calumnies
approbation. impolicy.usurpers
varlet
revolted provinces. deceivers. artifice.
protractors. design as in plan
contend. welfare of the country.
collective sentiment
peremptorily
liberality
casuistry. fraudulent avowal
independency. perilous to dominions
vassalage and chains
solicitous. effusion of blood
highest satisfaction
superadd
quitted. perpetual exemption
deluged this country. streams of misery. give them the lights requisite.
Twenty Thousand Lies: the presidency of Donald Trump
The pestilential maladministration of Donald Trump is coming to an end. Trump has joined that undistinguished list of incumbent presidents to be defeated. Only 3 presidents in a century have been beaten. The other two are Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford. Ford had been elected by Congress not the electoral college. Therefore, of properly elected presidents only two in a century have lost and Trump is one of those. Hoover had the Great Depression to contend with.
This shameless showboating charlatan is an indelible stain on American history. That such a blatantly pathologically lying racist demagogue could be elected poses some fundamental questions about the presuppositions that underpin democracy. Trump seemed to be guided by Barnham’s dictum: there’s a sucker born every minute. Trump’s strategy was to lie to his customers as bold as brass. This might seem overconfident but it had worked all Trump’s life.
It beggars belief that a person of such torpor, turpitude, imbecility, malevolence, deceitfulness, bottomless immorality and gluttony could ascend to the presidency. All America’s vices are incarnate in one man. There has never been someone so unfit to hold the office of President of the United States. I rack my brains to think of a solitary virtue to attribute to the commander in chief. Of the 330 million people in the United States this is the man whom American chose to be their leader. His obese orange physiognomy is the face of America. It is flabbergasting that a country with many morally upstanding people and with the top universities in the world should elect a man so morally bankrupt, cognitively deficient and unutterably ghoulish. Ignorance and arrogance are always a distasteful combination but when added to hyper-aggression and self-pity the mix is repugnant. This uniquely obloquial man won when the US is more educated than ever. Something is deeply wrong.
Never before has a President of the United States been so totally unworthy of the office that he holds. By any measure he is unfit to hold any position of importance in any sphere. In terms of physique, mental derangement, improbity and intellectual sub-normality he should be disqualified. Methought that his incessant outrages offences against decency and truth would redound to a disadvantage of a candidate. I was dead wrong. In 2008 Sarah Palin’s idiocy counted against her and helped torpedo McCain’s candidacy. There has been a sad degeneration since then.
The pernicious and rebarbative life of Donald Trump is littered with lies and malevolence. He cheated his way into college as his niece revealed. The man cannot read on an adult level. How could an academically subnormal person win admission to some of America’s top colleges? It is a damning indictment of the American educational system that such a man could be allowed into estimable universities.
Donald Trump’s father was a tyrant and driven by lust for money. He was a cruel and racist psychopath. He urged his sons to be ‘killers’. He seemed to be a disciple of Niccolo di Machiavelli. The choice was to be a bully or a loser. There was no middle ground. Though no Latinist Trump patently believes homo homini lupus. In his case this is not a regretful observation but his motto.
Trump’s niece Mary said that her father taught them never to acknowledge a mistake. That was inadmissible. Therefore, he must double down when he did something erroneous or was exposed as having lied.
Lawrence Trump, Donald’s brother, went the other way. He was seen as a weakling by his father. He later died from dypsomania. Donald scorned alcohol but that did stop him making money from selling the demon drink. As always with Trump: it is one rule for him and another rule for everyone else.
Trump learned not to care about the repercussions of his mistakes. That was why he reacted with complete equanimity to the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the US from coronavirus. These were the excess deaths caused by his gross mishandling of the crisis.
As straight white male multimillionaire in New York Trump could not have been more privileged. The numerous colossal failures that litter his career prove that he is an oceangoing loser. It takes real endeavour to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory so many times.
Perhaps Donald J is a case of nominative determinism. ‘Trump’ being the strongest suit in some card games. The verb ‘to trump’ meaning to overmaster might have led him to think that he was predestined to conquer. However, ‘to trump’ in British argot means to pass flatus. Trump is also Middle English for trumpet and Donald J certainly loves to blow his. What does his ceaseless self-laudation show? It is surely indicative of someone bedevilled by a deep-seated sense of worthlessness. A person of self-assurance would not be endlessly impelled to pass compliments on himself and would not crave the adulation of others. His inner vapidity and vacuity is something that he self-medicates for by endless on air therapy sessions with his work wife Sean Hannity. The two obese Americans also shared a lawyer: Michael Cohen.
Someone so boorish and bolshie must have been a nightmare in the classroom. His incuriosity and idleness rendered him ineducable. His stratospherically high self-esteem led him to believe that he had nothing to learn. The central paradox of psychology is that those who have most to be ashamed of are the proudest.
Donald J avoided military service by claiming to have bone spurs. A doctor who was a tenant of Donald’s father diagnosed them. The suspicion is that the physician purposively misdiagnosed them in return for a sweetheart deal on the rent. Donald has never released his medical records. Why? Is it because subsequent medical check-ups would indicate that he has no bone spurs? Bone spurs are lifelong.
In the 1970s Trump bragged that avoiding STDs was his Vietnam. This is not the behaviour which the Republican base would approve of. Bearing in mind his recklessness it is unlikely that he used a prophylactic. If he impregnated a woman, would he pressurise her to have an abortion? That would fit with his character. When has he ever shown moral decency? When has he ever shown compassion? When has he ever done anything for anyone else? When has he ever made even the tiniest sacrifice for anyone else? He does not even discharged his minimum duties to his family and his employees.
As a lackadaisical sort, Trump’s sport is golf. In his teens he played the sport of geriatrics. The only thing he ever does liberally is cheat. His malignity extended to all areas of his life.
Donald J proved himself to be so selfish as to be almost solipsistic. His greed and craving for adulation was on the grandest of scales.
THE BIGGEST LOSER
Trump is a dreadful businessman. He has lost billions of dollars and has gone bankrupt four times. Yet he would have us believe that his business acumen is nulli secundus. His reputation was built on the specious notion that he was a success. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They say that in the United States you have to fake it to make it. Trump embodies this dictum. Almost his entire life is a lie.
Trump boasted of dynamism and ebullience. In fact, he was listless and lethargic. ‘Sleepy’ was one the epithets he was fond of deploying against his foes. He claimed to have a lust for life when he only had a lust for lust and food. He boasted of his intelligence. His orations consisted almost entirely of words of two syllables at most. His high-octane odium directed towards outgroups was despite him previously saying he was anti-racist. Donald boasted he was an alpha male. Far from being stoic he was thin skinned. He was livid when stood up to. This man’s man wore more makeup than a circus clown. Would a macho man have such fussy follicles? Is it manly to pretend to have blond hair in your 70s?
Donald J was mentally fettered by many prejudices. Tellingly, one of the few he did not profess was homophobia. The reason is unclear.
Donald J would have us believe that he made money. Even he said he started in the Sixties with a ”small loan of a million dollars” from his father. A million dollars is not small now. It was worth 50 times that value in the 1960s. Even Donald does not claim to have repaid that loan. Has he ever repaid a loan?
In the early 70s Donald’s pater passed on. Donald inherited $400 million. What would that be in modern values? About £5 billion which is what he is estimated to have. As in if he had simply stuffed the money in high interest accounts, he would have more than that now. Wealth managers would have made astute investments on his behalf. But Trump’s conceit and imbecility made him engage in a gamut of madcap business ventures. He encountered as many calamities as you would expect for a man of his egregious torpor and weaponised idiocy. His unwisdom should have been a salutary warning for Republicans in 2016. But when did reason and evidence ever sway them?
Donald was an attention addict. He assiduously courted the media. He was eager to have his photo and name seen everywhere. He berated editors if coverage was not laudatory enough. He was so vain as to name all his towers after himself. There was Trump steak and even Trump wine which he did not drink since he was teetotal. Donald J assured us that Trump wine was wondrous despite never trying a drop of this tipple. Illogic, n’est ce pas?
The Trump Organization was found to have deliberately discriminated against African-Americans in housing. This racist policy was directed from the top. It was not a case of employees on their own initiative refusing to let or sell properties to black people.
Cement for the Trump Organization was bought from mob boss Fat Tony Salerno. Trump is a useless businessman. He was not buying from Salerno because of quality or price. It was to curry favour with a hoodlum.
Besides property wheeler dealering what else did Donald get into? He was in casinos. Many casinos are mobbed up. What else goes on in and around gambling dens? Prostitution, drinking, smoking, loan sharking, money laundering and drug abuse are almost unavoidable concomitants of casinos. Leave aside the psychological and financial damage that such places do to those with addictive personalities or innumeracy. It is odd that Christian evangelicals who so disapprove of wagers should chose Donald as their standard bearer. These moralisers curiously suspend judgment when it comes to the fake tan fuhrer. Preying on the feeble minded, the hopeless and the vulnerable has always been Donald’s gospel. These casinos seemed to be casinos for Trump’s money too. He so mismanaged them that several of them went bust. And they say the house always wins.
Far from being a job creator or a boon to the economy, Trump has always been verminous. He has been a parasite on his country. Not paying his workers or repaying credit has harmed the economy.
Donald Trump wed Ivana Trump who was Czechoslovak immigrant. So much for him opposing immigration. He showed not the least interest in his spouse’s country. In a few years Donald was carrying on an extramarital affair with Marla Maples. He also called New York tabloids to boast about his adultery. He ensured that his flagrant affair was front page news. Marla was quoted on the headline as saying ”Donald gave me the best sex of my life.” This is the adulterer that Christian fundamentalists chose as their standard bearer. I do not care two hoots about adultery. But the Christian fundamentalists do. This stands in stark contrast to their savaging of Obama about whom there has never been a whisper of infidelity.
In the 1980s the first book in Trump’s name was published. Tony Schwartz wrote it. In the book Trump says that lying to people about what he is selling them is an effective stratagem. Schwartz met many people who had been bilked by Trump and had irrefragable documentary proof of the same. The Art of the Deal was not just with Tony Schwartz. Schwartz wrote every word. It is probable that Trump has never read a page. Trump is notorious for his incuriosity and being allergic to reading.
Trump was a registered Republican in the 1980s. He said he wanted to be vice president. He gathered a team and went to a primary. This ingenue was laughed out of town. In 2016 he was not the political virgin that he claimed to be.
Despite Trump’s Republicanism he visited Moscow in the late 1980s. The Soviet Government liked to send pliant women to the hotel rooms of visiting men of consequence. A video camera behind the mirror would film them in flagrant delicto. Did Trump fall for such a honey trap? The USSR certainly saw him as a potential asset from that time. His sexual incontinence would make him a very easy victim.
Donald J would phone up newspaper saying he was someone named John Baron. To maintain this alias he would put on a false voice and sing the praises of Donald Trump. It fooled no one.
Forbes was bamboozled into putting Trump on the rich list. Trump persistently lied about the size of his assets on loan applications. He underreported his wealth on tax returns.
Someone in the 1980s commented that Trump has unusually small hands. He took this as a mortal slight. It is something he has never forgiven. He is exceptionally thin skinned.
Ivana was divorced. Trump wed his mistress and thereby created a job vacancy as Sir James Goldsmith would have said. Donald invited notorious New York mobsters to his wedding. His second wife produced a daughter. Donald divorced her.
Donald met a Slovenian who had come to the US on a tourist visa and made money by posing for nude photos including her cavorting with another woman in a sapphic scene. It is said that Melania came to the US on a tourist visa and worked illegally at first. She then got the right to work on an Einstein visa! As if posing in the buff requires intelligence. Naked photos do not offend me. But to the Republican base they are disgustingly immoral. The Republicans monstered Michelle Obama for a dress showing her arms. This elegant dress was met with Republican repugnance. But for another First Lady to have been a nude photo model is A ok.
Mr Trump wed Melania. She speaks very accented English. Melania’s is the sort of accent that gets newly naturalised Americans insulted in Trump country. Her claim to speak other languages such as Italian is probably bogus. On visits to Italy, she never converses in the language.
Trump was notorious in the 1990s for the Central Park Jogger Case. A white female jogged around the park. She was set on by several males severely beaten and raped. The woman survived and said her assailants were black and or Hispanic. The NYPD arrested several minors who answered to that description. Put yourself in the position of an ethnic minority teenager false accused of rape and murder a highly racially charged case. Imagine you fear of a life sentence. Imagine how you would feel if an extremely influential billionaire demanded your death.
Donald bought advertising space in newspapers to say that the suspects were guilty and needed to be executed. He said that suspects had ”unbelievable rights” and that victims had none. This would surely sway a jury.
All of the defendants were acquitted. DNA evidence verified that they could not possibly have been the rapists. Despite incontestable evidence Donald continued to insist that these children were guilty and should be put to death. He has never apologised for his remarks.
When Donald is credibly accused of any of his countless crimes or even investigated on the basis of a prima facie case he goes berserk. He says ”are we living in Nazi Germany?” He whines – they are being very unfair to me; they are nasty. But for non-white children: he says they should be executed for crimes less than murder without any proof of guilt.
Donald’s behaviour was always as crass as his claims were fatuous. He never missed a chance to be on TV. He craved the limelight. His frequent appearances in the media meant that he was a household name by the 90s. He was eager to invite photographers into his home. He seemed to have had the same interior designer as Saddam Hussein. The similarities between the two men did not end at tastelessly loud aesthetics. In his power hunger, pridefulness and need for people to abase themselves before him he resembled the Iraqi tyrant. His ostentation spoke volumes about him. Conspicuous consumption is perceived as a virtue by many Americans. It is taken as a sign of untrammelled worldly success.
In the 1990s Donald was a confidante of the Clintons. He donated liberally to them and was a registered Democrat. Donald’s reaction to the Republican Party had ended in what was typical Trump tergiversation. It reflects just as badly on the Clintons as it does on Trump. Bill Clinton was a moderate Democrat. But on one issue he was resolute: abortion. Despite knowing this Donald supported them. His subsequent claims of abhorrence at abortion are blatantly hollow.
What can be said of the Clintons and the Trumps? Two houses each alike in perfidy. Hillary Clinton’s later abomination of Trump is insincere.
By the late 1990s Trump said he was a renaissance man. He said he had read the Bonfire of the Vanities. In a television interview he said ”it is a great book; it is a beautiful book” but could not provide any information about it beyond these generalities. He then pretended that the earpiece was defective and that he could not hear the questions.
On 9/11 a certain braggart named Trump thought it the apposite moment to say that he owned the tallest building in Manhattan now that the World Trade Center had been destroyed. How is the average American no sickened at this malapert boasting at a time like that?
Trump was up to his eyeballs in debt by the 1990s. He said he was the king of debt. His lackadaisicalness meant that he did not succeed at his business misadventures. Yet he still has the temerity to say he is fantastic at deal making.
By the Millennium no American bank would touch Trump with a barge pole. He was synonymous with failure. Trump had the anti-Midas touch. His lassitude and folly meant that all his enterprises went bust.
Donald turned to banks from the former Soviet Union. Why did they lend to him? What did these state-owned banks expect in return? No one expected to be repaid. Trump has been a Russian intelligence asset since he first visited Moscow in the late 1980s. He is an agent of influence.
As Trump was a total failure at business he turned to what he was good at : publicity. He was willing to create a stir for the media and lie shamelessly. Even his towers did not have as many floors in them as he said. Trump was paid to lend his name to construction projects and to make appearances. But he had no role in planning, building, financing or selling them.
In the 2000s Trump got in on another wheeze: education. It is flabbergasting that a man as ignorant and unlettered as Trump should promote himself as an educationalist. He founded Trump University. It was not a university at all. It awarded fake degrees but charged exorbitant fees. Trump appeared in the promotional videos. Eventually it was forced to shut its doors and was sued for millions of dollars. Why was Trump not incarcerated for this blindingly obvious fraud? This is a criminal matter not just a civil one. People spend far long in prison for stealing far less. But Trump had long known that a rich white does not go to prison.
Trump was in favour of the Iraq War despite his protestations to the contrary. As Orwell said: war propaganda does not come from those fighting the war. Donald Trump later lied about having been pro-war in 2003 and bogusly claimed that he had opposed military action. Likewise, The Donald has been a war hawk on Afghanistan. He then changed his tune when that became the majority view.
As poverty-stricken teenagers signed up to get killed in Iraq, Trump was up to other things. He ran Miss Teen USA. 15 year old girls would pose on stage in the skimpiest bikinis to be ogled by obese old men like The Donald. The Donald had a reputation for barging into their dressing room to see these minors in a nude state. This was at best ephebophilic. This was the man that was soon embraced by the party of family values.
In 2009 Barak Obama became president. Trump tirelessly promoted the canard that Obama was not born in the United States. He claimed that Obama was not American and had no right to be a citizen. That was despite even Trump acknowledging that Obama was American on his mother’s side. So the child of an American mother is not American? Incidentally, Trump’s mother was British not American.
When unarguable proof of Obama’s Hawaiian birth was published Trump continued to disseminate the flagrant falsehood that Obama was not a US citizen. Was it because Obama was half black that Trump could not accept him? Trump accepted McCain as American despite McCain having been born in Panama. But Donald J showed no respect to Senator McCain despite McCain having served valiantly in Vietnam. John McCain was shot down over North Vietnam. He was held in horrific conditions and repeatedly tortured. John was offered the chance to go home to his wife and children. John McCain gallantly declined to be repatriated until all his comrades were released. His self-sacrifice was peerless. Yet Trump scorned him for being captured. Staggeringly, veterans’ organisations did not denounced Trump for this.
Trump’s incessant self-flattery wowed many. Someone ought to tell him that ‘’self-praise is no praise.’’ America is a country where bigging oneself up is perceived as meet and seemly. Donald J said ”I beat a lot of people” and ”I made a lot of money – not saying it bragging.” That was a double lie. He has lost billions of dollars and he was most certainly bragging. Avarice is a virtue for many Americans. As Chris Rock said many Americans mistake wealth for intelligence.
Trump long ago said that the Republican base were among the stupidest people on the planet. As a conman he has an instinct for an easy mark. That is why televangelists milk the Christian fundamentalists for their last dime. Would working class people put their faith in a vampire capitalist? Someone who so often refused to pay his workers? Some turkeys really do vote for Christmas.
The Donald’s TV appearances in the early 2000s are revealing. He spoke in Standard American. But one word he pronounced in a vernacular New York accent: ‘’cash’’. That was because it was such an emotive word for him.
PRESIDENTIAL BID
In 2015 Trump came down a golden escalator in the Trump Tower in New York to announced he was seeking the Republican nomination. It set the gold standard for tastelessness, tackiness and bling. Trump is loud in every sense. This political ingenue seemed an unlikely prospect. He had never run for any public office. He had numberless liabilities. He was on the record telling countless lies and had been successfully sued hundreds of time.
At first Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination with greeted with bemused mirth. He was such a basket case. Trump did not have a prayer of getting it. But people underestimated his ability to channel rage politics. Surely millions of people were not moronic enough to fall for the brazen lies of such a narcissistic conman. If only! This loudmouth loon was to win the hearts of the Republican base.
Someone with a proven track record of outrageous mendacity is surely out of the question as a candidate for any party. It was proven beyond a penumbra of doubt that Trump was an abject failure at business. It was a surefire thing that the Republicans could not embrace such a loser. Or so it seemed. Trump told the most blindingly obvious lies right from the get-go. Donald J claimed he would be the healthiest person to ever sit in the Oval Office. Barak Obama was 6’3’’ of sinew, played basketball daily and was in his 40s. George W Bush went jogging and cycling and was in the top 1% healthwise for males of his age. Bill Clinton jogged around Washington DC. Jimmy Carter could jog in his 60s. JFK has health problems but he was 43 when he took the oath of office. But oh no Trump who could not walk more than 100 yards, who struggled with even two steps up and who binge ate junk food would be the most salubrious person to sit in the White House. What chutzpah! The claim required an outsized sense of the ridiculous.
The Trump Campaign asked for volunteers. Trump’s miserliness is well documented. Despite plumping to be the mightiest man in the world he was not going to spend a penny of his own. He demanded that people work gratis.
The Christian right form a core component of the Republican base. Such people profess Victorian values. These people value fidelity to the martial bed, personal probity, clean language and ethical conduct in business. Christian evangelicals are oh so moral. The holier than thou crowd would never endorse a man who was an unchristlike as can be imagined. Would they?
Conspicuous religiosity is sine qua non for American politicians. Among Republicans it is virtually compulsory to voice the most antediluvian beliefs. They like to irk rationalists by scorning scientific facts about climate change, gun violence and evolution. Many Republicans are immature enough to think that epater la bourgeoisie is a proper ideology.
Laura Ingraham is considered one of the most eloquent voices on the right. She opines that Hispanic immigration is wrecking the United States and that marriage is sacrosanct. Children must be raised in a hetero marriage! This spinster adopted children from Central America. She boasts that she eats beef and uses plastic straws just to scorn those who point out the cattle add hugely to climate change and plastic caused environmental degradation. Republican ideology is little better than: own the libs.
Christian evangelicals form only half of grassroots Republicans. But a Republican ignores then at his peril. They are motivated and they are huge donors. The religious fundamentalist block vote is vital to Republican success. Trump praying was one of the most unedifying spectacles of the campaign. His insincerity was unmistakeable. His going through the motions seems to have tricked religious maniacs hook line and sinker. But it easy to dupe people when they want to be duped. Trump long ago recognised that the gullible are the best marks. Rightly are the Republican rank and file called ‘the faithful.’ Trumps’ totally unchristian behaviour did not deter most Christian fundamentalists. It is nauseating that these soi disant values voters embraced a man who is the total anthesis of all they purport to believe in. But these people love a good hate. Trump was not shy about saying that he hated whom they hated. If you hate ragheads and I hate ragheads, then that is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It is called negative cohesion. Trump was more against things than for things.
The holier than thou crowd gave Trump their blessing with alacrity right from the word go. These people demand clean language. In St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians he enjoins the faithful to refrain from using any unbecoming words. These judgmental prudes and pharisees gave their imprimatur to man who addressed the crowd at his rallies as ‘motherfuckers.’ Such an anglosaxonism would have been sufficient to sink most candidates.
It is small wonder that Trump went for the same demographic that televangelists go for. Trump recognised that religious maniacs are willing lams to the slaughter for a conman. He employed many of the techniques of televangelists. The marks are gulled into subscribing to a false consciousness. When their beliefs are disconfirmed they are so emotionally invested in their beliefs that they persist in them. The identity crisis that would be engendered by recognising that they have been had is unbearable. Therefore, these poor dupes feel compelled to continue fooling themselves. Conning people of faith is not hard. They do your work for you. Conning the faithful is as easy as clubbing a baby seal.
Trump said that he would be self-funding entirely. He was beholden unto none. This was proved to be an outright lie by his solicitation of donations from all and sundry. Many Republicans are totally capable of doublethink. They believed that Trump was totally self-financing and believed that he needed them to finance him. The man who boasted of his ten billion bucks beseeched Republicans on minimum wage to give their last brass farthing to him. It was as vile as the televangelists who support Trump asking their mentally subnormal fan base to pony up.
The Republicans manages to motivate people by highlighting some objectionable far left behaviour. The idea that there is a huge amount of racism and there are microaggressions from most whites irked Middle America. As Orwell said, ”there are some ideas that are so wrong that only an intellectual can believe them.”
Donald J pitched himself as the advocate for hyper nationalism and xenophobia. The inane slogan of ‘America First’ was not originally his. American First was a 1930s organisation that campaigned for neutrality in the event of a foreign war. He should remember what Orwell said ”Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.” This son of an immigrant and husband of two immigrants demonised immigrants. By marrying immigrants, he proved that there are some jobs that no American will do not matter how much money is on offer. He often employed immigrants. His other slogan was Make America Great Again. His vow was to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas. His MAGA caps were made in Pakistan. He often had his merchandise made abroad. He would rather make more of a profit than employ American workers. But that did not bother his illogical and asinine supporters. Trump never practised what he preached.
Donald’s speeches were often a tissue of transparent lies that spilled from his greedy slavering maw. They were replete with non sequiturs, solecisms and malapropisms. Trumpian twaddle won the hearts of the Republican base. His folksy Frontier gibberish struck many are refreshingly authentic. His apparent candour was juxtaposed with his many outright lies. But somehow that did not put Republicans off. Donald chose to de-emphasise his NYC background. That city is a den of iniquity so far as many people in the heartland are concerned.
Trumpism is too jejune to be classified as an ideology. Little of it is an innovation. It is an amalgam of populist themes. It combines anti-elite prejudice, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-socialist economic illiteracy, anti-environmentalist, militarism, a smash and grab foreign policy, faux Christianity, aggressive Zionism, a gross contempt for human rights and much demagogic posturing. Trump vociferated against out groups. He was a hurricane of hatred. He had no moral bottom line. One of the most jaw dropping things was to see people who earn less than the federal minimum wage accepting Trump as an anti-elitist. As someone who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars who can he be anything other than an elitist? The Republican Party accused Democrats of being divisive. Yet Republicans such as Cruz regularly inveigh against people from the coast. Perhaps Cruz cannot read a map but his state of Texas is on the littoral. His wife is from a coastal state. Trump is from NYC which is on the Atlantic Ocean in case Cruz did not know. For many conservatives New York is the root of all evil. Republicans have an exceptional capacity for doublethink and cognitive dissonance. There are two cognitions here. Coastal people are evil. Trump is good. How do they cope with Trump being a coastal person?
Trump won the hearts of the Republican base by demanding ”a total and complete shutdown of Muslim immigration.” That did not stop him owning property in Muslim countries such as the UAE.
The Donald scorned a gold star family. These Pakistani-Americans had suffered the death of their son who died fighting in American uniform. It seemed that perhaps Trump would run afoul of America’s reverence for the military. But he public insult of these people was a mere speed bump for his candidacy. He was crass enough to say he had made similar sacrifices to this family by paying for health insurance for his employees as he was legally obliged to do. As if that was tantamount to be killed. He was not being facetious!
Donald J was an outspoken advocate of pollution. Like most Republicans he denied the indisputable facts in relation to climate change. It is a pretty pass when you have to keep restating the plain truth.
Donald said he was against NAFTA. He wanted more manufacturing jobs in the USA. It was pointed out to him that Trump merchandise and even MAGA caps were made in over countries including Pakistan. He never practices what he preaches. Trump was paying foreign Muslims rather than non-Muslim Americans. His maximalist expression of American economic nationalism won his hoots, cheers and stamping of feet from the Republican masses. Beyond demanding an end to NAFTA and bringing back jobs he did not adumbrate an economic policy. Other candidates have carefully sketched out their policies. They proffer and menu with prices. They strive to ensure that it will withstand an academic level of scrutiny. Trump’s economic ‘policy’ was not even broad brush stroke. He recognised that none but political obsessives read policy proposal documents.
In 2016 most of the Republican politicians denounced Trump as a hateful, fraudster, a pathological liar and a racist. Trump did not dispute these labels. He simple riposted that his critics were part of the failed Washington establishment.
Trump insulted Ted Cruz’s wife. Cruz hit back ”it is not often I get mad. You leave her the hell alone.” Trump never apologised. However, Cruz came over to Trump’s side when it was electorally advantageous for Cruz. Despite Cruz endorsing someone who grossly offended his wife this senator vociferates for family values. He clearly does not value his own family.
When Cruz won the Iowa caucus then Trump said it was rigged. When Trump loses or thinks he is going to lose he traffics in denialism. He spread baseless claims of fraud. This odious lying snake had his claims believed by the mentally deficient and the cognitively challenged.
Donald Trump’s idea of fine dining was McDonald’s. His Lucullan banquets of junk food won him plaudits from blue collar Americans. His midnight feasts made him seem like a man of the people. His complete lack of refinement contrasted sharply with effete politicians such as John Kerry who achieved notoriety for using words such as ‘contretemps’. Fox News excoriated Obama for flavouring his food with foreign sauce: oh horror of horrors! Obama grew up in straitened circumstances. Against all the odds he became president. But Obama was to be lambasted for being an adventurous eater.
Trump was fortunate in that he had a good enemy. There is much focus on Trump’s rumbustious style and barnstorming vociferations. But the cicerone of cynicisms skills can be overstated. Yes, he was fork tongued and savaged his opponents with stridency. Hitting below the belt is ‘tough’ in the view of brutes. But Hillary’s debilities as a candidate should not be underestimated. She is too egregiously dishonest but not quite on the oceangoing scale of Trump. Hillary has advocated for many repellent policies. She is an indefatigable advocate for the oppression of Palestine. She has opined that crimes against humanity are entirely moral so long as they are committed by Israelis. Her unbridled devotion of abortion makes even many pro-Choicers squeamish. Hillary’s hypocrisy, cant, triangulations and woodenness put off Middle America. She inspired a visceral revulsion equalled only by the detestation that many feel for Trump.
James Comey’s fateful decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s misuse of a personal email for official correspondence as Secretary of State was very damaging. It fatally undermined her campaign at a critical juncture. The timing was terrible for her. Earlier in the campaign it would have been largely forgotten by polling day. Later in the campaign and it would have been too tardy to change many minds. The former senator from New York aggravated her predicament by deleting many emails. This added to her reputation as someone underhand. Her unctuous rhetoric also put many people off. When she stood to be a senator for New York she had changed her baseball allegiance in an electorally calculated manner. Such disingenuousness was plain. Trump too was utterly two-faced but she was little better.
The rambunctious Trump spoke in very plain vocabulary. His use of opprobrious language was very alluring to xenophobes. He was warmly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. This ought to have been the kiss of death. But no, it was the kiss of life.
The Donald’s low reading age turned out to be an advantage. His lexis consists mostly of short and very frequently used words. That was why even the dimmest person understood his verbiage even if it suffered from a total dearth of coherence and cogency. He was adept at communicating with common people. His pretence of being a man of the people worked. His very sophistication played well among simpletons. Donald J seldom used words of more than three syllables. Incoherence and Trumpian total tripe did not have any dissuasive effect on his attractiveness to the mentally substandard.
Donald J was more against things that for things. His hates were other people’s hates. Are you hating who I am hating? His channelling of rage politics was masterful. This disgraceful tactic was a winning one.
The Democrats despite their best intentions had failed to persuade half the working class that they were on the side of the average American. Despite arguing for and implementing policies that would benefit ordinary people many voters did not grasp this. It was a communications disaster by the Democrats. Saponaceous speeches by Hillary did her no good. Loony left policies about safe spaces, white privilege and footballers taking a knee alienated people of moderate opinion.
Trump was an erstwhile Democrat. He had been a Republican before that. But they did not see him as a turncoat.
Later in the campaign Trump said there was fraud in that the media was too sympathetic to Hillary. The press gave her a tough time. But even if the media had been too kind to her this is not rigging.
Donald explodes when a female journalist asks him a worthwhile question. When Meghan Kelly of Fox News put him on the spot he accused her of ”riding the crimson wave” and said she had ”blood coming out of her wherever.” He then said this was not an allusion to menstruation. He is very threatened by intelligent women. This pathological fear of confident women was to resurface time and again.
When a Fox News event was due to be compered by la Kelly this terrified Trump. He refused to attend. The Donald promised to donate a million dollars to military charities. In reality, he never gave an ob.
Ordinary Republicans perceived him as refreshingly unspun. But he was very much spun. He tailored his speeches to suit his audiences. He always told them what they wanted to hear.
There were record deportations under Obama. Yet Trump whipped up fear and hatred towards Mexican immigrants. He did not distinguish between legal and illegal ones. He labelled them ”murderers and rapists – they are bringing drugs.” When a Hispanic judge ruled against him Trump said that the judge did not seem like an American and was prejudiced against him. Trump thought that Hispanics did not count as US citizens unless of course they backed him.
Trump’s sister is a judge. But Trump has often said that the judicial system is totally unfair. That has not stopped him filing many lawsuits. If the system was unfair to him, he would not use it.
Projection is Trump’s modus operandi. He accuses others of his own worst vices. There was lying James Comey and Crooked Hillary.
At Trump rallies there were chants of lock her up. Trump led them. There were no specific charges against her. Trump did not even jump on board the Benghazi Bandwagon.
In case you have forgotten the Benghazi ‘scandal’ was about some American diplomats who were killed in Libya. Being a US diplomat always carries some risk of assassination. Accepting a posting to Libya when it was in the throes of a civil war in which the US had taken sides was an exceedingly hazardous undertaking. These valiant Americans gave their lives serving their country. There was an indication of a possible attack on the US Consulate a few hours before it occurred. Should the diplomats have been evacuated on the strength of that? Probably. Was it feasible? I do not know. US diplomats were killed abroad under Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and others. No one said that the president was culpable.
At Trump rallies he repeatedly urged his fans to physically attacks protesters. ”Beat the shit out of them… they should be carried out on stretchers.” Such assaults occurred. Despite knowing this Trump persisted in inciting violent crime. Why was he never indicted for this? By contrast as President Trump has advocated for the police arresting people for entirely peaceable and lawful protest.
During the campaign the access Hollywood tapes came to light. In an interview with Billy Bush ten years earlier he had bragged about sexual assaults he had committed. ”Grab ‘em by the pussy” was the phrase that stood out. Trump confirmed that it was him but said it was permissible since it was locker room talk. He later changed his tune and claimed that it was not his voice on the tape. This self-confessed sex fiend and pervert was the man that the ”moral majority” wanted to further their campaign of puritanism. His outburst on that tape might as well be called the Trump Doctrine: Grab ‘em by the pussy.
When the Access Hollywood tapes broke there was pandemonium among Republicans. Could they drop him? It was impossible. Despite protestations of abhorrence the Republicans almost all soon fell in line behind him. For the GOP it is very simple: win at all costs. Tell any lie, exploit any group, break any principle, stoop to any low, betray anyone, renege on any vow so long as you win. That outright Machiavellianism is almost impressive.
Trump’s extraordinary ill-grace, coarseness, foul mouthedness and repeated infidelities might have put off some family values conservatives. The Donald stood on the stage at a Republican rally and boasted about the size of his membrum virile. Parents should bear in mind that the president is a role model for many millions. Many children look at the president and seek to emulate his behaviour. Boorishness, hubris, wilful ignorance, spite, vulgarity, avarice and gluttony are unideal traits for children to follow. The president is also the commander-in-chief of the military. No ordinary soldier, sailor, marine or airman would be permitted to get away with such slothfulness, greed, indiscipline, untruthfulness and overt racialism. What signal did it send to troops that such a man could be elevated to the post commander-in-chief? He is supposed to be someone whom the lowliest military person can respect. His behaviour should be a standard to which others aspire. The Christian fundamentalists are very much ones to moralise. Why did these moralisers extend such unique indulgence to Trump despite his total impenitence. The unrepentant adulterer therefore became the standard bearer of these puritans and prudes.
Until 2015 Donald did not even pretend to be religious. He only turned up at churches for funerals and his three weddings. But in 2015 he got religion. How curious that he should have found Jesus at precisely the moment that it became electorally advantageous. Donald boasted ”no one knows more about the Bible than me.” As he is a biblical scholar this theologian might have known of ”the vanity of vanities”. Donald proved that he did not know the first thing about the Good Book. He said ”Two Corinthians” when any Christian knows it is ”Second Corinthians.”
In fairness Trump is similar to a Biblical figure: Judas. His pretence at religiosity was one of the most unconvincing things about his whole implausible charade. His lack of contrition and humility when exposed as a serial mortal sinner would surely stick in the craw of any practising Christian. Wouldn’t it?
To be fair to the Donald he had a religion. He could not be accused of godlessness. It was Mammon worship. But he was a bi-theist. He also worshipped himself. A Christian should view that as the worst sort of irreligion. His self-conceit was one of his many besetting sins.
To add some ballast to the Trump Ticket it was decided to add Mike Pence. The Governor of Indiana was a Republican straight from central casting. He was bland, uptight, reserved and a lockstep conservative. He was an evangelical Christian. One might have assumed that he would feel morally compelled to speak out against Trump’s numerous grotesqueries, vulgarities and puerilities. But no, not a bit of it. He acquiesced in everything Trump did. Never has a vice-president been in such a vicelike grip of vice. Trump’s conduct is the sort that Christian fundamentalists would usually say condemns a man to the infernal regions.
At rallies Trump called on Russia to continue to hack Hillary’s emails. Embarrassing information from the Democratic National Committee’s computer was published. The Russians hacked the Republicans too but chose not to use that information.
The one world leader Trump praised effusively was Putin. When people said that Putin murdered journalists Trump said ”he is at least in charge of his country and Obama is not in charge here.” So murdering journalists is ”being in charge.”
In 2013 Trump was in Moscow. He went to the Russian capital for a Miss World contest at Crocus City Hall. He stayed at the Radisson Hotel. It was here that he was allegedly filmed cavorting with two prostitutes. Did he pay them to urinate on the bed that Obama had slept on or to urinate on him? The only thing that is hard to believe is that he would pay anyone a bean for anything. It is not confirmed that such a pee pee tape existed.
The Trump Campaign was in touch with Russian intelligence officers for months. Donald Junior met them at the Trump Tower and sought damaging information on Hillary. These was all proven by emails. The Russians wanted Trump to get rid of the Magnitsky Act in return.
When questioned about meeting the Russians Donald Junior claimed the meeting was about adoption. That had a grain of truth. Putin hit back for the Magnitsky Act. He forbade Americans from adopting Russian children. The Russian children adopted abroad are often disabled or very ill. They cannot find Russians to adopt them. Putin was condemning these children to staying in appalling conditions in orphanages in his country that are underfunded because he plunders the treasury and spends most of what is left on arms.
Mr Donald Trump liked to boast about how much business he did with Russia and how he and Putin felt mutual admiration. In another speech he said ”I do not know anything about Russia. I have nothing to do with Russia.” He had long ago learnt that stout denial of easily verifiable facts is sufficient to hoodwink the purblind.
As for America First it was more a case of Russia First in terms of Trump’s priorities. Not for nothing was he known as the Kremlin candidate.
When asked to denounce the Ku Klux Klan, Trump refused to do so. The two groups he will never criticise are white supremacists and the Russian Government. Why? Both played a crucial role in his campaign. Peaceful protesters he excoriated as vile. But when it came to racist terrorists Trump would never say a word against them.
When Donald J orated it did not consist of dog whistles. For the first time in decades a candidate indulged in racialist screeds. Nativism was his stock in trade. He raved about the media being ‘enemies of the people’. This was indicative of incipient totalitarianism. This is the sort of atavism that US castigated in other countries.
Being uncharitable to lawful immigrants appeals to many Republicans. This did not prevent Trump assisting his parents in law to become US citizens. His barbs against immigrants being an economic boon to the country.
Up to 20 women accused Trump of sex crimes up to and including rape. Of one sexual assault allegation Trump said ‘she is not my type.’ So if she had been his type he would have sexually assaulted her? The tacit admission was unmissable. The fact that he was married at the time of the alleged sex crime would never have caused him to restrain himself. His conduct around women was injudicious to put it mildly.
Donald thought he would lose the 2016 election. He said it was rigged. He was getting his excuses in early. Just like he had said the nomination process was rigged.
To overwhelmingly international consternation Trump won the electoral college in 2016. He lost the popular vote by 2%. No president even lost the popular vote by so much and won the electoral college.
Had just 80 000 votes in three swing states gone the other way then the 45th president would have been Hillary Clinton. The third parties had their strongest showing since 1996. They polled 6% between them. That signalled deep discontent with the two major parties.
The fluke win in the Electoral College was not serendipitous enough for Trump. He had to lie. He claimed he won the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants had voted for his opponent. Not a single case of this was ever found. The Donald has stopped repeating this particular mistruth.
The incoming Trump administration refused to take meetings offered by the then still governing Obama Administration. They offered to tell the Trump team about contingency plans for another pandemic. There had been several pandemics over the previous 13 years.
INAUGURATION
When Trump was inaugurated, he said he would end American carnage. Trump took no action whatsoever to achieve this. There have been several gun massacres under Trump. He has made no attempt to reduce the frequency of such crimes. His inflammatory language has contributed to them. A Trump supporter shot dead several people at a synagogue.
Omarosa records that the president had wanted to take the oath of office not on the Bible but on The Art of the Deal. Had he done so even the blind faith that the Christian right had in him might have wavered. It was only with difficulty that Omarosa managed to speak to him dissuasively of his idea.
Being president inflated Trump’s already tumescent ego to even more spectacular proportions. He was to become ever more unmoored from reality. He is profoundly unanalytical. His difficulty telling truth from falsehood and fact from fantasy was going to be exacerbated by surrounding himself with toadies and yes men. He got most of his info from Fox News and was therefore inhabiting a Trumpian echo chamber. The Donald became ever more unhinged. The British say that no Prime Minister leaves Downing Street entirely sane. Trump entered it already suffering from a derangement of mind.
Some thought that Trump would grow into the office. But they were dead wrong. Trump’s blatant lying recommenced within hours of him being sworn in. President Trump claimed that it did not rain during his inauguration. Everyone could see that it did rain during his inauguration. The crowd size at the inauguration was half what it had been for Obama. Despite ample data and photo evidence Trump and his spokesman Sean Spicer insisted on telling irrefragable lies about this. The wholesale deglutition of proven lies by the Trump base is one of the most staggering things about this pernicious presidency. Their idol misconducts himself with the most egregious ill-grace. But that does not trouble them one whit.
Almost immediately President Trump tried to subvert every arm of the Federal Government. He wished to co-opt them into the Trump Organization. He abdicated his responsibilities to the people. Instead he wanted everyone to serve him as an individual. He genuinely did not comprehend the difference between him as an individual and the office of the president. No wonder he admired and envied autocrats.
Days after he was sworn in President Trump went to Langley, Virginia. He was visiting the HQ of the CIA. At the quondam Langley Farm, he gave them a stump speech filled with lies about how he had won more votes than anyone else.
The CIA, FBI, NSA and Homeland Security stated that they were almost certain that the Russian External Intelligence Service had helped Trump win the election. Congress voted to concur. The Republican majority in both houses voted for this.
Fancy Bear and the Internet Research Agency were the Russian organisations that disseminated damaging though often true statements about the Democrats. They discouraged African-Americans from voting. They did everything they could to propagandise for Trump. US intelligence was able to give chapter and verse on the SVR (Russian External Intelligence Service) units that had been behind this. When Putin was asked about it on Fox News he laughed. Putin is notoriously stony faced. He has no sense of humour. He only laughs when he had no other way to deal with being exposed as having done something outrageous. The appeal to ridicule is a formal logical fallacy.
Trump denied that Russia had assisted him. He then disparaged the US intelligences services. The Republicans used to be the party of national security and of law and order. Under Trump they had become the party of Putin.
With such an enormous ego Trump was exceptionally susceptible to flattery. As a trained spy Vladimir Putin played Trump like a fiddle. For the first time in history the Russian Federation openly backed a US presidential candidate.
It is true that Trump often violates norms. But normalcy can be overrated. Mindless conformity is not to be exalted. But the conventions that he disregarded were often there for a good reason.
Trump said he had the best people. Yet he had to fire many and others resigned. He hired a national security adviser despite being warned that Mike Flynn was compromised by contacts with the Russian secret service. Flynn lied about these contacts. Within days he had to resign. It was not long before several Trump appointees ended up in prison. Donald Trump then claimed to scarcely know people he was photographed having met on dozens of occasions.
Within days Trump signed several executive orders. These EOs included one trying to end the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. It was dubbed Obamacare by Republicans. Was the real name too hard to spell? Or was it that they tried to shift the spotlight from solving the problem of tens of millions of people without health insurance and onto a man whom they monstered for his colour? Many Republicans false accused Obama of being a Marxist. They also said that he was a Muslim as though that were a bad thing.
Trump appointed Dr Ben Carson as his Secretary of Housing. The surgeon had said that no Muslim should ever be allowed to be president. That won him the hearts of Islamphobes. Maybe the Republican base could forgive Dr Carson for being black because he was vilifying an outgroup whom they reviled even more.
The President would soon test the bounds of impunity. But would the Republican Party denounce him for it? Or would they be the movers and the shirkers?
President Trump flagrantly breached the emoluments clause. He had US military personnel and other Federal Government employees stay at his hotels. People on minimum wage had to pay into Trump’s business therefore. In Ireland the Vice President stayed in a Trump hotel even though it was on the far side of the country from Dublin where Mike Pence was having his meetings. US dignitaries in Ireland usually stay in the US Embassy. The US Presidency was turned into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump Organisation. The GOP was wilfully blind to this abuse of office.
Within seven days of being sworn in Trump announced the Muslim ban. There was no prior notice. This executive order came into force with immediate effect.
In 2017 Trump cut tax for the superrich. This enriched himself. His tax reform had a particular tax cut for golf club owners. Greed was one of Trump’s ruling passions. This tax cut hugely increased the deficit. He promised to get rid of national debt in 8 years. He did the exact opposite. It was 26 trillion dollars by mid-2020. Trump’s economic genius raised unemployment to 15%. That was the highest for decades. All countries have suffered an economic downturn consequent upon COVID-19. But the United States had higher unemployment than almost any developed country.
Trump pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership which was approved of by almost every economist. Under the TPP the US had reached new heights of prosperity.
The Donald denies the scientific truth on climate change. He slashed the budget to find green energy. Then he had the temerity to say that he is an environmentalist.
Trump abolished federal regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions, toxic matter air pollution and water pollution. He also loosened the Clean Power Act. Federal construction projects are now allowed to pollute like never before. He also allowed drilling in the Arctic Refuge.
Republicans had railed against Obama signed executive orders. They called it incipient dictatorship. When Trump signed more EOs than any other president they did not make a peep of protest.
Trump removed federal regulations on labour, the environment and health. So Americans can be more exploited, more poisoned and more unhealthy than ever before. MAGA!
In 2017 Congress repealed the Affordable Care Act with Trump’s blessing. Trump had talked about replacing it. He did not delve into particulars. No alternative has been mooted. Twenty-three million people were left without health insurance. Many suffer chronic illnesses and tens of thousands have died prematurely and totally avoidably from conditions that they would not afford to have treated.
President Trump said that he had kept health insurance for those with pre-existing conditions. This was an outright lie. People born with pre-existing conditions cannot afford health insurance unless they are multimillionaires. His move on health care was a death sentence to those who are ill including those who are ill through no fault of their own. Donald turned into a political Shkreli.
As a candidate Trump vowed to save Medicare and Medicaid. As president he did the exact opposite. He assured the public he would make medicines fear cheaper and far better. He did not offer any explanation. He has no repeated that boast since coming into office. It is galling that tens of millions of people believed his ludicrous and totally unsubstantiated claims.
Trump vowed to appoint judges who would overturn Roe v Wade. He appointed pro-Life judges. But Roe v Wade still stands.
By removing affordable healthcare many women cannot afford contraception. They are therefore more likely to become pregnant when they do not want to and more likely to terminate their babies. Trump’s policies have increased the number of abortions.
The president rescinded workplace protections for gay people in the federal government. This was a sop to the anti-gay religious fundamentalists. This move was unanticipated since Trump was not known to be a homophobe.
Vice-President Pence was asked if this move permitted discrimination. He said ”as if people would discriminate.” Indeed. As if! He did not say ”no”.
Several gun massacres led Trump to say he would introduce a gun control law. He backed down due to howls from the anti-gun control caucus. On this issue as with so many others he is a flip flopper. He does not know his own mind or he is invertebrate.
Trump rescinded the Cole Memorandum. This provided guarantees for states that had decriminalised cannabis. This was odd since even Republicans like John Boehner had recognised that decriminalisation was the way to go and became an executive of a marijuana company. The Republican president was also going against states’ rights.
Donald J vowed to introduce ”far worse than water boarding.” The sadists were disappointed when he did not.
There were five federal executions under Trump. That is the highest since the 1960s. He calls himself a Christian. Every major church opposes capital punishment.
Trump and his party pride themselves on being tough. They often lambast the left for being crybabies and promoting the cult of victimhood. How ironic that Trump should be so filled with self-pity. He was always whining that the media was not acting as a megaphone for him. When the press reported his words and deeds accurately Trump was enraged. His refrain was ‘they are very unfair to me.’ If a journalist asked him a decent question he would say that the person was ‘nasty’ and fail to answer the question. Trump being a whingebag did not dampen his followers’ enthusiasm for him.
Within a year of Trump assuming office it was bruited that he was senile. His father had Alzheimer’s. The condition is hereditary. Donald J exhibited multiple symptoms of this. He was disoriented. He struggled with going up even one step. The president was easily muddled and his slurred his speech. He had lost all emotional self-control. Watch videos of him from even ten years earlier and the contrast is dramatic. Back then Trump was in command of himself. He could feign decorum. He came across as almost plausible as a business executive.
Donald J did not pay attention at briefings. He never read files unless his name was in the documents. He blurted out top secrets to the Russians.
Trump appointed many people from the Trump Organisation. He saw the presidency as an adjunct to his business. Many of those he appointed were utterly unsuitable and had no pertinent experience. This included his daughter and son in law. Hope Hicks was appointed press officer because she had been a bikini model. Trump lamented that he appointed people because ‘they look very nice’ who then turned out to be woefully inept. Almost as though he was so superficial as to judge a book by its cover.
PARDONS
The president was ruth sometimes. He handed out pardons. Joe Arapaio was pardoned. This man was the cruellest sheriff in the US. He was convicted of ethnically profiling ethnic minority people. Arapaio believes in extremely harsh sentences for the most trifling misdemeanour. But not when he is the criminal! Trump clearly believe that racist policing was entirely acceptable.
Trump pardoned a sailor for taking forbidden photos of classified systems on a submarine. Why would spying in a way that could help a country like Russia be a bad thing?
The president pardoned Republican politico Scooter Libby for perjuring himself to the FBI. Trump thought that lying under oaths was completely ok.
Dinesh D’Souza is a Republican rent a quote. This Trump toady had illegally donated money to the Trump campaign. He was pardoned. This was a fundamental breach of the legal principle nemo iudex in causa sua since the president had personally benefitted from the felony. Clearly the president regarded campaign finance violations as praiseworthy so long as they were to his advantage. Dinesh D’Souza was an immigrant who lambasted the wickedness of immigration. He was a public intellectual who sedulously valourised Trumpism. His outspoken approval of Trump’s policies is an example of the trahison des clercs that infected some American scholars. In his case it might have been contrarianism. But it could easily have been he had found this a remunerative stock in trade.
The president pardoned a drug trafficker on a life sentence. Kim Kardashian had appealed for clemency. It is odd that Trump was merciful to this white woman when he is extremely anti-drugs and never pardons black people.
Trump pardoned three white financiers over fraud. The president sympathises with fraudsters. It is not hard to figure out why. One of these men was a former senior officer in the NYPD. So serious crimes committed by the police are more forgivable than those committed by ordinary folk.
The president pardoned the former Governor of Illinois Blagojevich. The president saw soliciting bribes as no big deal.
Roger Stone was a close crony of Trump’s who went to prison for 3 years for his coverup of Trump’s links to the Russian secret service. Trump pardoned Stone.
NO LAW AND A LOT OF DISORDER
It is astonishing that an anarch like Trump is accepted as a law and order candidate. He has always shown total disregard for the law. He carried this cavalier attitude into office with him. He wanted the Justice Department to be a bludgeon with which to club his law-abiding opponents. He then had to be told that there is the rule of law. The law is not simply whatever the president wants it to be. People cannot be investigated simply because they are uncongenial to the president. There has to be some evidence of criminous conduct first.
Trump reacted with fury when he was told something that he did not want to hear. But he prided himself on being one who told it like it is. In fact, he told it how it is not. Republicans ranted at liberal cry babies and liberals being enemies of free speech. In fairness there is some truth to these accusations but Trump should remember what Orwell said, ”Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Trump’s abuse of law enforcement plumbed new depths in 2020. He wanted to go to St John’s Church in Washington. Peaceful protesters gathered in Lafayette Square. Republicans often say that the First Amendment is sacrosanct. The right to express yourself and to gather to agitate upon public grievances are explicitly guaranteed under the US Constitution that Republicans claim to cherish. Yet these rights were trampled underfoot. Police violence cleared the square of people who were exercising their constitutional rights. Trump then walked across the square with the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Trump held a copy of the Bible upside down. Then he went back to the White House. A huge amount of police time was wasted for this photo opportunity. There was no need for him to go to the church that day or ever. He could have held the Bible in the White House. The administration said it was making a point about religious liberty. Other people’s liberty was taken away for the sake of the president posing. This fed into a key Republican talking point. They claim that religious freedom is under threat. This is from practising Christians such as Obama and Biden. Neither man has ever been accused of adultery or sex crimes like Trump. They do not swear or grossly insult women. Nor have they run casinos and sold alcohol. But Trump is the flag carrier for Christian values!
General Milley who had walked with the president to the church late thought the better of it. He apologised to the people saying that that he did may have produced the erroneous impression that the military was being partisan.
The Border Wall was Trump’s flagship policy. Even the most witless person could comprehend a wall. It was an image that won the president an election. Trump likes huge but extremely simple ideas.
The president promised to boot out millions of illegal immigrants. He had little success with that. Arrests of illegal immigrants near the border reached an all-time high. This suggested that more were coming than ever. Therefore, his bid to keep them out had failed. Deportations fell. The highest ever years for deportations were under Obama 2012-14. So much for the Republican accusation that Obama had an open border. No lie was too obvious or too shameless for Trump and his acolytes too tell or too idiotic for his cultists to fall for.
The Trump Admin had a policy of prosecuting all illegal immigrants and not simply removing them. This clogged up the courts and cost more money. It also kept people in the United States for longer.
The Trump Government began a policy of separating parents from children when they caught illegal immigrants. The parents often had no idea where their children were and had no means of contacting them. Some children were held in cages. Trump assured the public that this was vital for national security. This policy sparked outrage across the world. former First Lady Laura Bush was one of many lockstep Republicans for whom this policy was too much. She raised her voice against this as an unchristian act. Some of the children were not provide with soap. Fox host Laura Ingraham said the children locked up were in something like summer camp. I pity her three adopted children. It is strange that she abominates immigrants. She adopted three children from Central America. She could have adopted children from the US.
The Department pf Homeland Security launched an official inquiry into child separations. It found that the children were often held in dirty, dangerous and overcrowded conditions and were inadequately nourished. The head of the Customers and Border Protection said it was ”a humanitarian crisis”. Children were only supposed to be detained for 20 days before being handed over to Refugees Resettlement. In practise they were usually held for much longer.
The policy which had been ”vital for national security ” all of a sudden wasn’t vital for national security after all. Trump caved into public opinion and ended the child separation policy after only a few weeks. Despite his order the policy was not entirely discontinued. Republicans did not round on him for betraying the anti-immigrant cause.
Laura Ingraham opined that children held in these inhumane conditions were held somewhere like ‘summer camp.’ If she believes this then I pity her children. She is clearly an unfit mother.
In 2018 Trump moved 6 000 soldiers to the Mexican Border. He was not about to invade Mexico. The US Military have no power of arrest and could do nothing about illegal immigration. It was a deployment solely for the sake of optics. Trump’s admirers thrilled to the bellicose posturing.
He had called immigration ”an invasion”. Was that a metaphor? Many of his fans did not perceive it that way. They formed themselves into militias patrolling with firearms.
The president was elated with the US Supreme Court using the public charge ruled to reduce the number of people obtaining green cards. In 2019 the court also allowed the president to prevent almost anyone from Central America from being granted asylum. That is despite Central America being one of the most violent regions in the world. Murders in Central America are often drug wars. The drugs are mostly sold to the US. Drug dealing is so profitable because it is illegal. Murders in Central America are usually with US made guns. The United States could solve many of the problems that it has created in Central America at a stroke by de-criminalising drugs. But that would hit the profits of the Republican donors in the prison industrial complex. Would the US ever interfere in Central America? It has invaded all these countries at least once. They were slaughterhouse states because of Uncle Sam. That was why so many people from these benighted and impoverished nations wished to flee to the United States. They were running away from profound problems that the United States had purposively created.
Trump raged against granting citizenship by right of being born in the United Sates. These went down well with white supremacists who believe that non-white Americans are not real Americans. It was a Republican president, Reagan, who had introduced birth right citizenship. Prior to that children born in the US to non-citizen parents were not automatically US citizens. Trump was trashing the legacy of a Republican icon.
The president railed against immigration legal and illegal. He suggested that immigrants were member of the MS 13 Gang. Illegal immigrants have a lower crime right than US citizens. Trump did everything in his power to heighten animosity towards immigrants. This naturally spilt over into odium against ethnic minority Americans.
Trump demanded that immigration judges hear 700 cases per annum each or they would be seen to be failing. This meant that hearings were rushed and unfair decisions were sometimes made. Inevitably this led to some people being allowed to stay who should not have been. Trump had therefore brought about the exact opposite of what he intended. His policies were not rational nor were they thought through.
In 2018 Trump caused a Federal Government shutdown. He said he took ”full responsibility” for it. That was unique for his. He evidently believed such brinksmanship would play well with the anti-immigrant lobby.
Congress and the president sparred over funding for the Border Wall. Congress refused to do it. Why should they? Trump said that Mexico would pay. A quarter of all government activity ceased due to the shutdown. Many federal employees went unpaid.
$ 3 billion was lost to the economy through the shutdown. That was more than half of the USD 5.5 billion that Trump demanded for the wall.
On 14 February 2019 Congress gave Trump $ 1.375 billion for the repairing the extant Obama era border fence. It was not to build an inch of wall. The budget was signed. The shutdown was 45 days and the longest in US history. Trump had got 25% of the money he wanted.
There was already a border fence in some parts of the US Mexican border. This dated to the Obama era. The areas without a fence are some of the most inaccessible and inhospitable. Illegal crossings there are very few. The wall was a distraction. The majority of illegal immigrants come through legal ports of entry. They come as tourists, students or on business trips and simply overstay. Engineers looked at the Border Wall proposal. It was unfeasible. There would need to be access roads built to get labourers and materials in. Who would want to work in the most remote and searingly hot regions doing a minimum wage job? It is mostly immigrants who do such jobs. Moreover, the Rio Grande River is the border for hundreds of miles. The US signed a treaty with Mexico vowing never to disrupt the flow of the river. The wall would have to be built on private land. Compulsory purchase would cost tens of billions of dollars and take years in legal challenges. Some of the land is owned by states. That would be the Federal Government trampling on the rights of the states. So much for the much-vaunted Republican respect for states’ rights. The wall would have taken at least ten years to construct and cost tens of billions of dollars. Many Trumpists were imbecilic enough to believe in the wall until 2020. By then even Trump stopped mentioning it. His wall had become an impassable physical barrier. In 2016 Trump had been crystal clear. He explicitly disowned the notion of building a fence. It would be a wall!
Trump took military funds to build a border wall. That was diverting the monies from its intended budget. Trump – the champion of the military – was depriving US troops in Iraq of what they needed.
The lie that Mexico was picking up the tab for the wall was repeated by the president even in the 2020 campaign. Mexico never paid a peso for it.
Some sections of the border fence had been planned for replacement in 2009. The replacement was done in 2018. Trump claimed this was a wall.
Trump declared a state of emergency over illegal immigrants was a fence and dated to the Obama Administration. This ”emergency” was mentioned less and less through the rest of his presidency. In the 2020 campaign he never mentioned it.
By the election Trump had built 15 miles of fence instead of 1000. Not one inch was wall.
In 2018 before the midterm elections a caravan of thousands of illegal immigrants was supposedly spotted walking through Mexico towards the US Border. Trump said people needed to vote Republican to keep out these people. He said that ISIS terrorists were among them. The day after the election this caravan was never mentioned again. Republicans had tried similar trick with another putative caravan a few months earlier.
The Republicans were pursuing a familiar stratagem. They created as many bogeymen as they could. They told the public that only the Republican could protect them because the Republicans would breach human rights on a huge scale. Democrats would not be brutal enough. The GOP would go where the Democrats were unwilling to follow.
Surprisingly, Trump did not try the ‘caravan’ again in 2020. But part of his platform for re-election was to stop the illegal immigration that he had failed to stop. The required a high level of cognitive dissonance to fall for this. Trump is good at stopping illegal immigration. There is a lot of illegal immigration occurring immigration. Therefore, a second Trump term will stop the illegal immigration that the Trump Administration is not stopping.
Trump demanded unexampled compassion and indulgence for himself. But he was not ruth to the poor and powerless. This mercilessness is considered a virtue by the most zealous disciples of Jesus meek and mild.
FOREIGN POLICY
To call Trump’s foreign policy a ‘policy’ is asking that word to bear an impossible heavy sematic burden. The dysfunctionality, unreason and ignorance of Trumpism was best exemplified by his misconduct of foreign affairs. The president is the chief diplomat. Trump’s utterly undiplomatic style damaged relations with many other countries.
One of the few things that even Trump’s enemies compliment him on is his not embarking on a new war. But that is mainly a continuance of Obama’s circumspection. Prior to Obama US foreign policy was looking for trouble.
Tucker Carlson is Trump’s guru. The bow tie wearing race baiter admonished Trump not to initiate a war against Iran. For that at least the world owes the odious Carlson a debt of gratitude.
We were often told that Trump was the consummate deal maker. What of his much vaunted and unparalleled deal making virtuosities? He broke the Paris Deal. He broke the Iran Deal. He did not make a Korea Deal, or a Mexican Wall Deal or a China Deal or a Brexit Deal. These were all deals that he promised were just around the corner. When he was parleying with the Democrats in Congress over the budget he ended up by caving in. The deal was a match, set and point to the Democrats.
Trump voiced isolationist views. By he kept troops in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. He waxed lyrical about Netanyahu who had killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. Trump adored Duterte who ordered thousands of people to be shot dead on suspicion of selling drugs. Trump respected General Al Sisi who had hundreds of peaceful protesters shot dead in Cairo. President Erdogan of Turkey had degraded democracy and secularism in Turkey but Trump loved this Islamist. Trump liked King Salman of Saudi Arabia: the absolute monarch of the most Islamist extremist state on earth and one of the worst tyrants on earth. Trump was fond of President Bolsonaro in Brazil. That was probably because of Bolsonaro’s outspoken belief in military dictatorship, torture, homophobia and the oppression of women. In Europe the only two leaders whom Trump liked were Duda and Orban. These ethno-nationalists did what they could to undermine democracy.
Some of the white supremacists who back Trump are anti-Semites. They accused others of being Zionists. Yet Trump is the most aggressively Zionist president ever. He has recognised the Golan Heights as Israel’s despite it being Syrian sovereign territory. Kowtowing to Israeli aggression went down well in the US. Zionist zealotry is electorally de rigueur in the USA.
Trump praised Xi Jinping. That was especially so when Xi made himself President for Life. Trump must have been covetous of this. He ingratiated with Xi. This did not lead to a concomitant improvement in relations.
It was on North Korea that Trump was his most erratic. He threatened ‘fire and fury’ against the communist country. He scorned ‘little rocket man.’ The North Koreans hit back with a fusillade of insults. But Trump got over this infantile mudslinging. Trump then gave Kim Jong Un what he always craved: a tete a tete with a US president. No sitting president had ever met the North Korean leader. Trump went to the border and even stepped into North Korea. Kim Jong Un is one of the most vicious tyrants in the world. He cruelly persecutes Christian. But Trump ‘fell in love’ with him. The Christian fundamentalists who endorse Trump were untroubled by their idol’s effusive laud for this avowed enemy of their faith. A second meeting in Singapore bore no fruit. Trump’s charm offensive did not lead to North Korea ridding itself of nuclear arms.
Trump’s gushing praise for America’s enemies and for tyrants was in stark contrast to his attitude to America’s allies and to democratic leaders. Donald publicly insulted the leaders of Canada, the UK, France, Germany and other American partners. He repeatedly said that the United States should pull out of NATO. A leaked memorandum from the British Ambassador to Washington DC revealed what the UK privately though of the US President. London believed that Trump was uniquely inept, slothful, uninformed and spiteful.
White supremacists rallied to Trump. They were often anti-Semites. They managed to overlook Trump’s fulsome Zionism. He is the only American President to have a town in Israel named after him.
The president shifted the US Embassy to Israel to Jerusalem. Zionists were cock a hoop. He also recognised the illegally occupied Golan Heights as Israeli sovereign territory.
Every US President since Eisenhower has met Queen Elizabeth II. They all did their homework and comported themselves with decorum. Trust Trump to be the only one to mess up on a state visit. A state visit is the supreme expression of amity between nations. Trump walked into front of the Queen when he was supposed to be walking side by side with her. The president was insulting his hosts on twitter hours before he landed in the United Kingdom. The top diplomat was not just tactless. He was calculatingly offensive. But if anyone so much as asked him worthwhile question he reacted like the petulant infant that he is.
President Trump vowed to pull out of Afghanistan. He increased troop numbers there by a third. He never withdrew from Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria.
Within months of coming to office Trump had launched missile strikes on Syria. This was to penalise the Syrian regime for its chemical weapons attacks on its own people. These war crimes committed by President Al Assad were expedited by Russia. The objective of the attacks was to degrade Assad’s military capability.
In 2018 Trump said that the US had defeated ISIS. The Department of Defense said the exact opposite. The president announced the withdrawal of all US troops from Syria. Within days he countermanded the order.
Trump withdrew troops from some of Syria. He agreed this with Turkey. Trump abandoned America’s Kurdish allies. This earned a rare rebuke from Congress. The president’s justificatory statement on abandoning Kurds to genocidal ISIS and Turkish ultra nationalists: I don’t remember the Kurds being there at D Day. Perhaps that was because they were part of neutral countries at the time. The Russians and the North Koreans were not there either but Trump cannot stop kowtowing to their tyrants.
Trump approved of the Saudi intervention in Yemen. That is despite the many large-scale slayings of civilians by Saudi Arabia. He also approved $ 110 billion of arms sales to Saudi Arabia. He was arming the regime that arms and funds ISIS. So much for the claim he bandied about that he would ‘defeat ISIS easily and in a very short time.’ Trump was knowingly part of the problem. His own intelligence services told him that Saudi Arabia was the treasurer and armourer of ISIS and the Taliban: the two major anti-American terrorist organisations in the world. But business is business. Trump wanted to keep Mohammed Bin Salman sweet so that MBS would purchase a few more condos.
Trump increased troop numbers in Afghanistan. That was reneging on an electoral pledge. He also signed a peace agreement with the Taleban. This capitulation to terrorists is exactly what Republicans vowed not to do.
The Iran Deal (JCPOA) was twice extended by Trump. That was despite him saying it was the worst deal in history. After a year he tore up the deal. Sanctions were reimposed on Iran. This led to jubilance in Israel and Saudi Arabia. The US overlooked the fact that it was Iran that had mainly defeated ISIS.
If the Iran Deal was unconscionable Trump was a fool and a coward for reneging on his campaign pledge to shred the deal. But if he was right to extend the Iran Deal by a year then he was a war mongering moron to tear up America’s solemn promises when Iran was abiding by the deals provisions with scrupulosity. The United States itself as well as the UN repeatedly affirmed that the Iranians were upholding their end of tbe bargain.
As the US betrayed the trust of the world the Iranians correctly held themselves entirely absolved of their undertakings under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Teheran began to enrich uranium after the US perjured itself. The Iranians are much closer to a nuclear bomb than they have ever been. That is Trump’s fault. Far from preventing Iran becoming a nuclear weapons state Trump have caused this to be a reality.
Trump raised tensions with Iran by assassinating an Iranian general. He said that if the Iranians hit back, he would target their cultural heritage. This would be a war crime.
The US Government fulminated against the Iranians and labelled the Revolutionary Guard a ‘terrorist’ organisation. This was overlooking the inconvenient fact that it was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that had eviscerated ISIS and the Al Nusra Front. Were it not for Iran then ISIS would rule Syria and Iraq.
Policy on China was all over the place. He had said ‘they are raping us’ with regard to trade. This use of ‘rape’ as a term for a financial transaction tells us how petty Trump thinks rape is. He started a trade war. Trade wars, he said were ‘good and easy to win.’ He approved of the detention of over a million Uyghurs in re-education camps for brainwashing. It is galling that he made a show of going to Vad Yashem in Israel while he applauded Beijing for locking up an ethnoreligious minority in concentration camps. In fairness to the People’s Republic of China they are not striving to wipe out the Uyghurs only to deracinate them.
The president also extolled President Xi for making himself President for Life. Trump must have coveted this.
Trump vaunted his ability to restore cordial relations with Russia. He believed that the US had done everything wrong and Russia had done nothing wrong. He said he might recognise Crimea as Russian.
In the presence of Putin, it was blatant that Trump was timid and deferential. Trump foully insulted American allies. But he was always singing Putin’s praises. Trump said he believed Putin’s denial of electoral interference. Trump believed such a proven liar and mass murderer as against the US intelligence community’s unanimous assessment.
Trump lifted some sanctions on Russia but imposed others. He said he was against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. That was because US gas companies wanted to sell more to Europe and NS2 was a threat to them.
STAFF
Over half of Trump’s staff were fired or resigned by 2020. This is by far the highest turnover in history. Trump certainly had a zest for strife! He hired more lobbyists than any other president. His appointments were of more white males than any cabinet in decades.
In 2017 Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Trump’s minions went out to state spurious reasons for this. In an interview Trump said it was because of the Russian investigation. Trump asked Comey who he voted for. Comey is a Republican. But that is not good enough for Trump. People have to be personally loyal to him and not to the constitution.
Trump repeatedly asked Comey and others in the FBI to say in public that he was not under investigation. Comey and his subordinates declined to do so.
Donald J liked to surround himself with military men but never military women. Perhaps he thought some of their respectability would rub off on him. He craved recognition as a hardman. The president said that he would have risen to the pinnacle of the military if he had enlisted. He is utterly bereft of the virtuosities needed to make a good soldier, airman or marine. He is ill-disciplined, dishonourable, slothful, corpulent, ungallant, physically cowardly and so forth. Trump is miles gloriosus.
President Trump put a former marine officer as his chief of staff. This was supposed to bring some order to this uniquely unruly administration. But the president was the worst disruptor. The chief of staff did not manage to rein in the administration that was at once hyperactive and sclerotic. Trump’s midnight Twitter storms simply exacerbated the chaos and dysfunction.
One of Trump’s few successes was in dominating the media cycle. He drove the news like no other president. He boasted of being energetic. He was only energetic with the fingers of his notoriously undersized paws. Say what you like about Trump – noisome unholy fool would be apt – but he was not dull. His incessant outrageous insults and flagrant falsehoods caught attention. It was impossible to ignore him. He patently believes as Oscar Wilde did that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about. He kept his name in the headlines day after day. This was unusual even for a head of state.
IMPEACHMENT
Trump was the 4th president to be impeached. The House voted to impeach him. The case when to the US Senate. The trial in the Senate was voted on. Democrats needed two-thirds of the votes to remove him from office. They doubted that they had these. But they felt they had to take a stand against rampant criminality. They key issue was then Trump made military aid to Ukraine contingent on the country opening an investigation into Hunter Biden and telling the press about it. Trump wanted an embarrassing story in the media about Joe Biden. Biden was then the frontrunner to be the Democrats’ nominee.
Hunter Biden worked for a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma. It had been under investigation for over two years before Hunter was hired. The Trump team pretended that Hunter Biden was being investigated. The Trump Administraiton co-operated with the Kremlin to propagate the specious and ludicrous claim that it was Ukraine and not Russia that hacked the 2016 election. No one has ever claimed that the Ukrainians have ever interfered in any election anywhere. Hillary Clinton was an outspoken advocate of aid to Ukraine. Why would Kyiv want her to lose? It was a claim so staggeringly stupid that only the Republican base could swallow it.
The enormance of Trump’s abuse of office was unprecedented. The Democrats felt compelled to act. Lyndon Baines Johnson said the first rule of politics is to be able to count. The Democrats knew that not having a majority in the US Senate they stood almost no chance of removing the president from office. The impeachment required a two-thirds majority in the Senate to depose the commander-in-chief. The Republicans were unprincipled in their allegiance to the president in spite of his numerous felonies and transgressions. There was just a very slender chance that half the Republicans would be stricken by a sudden attack of conscience and moral decency. It appeared to be a forlorn hope. The Democrats believe that they were duty-bound to at least attempt to boot out the ever-recalcitrant president. They had to try. If they did not posterity would weigh them in the balance and find them wanting. Future presidents would believe that they had an untrammelled right to misuse their office for personal gain in the pecuniary and the political sense. There would be no distinction between the common weal and partisan advantage.
President Trump was the most impeachable president in both senses. The Republicans are so moralistic. These self-appointed guardians of the constitution should presumably hold one of their own to a high standard.
The Democrats are reason driven. Time was that the GOP was also part of the reality-based community. But these self-appointed guardians of ethics and constitutionalism would forgive Trump anything despite his total lack of contrition. The impeachment process proved that bipartisanship is old hat.
In a theophrastic statement Adam Schiff adumbrated the case for the presidents’ deposition from his office. Senator Schiff delivered his oration in a euphonious baritone and with panache. The evidence was beyond the realm of doubt. Despite a mountain of irrefutable evidence the Republicans would not budge. The evidentiary basis for the charges were seldom disputed by Republican senators. The evidence they heard was the probative basis for Trump’s removal being a constitutional imperative. By stark contrast the Trump Administration riposted with accusations against Biden which were without foundation. No Republican could rebut the case against Trump with any aplomb. They just bleated about their being a conspiracy against their kingpin.
In the end the vote was on almost entirely partisan lines. Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote against Trump. The Republicans had voted not to hear or read most evidence. They had wanted to depose Bill Clinton for lying about a blowjob. But when it came to high treason, they wanted to keep the president in office. This is Wednesbury irrationality.
After his acquittal the president fired many officials who had not towed the party line well enough. Trump then went on to muse about his desire to break the constitution and serve a third term. It never occurred to him to seek a constitutional amendment allowing him to do so. He thought he ruled by fiat. L’etat c’est Trump.
INVESTIGATIONS
The Donald was subject to numerous investigations. He ran various charities. He used the monies for such selfless and charitable acts as buying a portrait for himself for himself. There are at least 30 open investigations into the president at the time of writing.
A video of Trump’s police interview several years before his presidency revealed him boasting how memorious he was. But when questioned his hypermnesia suddenly deserted him. He claimed to be unable to read a document because did not have his spectacles with him. He has never been seen wearing eyeglasses. He reads the teleprompter without them. No one said he wears contacts.
Trump paid £150 000 to a playboy model Karen McDougal as part of an NDA. The Manhattan District Attorney subpoenaed documents pertaining to this.
In January 2017 the NSA, FBI and CIA all stated their near certainty that the Russian Government meddled in the election with the objective of helping Trump with the presidency.
Trump’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort. Manafort had worked in Ukraine for President Yanukovych. Yanukovych was pro-Moscow. He fled to Russia in 2014.
Michael T Flynn was a former US military officer on the Trump team. He was paid to go to Russia by its government. At a banquet he shared a table with Putin. Flynn was an advocate of greater co-operation with Russia on all issues. Flynn was in very frequent telephone contact with the Russian Ambassador in 2016. Flynn broke the Logan Act but conducting private diplomacy. He was agreeing to change US policy once Trump took office. Russia was clearly keen to bring such an administration to office. What did the Russians give in return for this promise of help?
Trump and his suck ups spread the utterly false claim that Ukraine had interfered in the election. Why? To bring to government a president who was favourable towards their foe?
Hacked emails from the DNC were passed to the Trump campaign to publish. The Mueller Report said it was questionable if this was illegal of the Republicans to then publish the stolen material.
In 2017 Comey opened an investigation into Trump’s collusion with Russia’s campaign to undermine the 2016 election. Within days Comey was fired. Trump said it was because of this investigation.
An investigation into Trump was launched by a Republican named Bob Mueller. Trump said Mueller would be fair to him. Then Trump got worried and said the whole thing was a witch hunt. Trump repeatedly said he would love to be questioned under oath by Mueller. But he never submitted to such questioning. It is doubtful that a president can be legally obliged to be questioned in this way. Bill Clinton voluntarily answered questions under oath.
Mueller’s failing was in not getting Trump to be questioned. Trump would surely have perjured himself.
The Mueller Report did not exonerate Trump. Mueller said it was policy not to charge a sitting president. Mueller produced pages of evidence of the Trump Campaign’s collusion with malign and illegal Russian Government activity. The report also detailed Trump’s countless attempts to obstruct justice. He had impeded investigations by withholding documents that were subpoenaed and instructing subordinates not to answer questions. The perversion of the law was clearly criminous.
Bob Barr lied to Congress about the content of the Mueller Report. He claimed that it was a total vindication of Trump.
Rudy Giuliani became a publicist for Trump. He went to Ukraine to meet Andrei Derkach. Derkach is the most pro-Russian politician in the country. Derkach gave him an edited recording of Biden phone conversation with Poroshenko. Giuliani spread the false notion that Biden had had a prosecutor sacked to get his son Hunter Biden off the hook in Ukraine.
Various key Trump associates went to prison over the Russia affair. Michael Cohen had perjured himself when he denied that Trump had spoken to the Russian Government about building a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Roger Stone was another consigliere who went to prison. He too perjured himself in relation to the Russia probe. Why did these men risk prison? What was so damaging that it had to be hidden? They could simply have asserted their 5th Amendment rights. The judge in the Stone case said that Stone was, ‘’prosecuted for covering up to the president.’’
George Papadopolous was another Trump lieutenant who ended up incarcerated. He had been in London in 2016 boasting to the Australian High Commissioner of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. The High Commissioner found this so disturbing that he informed the FBI.
Trump demanded blind loyalty from his underlings. Loyalty was a one-way street. Once people were no longer useful to him they were discarded. He had no conscience and no compassion.
Cohen published a book when in prison. The Trump Administration prevented him getting early parole in retaliation.
A masterstroke by Trumpists was inventing the notion of a deep state conspiracy against their idol. Whenever anything went wrong or any agency exposed Trump’s rantings as a lie this was adduced as further evidence of the deep state. The unfalsifiable claim that the deep state existed convinced main ignorant people.
Trump demanded immunity from prosecution for himself. Yet he accused journalists of being seditionists. Publishing something uncongenial to the president is not disloyal to the nation.
JUDGES
Trump appointed hundreds of federal judges. He was also almost unique in managing to appoint three Supreme Court judges in only three years.
Brad Kavanaugh was a very controversial pick. That was because of a woman who went public to allege that he tried to rape her when she was 15. The Senate held hearings on this. The Senate is not a court and cannot convict.
No one was asking the US Senate to find Kavanaugh guilty. They could simply desist from conferring on him the greatest honour in the American legal profession. Had Brad Kavanaugh not been confirmed he would have stayed where he was: as a Federal judge. His demeanour at the hearings was deeply unseemly. He was self-pitying and almost wept.
The Senate was under no obligation to approve Kavanaugh to the Supreme bench. The default setting is to keep him where he already was. There were hundreds of other Federal judges to pick from. Surely the Supreme Court Justices ought to be people of unblemished reputation. The SCOTUS does not want to be drawn into disrepute. If there is a question mark over a judge’s reputation it would be meet to choose someone else instead. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. 96% of people ever appointed to SCOTUS have been white males. The Supreme Court did not desperately need another one.
Towards the end of Obama’s time the Republicans invented a novel convention. They claimed it was an irrefrangible rule that another judge was not be appointed in the final year of a presidential term. This was to prevent there being another Democrat appointed judge on SCOTUS. But when Trump was in charge this rule was suddenly discarded. It was naked partisanship.
MENTAL ILLNESS
Trump is the first president to have a book written stating that he is deranged. The Dangerous case of Donald Trump: 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts assess a president.
Previously psychiatrists had obeyed the Goldwater rule. In 1964 some psychiatrists said that the Republican candidate for the presidency was mentally unwell. After that the American Psychiatric Association ruled that doctors could not assess a politician’s mental health unless they had examined that patient personally.
By 2016 many argued that Goldwater Rule had reached obsolescence. Because there are thousands of TV channels and past footage is available on YouTube there are hundreds of hours of Trump footage that anyone can access. There is ample observable behaviour in terms of dozens of tweets that the president published on some days. Therefore, many psychiatrists said that it was apt to analyse the president’s mental state without meeting him in person. A Yale Professor of Psychiatry published a book about Trump called A duty to warn.
Tens of millions of people have become Trump’s co-dependents. He has induced mass psychosis among his acolytes.
The president was labelled a ‘’a paranoid psychopathic narcissist who is divorced from reality’’ by a psychiatrist Dr Gartner. ‘’He lashes out impulsively at anyone he sees as his enemies.’’
Remember that the Greek myth of Narcissus that gives us the word narcissism warns us against the perils of self-adoration. Trump’s self-obsession and constant self-praise are highly destructive.
Lance Dodes – a former Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University – stated that the President has ‘sociopathic’. The professor emeritus observed that the president is a stranger to reality. Professor Dodes also observed that the president lied almost ceaselessly as the conman he is. Trump was trying to get people to buy his substandard and sometimes non-existent products and services.
The president craved love. He could not tolerate people asking him difficult questions or dissenting from his opinion. If people stood up to him, he would lose the cool and respond with invective. The president would not answer questions from journalists who asked him reasonable questions. He would start ranting about how these people were terrible and worked for worthless media organisations that were about to go bust. He never even attempted to engage with the substance of the question. His response was always ad personam.
Donald J could not abide anyone disagreeing with him. He would react with ire and contumely to the mildest dissent.
Trump indulges in magical thinking and wishful thinking. He does not hold beliefs on any evidentiary basis. He is one to judge a book by its cover. Trump falls prey to a cognitive bias called the availability heuristic. He said that he hires people because they ‘look very nice.’ His belief in his instinct being right is a dangerous delusion. Instinctual judgements means that he never bothers to research an issue. It is a trait that he has in common with Hitler.
The president is incapable of ratiocination. He feels and does not think.
A Florida mayor Andrew Gillum said that Trump was ‘a raving lunatic.’ It was hard to dispute what Mayor Gillum said. Psychiatric terminology is often used as part of political vituperation. But in Trump’s case the demotic version of this was suitable.
President Trump called himself ‘the King of the Jews’ in 2019. This was the title mockingly attributed to Jesus Christ on the Cross. Trump’s messianic delusion did not stop there. He called himself ‘the chosen one’ and made a halo over his head whilst looking to the heavens. One might have assumed that the Christian fundamentalists would be mortally offended by such open blasphemy. For some reason Christian extremists chose to disapply their exacting moral standards to Trump.
The President came up with ludicrous ideas. He decided he was going to purchase Greenland. Denmark had never said it was up for sale. The Prime Minister of Denmark rightly said that the notion that the United States could buy Greenland was ‘absurd.’ Trump was very upset at the Danish Prime Minister saying something so reasonable. He was triggered! Donald J kept saying it was such a ‘nasty word.’ As though Trump never said anything nasty! He can dish it out but he cannot take it.
President Trump cancelled a scheduled trip to Denmark because that country’s premier had shot down Trump’s preposterous proposition. There was perhaps another ulterior reason for Trump choosing not to visit the Danes. Barak Obama was also due to visit the country. Even Trump knew that the African-American would receive a rapturous reception and Trump would not. That would have been an unbearable humiliation for a man of Trump’s raging vanity.
Kim Jong Un rightly said that Trump was ‘a mentally deranged dotard’. Kim is a vile tyrant but even he is right sometimes. Trump riposted by calling Kim ‘little rocket man’. The epithet ‘little’ is the worst barb in Trump’s limited verbal arsenal. That is because he is fixated with size. Donald J is a man so profoundly insecure that a remark about his hands being small still suppurates decades later. He stood on a stage in front of pharisaical Republicans and boasted about the size of his membrum virile. They forgave him despite his unrepentance. Donald J succeeded in inducing mass psychosis among the party faithful. Why would a man feel impelled to boast about the size of his male member? It does not suggest that it is large. Presumably he is battling a deep-seated sense of inadequacy. The lady dost protest too much.
Despite totally changing his views on a whole host of issues Trump never seems to rue his misjudgements. He does not express regret much less remorse over mistakes or insults.
But Trump has the capacity to absolve. All people had to do was do obeisance to him. Shameless sycophancy will get you everywhere with Trump. The president addressed the Republican Party. The Republican Party used to be principled anti-communists. But all this opposition to the North Korean tyranny was thrown out in return for a grovelling letter. Trump told the party faithful why he had performed a volte face on Kim Jong Un: ‘Then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they are great letters. We fell in love.’
Words mean so much. He cancelled a trip to a NATO democracy over one word. He also performed a total about-face on North Korea in return for a few words despite no evidence that North Korea’s nuclear weapons will be dismantled.
Trump seemed to be a sadist. He derived gratification from inflicting pain and rubbing someone’s nose in the dirt.
The president was unable to form real relationships. People simply tools to be used. They were jettisoned as soon as they were no longer needed. Trump was loyal to his consiglieri so long as he could exploit them. As soon as anyone of them denounced him he said that they were wicked and that he hardly knew them. His niece Dr Mary Trump, a psychiatrist, confirmed all this.
Donald J was incapable of loving anyone except himself. He was only about himself. His camarilla consisted of criminals. Several of them ended up in prison.
Trump long since lost touch with reality. In 2015 Bill Clinton said that Trump was fact free. By 2019 it was worse. He could not tell fact from fantasy.
The President’s grandiosity was off the scale. He spoke in superlatives. He was the greatest, the richest, the best, the smartest and even the tallest. He said he was 6’3’’ when he is 6’1’’. He was compelled to incessantly broadcast his supposed accomplishments, physical attributes and talents.
Donald J made several parapraxes. When speaking he said ‘’I have the best economy’’ and ‘’I defeated the caliphate.’’ He conflated the United States with himself. This was probably not misspeaking. The president appeared to believe that the country was a mere adjunct of himself. For Trump, l’etat c’est moi.
All this expert opinion had no effect on the tens of millions of Trump’s fanatical supporters. Education, experience and scientific proof had no dissuasive effect on their adoration of this man who was determined to bilk them.
Dr Mary Trump is the president’s niece. Her intimate knowledge of him and her PhD in psychology put her in a unique position to assess his state of mind. In her book ‘Too much and never enough’ she limned his infinite desire for kudos and laudation. His unceasing crowing about his supposedly grandiose accomplishments and toughness is aimed at an audience of one: his late father who died 45 years earlier. The spectre of his father haunts him daily. Can he ever live up to his father’s expectations and can he ever live down his embarrassingly obvious vices and litany of public calamities?
The Donald’s mental impairment is only going to aggravate with age. To think that he is mulling over another presidential run in 2024.
CORONAVIRUS
Coronavirus broke out in China in November 2019. Trump had briefings about it in January. He has the attention span of a mayfly. He publicly praised the Chinese for their first class co-operation on the disease. Later Trump rounded on them for causing coronavirus. Either Trump was stupid to truth Cathay or else he was deceiving the American people yet again. When he subsequently excoriated Beijing for supposedly hugely lying about the scale and severity of coronavirus, he was striving to shift the blame for his own chronic mismanagement of the situation. He thought he could deflect culpability for his own blindingly blatant errors of judgement and outright lies. He thought he could get out of it by turning to his own standby of blaming foreigners.
In January 2020 Joe Biden and others told the president to get ready for coronavirus. The country was not in a state of preparedness.
In February 2020 coronavirus reached the United States. Trump said that it was a hoax. He was claiming that it did not exist!
Trump told people that coronavirus cases would be close to zero by March 12. In the end millions of American caught coronavirus and over 250 000 died of it. Much of this was due to Trump.
Planes from China were allowed to land in the US. Trump allowed people in who were not US citizens. No one was tested or quarantined.
Trump procrastinated about declaring lockdown. This modern-day Nero fiddled whilst the disease burned through the population. His other neronic traits are his incestuous lust for his daughter, his insanity, his debauchery, his avarice, him verbally awarding himself honours (cf Nero at the Olympics) and his odium towards religious minorities.
The president belatedly supported a lockdown. He held press conferences in which he rambled nonsensically. He proved yet again that he is totally devoid of empathy. Trump voiced not the least empathy for those slain by this disease or those bereaved. Instead he seemed to regard himself as the principal victim. He moaned that the press were not cheerleaders for him.
Before long the USA had the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world. MAGA! At least it was ‘America First’ in something. China has a population four times that of the United States. But the US has more coronavirus. Admittedly America’s high obesity makes people more susceptible to the disease. Trump set an example of binge eating junk food and avoiding even walking. That contributed to others being obese.
The US is the leading STEM country in the world. It has some of the best hospitals in the world. But the United States has among the highest per capita number of coronavirus deaths. It is true some European lands have an even higher rate. But countries such as Belgium have a high population density making the disease spread like wildfire. The USA with its very low population density should therefore have a commensurately far lower number of per capita deaths. It took an astonishing degree of stupidity, negligence and incompetence on behalf of the White House to cause the malady to spread so widely in such a diffuse populace.
The president boasted that he had stunned epidemiologists and virologists with his in-depth knowledge and understanding of their fields of expertise. He is a textbook example called the Dunning Kruger Effect. His intellectual poverty rendered him unable to assess his own academic shortcomings. He was always ultracrepidarian: mouthing off his uninformed musings on multiple topics.
In most countries constantly overstating one’s own competence is regarded as distasteful and even contemptible. With the self-esteem culture in the US many people hugely overrate themselves. Trump’s overconfidence and superiority complex was an extreme example of a wider malaise in American life.
Donald Trump told people to inject disinfectant into their lungs. He was urging his people to commit suicide! It was a statement so criminally stupid as to defy belief. Trump was the Jim Jones of the Republican Party. Tens of millions have drunk deep of his political kool aid. Fortunately, his cognitively subnormal admirers were seldom stupid enough to believe a word their idol said. Trump later denied what he had said live in national television. His British enabler Nigel Farage claimed that Trump did not say what he did say.
Many Trumpists claimed that the death toll was hugely inflated. Some said that coronavirus was a plot to bring down the president. No claim was too blatantly untrue or too stark raving bonkers for them.
The president wanted to get out of lockdown. He considered the economy more important. Despite saying that lockdown was dreadful and should be ended he did not actually end it. It is true that states have a wide degree of latitude. He could not make states lockdown. He could encourage them to do so and to end it. What Trump could control was the Federal Government. The president had the power to have people work from home. For a long time he refused to do that. But remember he was very willing to shut down the Federal Government without pay for weeks in 2019 in a failed attempt to build his stupid wall.
Against medical advice Trump held rallies. These were super spreader events. People had to sign waivers saying they would not sue the Trump campaign if they caught coronavirus there. The campaign knew it was spreading the disease. Asked about coronavirus at his rallies Trump said it did not worry him since he was far from the audience. So they could catch the disease and that did not bother him. There was no social distancing and few wore masks. He mocked Biden for doing so.
How many deaths are directly attributable to the Trump Campaign? Hundreds would be a conservative estimate.
Trump was recorded by Bob Woodward saying he was playing down coronavirus. When confronted with that months later he confirmed what he said earlier. He then said he played it up. He flat out contradicted himself.
Donald Trump blamed the World Health Organisation for coronavirus. He pulled the US out of WHO. WHO was exactly what was needed to stop the disease. The USA could not stop the disease at the border. The US is only safe when the world is safe from the disease. Despite the best efforts the USA cannot stop all illegal immigration. If coronavirus exists abroad then it will be brought into the United States.
President Trump demanded that US health agencies deliver good news. He told them to approve a vaccine that had not been properly tested. His political appointees with no medical credentials contradicted the Center for Disease Control. Trump then said that the CDC was a deep state conspirator trying to ruin him.
On October 2 Trump had to go to hospital with coronavirus. The president’s imprudence had led to him contracting the disease. It was poetic justice. He got healthcare that he denied to millions of others. The White House was not clear on when or how he caught the disease. He then had himself driven in a car outside the hospital to wave to fans. He was exposing his staff in the car to the disease. The White House kept contradicting what doctors said about the president’s wellbeing.
Every country has had coronavirus deaths. But the USA has the highest number in the world by a long, long way. It also has almost the highest per capita number in the world. Easily half these deaths are due to Trump. By the time lockdown started at the end of March the scale of the hecatomb was apparent. Tens of thousands of people in China and Europe had already succumbed to the malady.
In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic the Black Lives Matter movement revived. People were outraged by yet another police murder of an unarmed black man.
Some BLM people called for the de-funding of the police. A few Democrat politicians said that the police should not have military grade weapons. Clothed cognisance leads people attired in special forces garb and accoutred with military paraphernalia to behave like special forces soldiers, to perceive each encounter as a battle and to demonstrate excessive levels of bellicosity. Trump tried to claim that the Democrats would scrap the police.
The word socialism is toxic in Middle America. Republicans skilfully exploited the situation. They managed to persuade swathes of the populace that the Democrats were socialist and anti-police. But if Republicans are really anti-socialist they should refuse to take farm subsidies and subventions for the red states. They think that democratic socialism is North Korea and not Norway. And if North Korea is so evil (which it is) why does Trump adulate its tyrant?
Biden ran as a moderate. He is an establishment figure. But he was still vituperated and subjected to contumely. He was reproached as a far leftist. His half black and half Indian running mate was a target of racial odium. Trump suggested she was not American and had not right to be elected to any office. It was birtherism mark two.
Some leftfield Democratic ideas were seized on by the GOP. Andrew Yang’s universal basic income was never a Biden-Harris policy. The GOP said it would be disastrous. Only one US state has such a law. It is Alaska: one of the reddest states of all. It is Sarah Palin’s state.
PUERTO RICO
When a hurricane struck Puerto Rico the president did not lift a finger. Trump whinges so much when the press is not entirely pliant. But when hundreds of his own countrymen are killed and tens of thousands of others are suffering grievously he does not care. Why was he so indifferent to the plight of the US territory? As it is not a state its residents cannot vote for the president. The Republican Party claims to be patriotic. You might think it would wish to assist Americans who are in distress. You might assume that if a US territory wished to become an integral part of the United States, then it would be welcome by the GOP. You would be dead wrong. The Republicans do not want Puerto Ricans because they are Hispanic. There is an element of racism to that. There is also psephological self-interest. As the Puerto Ricans are not Cubans there is a 70% chance that they vote Democrat. The GOP does not want another two Democratic senators. Puerto Rico’s population is not negligible. It would mean at least 4 Representatives in the House and six electoral votes. These would be reliable for the Democrats.
INVESTIGATIONS
The FBI investigated the Trump campaigns links to Russian intelligence. There was a mountain of evidence of incontrovertible proof of knowing contact between the Trump Campaign and Russian agents. The FBI listened to Michael Flynn’s incessant calls to the Russian Ambassador before Trump was elected. Flynn was in material breach of the Logan Act. He strove to subvert US Foreign policy. The Logan Act states that people can only represent the US to foreign governments with the express approval of the president. Flynn was promising to reverse the Magnitsky Act and other sanctions in return for assistance from the Russian Federation.
Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and passed useful information to the GOP. Trump called upon them to hack Hillary’s emails. He said so on TV at a rally. You cannot say he was hiding it. Subtlety and discretion have never been among Trump’s fortes.
In 2020 he was asked if he would accept similar assistance from a foreign government in the campaign. He demurred.
Trumps’ eagerness to please North Korea, Russia and various tyrannical regimes in Central Asia is in stark contrast to traditional Republicanism. Say what you like about previous Republican presidents but they opposed communist dictators. Reagan excoriated appeasements. He said it was betraying your friends to reward your enemies. It is jaw dropping that the Republican Party let Trump get away with doing just that.
The body language when Trump met Putin said it all. It was the only time that Trump was ever servile. He was uncharacteristically reticent. What hold does Putin have over him? Is it sexual blackmail? Is it financial control? Whatever it was there was no doubt that Putin was in command. Trump was chastened, hesitant and totally lacking in confidence. Where had his brio and combativeness gone?
In 2016 the French, British, German, Dutch, Australian and other Western intelligence agencies warned the Americans that the Russians were actively helping the Trump Campaign and the campaign was knowingly accepting the support. Trump denied all this. Which is more likely: that every intelligence agency in the Western world should invent all this or that a pathological liar should tell and untruth?
LEGAL LIABILITIES
The president used Attorney General Bill Barr as his personal lawyer. Lawsuits filed against Trump as a private citizen were dealt with by Barr. The AG’s role is supposed to be acting for the US Government and for the Office of the President not he individual who happens to be president. The Trump administration drew no distinction between public and private roles.
The full story of the Trump campaign’s co-operation with the Russian Government came out. Trump had said at a rally that he wanted the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. Russian disinformation was a boon to the campaign. It was easily enough to get him over the line in three swing states. Russian ultra nationalist racist militarist politician Vladimir Zhironovsky toasted Trump on camera. Putin made admiring statements in the press about Trump during the campaign. The compliment was returned. Never before has Russia supported a candidate for the US presidency.
The Muslim ban came in. But it only banned people from a few poorer Muslim lands. It banned people even if they were not Muslim but a citizen of that country. Even then there were exemptions. It was unworkable and discriminatory. In most years since 9.11 Islamic terrorists had killed zero people in the USA. Guns had killed over 33 000 people most years. But Trump did not care about gun crime. Almost all of those shot dead in the USA are shot dead by fellow Americans.
Despite appealing to the basest Islamophobic prejudices Trump was no slouch in accepting the Islamic dollar. He went to Saudi Arabia and literally embraced the ruler of the most Islamic extremist country in the world. He had Mohammed Bin Salman as a guest in the White House.
After the Highland School shootings Trump talked about confiscating guns and doing the legal process afterwards. The NRA did not like that one. The idea was swiftly dropped. Trump was pro-gun but his events did not allow guns in. Why? For his safety.
Trump abased himself before Kim Jong Un. The savage tyrant was treated cordiality that Trump extended to no one else. By contrast America’s allies were betrayed. Ukraine was battling for its freedom and independence. Trump said aid was conditional on Ukraine making up lies about Joe Biden. NATO leaders were routinely publicly insulted.
The president came to office with a concatenation of psychological flaws. He had a personality disorder. It is the dark triad of malignant narcissism. He had not the least empathy for anyone else. With his constant crowing about his supposed successes many people mistook conceit for confidence.
The Donald said that he could have risen to the top of the military. When did he ever show courage moral or physical? Was he ever athletic of disciplined? The claim was utterly risible.
Pulling out of the Paris Deal was applauded by the anti-environmental lobby. Polluters were elated that they could pollute the planet with gay abandon. His base were irrationalists. They disbelieve in evolution as they disbelieve in climate change. Irrefutable scientific proof does not sway them. They were not reasoned into their asinine beliefs so could not be reasoned out of them. Trump’s determination to aggravate climate change and poison the air went down well in coal country in West Virginia.
Trump planned to move the US Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He fulfilled this pledge. He was heedless of Arab protests. The Ishaemlites had largely abandoned their Palestinian brethren. So there was little pushback. That is also because the Gulf Arab states were far more preoccupied to a possible war against Iran. They wanted American and even Israeli assistance.
LIES
How does he get away with all those lies? In a sense he really is a genius. He has managed to get tens of millions of people to trust him by lying to them all the time. His deceits are not isolated or few but pervade his entire discourse. He often manages to squeeze in two lies in a single sentence. Many of his lies are bear no verisimilitude.
Trump always brags about being the best. To be fair to him in one way he is. He is an oceangoing, world beating, twenty-four carat gold Olympic medal winning super liar. His indefatigable lying takes on a strange sort of magnificence for its sheer effrontery.
Donald J Trump tells lies almost ceaselessly. He could be called a barefaced liar but he wears too much makeup for that to be accurate. His minions go on television and tell untruths on his behalf. They lie about lies and even lie about lies about lies. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is one of the most infamous untruth tellers to have served in the scandal struck administration. She is also a Christian fundamentalist. She boasts of her faith. She ought to remember that the Good Book says, ‘lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.’ She might recall the Decalogue says ‘thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’ when she blackguards others. She even dragged her children into it. To claim that she would never tell a mistruth she said that she wanted to have a clear conscience when she went home to her children. Good point: so parents never lie? Was that true of the Clintons then?
The Washington Post kept count of the false and misleading statements made by President Trump on the record during his term of office. At the time of writing the number was well past 20 000. Some of these were merely half-truths or exaggerations. Others were outright shrieking lies. Trump is a liar who lies about lying. This latter-day Pinocchio goes in for projection. He calls the Washington Post the fake news media. If anything goes wrong; it is all the mainstream media’s fault for reporting it. This Republican talking point about the liberal media has been around for decades. According to the GOP the media is dishonest for reporting Trump’s dishonesty. You could not make it up!
President Trump is projecting. He is accusing others of his own worst vices. He and those of his ilk deny objective reality on climate change, gun crime and a whole host of other issues. That is why it is so Orwellian with Trump. In the Republican mind truth and falsehood swap places. They are casuists who argue that up is down. The War on Truth waged by the Trump Administration may have decennial repercussions. How can a country be governed when a considerable minority fervently hold false beliefs on a whole host of issues? These are factual beliefs and no opinions.
Trump’s industrial scale mendacity is unsurpassed even in the lamentable annals of American Political History. The lamentable failure of the Republican Party to speak out against such incessant deceit is an eternal blight on its name.
Despite the infinitude of lies the Christian fundamentalists stayed with Trump. They savaged Obama for the merest pecadilloes. Trump was impenitent about his manifold sins and transgressions.
Christopher Hitchens said how the Clinton presidency was the death of shame. But Trump took shamelessness to a whole new level.
It is galling that so-called macho men should back Trump. The alpha male movement endorsed him. He was an odd poster boy for such males. This coward and thug is no standard bearer for masculinity. Does a macho man dye his hair and brush it forward to cover his baldness? Does such a man wear fake tan an inch thick? Someone who insults women in such a foul fashion is ungentlemanly. Does a real man throw the toys out of the pram when asked a challenging question? Does a hard man whine nonstop that everyone is unfair to him? This whingebag is an odd role model for stoicism and hardihood. He vacillates and he changes his coat all the time.
Christian fundamentalists flocked to Trump. Until 2015 Trump never pretended to be religious. He did not attend church apart from weddings and funerals. He did not even say ”first Corinthians” right. He bragged ”no one knows more about the Bible than me.” Oh vanity of vanities!
Donald Trump’s imbecility was staggering. He cannot read on an adult level. He horrifically mispronounced names. He invented a new country ‘Nambia’. Officials went slack jawed at his pig ignorance. The president did not know that the UK had nuclear weapons. This had come out in presidential debates when it came to light that he had no idea what the nuclear triad was. He has the attention span of a may fly. He did not attempt to remedy the countless lacunae in his knowledge. But in Trump’s mind he is a ‘genius’. Actual geniuses are not promuglators of their own genius.
When Trump met Putin he said that there was no reason to believe that Russia interfered in the election. He dared not defy his paymaster. After the press conference Trump claimed to have misspoken and meant to say the exact opposite. Putin was honest and said that he had wanted Trump to win. He has never voiced a preference for a foreign election before.
Keeping immigrants out was major planks of the Trump campaign. He drew no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. Then he said that he wanted more immigrants from China. Donald J repeated the transparent lie that he would build a border wall and Mexico would pick up the bill. In time he blurted out that Mexico would not pay two cents for it.
Nepotism is one of Trump’s besetting sins. He promoted his daughter Ivanka and her husband to high office. They had no pertinent experience.
It came to light that Trump had had unsafe sex with a porn star named Stormy Daniels a month after his son Barron was born. Stormy had been pay to lie about the arrangement and say that she had not copulated with Trump. She later said that she had had intercourse with him and a polygraph test proved she was speaking the truth. The non-disclosure agreement that she signed was pro forma. It said not to reveal pregnancy information. Therefore, Trump has done this many times before and may well have impregnated his other mistresses. Presumably, they had abortions as no children from outside his marriages have cropped up. The NDA was in the name of David Dennison – an alias for Trump. Trump lied about adultery, liked about the NDA, lied about paying for the NDA. Michael Cohen paid Stormy off and later recouped the money from Trump. It was not declared as a campaign expense and was therefore a violation of electoral law.
Trump called less developed countries ‘shitholes countries.’ He was busy turning his country into one. He wondered why Europeans do not want to move to the US. Could it be gun crime, murder by the police, pollution, the lack of public healthcare, the lack of affordable higher education, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, religious mania, irrationalism, climate change denial; in a word: Trumpism?
Megalomania dominates Trump. He wanted a military parade to honour him. It was such a flop that he held it only once.
The president vaunted his supposed admiration for the US Military. He was happy to play golf in the rain. But when it came to honouring young American soldiers who died shrieking in agony. These teenagers laid down their lives for their country but Trump refused to attend a ceremony when it was drizzling. Still the Republican base stayed with him despite his rank disrespected for Americans who had been killed in action.
Trump did not prepare for coronavirus. He was told it was coming. He lied about it. The president said it was a hoax. He said that it did not even exist! This led people to be incautious. When Trump had to acknowledge that coronavirus was real he de-emphasised it. He said it would all be over by March 12. It was going to disappear in April then.
The president vacillated about lockdown. Then he blamed others for not locking down. He refused to distribute aid on the basis of need. Donald J said he would distribute aid to states according to how much their governors did obeisance to him.
Trump’s lassitude was considered a benediction by some of his foes. When Trump was slobbing around he was doing less harm. Long may he remain a couch potato. But when it came to coronavirus his laziness turned deadly. His inattention and lack of application had fatal consequences for hundreds of thousands of Americans. A conscientious president would have worked around the clock to comprehend the situation, draw up a strategy and superintend its implementation.
The president was still full of braggadocio and brass neck. He claimed that he had stunned epidemiologists and virologists with the depth of his knowledge of their fields. In press conferences he gave rambling and incoherent answers.
The war on the truth might be the most damaging legacy that Trump has left the world. It started almost on day one of his administration. Days into his term of office Kelly Conway said there were ‘alternative facts’ that she had to state. That took the biscuit. The term ‘orwellian’ is often overused. But when describing Trumpism it is entirely apt. It was a case of the Ministry of Truth dedicating itself to proclaiming lies unabashedly.
Rudy Giuliani, America’s mayor, has the most overblown reputation in the US because he happened to be Mayor of NYC at 9/11. His contribution to preventing tragedy was to disregard expert advice to move the counter terrorist unit out of the World Trade Tower. But Giuliani squandered the respect of the world by going into bat for Trump. Giuliani wrote RICO and used to prosecute hoodlums. The he became an indefatigable publicist for one. He was forever contradicting himself as his senility advanced. Giuliani’s contribution to American political philosophy will be what he said in a 2019 interview, ‘’Truth is not truth.’’ That should be etched on his tombstone. His incipient senility is plain to see.
It took centuries for the US to establish trust in its institutions. It took Trumpism only a couple of months to fatally undermine trust in the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, National Security Agency, electoral system and courts. It will be a very slow and painstaking process to rebuild the trust that was recklessly destroyed by inchoate populism.
Donald John plainly believes in the Big Lie Theory. The masses will fall prey to a big lie more than a small one. People believe in what is seen to be strongly believed in. When his lies are exposed as such he doubles down. He never explains and never apologises. His lies are told with stridency and unblushingly. Who would have the impudence to tell such gross untruths? Some of his lies are so brazen that some assume he could not make such statements unless they were true.
To deal with the election loss Trump’s idea is to ceaselessly insist that the election was stolen. This was Trump grappling with cognitive dissonance. One cognition was that he won the election and the other was that he lost it by every metric. He coped with that by subscribing to the groundless belief that he outpolled Biden. If a lie is repeated frequently enough then many weak-minded people will end up believing it. As Churchill said ‘you can fool some of the people all the time.’ The notion that Trump won the election is endlessly dinned into people in the Trumposphere.
DEFEAT
In 2016 people could claim they did not know how bad Trump would be as president. By 2020 it was clear that he was traitorous, self-serving, and always spouting outright lies. Nonsense on stilts did not put off many people who voted for him the previous time. Republicans rounded on the Clintons for lying. But non-selectivity in denouncing mendacity is seldom found in politics. The Democrats had fouled their own nest by not denouncing the Clintons.
Trump lost the election. The scam artist then begged his supporters to donate to his legal defence fund to overturn the election in the courts. That was because the billionaire Trump wa s too tight fisted to pay for his own legal challenges.
By any datum it was plain that Donald J was going to lose the election. Trumpists said that the polls had been wrong in 2016 and they were wrong again.
Even then Trump lost by only 100 000 votes in three swing states. Biden’s margin of victory approached six million votes. But it could easily have gone Trump’s way despite Biden’s clear win in the popular vote.
Despite Trump’s numberless grotesqueries and puerilities coupled with an utter lack of contrition, the ‘moral majority’ with him. Even more staggeringly he gained more votes than he had in the previous election. This proves the moral bankruptcy of a huge swath of the American populous. There is an assumption that the majority of people have a modicum of decency and a basic intelligence. Empirically this is untrue.
By the end of the Trump Administration scores of ambassadorial posts had been unfilled for four years. US diplomacy has never suffered from such wilful negligence.
America’s name has been dragged through the more like never before. Donald is utterly unworthy of the office that he holds. He lacks the mental furniture to be president. It is a matter of intellect and temperament.
This mephitic man finished off his presidency with egregious and trademark ill-grace. Alone of all the 45 presidents he has refused to concede. He is a loser and a sore loser at that.
For five days after Trump’s defeat he was dumbstruck. For five days he made no public appearances and gave no interviews. His silence is both golden and deafening. Such laconicism was uncharacteristic for Trump who was notorious for his logorrhea by mid-2020. He nonetheless tweeted incessantly disseminated specious claims of huge scale voter fraud by his opponent. His irresolution in accepting the outcome of the election was consonant with his lifetime of ill-grace.
The free world quickly felicitated Biden on his victory. Finally, China applauded the former vice-president on his election. Russia alone held out for Trump. It is not hard to see why they stuck with their asset.
Trump continued to publish outright falsehoods on twitter. Once he is no longer president Twitter might block him. But do they want to lose someone who brings them so much traffic?
The Trump Campaign lodged vexatious lawsuits. These cases were found to be meritless. Their claims of voter fraud were in almost all cases without foundation. There were almost bogus claims of personation: of people voting on behalf of the deceased. Some people were named as dead people whose votes had been stolen by the quick. However, some of these putatively dead people turned up and gave interviews proving themselves to be very much in the land of living.
The purpose of these unmeritorious lawsuits was not legal. It was presentational. Outside court the Trump lawyers were full of sound and fury about massive scale fraud. The more harebrained advanced about how the President of Venezuela – Hugo Chavez – who died 7 years earlier was behind electoral fraud. When the lawyers entered court they were asked by judges if they were electing fraud. Trump lawyer after Trump lawyer said that they were not alleging fraud. Lying under oath in court would have grave repercussions for any attorney. Therefore, the allegations of fraud suddenly stopped when Trumpists were under penalty of perjury. The aim of specious claims of electoral fraud, personation, valid votes being deleted and bogus voting is to create a belief in the minds of Republican voters that the election was stolen. It seems to have worked. 70% of Republican voters believe that Trump really won. This belief will not disappear when Biden is inaugurated. The country is going to be more polarised than ever. The United States is divided into two hostile camps. You are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
The late great Christopher Hitchens published a hatchet job on Bill Clinton entitled ‘Nobody left to lie to.’ The same could be said of the obloquial Donald.
The President is probably trying to carve out a new career as a GOP pundit or shock jock. This cloaca of disinformation and bigotry will be welcomed onto Fox News.
Donald John Trump’s response to his defeat was as lacking in cogency as everything else he did as president. He was in blind denial about being bested. He published numerous completely false statements. The president threatened and indeed initiated legal action. From some of his pronouncements one could infer an acceptance that he had been voted out. Then he contradicted himself and bragged that he had been re-elected.
Trump is the lord of misrule. He is fantasising about a 2024 bid. No president has been voted out and then come back to win since the 19th century. But Trump has broken precedents before. He is the only Republican to lose the popular vote twice besides Thomas E Dewey. Trump is physically very unfit and mentally unsound already. In four years’ time his declension will be in an ever more advanced state. More likely one of his brood will throw his or more likely her hat into the ring. Though these three are less formidable than their pater the Democrats should not write them off. Ivanka is as pampered and out of touch as can be. She is a former Democrat but so was her father and that did not prevent the Republican base assuming that he had had a Damascene conversion. Ivanka Kushner is a passable public speaker. She has her mother’s model looks. She would also be treated with greater consideration on account of her sex. The party knows it needs to appeal more to women. Donald Junior is such a disgrace that his father wishes he could take his name back from his eldest son. Donald Junior would not have the visceral appeal of his father and is no orator. Eric Trump is the dimmest of the three who have been politically active. That is really saying something. He is also indiscrete and often blurts out things that are profoundly unhelpful to the family.
Trumpism has been greatly assisted by Fox News and social media. Fox was the semi-official channel of Trumpism. The accursed Trump mindset was amplified through Infowars and other white supremacist anti-gun control channels that broadcast absolute lies such as the vile claim that the Sandy Hook Massacre was a hoax. You tube as well as Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites allowed Trump and his disciples to bypass the mainstream media. He was able to communicate to the masses directly.
President Trump broke the rules of Twitter and Facebook on countless occasions. His hatespeech and dangerous lies would have gotten anyone else kicked off. These networks believed they could not block him since he was a sitting president. He was newsworthy. Plus, he garnered them huge amounts of traffic and therefore revenue. Once he is no longer president they might well ban him. If another Trump were to arise it is crucial that these social networks ban him when he seeks nomination. Do not let someone spread nefarious lies and racial animus. Trumpist tropes have real repercussions in terms of racist physical attacks. If demagoguery is deprived of the oxygen of publicity it perishes.
Donald J railed against the mainstream media. The ‘lamestream’ media has been a Republican whipping boy for decades. He branded journalists ‘enemies of the people’ for their honest reportage. His loathing of various channels and newspapers did not prevent him and his staff giving interviews to these channels and assiduously promoting their agenda through these supposed biased media. They cannot have it both ways. If these media are so unfair then boycott them. As Trumpists try to use these channels and newspapers then these outlets cannot be so prejudiced against Trump.
Much of the media was in quandary about how to report Trump’s reprehensible conduct. He branded them biased. If they said that his lies were lies this might appear to confirm his accusations. Some journalists confused neutrality with objectivity. It is an objective fact that Trump is a race baiter and a nonstop liar. It does not make you neutral to refrain from telling the unvarnished truth.
Trump said he was leaving office. Then said he would not. It was yet another example of him constantly contradicting himself. Some of his allies such as Steve Bannon said that election officials who confirmed that the election was won fair and square by Biden should be killed. Was Bannon speaking metaphorically? When his incitement to murder met with outcry he never clarified that he was using figurative language. Republicans often tarnish BLM’s reputation saying it is violent despite prominent Republicans literally sanctioning murder for those who uphold law and democracy.
There is a danger that Trump might do something especially rash in his lame duck period. George H W Bush started Operation Restore Hope in the dying days of his presidency.
Once Trump returns to being a private citizenship he is unlikely to fall silent. He will keep promoting outrageous conspiracy theories and making foully offensive accusations without any evidentiary basis. Lugubriously, the US has a weakness for such myths. The John Birch Society passim. In the 1950s the JBS disseminated the claim that Eisenhower was a card carrying communist. Several million people tuned into JBS Radio each night. They firmly believed that a Republican president and ardent Cold Warrior was as red as a baboon’s bottom.
Trump has been ousted. But Trumpism has not. This farrago of nativism, anti-intellectualism, illogic, malice and fury will probably persist as a significant threat to civilisation for a multi-decennial period. There is no panacea that can quickly cure half of America that is infected with a mind virus. Trumpism will certainly prove more lethal than coronavirus. That is no metaphor. Trumpism’s opposition to environmentalism, clean energy, gun control and publicly funded healthcare kills hundreds of thousands of American per annum. That is a conservative estimate.
Donald J will leave office as gracelessly as he entered it. Whinging and lying as always he faces an uncertain future.
The reign of error is over. But Trump is already musing about being the comeback kid in 2024 when he will be mere 78. If he is this deranged at 74 how deranged will he be in another four years?
My fondest hope is that the ex-president will serve reclusio perpetua in supermax. But American injustice being what it is this prolific felon will probably never even have his collar felt.
Lock. Him. Up.
doubled vacced
slight illness.
double blind tests
save your life save others
why have we defeated smallpox and polio. MMR
why take any medicine at all?
some people are against all new tech. electriicty. cars. computers. planes.
obstinacy of irrationality.
evidence.
why would people create a vaccine?
some people are anti-science
highest vaccinaigton lowest covid. israel
vaccine not perfect. no medicine is
scare mongering. blood clots. these happen anyway.
trump took it. now feeding anti vaccine pernicious lunacy.
dangerous. death dealing demagogues
wreck the economy
loony tunes. derangement of mind – plandemic. george soros
cui bono?
there have been anti vaxxers as long as there have been vaccines.
edward jenner
vaccines interfere with nature. playing God.
wednesbury irrationality.
new book. will be truthful. does not go without saying
no money. fame. his commodoty is name recognition
keep name in the media
their trade is treachery
glut on the market for self pity
savafing his family. bad mouth. trade. calumniate.
playing th victim
woe is me
feeling sorry for himself.
sorrowful
doelful
tristful tale
lugubrious
tenebrous.
plaintive
maudlin
melancholy
pathos.
=====================
horripilation – hair standing up due to cold
querimonious – discontent , complaining
solidungulate – having one hoof on each foot. adjective ir noun
aver
avocation
matricular
paltry
niggardly.
eulogistic. eulogium
elegaic.
immutable truths
attritional
juxtapose
whiff. skiff
quinquennial
captious
entangle
backwoods
gilded. yoith gawky
lofty indifference
redoutable
running the gaunlet
mercurial effiacy
maverick
cocky
deadpan
squeal with laughter. squalls of laughter. gales
countermeasures
counterstrike
riposte
unavenged
ingenuity
hardword
foreshorten
hard-won
raucous
bewitchingly
on leisure bent
ginger up
hobble sheepishly
construal
misconstruction
miseducation
jejueneness
indolent
assortment
inappreciable
curoous paradox
with practised ease
digressions
suffer an indignity
distessingly reminiscent
phrasemaker
facade
carapace.
slouch. saunter
benefaction
behove. incumbent on
hemispherical
hegemonic
reithian
protestations
characteristic indifference
blandishments
surmise
limerence
discoursing
bemused indignation
incomprehensibility
concupiscent.
swashbuling
pucker
theatrical
coquette
mimicry
bravura display
hang on my lips
eyes screwed up in anticipation
verbal assualt
half baked
wll thought through
phsyical anguish
wooliness
sprightly
hebridean
bald assertion
unsubstantiated
pomposutt
gibberish
unmitigated
gormful
exasperation
countenace
physiogonomy
mutterings of feigned incredulity
puzzlement
deeply disdainful
on pain of our highest displeasure
retrenchment
antagonistic. antagonist
high diction
protagonist.
aloof
selective blindness. myopia
speechifying
ill judged flights of rhetoric
barking mad
bedraggled.
mortify
magnetism
vignette
wratful
run afoul
founder
bring to grief.
dog whistle
unburdened
burdensgome observances
cajole
imperceptible glimmer
maddeningly strident
coute de coute
a tout prix.
hidebound
phyllaceteries
disenchant
enchantress
arcana.
trenchant
it grates
wodehousian
asperity
aesthetic. ascetic
modus vivendi
ludicrous proposition
utilitarianism
bounded rationality
functional rationality
connoisseur
aficionado
dilettante
amateurism
literary firmament
constellation
proselytise
aphorism
witticism. unwittingly.
catalytic. catalyse.
catatonic
rabeleisian
mock severity
controtions
ostensible
tirade
congenial.
manna from heaven
bwllow
dismissive attitude
attitudina’ experientally.
inimitabe
archetype
dottily
hilarity
enliven
admonition
deleterious effect
steely self will
penance
impenitent
unrepentant
liliputian
aggravate
miscranta
ponder oit fate
barrel of laught
a mine of …
lugubriious
renaissance man
unpalayable
hoary odl cloche
foretaste
mindest
misdemeanour
wayside
unhinged.
troublesome
imperil. jeopardy
punctilious
sutbborn as a mule
moral compass/
hellish. infernal/ ,motley
,metier manque
hauled
indigennt. blood boiling
affrtoend
ebard the lion
disarming
dissimulation
muddled
pickle
protean
beffudled.
befogged
relish.
implausble
nonsensival
impending
upbraid
overbearn
impediemtnia
paraphernalia
melee.
I was in an airport dept area. hardly anyone there. do not know the time of day, locaton or my destination
walked into a bar. anyone at the small round tables? Unsure. a slim white barman aged 30 or so stood behidn the dar. dark hair. clean shaven and no specs. asked for a glass of tap water. he said sorry we dod not do that. I saw from the expresison on his physiognomy he had taken an instant dislike to me. he was being hostile. asked for a bottle of still water.
he went ti te ridge .took one out. t=said there would be an extra 20% on that. there was a large ledger open on his sde of the counter. I saw in blue biro all the drinks he had sold recoreded aiwth prices and 20 written at the end of that. son he charged everyone an extar 20%. tax? fiar enoyght. I was willing to buy. then he said there would be charge for tarfa services. I was irate at that ad stalked off. he had asmirked at me as he said it
why did this come up? guilt?
was served a small bottle of scottish still by martin yesternight under v different circs
I thoght of exacting vegances on the barman. tripping him up somehwere. how often I have wished to do that.
what can the revery signify? was in tiuch with tarfa yesterday but did not go in the end. even chatting is a treat.
prof. emphasis
repetition.
========================
travelling around THE china
fry around. fly
=======================
we need formal not informal
politics. stress
15 feb. d o b
——————
I don’t actually met this person.
mom – informal.
anxious. stress
in my future.
we had a quite long conversation
an intersection about what you can do.
Think. th
======
past present and future
========================
difficult experience
at Chinese reasearch foundation
poor? pronunication
finish their study
my study. studies
it is quite hard for me. was
a good way. pronounce good
manage my time more wisely. efficiently.
timetable. word to use.
I usually . pronunciation
I concentrate myself better
think. pron TH.
=========================
memorable journey
better on TH.
English. L
how to say? how do you say.
the prices is cheap
major. A pron
how brief he was. ? short time.
worth
=====================
study method
keep your concentrate
he used to be with phone. his
concentrate herself
terrifying situation
====================
my favourite photograph is a selfish about me
we are camping
============
sporting event
I attend the sports event as a cheerleader
rather than as a competitors. singular
I do a lot of efforts.
cheering up for others
================
useful tool
I wanna
things. TH
tutorial. pron
I would feel panic and depressed.
kill my ties. time?
==============
good leader
=======
internt business.
in instagram.
their lifes…
figured . pron
think. TH
thing. TH.
===================
was on a fairly busy street. British Isles. cool weather. people warmly dressed. autumn leaves carpeted the pavement. there was a protest on. people walked with placards. do not recall what it was about..
then I started to sing bandiera rossa – the chorus. I canticled lustily. everyone one was impressed and joined in
later I felt crowded. to get away I willed myself to fly. I was able to fly vertically. no need to flap arms as wings. I could see several streets around. but could I really fly I wondered? Was I imagining this ability? Often dream that I can fly
i tried to pimch myself. I felt something but was still flying. Then i wondered if a moist sensation would change things. I licked my lips and instantly felt the matress under my back. I was back standing on the street. I realised flying was an illusion.
no one had seen me fly despite there being a crowd around
later sata at a kitchen table. pater and geraldine were there. told them about it. they paid rapt attention. twas an affable ambience.
dreamt of meeting geraldine a few nights ago and getting along well.
whats a doing? what is doin? whatcha doing? whassa doooo-in?
nono.
no dado no. like it like it.
messy messy off off. a funny, a silly.
i can’t member. that my daddy called.
what s a happen by n. n, n, n, wet. wet n.
I is happiest when Is smoking me own home grown.
you wet n. you stinky. my name is mr n.
mam A mam A. aur
nu vreau nu vreau nu vreau
padazhdi padazhdi padazhdi.
si mai o data.
sunt copillui lidia.
vreau s dorm singur. tati a me spalat si schimbat.
apa apa.
