A Liberal in Trumpistan: October - December 2023

October 1, 2023: October starts off just as badly for Donald J. Trump as September ended – although he claims he’s “skyrocketing in the polls.” At one point, he says he’s leading Biden by 10 – but that’s based on one outlier poll.

But this blogger isn’t a clueless dope, like Donald, or so many of his cult followers. The polls are generally correct, when averaged.

Could Donald win a second term – which he definitely DID NOT in 2020 – in 2024? According to RealClearPolitics, he has a 45.2% to 44.2% lead when I update my post on October 9.

Meanwhile, the former president wants us all to know. If he’s the GOP nominee in 2024 (which seems a foregone conclusion), he’s not picking a “birdbrain” for his next vice president. Whereas he did pick a “birdbrain” to serve as his first ambassador to the United Nations.

Namely: Nikki Haley.

To be honest, it’s hard to imagine any president picking more duds for his administration than Trump did in 2016 – when he promised to pick only the “best people.” For example, we had his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Trump would go on to label him “dumb as a rock.”

Then there was the time he picked Elaine Chao, wife of Sen. Mitch McConnell, to be his Secretary of Transportation. It turned out, after four years in his cabinet, that Trump finally decided she was a tool of the evil Chinese, Mitch’s “China-loving wife,” as Donald put it.

On Truth Social, the former president recently insisted that Haley has “no loyalty,” but “plenty of lies.” He puzzled out what to say for a moment, and then decided to hammer his CAPS button. “Anyway, Birdbrain doesn’t have the TALENT or TEMPERAMENT to do the job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

In other early-October news, Trump decides that the man he appointed to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, was a terrible pick, and in an era when America WAS GREAT (the blogger has decided to capitalize randomly, for fun), Milley would have been found guilty of TREASON for crossing his boss, and WOULD DESERVE THE DEATH PENALTY!

Gen. Mark Milley, by now the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a possible witness against Trump in at least one of four indictments), left his post, with a few blunt words to describe his old boss. First, Milley told reporters he was taking necessary precautions to protect his family.

(Trump has repeatedly stirred up death threats aimed at his enemies.)

In a speech to an audience gathered to honor him at his retirement after four decades of military service, the general pointed out that members of the military take an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

What was it, he explained, that they don’t do?

We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don't take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.

In other words, add Gen. Milley to the list of people who worked closely with Trump during his first term in office and came away appalled.

Milley speaking at an earlier point, during the Trump presidency.

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“A person that has no idea what America stands for.”

10/2/23: Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s White House Chief of Staff for longer than anyone else, has also had all he can stand from his former boss. After Trump hints at death for Gen. Milley (see: October 1, 2023), who served for decades in the U.S. Army, Kelly erupts.

In the process, he confirms a number of damning stories about what Trump has said about member of the armed forces.

CNN explains:

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

In the statement, Kelly is confirming, on the record, a number of details in a 2020 story in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, including Trump turning to Kelly on Memorial Day 2017, as they stood among those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery, and saying, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Those details also include Trump’s inability to understand why the American public respects former prisoners of war and those shot down in combat. Then-candidate Trump of course said in front of a crowd in 2015 that former Vietnam POW Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was “not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II, as a “loser.”

CNN reached out to the Trump campaign Monday afternoon, telling officials there that a former administration official had confirmed, on the record, a number of details about the 2020 Atlantic story, without naming Kelly, and seeking comment. The Trump campaign responded by insulting the character and credibility of retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, who had nothing to do with this story.

That last little detail – that Team Trump doesn’t even know who to attack – tells you what you need to remember about Donald’s current gang of misfits.

General Kelly.

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10/5/23: Former President Trump rips his longest-serving former White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly. He describes the former Marine as a “lowlife with a very small brain and a very big mouth,” “by far the dumbest of my military people … incapable of doing a good job.”

Trump goes on to insist that the White House job “was too much for him, and I couldn’t stand the guy, so I fired him like a ‘dog’…”

Add Kelly to the long list of people Trump chose to help him run the government, who Trump now says only an idiot would have picked to help him run the government.

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“Absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

10/6/23: According to scientists, last month was the hottest September globally on record. It broke by nearly a full degree Fahrenheit, the old “hottest” record for a September, set way back in 2020. It now seems certain that 2023 will set a record for the hottest year on record. But the climate-deniers are undaunted by science. Among those groups of scientists who are deeply worried: The World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. effort – which means right-wingers won’t believe anything the WMO says, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European operation, and the Japan Meteorological Agency. Or as one climate scientist put it, in less scientific terms, September temperatures were so far off the charts as to be “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.” Across Europe, all-time heat records for October fell within the first three days of this month. Scientists at NASA concurred: the summer of 2023 was the hottest ever recorded.

If 2023 proves to be the hottest year ever, then the last ten years will be the ten hottest, and the ten years my oldest grandchild has spent on this planet.

As for Donald J. Trump, he had other worries on his mind. In an interview with The National Pulse, Don went full-Hitler, ranting about immigrants sneaking across the border, and how they would destroy this nation.

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from,” he warned, “and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions, insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists.”

Not content to paint that dystopian picture, he added, “Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”

Call it what it is: White Supremacy 101.

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10/10/23: Republicans continue to shoot themselves in their assorted conservative and right-wing feet. Sometimes even their own knees. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been ousted from power – the first time in American history that a speaker has lost the job, when his or her party held the majority.

On the other hand, “scandal-plagued” Rep. George Santos still has a seat! And by “scandal-plagued,” in this case, we mean “bubonic plague” level scandal. One of the boldest liars ever to finagle a seat in Congress, his campaign manager, Nancy Marks, has plead guilty to felony fraud, and Santos, himself, faces thirteen felony charges.

Ms. Marks, America’s newest felon, could face up to five years in prison. Santos could end up serving longer.

In the meantime, Rep. Matt Gaetz, who brought forth the motion to vote on Speaker McCarthy has even fewer friends in Congress – if possible – than Santos. Gaetz is just one of the biggest dicks in the GOP – and there were reports that after he helped bring McCarthy down, fists would have been thrown had the GOP caucus met on Wednesday, in the wake of Tuesday’s vote to boot Kevin.

(This blogger has never started a fight in his life, and at 74, doesn’t plan a change in policy. But he can say this much. Matt Gaetz has one of the most punchable faces in all of American politics.)

Gaetz finds himself in the limelight again – and the limelight does not make him look good. For a long time, he was under federal investigation, accused of sex-trafficking underage girls. “Innocent until proven guilty,” of course. And investigators could never build a case they were sure would stick. In Congress, however, a two-year ethics inquiry into Gaetz’s behavior has continued. Gaetz insists interest has grown, “payback” he says, for his role in ousting the House Speaker.

As The New York Times explains,

Since the spring of 2021, Mr. Gaetz has been under investigation over allegations he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use and accepted impermissible gifts under House rules, among other allegations.

Gaetz looks like a Batman villain.

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10/16/23: Speaking to an audience in Iowa, regarding the current crisis in the Middle East, former President Trump gets distracted by a fly. With that, he launches into a discussion of fly paper, and how you can’t buy it anymore, because of…well, something about “cruelty to animals.”

It’s classic Trumpism.

Nonsense.

The simplest fool can get on Google and search for “fly paper near me,” and turn up all kinds of options.

Still readily available - unless you're a dunce.

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10/18/23: Former President Pussy Grabber decided Wednesday that it would be fun to help spread the home address of New York Attorney General Letitia James online since she is prosecuting him for a purportedly massive tax fraud scheme in a Manhattan courtroom. And what could go wrong with putting an elected official and an officer of the law’s home address out there on the internet!

As for the trial itself, it has not been going well for Donald. Today, he was admonished by the judge after talking audibly and throwing up his hands in disgust during testimony by a witness for the state. That witness was real estate appraiser Doug Larson, who said (basically) that he had never signed off on a number of appraisals that the Trump Organization said he had. My favorite detail from this trial, however, remains the claim made by Trump accountants to boost his alleged total wealth, that his penthouse apartment in Trump Tower was nearly 30,000 square feet.

And, oh so close! The real square footage was 10,996.

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10/19/23: What’s the good word from Trumpistan? In the House of Representatives, Republicans still can’t come up with a candidate who can get enough votes to be elected Speaker.

They have the majority in the chamber, but they can’t find anyone they like to take charge. And it’s the fault of Democrats! (Democrats do not have the majority. If they did, they could elect a Speaker.)

Steve Scalise was put forward first to replace departing Kevin McCarthy, first Speaker of the House ever voted off the island by members of his own party. Scalise fell short of the votes he needed.

Rep. Jim Jordan stepped boldly to the fore, called for a vote, and similarly fell short. He called a second vote Wednesday and fell even shorter. He planned to call for a third vote today, but it soon became clear opposition was growing. Tomorrow, instead of holding a vote, Mr. Jordan will hold a…press conference.

Solving problems for real Americans!

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10/20/23: TGIF! No doubt, Republicans are looking forward to a relaxing weekend, with or without a real Speaker of the House. So, with Israel and Hamas locked in combat, GOP lawmakers are in a position to accomplish nothing.

Wait…we have an update. The Republicans have voted NOT to make Jim Jordan Speaker, which is absolutely the fault of Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Transgender Biden, and White House Dog Biden.

Maybe, next week.

(In a series of three votes, Rep. Jordan went from 20 Republicans opposed to his candidacy, to 22, and finally 25. According to Rep. Nancy Mace, however, there may have been as many as 100 members of the House GOP who opposed.)

Finally: Proof of real election fraud!

On a positive note, Sidney Powell, 68, once a member of the “elite strike force” that was going to prove the 2020 election was stolen, has struck a deal. In the election fraud case brought against former President Trump and 18 co-conspirators, Powell is the second to take a plea deal and agree to testify against the other defendants. Powell’s legal career is over, and she’ll be on probation for the next six years, and must pay fines and restitution in the sum of $8,700.

Then another shoe drops. A third defendant in the Georgia case takes a plea deal – this time copping to a felony.

Ken Chesebro will also testify against the other conspirators – up to and including Donald J. Trump.

If you are paying any attention at all (and most Trump fans are not) you might have noticed that as of today 1,081 days have passed since the last presidential election. Loser Donald continues to swear he won a “landslide victory.” But the calendar turns every month. Still NO PROOF of significant voter fraud has been shown in any court in this great land.

What a sleazebag.

Well, not counting the guy who just got seven months in prison for committing real voter fraud. What a sleazebag! Douglass Mackey, a “social influencer,” came up with a scheme in 2016 to depress the vote for…Hillary Clinton.

Mackey is MAGA.

His plan, played out via Twitter, was to trick people into believing they could vote by text message. At least 4,900 fell for his ploy. That’s more voter fraud, right there, than Team Trump has been able to prove in court in all the days since the last election – and not for lack of trying.

FUN FACT: Trump has also been fined $5,000 in his New York fraud case, after he failed to take down a social media post, which the judge has ruled threatened the safety of his court clerk.

Another such incident – and Donald could go to jail.

Mr. Mackey wasn't really interested in a fair vote.

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November 1, 2023: Remember when the greatest president ever, Donald Trump, was in office, and American companies were pumping more oil than at any other time in history. And then Joe Biden took over and killed the oil companies with his terrible, commie policies. And then oil production in the U.S. set a daily record, pumping 13.1 million barrels per day in August.

As in: Better than Trump ever did, but only by a little.

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11/14/23: Once upon a time, there was a good Christian man. His name was (and still is) Mike Johnson. On August 6, 2015, Mike watched the first Republican primary debate featuring GOP candidates for president.

Mike, as we said, was and is a good Christian man. Like many Americans, including this blogger, he came away appalled by what he saw. The following day, he posted at length on Facebook.

A “much higher level of virtue and decency.”

As summarized by The New York Times, here’s what the good Christian man said, more than eight years ago:

“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post … before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.

Challenged in the comments by someone defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson responded: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”

Mr. Johnson, then a state lawmaker in Louisiana, also questioned what would happen if “he decided to bomb another head of state merely disrespecting him.”

“I am only halfway kidding about this,” he wrote. “I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”

In 2015, Mr. Johnson, who would announce his first run for Congress the next year, wrote that he was horrified as he watched Mr. Trump’s debate performance with his wife and children.

“What bothered me most was watching the face of my exceptional 10 yr old son, Jack, at one point when he looked over at me with a sort of confused disappointment, as the leader of all polls boasted about calling a woman a ‘fat pig.’”

In one of the most famous exchanges from that debate, Megyn Kelly, a moderator and then a Fox News host, asked Mr. Trump about his history of referring to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”

“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Mr. Trump responded. He added that the country’s problem was political correctness, something he didn’t have time for.

Mr. Johnson was horrified.

“Can you imagine the noble, selfless characters of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln or Reagan carrying on like Trump did last night?” wrote Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian. He noted that voters needed to demand a “much higher level of virtue and decency” than what he had just witnessed.

Then the good Christian man lifted a finger to the political winds. Mike realized the wind was blowing Trump’s way.

With that, the good Christian man swallowed his beliefs. He went to work, shilling for Trump. Even the famous “Pussy Grabber” tape didn’t bother the Christian man. In 2020, Johnson would do all he could to help Donald gain a second term, even though he didn’t deserve it. In fact, Mike is no longer bothered by Donald’s lack of virtue and decency. Because Mike – now the U.S. Speaker of the House – has shed his Christian principles in the face of expediency.

Speaker Johnson with his family.
He had Trump pegged correctly in 2015.

“A proud election denier.”

So, the thinking of the good Christian man has changed; but Donald has not changed, unless you count getting worse as change. At a recent rally in New Hampshire, Donald was at his dehumanizing worst.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he told a hooting, clueless crowd.

He also assured his fans that he was “a proud election denier.” Which is another way of saying, “I’m a liar.”

That’s a violation of the Ninth Commandment, but Trump doesn’t care about the Ninth, or Commandments 1-8 and 10, either. Donald is particularly bad when it comes to the Seventh Commandment – namely, the one about, “Thou shalt not cheat upon thy spouse, or spouses in sequence.” Mike has forgotten the biblical admonition that calls upon true believers to stone adulterers.

Trump also used the term “vermin” to describe his political opponents, in a recent post on Truth Social.

FUN FACT: We should also point out that grouping fascists in with the “left” is a slick political trick. It only works if your audience is too dumb to know any history. The far-right fascists – Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in Spain – were the bitter enemies of the far-left communists both before and during World War II.

You can look it up, if you aren’t a Trump fan, and aren’t too busy loading up your guns, and getting ready to kill some vermin.

Feeling the authoritarian blood coursing through his veins, Trump went on to compliment three of the most dangerous foreign enemies of the United States. Putin? Xi Jinping? Kim Jong-un?

No problem.

The “threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” the former president told his fans. “Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”

The Dehumanizing Hall of Fame

In any case, here’s one of my main problems with Donald Trump – and it goes back to the day he came down the escalator and made it sound like all Mexican immigrants were “rapists” and “drug dealers.” History shows us on many bloody pages that dehumanizing others makes it easier to abuse or kill them.

Here are a few examples:

“Nits make lice.”

Col. John Chivington, explaining why the massacre of native American women and children by his troops, at Sand Creek in 1864, was justified.

Sand Creek Massacre - 1864.

“If you cut even cautiously into...an abscess, you found,

like a maggot in a rotting body...a kike [Jew].”

Adolf Hitler, warning his followers that the Jews were like “incurable tumors,” “as dangerous as the Black Death.”

On the way to the gas chambers.

“The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats.”

Governor Chase Clark of Idaho, using the kind of language which allowed unthinking Americans to lock up 110,000 Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor was bombed – including 77,000 U.S. citizens – none of whom dropped any bombs on Pearl Harbor, Boise, or Coeur d’Alene.

Japanese American boys in a "relocation camp."

Trump, with his talk of poisoned blood also treads on soil walked by haters before. Hitler also had a few thoughts about race and the need to keep the blood of his great nation clean from contamination:

“There is only one holiest human right,

and this right is...to see to that the blood is preserved pure.”

In fact, in this country, the typical racist of the 1950s believed that blood spilled to protect the “pure blood” of the nation would be required. Here, for example, was the reaction of the Jackson Daily News, a Mississippi newspaper, in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building. White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation. It means racial strife of the bitterest sort. Mississippi cannot and will not try to abide by such a decision.

In our own country, the effort to keep blood “pure” led to segregation laws – to keep blacks and whites separate in every possible way. States like Virginia, and many others, banned interracial marriages until 1967.

And so it is. When Donald talks about “vermin” and “poisoned blood,” he is walking in the same style of shoes preferred by all haters, across the wide range of all American and world history.

You would think a good Christian man like Mike Johnson might have noticed.