned. Cares about Palestinians. Is interested in Africa. His dad teaches postcolonial studies at Columbia University. His mother makes movies about immigrants to America. He enjoys music. And he’s a socialist!

He’s everything — so we think — that Li’l Duce and his MAGA followers loathe: the shit-hole countries, the darker skin, intellectual, and a socialist, which, to them, is lower than child molester.

What are we to conclude about all this? How can the same people vote for two such wholly opposite figures within seven months of each other?

Simple. People today do not base their vote on foreign affairs, on who’ll put up the better fight for rights, or on which candidate is smarter, more caring, or more thoughtful. They vote for the person who makes the most believable promise that he’ll get them lower prices.

That’s what Mamdani did.

And one more thing. Perhaps even more important today is this: they vote for somebody else.

Li’l Duce was somebody else in 2016 and 2024. In 2020, he was president. So people voted for somebody else. Then in November, he was somebody else again.

You couldn’t get a candidate more somebody else-y than Zohran Mamdani.

If he wins the general election, he’ll be a one-term mayor. In 2029, New Yorkers’ll vote for somebody else.

People don’t think about their vote. They feel it. It’s a hell of a way to run a country.

 

05/12/2025
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Donald Trump, John F. Kennedy

869 Words: Imperfect

Aging is a trade-off process. You balance plusses and minuses. For instance, in my case, I’m no longer an impulsive, mercurial, slave to my libido, know-it-all, which nicely described me when I was, oh, 22 years old.

Now, nearly a half century later, none of those descriptors apply. Hurrah.

On the other hand, this body I inhabit is the equivalent of a car with 235,000 miles on it. It’s rattly, creaky, squeaky, in need of constant repair, slow, awkward, worn out, and has a vanishingly small trade-in value.

It gets me from here to there but not in any decent style and, on the way, I worry about the next breakdown.

Overall, I’d take this version of me over that younger version.

Funny thing is, when I was 22, I fretted that I wasn’t good enough for the world. Now, I fear the world isn’t good enough for me.

Not that the world — or, more accurately, humanity — has changed all that much since 1978, but over these years, these decades, I’ve realized we’re a mighty fucked up species. And the fucked-upness I sensed within myself way back then was the same thing, only with different details, that makes every living and dead human being something less than a paragon.

Speaking of imperfect human beings, the other week I finished reading Chris Wallace’s book, Countdown 1960: The Behind-the-Scenes of the 312 Days that Changed America’s Politics Forever. It’s a light-as-a-feather history of the presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. They were two imperfect human beings.

JFK, too, was a slave to his libido. I mean he was an every day, sometimes several times a day, dipper into what Mark Twain so aptly called a refreshment.

Nixon, on the other hand, appeared to be just the opposite, a tendency, in my view, as odious as his opponent’s.

Anyway, let’s concentrate on Kennedy. Despite the fact that his always-rigid sundial spurred him to betray his marriage vows, keep countless secrets from his wife, treat other women as playthings, and get involved with people whose friends and acquaintances were too often sleazy-slash-criminal, he truly cared about the poor, Black people, kids, immigrants, and pretty much everybody else who through dint of birth and circumstance were dealt a lousy hand.

Were he to have been transported to this day, running for president, the other party would vilify him ceaselessly. Perhaps his charisma would allow him to overcome the vilification. Perhaps a plurality of voters would say, Aw hell, boys will be boys. Pretty much what some 51 percent of those who voted in the presidential election last November essentially said about the eventual winner, a man with all the charisma of a weasel.

(L-R) Kennedy, Nixon, a weasel.

Wallace’s book made me think about why I would have voted for Kennedy (I didn’t; I was way too young) even though he had the sexual morals of a goat. And it made me think about the repulsion I feel toward the current occupant of the White House.

I don’t believe Li’l Duce was as tumescent as JFK was. I get the feeling the current president doesn’t really like sex, seeing it more as a cudgel of power, rather than a sweet expression of love or even fleeting affection. Li’l Duce’s a germophobe so, really, how much do you think he savors the mixing of sweat, skin, and slippery stuff the sex act entails?

No matter, his view of women is, in its own way, as repulsive as JFK’s. Maybe even worse.

So would I ignore Kennedy’s sins and mark the box next to his name?

Of course I would. At this age, I’ve come to understand every saint wears a cloak, hiding the sinner within. The opposite holds true too: a friend’s mother was a childhood neighbor back in the 1950s of notorious Chicago Outfit capo Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo. He earned his nickname while, as a lieutenant under Al Capone, he beat some recalcitrant business partners to death with a baseball bat. Accardo and the Chicago Mob polluted labor unions, Las Vegas, complicit law enforcement officials, and businesspeople unable or unwilling to resist his gang’s influence. Yet, according to this friend’s mother, in his private life, Accardo was generous, warm, loyal, and a sterling neighbor.

The evil Mafia cloak he wore hid the swell guy within. That’s where the analogy ends. Whereas I can forgive JFK’s sins so long as he strove to better the lives of the miserable, I can never excuse the crimes of the likes of Tony Accardo.

Or Donald J. Trump, for that matter.

Li’l Duce cares nothing for the losers (his word) of the world. He possesses few, if any, redeeming characteristics. I suppose I’ll give him credit for speaking from the heart, which he does. That’s not enough, though, to overcome his swift dismantling of this nation’s safety net. It’s clear he wants to end every conceivable federal program that helps people in poverty, consumers, the environment, new parents, working people, Black, brown, or otherwise nonwhites, the aged, the hungry, the homeless, students, teachers…, everybody, that is, save for the billionaires.

The good in JFK hid, and overcame, a certain ugliness.

The ugliness in Li’l Duce only hides more ugliness.

03/03/2025
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Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky

744 Words: Don’t Tread On Them

I’ve written about my friend, The Republican, before. He’s the one who, despite a lifelong loyalty to the GOP and a firm believer in “free markets,” etc. has refused thus far to vote for Donald Trump. Three times, in fact, he’s eschewed The Emperor.

If I recall correctly, he abstained from choosing between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016. I don’t remember if he voted for Joe Biden in ’20 but he did, indeed, vote for the Dem candidate in ’24.

This is a fellow who reads things like the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek’s books and has urged me to follow suit. In fact, I bought Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom a few years ago. I couldn’t get past the second page. Hayek believes, as I understand it, that giving a helping hand to the less fortunate leads inexorably to Stalin and Hitler. Okay, that’s a totally simplistic way of putting it but, honestly, I’m not at all interested in delving further into it.

If there is a hell and I’m sent there, I’m sure I’ll be forced to listen to lectures by economists for the rest of eternity.

Anyway, this staunch conservative has been spouting off about The Emperor’s madnesses since he was elected again in November. He was no softer on 45/47 back in 2015 through 2021. His erstwhile party-mates were and are aghast. They’re roasting him.

The Republican expressed repulsion — as any sentient being would — in the wake of that fiasco in the Oval Office Friday, the one where The Emperor and his Squealer dog-piled on the Ukriane leader, Volodymyr Zelensky. Those still loyal to the Mar-a-Lago Macaque have called The Republican every name in the book for his apostasy over the years but now, I guess, he’s gone too far. They’ve finally pulled out the L-bomb for use against him this time.

Hail to the Chief.

The Republican, many of his ex-brethren and sistern are shrieking, is a Liberal! And that’s the worst thing you can call someone, several notches below child molester.The Libs, one says, are too worried about starving children. “They ain’t worth a dime to this country,” the guy says. I assume he means the Libs. Either that or starving children.

A number of huffers-and-puffers have told The Republican that what The Emperor and his Squealer did Friday was, at last, stand up for this country. We’ve been a doormat for far too long! they say. We’re sick of everybody walking all over us!

Now, they’re talking about the United States of America, the richest, most powerful empire in the history of the world. We and our corporations control the world economy. Our military reaches around the globe. We possess enough nukes to incinerate all the major cities of Russia and China and, if we’re still in a cranky mood, those in Iran and North Korea as well.

Doormat?

They can’t possibly be talking about the United States of America. They’re talking about themselves.

They feel like doormats. They’re sick of struggling. They’re sick of being dissed and abused by health insurance companies and Big Pharma. Every time they visit the gas station or the grocery store, they feel incrementally diminished. It all adds up until, finally, one man says, I’m with you!

The fact that they believe him when he says that is a topic for another conversation. I know, I know, it’s crazy. A big mouthed New Yorker who was set up in business with a half-billion-dollar starting stake from his old man, a bragging, cheating, reneging, pussy-grabbing, philandering, bronzer-daubing pal of Jeffrey Epstein — precisely of the ilk you’d expect most MAGA-ists to despise — has become their savior of the nation, their ideal of manliness. their very own gift from god.

Ignore the fact, for the moment, that their embrace of him is as whack as saying…, well, Ukraine started the war. The only thing that counts is they buy it.

The Emperor speaks in their language. He gives voice to their fears and loathings. He’s their Hercules — they know because he’s told them so.

And when he and his Squealer lashed out against Zelensky — a transparent set-up if their ever was one and further proof that 45/47’s genius is he understands that all politics is theater — he (and Squealer) spoke the words, expressed the feelings, that they feel every goddamned day.

It didn’t matter whom he spoke them to. Just that he spoke them. MAGA people, indeed, are sick of everybody walking all over them.

We all are.

02/10/2025
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Donald Trump

579 Words: The Plastic Emperor

The other day I wrote that from now on I’ll be referring to 45/47 as The Emperor. It was a neat way of avoiding writing his actual name, considering doing so acts as an emetic upon my system. And, since this Holy Land is indeed an Empire and the sovereign ruler of great power and rank in question wishes to be the monarch of all he surveys, I figured, hell, let’s call it like it is.

But events of the last few days have caused me to tweak the monicker. Friday, The Emperor issued a ukase reversing the Biden Administration policy of replacing all single-use plastic utensils in federal food service operations with paper-based products. “I will be signing an Executive Order next week ending the ridiculous Biden push for Paper Straws, which don’t work,” The Emperor wrote on his Truth Social website.

The tweak, ergo, is this: he is now The Plastic Emperor. Or Pemp, for short.

There can be no more definitive act of this or his first presidency than making a big deal out of what federal employees suck their Diet Cokes through. It is picayune, mean, pointless, petty, infantile, infuriating, and, ultimately, destructive.

In fact, the most important descriptor listed above just might be infuriating.

Let’s explore the possibilities.

  1. He really believes it is better for the world if, in federal cafeterias and military mess halls, plastic straws, sporks, and bowls are used as opposed to recycled and/or recyclable paper-based items.
  2. He despises Joe Biden so much for beating him in the 2020 election, that, if he could, he’d outlaw the breathing of air because…, well, that’s what Joe Biden does.
  3. It pisses off The Libs.

Possibility Number 1 can immediately be stricken off the list inasmuch as Trump has no concern whatsoever for what is better for the world. Plus, that possibility would entail him weighing competing ideas and coming to a rational conclusion. Paper or Plastic? Hmm, let’s see. What do the experts, the scientists, those who know what they’re talking about think about this? Please bear with me as I mull this for a while.

Nah. That can’t be it.

Possibility Number 2 comes nearer the truth. He was so pissed at Biden for cutting off his access to classified government materials after it was discovered he’d stored such stuff in an unsecured Mar-a-Lago bathroom that one of the first things he’s done this term is to cut off Biden’s access to that material. Ex-presidents, by tradition, get daily intelligence reports and the like — but now not Joe Biden. And, it can be assumed, Biden didn’t even store the stuff where he moves his bowels. So let’s say Possibility Number 2 counts for about 35 percent of The Plastic Emperor’s decision on plastic straws, etc.

So, we’re left with Possibility Number 3. Bingo. Social media, late night humorists, wits and wags, all lit up is response to this particular Executive Order. Nothing pleases MAGA Nation and its strings-holder more than making the opposition boil. The Germans, appropriately, would immediately come up with some kind of lengthy compound word to describe this weird drive to derive pleasure from seeing others get red in the face. The phenomenon is a bit different than schadenfreude — gaining pleasure from others’ suffering — although there’s plenty of that in there, too. It’s more specific, though. Did we piss you off? Good! Hahahaha!

Yep, The Plastic Emperor’s edict on plastic straws is picayune, mean, pointless, petty, infantile, infuriating, and, ultimately, destructive. His presidencies in a nutshell.

01/03/2025
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Donald Trump, Elon Musk

412 Words: Resignation

It’s been two months since the nightmare 2024 US national election. Two months for us, who aren’t Trumpists, to digest and process the damnedest outcome we could have imagined. US President No. 45/47 now controls every single lever of the federal government.

That guy (I’m still loath to even utter his name) now just might be the most powerful president since Lyndon Johnson in the post-Kennedy assassination/landslide over Barry Goldwater era. Those of us whose bones creak when we try to get out of bed in the morning might recall that LBJ was able to ram through his Great Society/War on Poverty programs in 1964 and ’65, remaking America almost as radically as Franklin Roosevelt did in the 1930s. (Of course, Johnson self-sabotaged by committing half a million US soldiers to the meat grinder in Vietnam, but that’s another topic entirely.)

Those of us who tremble at the notion of 45/47 remaking America in his vision, were all agog when Old Man Joe Biden dropped out of the running and VP Kamala Harris took his spot on the Democratic ticket.

We’re agog no more. Quite the contrary.

Blinding ourselves to the fact that Harris was an awful candidate (no clear message, an infuriating tendency to dodge questions, running almost solely as the anti-Trump, the sex reassignment surgery for federal prisoners ad fiasco, etc.), we non-Trumpists never saw the November 4th gut punch coming. Like all astonishing occurrences, the results have left us stunned. Or, to use the terminology corporate news people are addicted to, we are left reeling.

The 45/47 kayo was so shocking on so many levels that we (again, the non-Trumpists) don’t even know what to do about it or even how to react to it. As if we’ve experienced the death of a spouse, we’ve drawn inward. I warned about this almost immediately after the election. Everybody I talk to…, well, doesn’t want to talk about it.

It’s as though we’ve been beaten to a pulp and can only lie there, hoping against hope there’ll be no more blows.

Maybe we’re regrouping. I didn’t know. What I fear is we’re resigning ourselves to an inexorable fate. The likes of 45/47 and his henchman Elon Musk are now our kings, so why fight it? It brings to mind that famous quote by the late Indiana basketball coaching legend Bob Knight who spewed, “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

We may not be enjoying the coming Regime, Redux, but I’m afraid we’re relaxing.

 

 

09/17/2024
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Assassination, Conspiracy Theory, Donald Trump

503 Words: A Lot of Loons

Now a second loon has pointed a long gun at the thankfully-ex-president. One loon pulled the trigger in July and clipped The Only One Who Can Fix It in the ear. The other one, this past weekend, was subdued before he got the aspiring King of the World in his sight.

So what do No. 45 and his Ohio messenger boy say afterward? That the Democrats are responsible for these attacks. And their brother in evil spirit, Elon Musk, wonders publicly why our holy land’s mental patients can’t start opening fire on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And, to think, some 45 percent of the electorate wants this capo and his mob to move back into the White House next January.

People, we Americans are a fucked up bunch.

And I’m not going to let those on my side of the fence off easily either. My social media feed is rife with folks swearing to their goddesses that the Trump crew has staged one, the other, or both of the assassination attempts.

I’m going to say the same thing I say to Trumpists when they spew their “theories”: show me evidence. Until then, these dramatic, fantastic allegations are irresponsible. It’s not that it’s impossible for a demagogic, wannabe emperor and his co-conspirators to stage a phony attack. Hell, The Hillbilly Elegist just a couple of days ago admitted he and his boss made up the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pet pooches and kitty cats, reasoning, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Old Joey Goebbels would have grinned in approval. The Trump/Vance syndicate is more than capable of exaggerating, cherry-picking, fibbing, lying, and even choreographing false flag incidents to serve their malevolent ends.

Would your jaw drop if you learned the sniper at Trump’s Florida golf club was a put-up job? Me neither.

That kind of thing is not unheard of in American history. For instance, consider the bounty alleged to have been offered for anyone ambitious enough to tail and kill Martin Luther King, Jr. until the very day someone actually did it. The same year James Earl Ray hoped to earn his hefty financial bonus, the FBI and the Chicago Police actually planted agents provocateurs in the local antiwar movement, hoping to smear the peaceniks. The G-men and the cops also teamed up to cultivate a plant within the local Black Panther Party chapter. The plan resulted in the state-sanctioned murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969.

The fact is, even in our land, there exist powerful people as amoral as Nazis, Stalinists, Iranian mullahs, and even the fictional sadists of the book, 1984.

All that said, we still need proof to convict the Trump gang and there is none as yet regarding its staging of the assassination attempts.

Just because we want something to be true doesn’t make it so.

My team sneers at Trumpists for that very sin.

09/13/2024
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2024 Election, Donald Trump

563 Words: Jump!

Now we have bomb threats, harassment, and physical attacks directed against ethnic Haitians in Springfield, Ohio following the Stable Genius’s demented charge during the presidential debate Tuesday that immigrants of that stripe are busy dining on people’s pet cats and dogs.

The thankfully-ex-president has been spewing this kind of mouth toxin since he first announced his run for the presidency back in the summer of 2015. You may recall, early on in his then-seemingly quixotic campaign to become the Leader of the Free World, he swore up and down he saw on TV in the hours after the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 hordes of Arabs dancing in the New Jersey streets in celebration. Like the cats & dogs charge, the dancing in the streets rap was a product of the man’s pathologically unhealthy imagination.

Even allies of The Only One Who Can Fix It know he’s full of shit in this case. Republican activist and rhetorical arsonist Christopher Rufo has offered a $5000 reward for evidence that Haitians in the Ohio town indeed have prepared poodle casseroles, inasmuch as no such confirmation exists in the world sane people occupy. Rufo so badly wants this gross gustatory phenomenon to be true he’s willing to shell out real dough for it. No one, as yet, has claimed the prize.

The clear pattern has been established over the last nine years that when Donald J. Trump says jump, the most unhinged among his fanboys reply, How High? And, while I’m up in the air, will I still be physically capable of throwing acid in a dark-skinned person’s face?

A decent human being might conclude after seeing, for instance, the reactions of the motley crew Trump addressed the afternoon of January 6, 2021 that there’s a direct link between his words and anti-social and  criminal lashing out by a significant portion of his political base. That decent human being might say to himself, Hmm. Maybe I oughtta tone it down a tad.

Donald J. Trump is not a decent human being.

And, of course even after the fact, Trump pats his most felonious followers on the back when they go so far as to try to take the lives of anybody not as enthralled with No. 45 as they are. To wit, Trump’s “some very fine people on both sides” quote after one of his idolators plowed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters at Charlottesville, Virginia’s Unite the Right Rally in 2017.

So, both before and after, Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric eggs on the most volatile among his base.

There can only be two possibilities for this:

  1. Trump is blithely oblivious to the effect of his words
  2. Trump knows precisely what he’s doing

Now, Trump is no intellectual. He lacks discipline in his thinking. He loves moving and shaking and so is too impatient to sit down and read a book. His thought processes are all viscerally-based. Yet, he’s quick, he’s clever, and he’s bright. He’s got enough on the ball to recognize patterns. He speaks, his followers act.

Trump’s no Nazi but. like Hitler, he’s a small man who finds himself able to move masses. Imagine being so powerful that all you have to do is utter a few words and thousands, even millions of people jump.

They jumped on that January day in Washington, DC. They’ll jump again the day after this November’s election no matter who wins the race.

07/29/2024
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Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Laughter

900 Words: Don’t Laugh

The two-time popular vote loser whose name I’m often loath to say/print/hear has quickly found a hammer to beat Kamala Harris over the head with. He now calls her Laughin’ Kamala Harris, adding cachinnation (yep, swear to god, it’s a real word — look it up!) to his dependable bag of slurs and characterizations that include Sleepy Joe, Crazy Bernie, Pocahontas, Crooked Hillary, Stone Cold Phony Beto O’Rourke, Snowman(woman) Amy Klobuchar, Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and…, and…, well, there’ve been way too many to list here.

The 45th President of the United States has a lengthy track record of failures — marital, personal, business, political, and…, and…, well, again there’ve been way to many to list here. He is a master, though, a virtuoso, an artist, a prodigy of insults. He makes the bully you might remember from high school look like Marianne Williamson.

Harris, apparently, emits huge guffaws, deep gut, from the heart, kitchen table salvos of laughter. The convicted felon, serial stiffer of contractors, and proud pussy grabber finds such uninhibited emotion something to ridicule.

Soon after it became apparent Harris would be the new Democratic candidate for president, the GOP standard=bearer said: “Have you ever watched her laugh? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh…. She is nuts.”

This new line of affront should come as no surprise inasmuch as the man spewing it never, ever, ever laughs. I mean really laughs. He’s clearly incapable of feeling and expressing pure joy. He cannot, it is obvious, let himself go. He’s as tightly wound as the hawsers of an ocean liner at port. Not only that, he never really smiles. Oh sure, he smirks a lot, especially when, for instance he asks the crowd at one of his rallies what we should do with all the people coming over our southern border and someone responds, “Shoot them!”

But smirking is not smiling. Smiling communicates happiness, something that runs counter to his message and the visceral appeal he has to a sizable portion of the American electorate. He — and they — are much more comfortable living in their cesspool of rage and grievance. To smile, to laugh, to say “Ah, I feel good this morning,” is foreign to them.

Perhaps it’s generational.

Many Trumpists are aging white people, the kinds of folks who recall their parents telling them about the Great Depression and World War II. I’m an aging white person (who, natch, does not count himself among that sulky set). I recall those of my parents’ generation telling tales about bread lines; soup kitchens; unemployment; meat, sugar, and tire rationing; global bloodletting, Nazis, sneak attacks, the Holocaust, and any number of other horrors they faced everyday starting in 1930 and lasting for the next 15 years. That so-called Greatest Generation might have found laughter a luxury. How can one belly laugh when nobody can find a job and 60 million people are being slaughtered?

My father, for example, was made uncomfortable by the sound of children’s laughter. Any number of times, when my brother and I would be off giggling in another room, Dad would shout from his recliner, “Stop that laughing!”

Even as an eight-year-old, I found that downright bizarre. I never felt, when so scolded, that I was doing something wrong. Dad, I concluded, was a miserable crank.

As I grew older, I’d tell others of my generation about this and they’d say, “Oh yeah, my Dad yelled at us all the time for laughing too! It was so weird!” It was a phenomenon common to working class families. My old man and the millions of his generation grew up squeezing pennies, being forced to go to work at the age of 13 and 14, then getting drafted to fight in bitter cold, African deserts, and South Pacific jungles. When peace and prosperity came at last, they had to spend most of their waking lives working at unrewarding jobs in soulless factories, where their health was endangered and their spirits crushed.

The sound of kids laughing must have been, to guys like my father, worse than the 120-decibel din of fingernails on a blackboard.

The Republican candidate for President of the United States is 78 years old. His old man imparted to him a deep abhorrence to laughter. Mary Trump has written that Fred Trump warned his son against laughter. To do so, the old man said, “is to make yourself vulnerable. It’s to let down your guard in some way.

Which is true. We do become vulnerable when we laugh. We do let our guard down to guffaw. These are necessary releases, as important to our health as fresh air, clean water, a balanced diet, exercise, and a good lay every now and then.

“Laughter,” senior editor Michael Mechanic of Mother Jones writes, “is pretty much universally seen as positive. Indeed, the list of prominent people who have spoken and written of the value of laughter is long. It includes Catherine the Great, Charlie Chaplin, Charles Dickens, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Martin Luther King Jr., William Shakespeare, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Wolfe, and on and on. Perhaps more relatable to Trump would be Andrew Carnegie, who is credited as saying: ‘There is little success where there is little laughter.'”

How sad that an entire population of men grew up in dread fear of laughter. How sad that tens of millions of us want one of them to become our leader — again.

 

 

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