Donald Trump Explained in Quotes

I WAS GOING THROUGH a list of quotes from past readings when it struck me a handful might help us grapple with President Trump and understand the daily tweet storms blowing out of the Oval Office.

What makes Dear Orange Leader tick?

Christopher Logue, writing about the Trojan War, might have had him in mind when he described Agamemnon, the grasping Greek king:

   “Behold his cause:

Me first, me second—

And if by chance there is a little left—me third.”                      

It’s unfortunate Trump gets all his best ideas from watching Fox and Friends every morning. Far better, before tweeting or talking (to Lester Holt about why he fired James Comey), if he recalled Sophocles:

“Second thoughts are wisest.”

It might also benefit the Chief Executive—who hates Mexicans, Muslims and F.B.I. investigators—if he learned to temper his bowel-impacted, septuagenarian, morning fury. He and many of his most avid supporters might well keep in mind what James Russell Lowell said in 1848:

“Folks never understand the folks they hate.”

How about the false argument that we should forgive Trump a rash of sins, since he’s not really a politician? Mark Sullivan, writing about America after World War I, described politics this way:

“Politics is merely the name for the process by which whatever force or group is at any time dominant in society achieves its will in government.”

In an era where the Koch brothers spend hundreds of millions to prop up GOP lawmakers and influence decisions, where Jared Kushner sucks up to bankers tied directly to Vladimir Putin, and billionaire brigands turn Marxist ideology upside down in China and rake in even more billions, those with vast wealth are clearly the “greatest” politicians.

In terms of Trump and the other mercenaries who make up his family, historian John Fiske clearly offered pertinent comment a century ago: 

“Devices for appropriating the fruits of other people’s labor have in all countries been multifarious, from tomahawks to tariffs.”

Conservatives will always focus on “taxes” as their least favorite form of appropriation. Those of us of liberal bent will counter with: Trump University! Bailouts for Wall Street! Big Pharma spending hundreds of millions to lobby (bribe) Congress, reaping a hundred times as much in profit!  

Based on the sophomoric level of vocabulary we see in Trump’s tweets, we may be in trouble. Lowell, again, provides a perfect summary:

“Language is the soil of thought.”

Alas, the mind of President Trump is apparently a barren wasteland, where empathy and human decency wither and die.

When it comes to wisdom, Mark Twain nailed it perfectly when he said of someone much like our current Commander-in-Chief:

“As for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie, and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.”

Speaking of leadership—and this one bodes ill for Trump and all of us—Harry Truman once said:

“Readers of good books, particularly books of biography and history, are preparing themselves for leadership. Not all readers become leaders. But all leaders must be readers.”

Trump has been called many things, but no one has ever dared call him a “reader.” Sarah Palin is a bibliophile by comparison.

For those struggling to come to grips with the man in the Oval Office, General Winfield Scott perfectly described the current resident of the White House, a century ago, when he said of a fellow officer, that the man was: 

“The only person I have ever known who was wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood.”

ON THE OTHER HAND, those of us who love this nation and believe Trump is a menace to core American values may find consolation in the past. In 1837, Justice Joseph Story of the U.S. Supreme Court, studied the world round him, shuddered at the condition of our young nation, and offered grim assessment:

“The Republic is daily sinking. I have lost my confidence in the practical administration of our government. I am in utter despair. I can see little or no ground of hope for our country.”  

Yet there was hope.  The country recovered from the Panic of 1837.  We weathered a Civil War, overcame a century of Jim Crow prejudice, battled through the Great Depression, survived two World Wars, granted women equal rights, handled the challenges of Watergate and fought terror in the wake of 9/11.

We can survive four years of Trump.

To do so we must rest on the bedrock of our values. When Trump attacks the free press and leading right-wing voices applaud body-slamming reporters, the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson applies:

“ The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When GOP lawmakers howl about raising taxes for health care—but swoon at adding $50 billion in defense spending—a liberal may rightly quote President Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

THE LAST WORD GOES to Sherman Alexie, a Native American author. As far as any prejudice aimed at Mexicans, Muslims, liberals, or loyal Donald J. Trump supporters by supporters from our liberal side—it pays not to generalize. Alexie is correct:

“The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.”

Sadly, it seems clear where the President belongs in that categorization.

When Does the GOP Stop Whining about Obamacare and Do Something?

OH, FOR GOD’S SAKES! When are Republicans “snowflakes”—a term the right loves to throw in liberal faces—going to quit crying about Obamacare? It’s a bat shit crazy blizzard! Once again, they’re in a tax-slashing tizzy because Anthem is pulling out of the Ohio insurance market.

You just figured out Obamacare was “failing?” You’ve been parroting that line for seven years. You giant pack of assholes! You voted fifty times to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. You warned, even before it became law, there would be “death panels” for granny if it passed. You scared dimwits across America with that line of preexisting manure. You promised you were going to repeal and replace Obamacare as soon as you had a chance. You only needed a Republican president.

You have him. 

True, he’s a tweeting nitwit, but even a tweeting nitwit could sign any bill your GOP-controlled Congress managed to slap on his desk in the Oval Office. You can get it done tomorrow. You can kick 24 million people off insurance under GOP Plan #1, or 23 million under GOP Plan #2, any time the Senate moves to grant approval. 

President Obama can’t stop you.

You know who else can’t stop you? President Truman! He’s dead. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR—all long, long gone. 

They have the same power to stop you as Mr. Obama.

GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR collective asses. Louie Gohmert, you and your Tea Party pals shut down the government in 2013 in a vain effort to destroy Obamacare. What’s wrong, you fair weather fanatic! Shut everything down now if you want to do something “constructive” in regard to denying health care to your fellow citizens. You shouldn’t need to. Your party has 52 votes in the U.S. Senate. Mitch McConnell jimmied the rules. You need 50 “ayes” and a tie-breaker from the Vice President to get a plan through the Senate.

You control the levers of power. Pull them, you candy-ass cowards.

If you want to eliminate the 3.8% tax on incomes above $250,000 that helped make it possible to cover people with preexisting conditions, do the deed and live with the political and moral consequences. You can’t cut taxes and cover everyone Obamacare covered. You can’t repeal and replace basic addition and subtraction. If you want to take a chance on letting kids with cancer die or let families go bankrupt because sons or daughters were unlucky, make the bold call. But don’t forget, in 2010, 62% of all bankruptcies in this country were a result of catastrophic medical bills. Obamacare didn’t fix that problem; but it helped. It absolutely didn’t cause it. 

The real dilemma is the high cost of health care. The United States is the most expensive place in the world to get sick and seek care.

Maybe that’s the fundamental problem—and you can’t solve it by slinging typical right-wing bullshit.

Repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act isn't going to address the main problem.

Maybe a good place to start with cuts would involve taking a look at salaries for top health care executives. According to Bloomberg, “Among the 200 top-paid U.S. executives at public companies, those in health care and pharmaceutical businesses were awarded average pay packages of $37 million in their most recent fiscal year.” No other business sector had executives who did better. Why, you have to wonder, how Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson and Johnson does it! Gorsky had to pinch pennies annually, under Obamacare, earning only $103 million between 2012 and 2016.

Starvation wages!

How do these poor health care executives manage!

What about those poor drug companies! Pfizer had a 42% profit in 2014! Sure, they dipped to 14.2% in 2016. Then again, Gilead Science made a 55% profit that year, Biogene Idec 33%, Amgen 32%. Johnson and Johnson, leader in the field with $70 billion in revenue, made a paltry $16.54 billion in profit in 2016. 

Who can live with that lousy 22% return!

TRUE, PROFITS WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER if the Justice Department under Obama had quit suing them for illegal business practices and slapping them on their greedy wrists for defrauding Medicare. Ten top settlements between 2009 and 2014 forced Big Pharma to cough up $13 billion in penalties.

You can look it up if you don’t believe me. But, nooooooooooooooooo, don’t dare regulate these pirates!

You don’t need to worry about kindergartners who develop type-1 diabetes or babies born with heart defects. You need to give tax cuts to the Koch brothers! Those billionaires, Charles and David, are headed for the poorhouse with only $41 billion a piece. That’s why they decided to donate $889 million to GOP candidates in 2016.

They can’t survive under their tax burden.

You want to run on your “accomplishments,” you political poltroons? You want to say you repealed health care and gave huge tax cuts to the richest among us? 

Democrats can’t stop you.

You had seven years in opposition to work out a plan. You voted to repeal and replace again and again. Now your base is counting on you—well, not counting the significant portion that will wake up soon, if you pass your plan, and realize they too lost their coverage.

IF OBAMACARE IS TERRIBLE, if it’s failing, if insurers are pulling out (and by the way, Anthem pulled out of Ohio because the company said it has no way of knowing what you boneheads are planning, particularly in regard to subsidies), you are in charge. The buck doesn’t stop with Obama. 

The buck stops with Donald J. Trump.

You bitched about Obamacare for the best part of a decade. You ran nonstop against it in 2016. You’ve had control of both required branches of government to repeal and replace, for months now.

Dry you crying eyes. 

Get something, anything, passed, no matter how terrible, and place it on President Trump’s desk pronto.

OR, ARE YOU LIKE THE DOG that chased the car? Only you caught the ambulance. Don’t blame our side because you have no clue what to do with it.

Woof, you fools.

Woof!

President Trump and the Coal Miner's Granddaughter

At a March 2016 campaign rally, Hillary Clinton told her audience what was going to happen if she won. “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said. 

At that point, it was already clear that Donald Trump was the most loathsome man ever to run for the nation’s highest office. I knew Secretary Clinton meant she was going to focus on clean energy. Still, it was a tone deaf comment and I thought to myself, If I was a coal miner, I’d probably vote for Trump too.

I was reminded of that incident again one recent morning. I was driving over to my son’s house because I watch my three-year-old granddaughter on Fridays. On the radio NPR was doing an interview with an Ohio miner. He said Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord gave him a “sense of security.” He had “bills to pay.” He only wanted to provide for his family.

I thought he sounded like any good family man. He cared about his wife and children, just as the rest of us care about ours. And that’s a fundamental element in this story. The problem is this tale doesn’t terminate with one coal miner, or one generation, or one snowball (as we shall see).

This story encompasses one planet.

The decision this week by President Trump, who has no better grip on climate science than my granddaughter—and she can be excused because she’s three!—ignores that final element, that one planet. In my mind, if you don’t sympathize with that Ohio miner something is wrong with you. If he loses his place in the mines, or a thousand peers lose theirs, you should hope he wins the lottery and they all get hired by some good company that will still go ahead and pay them $25 or $30 per hour.

(As a card-carrying liberal, I’m for higher wages for the average worker.)

Unfortunately, our country finds itself saddled with an intellectual dwarf in the White House, a man who thinks not in terms of planets but snowballs. 

That means the coal miner’s granddaughter, and Trump’s grandchildren, and yours, and mine, are all going to pay for his gross stupidity.

Mark Twain once joked that everybody complained about the weather but nobody ever did anything about it. There’s a difference, though between climate and weather which Trump seems incapable of processing, despite his constant complaining.

Suppose you went outside one day and the temperature was twelve degrees above normal. Would that be proof global warming and/or climate change was occurring? You would be a fool to argue a position based on a single day’s weather. Yet that has been the level of sophistication Trump has brought to the topic. Sadly, the man in the Oval Office believes in James Inhofe’s snowball.

If you are not familiar with Inhofe, or his snowball, you can be sure, together, they represented complete and willful ignorance. In the winter of 2015, during a cold snap following a blizzard in the nation’s capital, Inhofe carried a snowball into the U.S. Senate. This was not a random snowball, packed by a lawmaker from Oklahoma, where snow is rare and (according to scientists) earthquakes related to fracking are common.

No. This was a proof.

Inhofe stepped to the podium on a cold January day and offered up juvenile analysis: “In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair, do you know what this is?” Inhofe directed his remarks to Sen. Bill Cassidy, presiding over a mostly empty Senate chamber. A good guess at that moment might have been: A moron about to offer up a stunt to fool other morons? Alas, Cassidy, a fellow Republican, was not prepared to comment. In dramatic fashion Inhofe pulled out a plastic bag. He opened it. Inside was a snowball. Inhofe removed it. “It’s a snowball,” he explained, pretty much stating the obvious, even for any morons listening at the time. “And it’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.”

“We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” Inhofe continued. He was referring to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “But now the script has flipped,” he insisted.

Only the script hadn’t flipped.

It still hasn’t.

NASA and NOAA were relying on global data, the kind of data Trump has routinely ignored. According to their records 2014 was the hottest year on record. Not one day. Not one city. Not one fool with one snowball.

One planet.

You could go to the NASA website. You could pull it up on the internet. It’s as easy as packing a bit of snow.

For years, however, Trump has been too lazy or too busy grabbing women to bother with any science. He started seeing snowballs in 2011 when he first plunked down in the camp of the willfully ignorant. That fall he tweeted: “It snowed over 4 inches this past weekend in New York City. It is still October. So much for Global Warming.”

No, sir. 

That would be weather.

In the winter of 2012 he looked outside and spotted Frosty the Snowman, still not melting. “It’s freezing and snowing in New York—we need global warming!”

Again: that would be weather.

In 2013 he used slightly better evidence, mentioning trends for an entire month and an entire country: “Looks like the U.S. will be having the coldest March since 1996—global warming anyone?????????”

Only that still wasn’t climate. The year, itself, globally, proved one of the hottest on record.

Trump’s tiny toes turned blue again in December and it was back to complaining about weather, but not doing anything about it. “Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee—I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” he tweeted.

In 2014 he offered up another nugget of Trumpian wisdom: “Baltimore just set a record for the coldest day in March in a long recorded history -4 degrees. Other places likewise. Global warming con!”

He even backed up Inhofe in January 2015 with this fact-deprived, flailing stab at scientific thinking: “It’s record cold all over the country and world—where the hell is global warming, we need some fast!”

So, was it a hoax? Was 2014 the hottest year ever? 

NASA said it was.

What happened in 2015, the year that began in promising fashion, with James Inhofe’s snowball? Again, relying of worldwide data, from all four seasons, five oceans and seven continents, scientists said it was the new hottest year on record.

NASA reported.

The year did end on a hopeful note when the Paris Climate Accord was ratified and signed by 195 nations. It wasn’t a perfect document, because no human document is. But because the danger was clear, nations united.

By chance, six months before, Trump had opened his campaign for president. As one might have expected, he continued to display a complete lack of understanding of simplest science. At one point he sat down with loyalists at Fox News and said: “Well, I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax.” People who studied it were probably only in it to make “a lot of money.”

Then the numbers were tabulated again—by dedicated men and women at NASA and NOAA. Once more, 2016 turned out to be the new hottest year on record. In fact, sixteen of the hottest seventeen had occurred in this young century. That’s why 194 nations still support the Paris agreement.

As for the United States, we now link arms in solidarity only with rogue nations Nicaragua and Syria.

In the end, we should sympathize with the coal miner and his plight. We should do what we can to help all workers in a similar predicament. But if we blow this battle, as President Trump seems intent on doing, we must surely fear for the coal miner’s granddaughter. 

I know I fear for my grandchildren. 

You should fear for yours.