As the United States reports record deaths and hospitalizations from COVID-19 in the final days of 2020, we look at how thepandemic that ravaged the country this year has shone a stark new light on racism in medical care.
In a viral video recorded by Black physician Dr. Susan Moore, she describes racist treatment by medical staff at a hospital in Indianapolis and says they did not respond to her pleas for care, despite being in intense pain and being a doctor herself. In the video, Dr. Moore says she had to beg to receive pain medication and the antiviral drug remdesivir, and accuses a doctor at Indiana University Health North Hospital of ignoring her pleas because she was Black. “I put forward, and I maintain: If I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that,” she says. Dr. Moore died December 20, just over two weeks after she posted the video. She was 54 years old.
Somebody compared watching this video to seeing the video of the George Floyd murder, and I can see that. Can you say “black lives matter,” motherfucker?
Or as noted non-racist former Attorney General William Pelham Barr would say: an infinitesimal number of female black doctors have been killed this way during this historic pandemic, certainly not more than a large handful. Obviously not indicative of any kind of institutional problem reflecting on the values of the larger society, and clearly, this is an angry dying woman in the “viral” video. And give me a break, forced lockdowns of people used to freedom and liberty are actually worse than centuries of slavery for people who have never known freedom or liberty!
Does my heart good to refer to the repellant Trumpist “Christian” as the former attorney general.
The power of accurate, clearly written history writing is not the same kind of power as that threatening blunderbuss-style of power wielded by an unaccountable maniac with a childish view of life and a sadist’s keen delight in the suffering of others, but it is powerful. It cannot literally take food out of the mouths of hungry children, or a week’s pay away from their parents, as can randomly flexed presidential power when POTUS pouts and golfs while protesting the unfairness of things like the proposed name changes of military bases now honoring traitorous Confederate generals, not that it would want to. A president so inclined can mandate a national curriculum of denial of history, a historian with a conscience writes serving the opposite inclination.
A detailed, honestly told history is a powerful force in the world. Here is a prime example of it, written last night by Heather Cox Richardson, who ends with this inspiring observation:
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
A friend sent me the recent NY Times business piece about the historian’s amazing and well-earned viral internet success and her sudden wealth. The reason so many subscribe to her nightly newsletter is that she has emerged as a clear, mostly calm voice, giving the perspective of history to shed light on this horrific moment in time. Forwarding this piece to my friend last night all I could add was “WOW”. All he needed to write was “Agree”. A short read, well worth your time, particularly if you think history is a bunch of boring and irrelevant busy-work with no relevance to our current predicaments and no clues to offer about a way to a better future.
One should not be too opinionated these days. These are very angry and stressful times. We all know that Mr. Trump is an unusual kind of president, the kind of person who seems to behave irrationally as he instinctively serves the powerful forces that have served him all of his life. He’s not as stupid as he seems, perhaps, just a malignant narcissist. A spoiled two-year old who never experienced real affection and so is incapable of feeling it, by the looks of it. Each of us have our opinions of this greatest and most brilliant, handsome and well-endowed president in American history.
I really should keep my foul-mouthed opinions to myself. We all need to be more understanding. After all, the president’s story is like the story of many of us here in our nation of immigrants. Trump’s mother started life as what is often called White Trash, dirt poor from a benighted part of Scotland. She was transformed into a glamorous queen by marriage to a very wealthy second generation German-American man.
Mary Anne McLeod Trump [1] may or may not have been a loving woman, the odds are she was challenged to be a nurturing mother to her brood of five, little Donald being number four. He was apparently a handful, disrespectful to her, unruly, constantly acting out, impossible to manage. One can’t blame a mother for having a hard time with such a child, I never held my mother’s difficulties raising someone like me against her. That’s not really true, of course, but it sounds generous — I held it against her for years. As an adult of advanced years I finally learned not to hold my mother’s human limitations against her. Donald and his mother, perhaps not so much. Not to judge, God forbid!
But what exactly brings forth this sickeningly opinionated title I’ve put on top of this post? Well, after a delay of just a little more than half a year, during a terrifying, out of control pandemic, Mitch McConnell allowed a watered down version of bipartisan bill to relieve some of the suffering of the majority of Americans to become a bipartisan law to help many of the eight million Americans who have fallen into official poverty during this Act of God pandemic, and giving aid to millions more who are hungry and in imminent danger of homelessness. Democrats and Republicans agreed to the $900,000,000,000 COVID-19 relief bill right before Christmas. That was part of a $2.3 trillionConsolidated Appropriations Act of 2021. It was approved and passed on to the president on Christmas Eve, because, you know, no point waiting until the very last minute.
Then my man Fuckface refused to sign it as he headed to Florida for golfing and plotting a self-coup. Happy Christmas, traitors!If Trump doesn’t sign it within ten days (and this Congress ends on January 3) he’s run out the clock with a “pocket veto” and forced the third U.S. government shutdown in three tries (he didn’t get a chance to shut it down in 2017, but he did in 2018 and 2019 [2] ). Here’s Heather Cox Richardson, to explain:
Trump’s supporters are urging him to “pocket veto” the Consolidated Appropriations Act, taking advantage of a weird option at the end of a congressional session. Normally, a president has ten days, not including Sunday, to review and sign a bill. During a congressional session, if the president doesn’t sign a bill within ten days, it becomes a law. But if the congressional session ends within ten days, the bill does not become a law. This is known as a pocket veto. The 116th Congress—this one—officially ends at noon on January 3. If Trump got the bill on December 24, and all indications are that he did, the ten-day window ends on January 4. So, he could, in fact, run out the clock in such a way that Congress could not override his veto.
Now we assume Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was Trump’s mother, he looks a hell of a lot like her, including his hairdo.
Comedian Bill Maher famously offered to pay a few million to Trump’s favorite charity if Donald could prove his mother was not an orangutan. Nothing in nature is that color, besides an orangutan, said Maher. His offer was a parody of Trump’s famous public challenge to Barack Obama to pull his pants down, bend over and show America everything about his high school and college grades, his SAT and LSAT scores, his “long form” birth certificate and all the rest, daring him to disprove Trump’s many lies about him.
The famously thin-skinned Trump saw no humor in Maher’s disrespectful and disgusting parody [3] and had lawyers sue Maher for “breach of contract” (since as a public figure he could not win a slander or libel suit over parody, as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988) — see FN 2) when Trump produced HIS birth certificate — proving his mother was homo sapiens, SO THERE! — and Maher didn’t pay up on his joke offer.
The case cost Maher/HBO a pile of cash, no doubt, they had to respond to Trump’s baseless lawsuit or lose by default, but Trump’s lawyers did their job, the enraged threat became real, even if they wound up quietly withdrawing the pathetic claim after it had its effect in showing Trump takes no shit from anybody about anything, including the ugly statement that his mother who was completely a human being, was some kind of smelly great ape. He’d do the same thing, dozens of times, after losing the election he claims was stolen from him, almost two months ago.
So, fast forward a decade or so, to the day after Christmas of an historically hellish year, Donald Trump orders the exhumation of the skeleton of his dear mother, has her brought to Mar-a-Largo, and begins furiously violating her. “You did this to me, you fucking heartless bitch!” he sobs over and over, violently taking the pile of bones from behind, as is every motherfucker’s prerogative. There’s no such thing as “consent” or “rape” when you own the thing you are having sex with — the same goes for the dead, they lose their legal right to complain, even of necrophilia.
As for the millions now in real danger of continued hunger, increased terror and winter homelessness the week after Christmas, (and never forget, Trump made wishing each other “Merry Christmas” legal again in the United States after years of illegal rule by sick and dangerous Democrat miscegenist pedophile cannibals) — well, shit happens. Merry Christmas, Sir, they say to him now, the people in his bunker.
All he really wants at the moment is a little privacy, to keep hammering at the skeleton of his sainted, once-human mother.
[1]
Mary Anne Trump was a Scottish-American philanthropist known for being the mother of Donald Trump and the wife of real-estate developer Fred Trump. Born in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, she emigrated to the United States in 1930 and became a naturalized citizen in March 1942. Wikipedia
[2]
There have only been a handful of full federal government shutdowns, most lasting only a short time. Most of these were hardline leverage by the Opposition party. Trump has shut his own government down when it refuses to do things like fund THE WALL. Trump holds the all-time, unlikely to be broken record for longest temper tantrum-driven shutdown, 35 days. Here is the chart:
Which, it must be said, did not begin to compare, in sheer disgustingness with Larry Flynnt’s truly revolting parody of a risqué Campari ad, asking Jerry Falwell about his “first time”. The parody ad was even disgusting to me, which is saying a lot. Let me see if I can find it online for you, judge for yourself (lest ye be judged):
read about Falwell’s lawsuit and the famous Supreme Court ruling, HERE
The title above is the first line of Deuteronomy 16:20, yo. Biblical text, the original intent of the framers — Justice, justice shall you pursue. Which would you rather pursue as a life’s goal, fairness or unfairness? Doesn’t take an ancient mystic, or the exhortations of a holy book, to help you work out this uncomplicated riddle.
Unless, of course, you benefit tremendously from institutionalized unfairness, in which case, you can forgive yourself for calling it “Liberty” and creating a worldview centered on the inviolable right of the individual to do whatever she wants with her wealth, outside of things like steal, murder and rape, of course, actual, legally defined stealing and murder the law will hold you accountable for and rape that you can actually lead to your prosecution and jailing. Outside of actual rape and murder, survival of the most liberty-loving! We have a dominant (if demographically doomed) political party that now explicitly stands for this worldview.
One of the last dissents of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s long, principled life (possibly the last, as far as I’m aware) was a plain-spoken and clear-eyed analysis of the problems with the narrow legal reasoning used by a 5-4 minority to restrict voting in Wisconsin during a pandemic. The dissent was the first writing by the Notorious RBG that I recall reading, not long before the end of her remarkable life, and I was very impressed. Clearly written, clearly reasoned, laying out, in a few broad strokes, the human story deleted from Boof Kavanaugh’s nakedly partisan “narrow legal” attempt to help his party attain a slight electoral edge in the justice game.
Reading Kavanaugh’s ruling, in which he took the dissent to task (unconvincingly) for being “quite wrong on several counts” (his telltale childishness is never long concealed) and claiming (falsely) that he’d taken COVID-19 into full consideration (along with the fact, never mentioned by Boof, that thousands of Wisconsin voters had not even received ballots in time to mail them in by the deadline), you’d never know that two federal courts had ruled, in light of the pandemic, postal delays and the Republican state legislature’s refusal to allow modifications to the primary election schedule, that it was reasonable to allow a few extra days for mail-in ballots to arrive and be counted. In Kavanaugh’s view, the question was a narrow, strict question of law, to be applied mechanically and unemotionally (and, by total coincidence, for the perceived benefit of his political party). He was dead wrong, “quite wrong” in fact, but, you know, he had the four other Federalist Society votes to make his will the final unappealable 5-4 ruling on the matter.
“Five to four, suck it!” is not democracy. “51-49, fuck you, losers,” is not democracy. An extraordinarily bold and historically brazen insertion of a sixth vote to make the Supreme Court an unappealable six-three right-wing, (51-49 suck it, cucks), majority is, while worthy of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Hermann Goering and friends, not democracy.
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and her immediate rushed replacement by a religious cult member true believer in the causes dearest to the hearts of the extreme right, underscores that a nine person partisan Supreme Court is no longer a viable option for preserving American democracy.
That the rights of millions of Americans may hang in the balance of who is the deciding vote, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Amy Coney Barrett, is an anti-democratic tragedy we must not endure. There are powerful federal Courts of Appeal with many more than nine judges ruling by 5-4 majority. There’s no reason, nor any need for a Constitutional amendment, not to expand the number of Supreme Court justices to 15, or 25. Form a bipartisan commission to approve the new candidates. Have a court where the opinions of one, two or even six party-line judges does not mean the difference between a century of our fellow Americans having “no rights a white person is bound to respect” and a court whose watchword is Justice, justice shall you pursue.
You know that for the good of us all, and our hope of preserving what’s left of our beautiful natural world, justice is a much better goal than an unappealable “6-3, suck it, loser.”
[1] wow, this looked much better on my phone’s tiny screen. Blown up I can see how sloppy it is! Sorry about that.
I’ve been trying to take a break from this creature, our mad president, think about something a little deeper than this sad and destructive man’s desperate need to be the most important angry two year-old in the world. It’s hard to do, especially since he can still, literally, blow up the world and there’s really nothing that can stop him (as he prioritizes the federal executions of several black men and a heavily medicated mentally ill woman who was serially raped for her entire childhood). We learn that he had the insane conspiracist Sidney Powell back to the White House Sunday night, for Kraken’s sake. He has shown over and over that he is capable of unspeakable things in the service of his damaged ego.
Because history fascinates me, I listen to a couple of history-based podcasts. One I rarely miss is Robert Evans’ “Behind the Bastards”a gleeful telling of the stories of some of history’s most repulsive and destructive creatures. Evans recently featured Roy Cohn, a peach, and Robert Welch, intellectual force behind the John Birch Society, and the other moral godfather (along with Cohn) of Donald Trump. The Welch/John Birch Society episodes, along with an excellent documentary on Showtime about this great entertainer:
once again made this connection for me:
Robert Welch, the candy tycoon who along with Charles Koch’s father Fred and a few other extreme “libertarian” types, founded the John Birch Society in 1958 (galvanized by the “activist” Supreme Court ruling that segregation was unconstitutional). These extreme right wing conspiracy theorists were considered an embarrassing lunatic fringe by other Republicans throughout my childhood. Their unapologetically extremist candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost in a landslide in 1964. Then Reagan (who got 489 of 538 Electoral College votes in 1980!!) embraced and normalized a core of their belief system (particularly when it came to racism, wealth and Communism) for his fellow Republicans. Then we had Gingrich, Cheney, Barr and co. et, voila! — the current Republican party. Under this Orange Menace, we have a full-blown John Birch Society Republican party marching in lockstep, menacing traitors in their midst, as their kind always does… No conspiracy too wild for America! Democrats rape children and drink their blood, take that to the bank, losers. A testament to the staying power of big “ideas”…
Now, to the title of this post. A friend sent me a recent article from the Atlantic, an excellent post mortem on Trumpism, which, like a super zombie from a low-rent horror movie, is unlikely to ever truly die.Here are a couple of insights from the author, George Packer.He mentions LBJ’s lie about the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” (to justify escalation of the American war against Vietnam) and Nixon’s trying to cover up the Watergate break-in as examples of standard presidential lies.
But these cases of presidential lying came from a time when the purpose was limited and rational: to cover up a scandal, make a disaster disappear, mislead the public in service of a particular goal. In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders. After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, “I’ll never lie to you,” and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular.
Trump’s lies were different. They belonged to the postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that fact, but reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private life, clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air, dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the public. He was stunningly forthright about things that other presidents would have gone to great lengths to keep secret: his true feelings about Senator John McCain and other war heroes; his eagerness to get rid of disloyal underlings; his desire for law enforcement to protect his friends and hurt his enemies; his effort to extort a foreign leader for dirt on a political adversary; his affection for Kim Jong Un and admiration for Vladimir Putin; his positive view of white nationalists; his hostility toward racial and religious minorities; and his contempt for women.
…So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.
…For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.
For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling. After the election, as charges of voter fraud began to pile up, Matthew Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media activist, tweeted: “Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that liberals are evil.”
Embarrassing and frustrating as it is to live in a nation where 74,000,000 votes were cast by citizens who wanted to reelect the worst president in US history, a man we benignly refer to as a transactional narcissist (and even a malignant narcissist), and as inured as I am to it, mostly, sometimes an item in the news just hammers me in the face. There was the recent revelation of a massive Russian hack of American government and businesses (Pompeo announced it was Russia, Trump tweeted “fake news” it was probably China, LOL!), the lie immediately told by Trump’s recently inserted loyal appointees at the Department of Defense about an “agreement” to suspend national security briefings with the Biden transition team (for the Christmas break), the Senate majority’s partisan refusal to provide help for tens of millions of suffering Americans as Merry Christmas 2020, and a tidal wave of American homelessness, approaches (while Mitch and friends doggedly fight for more corporate Christmas gifts), our steady, upward succession of new, daily world records for COVID-19 infections and deaths (as emails come out that deliberate infection of millions was Trump’s plan all along), our raging president is delusional in his bunker, still wildly insisting all this news is complete bullshit. I digested all that, to the extent one can. Then, a nonchalant hammer to the old face:
On Friday, we learn, Trump had Mike “Lock Her UP!” Flynn and his insane attorney Sidney Powell at the White House (with demented Trump dead-ender Rudy Giuliani participating by phone) for a powwow on how to keep Trump in power in spite of a pesky election loss of over 7,000,000 votes (and a 74 vote Electoral College margin) and no path remaining through the courts or Congress.
General Flynn, you will recall, was fired (with regret, by Mr. Trump)for lying to Mike Pence about illegal contacts with the Russians and then was prosecuted and admitted guilt in federal court, for repeating that lie to the FBI and a couple of other little white lies he needed to tell in order to get security clearance for his job as National Security Adviser. But otherwise, a fine and upstanding patriotic American hero! Trump always says what a good guy Flynn is. He ought to know.
Sidney Powell, you may recall, took over Flynn’s federal case and sought to have his guilty plea thrown out. Working closely with Bill Barr, her collaboration with the Bagpiper led to Barr withdrawing the charges against Flynn (Flynn’s several lies, Barr decided, were “immaterial” and therefore non-criminal — the real criminals were the partisan liars at the FBI who illegally trapped him into lying). Barr attempted to have the case dismissed without allowing the judge to hold a hearing before dismissing the case (the law allows a judge to hold a hearing if he’s not satisfied by the papers submitted). Barr and Powell insisted the judge instantly dismiss the case, as a matter of law. When the judge refused they sought a writ of mandamus, an extremely rare form of relief only given when no other legal avenue remains, to force the judge to dismiss the case against Flynn, along with his two guilty pleas. They got the writ, from a Trump appointee, on shamelessly partisan quasi-legal grounds (judge was trying to unconstitutionally “usurp” presidential power by demanding legal reasons for dismissing the case) that were overturned immediately when the judge appealed her ruling.
With a hearing on the horizon, in which DOJ lawyers would have to explain the dirty-looking, unusual DOJ about-face in suddenly hurrying to let the president’s pal off the hook, Trump pardoned Flynn unconditionally. Flynn immediately repaid this quid with his pro quo, giving fiery speeches, peppered with QAnon shout outs, about Trump’s greatness and the need to keep him in power no matter what millions of (colored fuckers, ugly women, lazy poor people, homosexuals, abortionists, elite child-molesting cannibals, fucking Commies and other) anti-American freedom-haters might think about it. Flynn is a good guy, remember, one of the best people Trump has ever collected, and certainly very loyal to the president.
Meanwhile, QAnon spouting attorney Sidney Powell, who threatened to release a biblical “kraken” [1] of a lawsuit to bring the entire fraudulent election and the vast blood-drinking, child raping cannibal conspiracy to steal Trump’s presidency crashing down, was fired by Trump’s campaign for being too insane even for them. Like all the other election lawsuits Team Trump brought, Powell’s were dismissed as baseless, releasing the mythical kraken, it turned out, was all in her fevered imagination. She was finally deemed too fucking crazy to be part of even this lunatic squad of suicide bomber Trump lawyers and was publicly renounced by Giuliani, who is something of an expert on lunatic suicide bomber Trump lawyering.
Powell still appeared regularly on right wing TV and internet shows, but only the most gullible and enraged took any of her raving seriously. Mike Flynn began calling for Trump to impose martial law and stay in power, claiming martial law had been declared 64 times and was nothing out of the ordinary.
Friday:
Makes sense, no? Appoint batshit crazy partisan Sidney Powell as “Special Counsel” (really, really special) to get to the bottom of this vast conspiracy, involving not only Trump haters everywhere but (and here’s the devilishness of this sick, dangerous anti-Trump conspiracy) every judge (including many Trump appointees) who heard every case related to Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Speaking of batshit crazy:
The New York Times added, because they are the best at this sort of touch:
A White House spokesman, Ms. Powell and a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.
I ask you, fellow citizens, why would they respond? To the lying New York Times? Are you friggin’ serious?
Look at the crap they see fit to print!
[1]
The kraken is a legendary sea monster of gigantic size and cephalopod-like appearance in Scandinavian folklore. According to the Norse sagas, the kraken dwells off the coasts of Norway and Greenland and terrorizes nearby sailors.
The story is now out, with details (and documentary evidence), about how Mr. Trump and his unqualified appointees chosen for their unquestioning personal loyalty to the tyrannical asshat from Queens (along with their skill at stroking his delicate ego), continually lied about their efforts to control the deadly pandemic that is now raging out of control in the US.
The Trump administration’s regular attacks on the pandemic mitigation advice given by all medical experts were apparently motivated by their united embrace of an alternative “theory” (remember “Birtherism” is also a theory, as is “Libertarianism”) about how to beat the pandemic: infect everyone to bring about herd immunity (or “herd mentality” as a Trump Freudian slip rendered it on live TV).
Stupid people blindly ambitious and loyal to the stupidest, vainest, most vindictive man ever to be president, deliberately pursued a strategy of mass infection. Mass infection with a deadly, highly contagious disease science currently has no cure for. Because, you know, politics, power, prestige, career, obscene, untouchable wealth, DUH!
We set new records yesterday here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, for infections and deaths from this monster, COVID-19. As reported in the Lyin’ New York Times (official enemy of the people):
Officials across the United States on Wednesday reported the highest daily number for new coronavirus since the pandemic began, as well as the most deaths in a single day.
New infections were put at 244,365, and deaths at 3,607 — nearly 500 more than the record set only a week ago. The previous case record, 236,800, was set last Friday (though a reporting anomaly in Texas made it appear still higher.)
The latest figures capped day [sic] on which health experts warned Americans, buoyed by the rollout of a vaccination campaign, that it is far too soon to abandon common-sense precautions for halting the spread of the virus.
Now we know, with emails in their own words, to confirm our worst suspicions, that these imbeciles appointed by our petulant blob of unaccountable presidential prerogative actually pursued a secret, deliberate mass infection agenda. These accursed cretins actually wrote to each other spelling out their master plan to ignore science and let the vast majority of Americans go for broke.
I am not trying to insult unintelligent people, there are many who are kind, gentle, generous, loving. Intelligence, goodness and decency have no direct correlation. Many very smart people are vicious pieces of shit (Bill Barr pops to mind, though he may also be mentally ill [1]). The kinds of supremely ambitious idiots I have in mind are those who are just smart enough to know how to ingratiate themselves to corrupt and powerful idiots who will lavishly reward them with unearned positions of power and prestige far beyond their competence (Betsy DeVos, honey, I’m seeing your dazzling smile).
Someone observed recently, comparing increasingly foolish and deluded highly placed Trump dead-enders to high Nazi officials, that few would have had any chance of promotion except in a regime where blind loyalty to a barking mad leader, and the ability to shamelessly gratify The Leader’s ego, were the chief prerequisites for advancement. Trump does not have the best people. He does not even seem to have average people.
Now, the reservoir of rage inside threatens to overflow its banks and wash over me. I read about these stupid bastards and their blind, murderous idiocy and it fills me with anger, and despair over the cultivated stupidity of millions of my fellow Americans — and an individual’s powerless to have any effect on any of this.
An election cannot change any of these ugly facts. Not when the national leaders of the party that won the election keep expressing the high-minded, simplistic idea that we just need to get back to “normal” and everything will be fine.
Everything won’t be fine, not without constant organizing, mobilization and activism by those of us who believe in more than just an increasingly corrupt status quo that makes millions more feel comfortable while leaving millions of children hungry every night as the earth continues to be destroyed and our citizenry immiserated for the profit of supremely deserving men like Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
The election of Biden will not bring back any of the 300,000 dead (and rapidly counting — 3,607 means 2.5 dead of COVID EVERY MINUTE yesterday), many of whom, perhaps half or more, did not have to die horrible, solitary deaths, but for the depraved indifference of Mr. Trump and his idiot lackeys.
Let us also remember that this is an oligarchic administration that truly had no business being in office, and would not have in an actual democracy. Trumpism was narrowly elected in the Electoral College (78,000 votes in MI, WI and PA combined gave Trump the presidency), the Electoral College being the electoral savior of otherwise defeated minoritarian right-wing candidates. That archaic memento of the Peculiar Institution gave us two bloody, destructive imbecile presidents within sixteen recent years, both of whom lost the vote of citizens by considerable margins (the former by less than half a million, the latter by almost 3,000,000).
We are relieved, those of us who embrace the label anti-fascist, that our great nation did not descend into autocracy. The president is still trying to bring that about, but it’s not happening, not yet, not under this unfunny clown, anyway (Pompeo and Christie are the new hopes for a one-party Leader, I suppose — at least in their own grasping minds).
Trump abdicated and disclaims any and all responsibility for the mass death on his watch, especially now that he’s lost, as his party blocks monetary and food relief for millions of suffering Americans. Trump, Pompeo and company continue to actively spread the deadly infectious pandemic with holiday super-spreader parties. Republican leaders are also actively sabotaging Biden’s presidency as they hatch a comeback in a RED WAVE in 2022, based on Biden’s Socialistic failures and the many thousands more who will die of COVID, hunger and homelessness on his watch.
We must take solace in the consolation that our “institutions” have held.
It is some consolation (and nothing to sneeze at) that courts did not renounce the rule of law, as the Senate majority, the majority of Republicans in the House, the president and his remaining myrmidons all have. Fortunately, the election was not close enough for Amy Coney Barrett to be able to cast the deciding vote, or for other Trump appointees to the federal bench to do anything for their benefactor but follow the actual laws of our “nation of law”.Laws under which the lawless, even if supremely powerful, must sometimes lose.
It is some consolation that numerous Republican state officials across the country did what the majority of House Republicans did not — accept the election results after certifying (and in some cases recounting, more than once) the votes in what they confirmed was a fair election. They risked the rage of a vicious madman and should be acknowledged.
But is there any real consolation in people simply doing what they swore a public oath to do? Isn’t that the minimum we should demand of public servants? This is how far we have slipped as an experiment in democracy, we are much closer to an experiment in fascism.
A recent rampage by “Proud Boys” on the streets of our nation’s capitol, raising hell over a “stolen election” that every official everywhere has confirmed and certified, was a frustrated attempt at a pogrom. They’d probably have loved to do more killing, hoping to stir up a justifiably violent reaction by anti-racists that would have allowed their Leader to declare an insurrection, invoke the Insurrection Act, martial law and a Trump seizure of absolute power.
Even Trump’s hero, Mr. Hitler [2], could not have pulled that one off in the US in 2020. Hitler could not have come to power with only a small contingent of this kind of violent asshole willing to break heads for him. We just got lucky with that one.
Germany during Hitler’s rise had literal armies of angry veterans (freikorps), right-wing students and humiliated nationalistic sons of the unemployed, on the streets, everywhere, by the hundreds of thousands, ready to violently disrupt protests, bash people in the face, bloody their fists, stab, shoot, string up political enemies. As in similar situations here, the cops often stood by in sympathy, allowing them free rein to intimidate and beat up their hated pro-democracy enemies. In that climate of regular street battles, it was a matter, for the shrewd Mr. Hitler, of making sure his shock troops were more violent than anyone else and seizing leadership of this gigantic mass of enraged, violent Germans. Within a short time, they were all Nazis, marching under the swastika, winners.Seig Heil!
We don’t currently have that widespread, wildly popular ground game by disaffected, enraged men, feeling hopeless except when taking up arms and banding together to put some hurt on people they hate. If big changes are not made by this incoming administration, starting with prosecuting sedition and other high crimes by highly placed Trumpist democracy deniers, we can expect the forces of reaction to keep reacting, more and more violently.
We also need government programs, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that FDR put into place (by executive order), to give meaningful jobs, a decent future and a real connection to the larger community to millions of potential troops for the next would be American autocrat.
If we don’t learn to work together, and look out for each other and our common interests, the future is violent.
Clearly, crimes against democracy have to be vigorously prosecuted, and new laws put on the books to prevent the unaccountable corruption of a man like the “totally exonerated” Mr. Trump (so what if he abused power and acted in contempt of Congress? 51-49, suck it, cucks!), and other future fascistic shenanigans by narrowly elected officials and their unqualified interim appointees.
Biden won the Electoral College by a comfortable margin and the popular vote by 7,000,000 — margins not seen by any candidate defeating an incumbent since FDR ousted Herbert Hoover in 1932. A solid win, a mandate for democracy, you might say.
Half the country, and the vast majority of Republicans, believe that Biden is as illegitimate as the Kenyan secret-Muslim that he worked for, the corrupt and evil spying divider that Trump’s DOJ is still investigating with Bill Barr’s ongoing John Durham Investigation into “Russiagate”.
These loathsome creatures do not sleep. They plan, they create and fund ideological think tanks and employment societies, buy TV and radio stations, newspapers, airwaves, bandwidth, buy political candidates, “primary” moderates out of office, fund astroturf “mass movements” like the “grassroots” Tea Party that brought many maniacs into Congress (and more recently, Q-Anon adherents and a religious cult member Supreme Court justice).
The bulk of these folks are some of the stupidest and most selfish motherfuckers the world has ever known, but their sheer numbers, and determination, make them a force to reckon with. Ask any of the 3,607 Americans who died yesterday, at a rate of better than two a minute, on the Loser-in-Chief’s petulant lame duck watch.
[1]
[2]
The only book we are relatively sure our reading-challenged top student president ever read (or at least browsed) was the collection of Hitler’s speeches he kept by his bedside at his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower.
It’s exhausting to witness the president’s inexhaustible commitment to denial, every day, every moment — the now reclusive Winner-in-Chief grimly insistent that he WON, now more than a month after he lost the election. You can restrict yourself to catching the news once a day and there it is. Lame duck tweets “#OVERTURN” — 17 state attorneys general join shady Texas AG in petition to Supreme Court to overturn certified election results in four other states. You think, well, “overturn”… Trump’s admitting he lost, isn’t he? No need to overturn the results of an election you won, right? No matter. He makes a brief appearance on camera and shambles away in the middle of hanging a presidential medal around somebody’s neck. You watch the short clip, the camera pans over to the medalist, suddenly alone in the middle of the Oval Office. The man gives the camera a big WTF? shrug. He shrugs for all of us.
It’s hard to focus the mind on anything else, I find, while this rabid man persists in soiling everything his office, his nation, is supposed to stand for. As our country sets a world record for COVID-19 deaths in a single day, surpassing the total killed by terrorists on 9/11, the defeated president is focused only on somehow invalidating the ballots of millions of Americans. We are literally in the middle of a seemingly eternal war between demonstrable fact, upheld by actual laws, and FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMNED FUCKING FUCK!
Tech giant youTube puts a link to a government website debunking all rumors of a stolen election under every video [1]. You click on it (accidentally in my case) read a bit and wonder how the government officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who maintain this so-called fact-based website are still on the job under the reflexively vindictive master of the purge.
Let me try to take our minds off the immediate shit show for a moment with this little game. Take any fact you like, let’s go with a historical one. Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, the party’s second ever candidate for president [2]. The sharply divided Democratic party in 1860 (it ran different candidates in the north and in the south) was dominated by pro-slavery racists, certainly in the slave states. Today you will hear the talking point, from in-your-face right-wing provocateurs, that the Republican party is the party of equality, the party that emancipated the slaves, and the Democratic party is the party of the Ku Klux Klan.
Look at any presidential election map since Nixon’s 1968 victory. The entire former Confederacy is painted solid red, for Republican. Since the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s (and LBJ, signing these bills into law knew he was crippling his own party in the former Confederacy), and Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of dog whistling racism to bigots to get votes that would have gone to his challenger George Wallace, the party of the aggrieved white man is the former party of Lincoln.Wallace, we learn, pursued an electoral strategy similar to Trump’s — throw the lost election to the House of Representatives [3]! Fuck, there he is again…
Impossible to escape from this ubiquitous, attention-obsessed, emotionally frail egomaniac and his loud-mouthed fans. Hard to even remember that in 40 days his replacement will be sworn in. Just using the word ‘replacement’ in that sentence puts the cadence of those fine young chanting men into my head “Jews will not replace us!” It’s exhausting to anyone who believes reason and logic are still indispensable to the human experiment in not destroying all life on the planet.
Exhaustion is the whole point of the infernal exercise.
[1]
from the “traitorous” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency website:
#PROTECT2020 RUMOR VS. REALITY
Mis- and disinformation can undermine public confidence in the electoral process, as well as in our democracy. Elections are administered by state and local officials who implement numerous safeguards to protect the security of your vote pursuant to various state and federal laws and processes. This resource is designed to debunk common misinformation and disinformation narratives and themes that relate broadly to the security of election infrastructure and related processes. It is not intended to address jurisdiction-specific claims. Instead, this resource addresses election security rumors by describing common and generally applicable protective processes, security measures, and legal requirements designed to protect against or detect large-scale security issues related to election infrastructure and processes.
History little recalls the nation’s first Republican presidential candidate. Most of us will need a search engine, and less than a second, for the answer to that trivia question:
John C. Frémont ran as the first Republican nominee for President in 1856 behind the slogan “Free soil, free silver, free men, Frémont and victory!” Although Frémont’s bid was unsuccessful, the party showed a strong base. Abbreviation: GOP (Grand Old Party) Political position: Center-right to right-wing History of the Republican Party (United States) – Wikipedia
Although Nixon ultimately won a majority of 301 electoral votes (270 being a majority), Wallace’s effort put the chance of a brokered electoral college relatively close. For example; had he won South Carolina or Tennessee (falling less than 50,000 votes short) and had the Democratic ticket won either Illinois or Ohio (trailing the Republican one by around 100,000 votes in both cases) Nixon would have ended up with a plurality but not a majority, and the election would – for the first time since 1824 – have been thrown to the House of Representatives.
I don’t want to hate the people who hate people like me. Not only because I think hate is bad (it is) but also, practically, because it leads to hopelessness and rage, which lead inevitably to deadly violence. The only way out of this cycle of viciousness is through conversation, listening, understanding, honestly working to solve big problems that oppress us all. Powerful forces are intent on making that kind of helpful dialogue impossible among the billions of regular people of limited power. Hate is the antidote to Reason.
One thing unites the half of the country who voted for Biden and the almost half who voted for Trump: hatred of the other side. The stoking of agitated hatred by political attack ad is a successful tactic in American elections, as proved every election cycle. Do not discuss ideas, plans, strategies to deal with the many daunting challenges we face, do not mention what is actually happening in the world — attack the godless Communist you are running against (if she’s a Democrat) attack your hypocritically pious Fascist opponent (if she’s Republican.)
Let us not pretend that this is a mutual, even, fifty-fifty war, with very fine, and very horrible, people on both sides. There is no real equivalence between the political parties in 2020, as far as the lengths they will go to create hatred, provoke fear and rage, threaten violence from angry, low-information voters who want revenge on people they honestly believe are stealing their very lives from them.
I won’t go into the accursed mass media false equivalence business here, except to state one obvious fact: one party’s leader wants to count only votes for himself, and his supporters in Congress insist the president has every right to take this radical position, no matter what the so-called courts might say: because the future of the world depends on it! A brazen, stubbornly irrational position (without proof of fraud or irregularities) that until it was done would have been unthinkable — to petulantly and baselessly contest an election everybody from both parties has certified the results of and says you lost — is now in some bizarre way “normal”. A few years ago, this kind of open defiance of national election results, which includes repeated calls to violently resist a “stolen election,” would be considered treasonous. Now the president’s apologists insist this open attack on American democracy cannot even be investigated. To investigate sedition is itself sedition!
Facts, as we have noticed over and over, no longer matter in politics. Faced with a tidal wave of pandemic infections, overflowing hospitals and morgues, millions more Americans thrust into poverty, the president’s party, passionate, mouth breathing anti-maskers, focused only on putting a hyper-conservative religious cult member on the Supreme Court days before the election.
The national moratorium against evictions will end December 31. On the first working day after New Years there will be a million evictions of people behind on their rent, their mortgages, who have not been able to work and have not received any government help (aid repeatedly blocked by the president’s party — unless corporations are immunized against liability for all harms they inflicted during the pandemic). These pauperized American families, newly homeless as winter descends, will be thrust directly into the jaws of a deadly, highly infectious, airborne medical emergency. Because?
During The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, centuries when science and technology took great strides as philosophers rediscovered the writings of the ancient (pagan) Greeks, Reason was held up as the guiding principle of human endeavor. Renewed was the forgotten belief that humans are creative, primarily rational, actors, free to make the best choices and find the best solutions, based on considering free-flowing good information and making intelligent calculations based on knowledge. A world guided by Reason, it turns out, is a very optimistic view of human affairs (this was pointed out in this excellent video). We seem to have returned, en masse, to the monkish ignorance and superstition (a phrase I always loved) [1] of the Dark Ages.
As the painter Francisco Goya wrote on a famous image, (a 1799 aquatint, Jeeves informs us): the Sleep of Reason produces Monsters.
Medieval monkish ignorance and superstition 101: to fight the mass death of the Bubonic Plague, round up and kill every single Satanist witch, burn them to death, along with their evil “familiars,” the cats. In Europe cats were killed wherever they were found. With the cats gone, rats proliferated and so did the plague, which was carried and transmitted by rats. I don’t need to make the comparisons to how the party of Trump is reacting to science’s best efforts to control the spread of our modern day plague.
A few years ago, after listening to the beautifully read audio version by Wanda McCadden (from the NY Public Library), I picked up my own copy of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt’s masterful rumination on the world famous trial of a high ranking Nazi bureaucrat. The book, which started a shit storm even before it was published, is deep and thought-provoking, as well as a treasure chest of illuminating historical detail about this dark era of human history. I’ve read it several times now.
I wrote a piece, back in 2018, called Hannah Arendt, towering intellectual It-girl. It was read a handful of times when I posted it, and forgotten (not a single reader in 2019, WordPress informs me). I’ve been surprised at how many readers seem to have discovered the piece in 2020. In it I express my great admiration for Hannah Arendt, who wrote that real, honest internal dialogue is the key to puzzling out any vexing mystery. All evidence must be carefully weighed, as many specious arguments as possible removed from consideration, and to the best of your ability, patiently analyze what you have and act on it. Arendt convincingly shows that the inability to conduct this kind of principled internal debate marks an ambitious person for life as the perfect Eichmann, a person of limited imagination whose only moral duty is unquestioning obedience to authority.
What does the average Eichmann want? Respect, praise from his boss, a world he can feel safe in. Nothing unreasonable there, once you accept the terms. In Eichmann’s case those terms were that forced emigration would not solve the Jewish Problem after all — only wiping out every Jew in the world would solve the Jewish Problem. Eichmann himself was not happy about mass killing, not at all, he was no killer, no sadist, not crazy, but he did his duty, to the best of his ability, as Nazi morality demanded. How did he become convinced that tirelessly facilitating mass murder was his duty? The Leader, a man endowed by God with 100% confidence in his infallible convictions, told him he must. End of conversation.
Here’s an insightful analysis of how the process of winning angry hearts and overwhelmed minds works in the age of mass media [2]. Mr. Trump is doing the same thing now that successful fascist demagogues of the past did, doing it with surprising adroitness. The bloodbath he keeps coyly inciting will hopefully not start, Trump dead-enders may have to content themselves with sabotaging everything possible to ensure that the Biden administration inherits a chaotic, failed country nobody can fix. The blame for the ugly mess will then go to the hated Democrats, again, who will be voted out in disgrace. I vote for them, but, I have to be honest, I hate them too (with a handful of exceptions).
Hate is so fucking easy, takes so little work and gives a strong feeling of righteousness — I guess it’s just irresistible to us “wise apes”.
[1]
May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
Thomas Jefferson, author of Liberty and father of mulatto slave children, in a letter written before the final July 4th of his long life.
Give me 2 months and a few million violence-prone, low-information, chanting, gun-toting angry white men and I’ll show you how to put on a show! “Abuse of power”, “contempt of congress” (fuck them!), open defiance of things like the stupid Hatch Act, quid pro quo with foreign leader for electoral advantage, nada! Ditto incitement to violent overthrow of the duly elected government. USA! USA!LOL! LO fucking L!
There was no federal anti-lynching law for the many decades large numbers of people were being lynched in the USA. This was because a sizable block in the Senate truly believed that certain people needed to be dragged off, tortured and strung up, or mutilated and set on fire while still alive. Legally sanctioned terrorism was a way of life in certain areas, an integral part of maintaining “law and order”.
If there was not even a federal anti-lynching law for so many years, why would you expect an anti-discrimination law to stop the racist application of government programs? It was not until after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, during the upheaval of the “Civil Rights” Movement (Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz, correctly called these Human Rights) that federal anti-discrimination legislation, like the Fair Housing Act of 1965, was signed into law to halt some of the more pernicious practices of genteel, wealthy racists.
The wealthy, genteel or not, have always seen to making laws that enforce their privileges. That’s why having money in the United States is often the difference between a long life and a short one. My father, born into terrible poverty, was part of a generation of American veterans of the Second World War who were able to get a free college education and a low cost housing loan and, with hard work, emerge from poverty into the middle class. The program was called the GI Bill.
I read recently that in New York State, of the thousands of these GI Bill housing loans and low-cost mortgages that were made to veterans who bought houses (and amassed an inheritable estate), only a handful (11, I think) went to black veterans. Black veterans applied for these benefits, they were legally entitled to them, they just didn’t get them. Renting a decent place to live was the same way, no law really prevented a racist owner from telling black or brown people (or anyone else he simply didn’t like the looks of) that the vacant apartment they’d looked at was, unfortunately, no longer available.
Donald Trump’s father made the bulk of his fortune exploiting the post World War II home building explosion. He was an expert at profiting from government subsidies that incentivized the building of affordable housing, he made many millions from these government programs. The government put conditions on these highly subsidized deals, the housing had to be affordable, widely available to working people. There was just a wink, an understanding, about renting to what were then called Negroes, Spics (Puerto Ricans), Kikes (poor Eastern European Jews), Wops (darker Southern Italians), “Ethnics’ of every stripe. Trump’s father had a policy against renting to such ‘unsavory’ types and there was no law against it, until the Fair Housing Act.
Donald was 19 when the Fair Housing Act became law, already (having successfully dodged the draft and the deadly jungles of Vietnam) being groomed to take over his father’s empire (an empire he’d sell at a loss after the old man died, in violation of the dead man’s wishes, but that’s another story).
The younger Trump sat next to his father during the government’s case against Trump Properties and watched an unscrupulous master (eventually, too late, disbarred and indicted) named Roy Cohn work his magic. Cohn first countersued the Department of Justice for defamation of the Trumps (who, although they honestly hated the people they refused to rent to, arguably had every legal right to be selective in processing tenant applications). Eventually the Trump’s signed a settlement with the government, admitting no wrongdoing in marking applications “C” (for “colored”) and rejecting every applicant with a “C” on their folder, and agreeing to allow supervision by federal authorities to ensure future compliance with the Fair Housing Act, a law they did not admit they had violated.
It was an eye-opening, intoxicating victory for the young Donald Trump. He went on to become possibly the most litigious man in history, with over 3,500 lawsuits (before becoming president) and literally hundreds since (at least 300 prior to the 2020 election and, at last count, 43 since — his record in those Stop The Steal! cases is 1 win, 42 losses).
The simplest explanation for why Trump is involved in all this protracted litigation is The American Rule. We learned about this in law school, and many of us were shocked to learn it, though, after you think about it for a moment, it makes perfect sense.
In most countries, if you bring a weak lawsuit designed primarily to vex, harass, cow, intimidate, delay, bully, pauperize, manipulate, exploit or outright cheat another person, and you lose the case — or withdraw the suit after bankrupting your opponent with legal bills or otherwise proving your point — you must repay the legal fees of the person you brought to court. In most places this repayment of what can sometimes be vast legal bills is part of the principle of making the person “whole” after they suffer a legal injury. The American Rule is all about “fairness”– each side is responsible to pay its own costs in court and the winner may not be compensated by the loser for legal fees, except in specific, fairly rare cases.
As the inheritor of vast wealth, Trump, history’s greatest beneficiary of the American Rule, has never had any problem financing every possible lawsuit imaginable. Many of these expensive lawsuits are deductible as business expenses and, over decades, he has profited handsomely from the delays, favorable settlements and the bankrupting of hated adversaries. As the sitting president, and rightfully feared head of the Republican Party, he no longer has to finance his own lawsuits, that burden falls on we the taxpayers (for cases brought by Sessions’s and then Barr’s DOJ), his donors and the Republican National Committee war chest.
There are many things in life that are plainly wrong, although not, strictly according to the written law, illegal.Men like Donald Trump are experts at exploiting the fact that it is impossible to write down enforceable prohibitions of every form of evil and abuse.
The Supreme Court ruled against Richard Nixon when he claimed executive privilege in his attempt to withhold evidence during his impeachment. They ruled the same way against Bill Clinton when he tried a similar thing during his impeachment. Trump, advised by the equally unscrupulous Bill Barr, made the same arguments Nixon and Clinton lost in their attempts to hide evidence of their wrongdoing. Trump’s many defenders said Trump was only doing what other impeached presidents had done (conveniently omitting any reference to the legal outcomes or the elemental principle of justice behind them).
The Supreme Court would eventually have to rule against Trump’s absurdly broad claims of limitless immunity too. Only in Trump’s case — delay was the key. What he did in openly obstructing the impeachment may be found, in the end, to have been unlawful, but it worked! When the Supreme Court eventually rules that it was illegal for Trump to block all legally issued subpoenas for testimony by his employees, current and past, on the grounds of an inviolable expansive blanket protective presidential immunity (Barr’s genius concept), Trump will be involved in some other lucrative scam (or in prison for tax-related crimes).
Presidential pardons are about to burst forth in a gusher. The president’s right to grant pardons is practically unlimited, though self-dealing pardons may be subject to review, particularly the pardon of a presidential co-conspirator in federal crimes, like Louis DeJoy. Or the faithful Rudy Giuliani, if he survives COVID-19, for his role in the long pattern of mutually beneficial shady, illegal political shenanigans/business deals in Ukraine that led to his old friend’s impeachment.
Jared Kushner, perhaps the greatest walking illustration of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ (a completely ordinary idiot can do very evil things, if he has the power to do them), will be at the front of the line for a full presidential pardon. Jared is totally innocent, the president will announce, but because the sick, vindictive radical left Democrats are so intent on revenge after stealing the election, nothing Jared did while in power, no profits he personally made while a government employee (a reported $82,000,000 last year, along with First Daughter Ivanka), may be investigated, no crimes, even if evidence is found, prosecuted. The pardon will most likely protect Jared in all related federal lawsuits — good luckin state courts, JK.
The most unprincipled and stupid of Trump’s accomplices will all certainly get pardons– as long as they’ve been loyal to their famously disloyal boss. Pardon me, folks, but this is just another expression of the American Rule.
