August 2024 Archives

Dear America,

A couple of days ago, I received a text message purportedly from someone  telling me that "Don, Jr." really liked my answer to "question 4," whatever that is, and inviting me to click on what appeared to be a website...I presume to beg for money from me.  I politely responded with the prescribed message: stop2end, and they responded that I had been "successfully unsubscribe."  Within a matter of hours, I got another text, this one purportedly from "TRUMP" asking me for money.  I wrote back to say, "Stop2End," and they confirmed that they would.  But then I got a text alleging "Your information has been breached by Democrats" and urging me to donate to "Secure [my] GOP donor profile" to which I responded "Stop2End you lying felons."  And they texted back that they had done so.  Today I got a text admitting it was from the GOP and asking me to donate and have my donation matched 1050% by some rich donor.  I sent back a text saying that they must be desperate to be importuning Democrats to donate to their cause, and inviting them to leave the party of that "lying miscreant", Trump and join the Democrats.  I never got a response saying that I had succeeded in unsubscribing.  Presumably, the person who read my response to their solicitation is thinking about it.  Chalk one up for those of us who actually have honest valleys.  

But generally Trumpers are diehards.  The truth is irrelevant, and they cleave to the neo-conservative tenet that if Trump says it, it's true.  But Trump said in 2016 that he was going to build a "big beautiful wall" at the Mexican border and he added "...and they are going to pay for it.  Believe me."  Trump said it, so his gullible constituency believed him, and now no one talks about the fact that Mexico has never paid one thin dime of the cost of Trump's wall of futility.  He also went to Korea, and even took a few steps into North Korea with Kim jungun in the pursuit of curtailment of Kim's nuclear weapons development program.  Kim strung him along for a few days, but nothing changed, and Trump, who promised to subdue Kim stopped talking about his brag that he could prevail upon the dictator to abate his ominously waxing-bellicose nuclear program.  But they believed Trump...at least the evangelical Christians in attendance did...when he told them that they had to vote for him because if they got him elected, "Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore."  Juxtapose that remark with one he made in 2020 when a crowd began chanting "four more years."  He intervened saying, "you want to drive them crazy? Ask for twelve," apparently disregarding the 22nd amendment limiting presidents to two terms, suggesting that he would prevent that amendment from having its intended effect.  Presumably the evangelicals, and for that matter all of Trump's acolytes believed this suggestion from the liar in chief, and rather than repudiating his exhortation they applauded it.  Put concisely, if it's not too late to be concise, Trumpers believe Trump no matter what idiotic thing he says, and so they are apparently okay with his ostensible promise to be in office in perpetuity and to do what they want him to do.  I don't have to tell you that I don't want either of those eventualities, and I'm betting you don't either.

So the bottom line is that Kamala Harris' election is an existential matter for our nation and our democracy as well as the individual liberty of every American.  Trump seems to desire that we all subscribe to reactionary principles, and presumably he would put that preference into law with the co-opted fealty of his Republican Party legislators.  In other words, Trump wants to be Putin, Xe, Erdogan, Orban, and every other autocrat in the world rolled into one.  He wants all of us Americans to submit to his authority, which is exacerbated by the fact that he is a philanderer, a crook as attested to by many of those who have done business with him, a megalomaniac, a pathological narcissist, a martinet... name the vicious tendency and he fit's the description.  Yet, the self-proclaimed contingent of the American electorate designating itself "evangelical" isn't proselytizing for traditional Christian virtues and tolerance of others but rather is supporting a flagrant transgressor against every tenet of virtue they putatively believe in.

Thank God Kamala is ahead in the polls.   

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Trump says he is thrilled with Kamala Harris's choice for vice president on her ticket.  I think he is just whistling in the dark, but no matter what the case, his remark on the subject was just typical Trump.  What that means..."typical Trump"...is plain for anyone to see if his youth is considered, because that's when all this macho bravado became the cardinal quality of his public persona.  Specifically, he went to a private school until he was 13, at which point his parents removed him from that school and sent him to a military school with a reputation for maintaining a tough environment, and the most credible explanation for that transfer is that the school "recommended" to Trump's father, a predator real estate magnate named Fred Trump, that Donald go to a more disciplined kind of school.  The school settled upon by the Trumps was NYMA, or New York Military Academy, which had a reputation for producing disciplined alumni with good manners, which Donald was in need of developing.

Trump's niece, the daughter of his brother who committed suicide, is a clinical psychologist who wrote a book about her uncle, which was anything but flattering, and it included some references to Donald's career at NYMA among other things.  The Trumps as a group tried to prevent her from publishing her book, but she did so anyway, and considering the adult that Trump became, her exegesis of that process is compellingly credible.  Her account of Trump's military school career included reports of hazing, bullying, name-calling and brow beating, which he first learned as a victim and then perpetrated against younger and smaller fellow students.  Thus, Trump learned the tactics he uses in dealing with others now both by being forced to endure them at first, and then as he became an upperclassman by employing them while becoming one of the less popular students at the academy.  In short, that is how he developed his strategy of branding his opponents pejoratively--you know, like crooked Hillary and crooked Joe Biden, Little Marco, Lying Ted Cruz, etc.--which he employs with impunity among his credulous constituency. It's as if what he sees in the mirror is what he recognizes as moral deficiency in others, which paradoxically he is then motivated to criticize.  I think that part of the explanation of Trump's "playground bully" personality is that he is autistic; you know, nature versus nurture.  After all, one of the cardinal traits of the autistic is often an inability to relate civilly to others, but insight as to his high school education brings nurture into it more compellingly.  Apparently his mother was glad he got sent away and, while Fred visited Donald most weekends, Mary, Trump's mother went to see him only once or twice over the years of his "military" career.  If his mother didn't like him, what does that tell you?

So the residual question after considering the etiology of Trump's personality is, does this make him psychotic or just neurotic.  Of course occasional use of epithets is something many of us are guilty of, but with Trump it is his modus operandi, and in that light, I often wonder if his reliance on that sophomoric tactic is a sign of mental illness or just a jejune  self-defense mechanism he adopted when he was too small to fend off the bullies from whom he learned bullying as a life style.  But in the final analysis, we will never know because the idea that we can ever get candor from Trump himself makes diagnosis an impossibility.  Thus, while his psychologically traumatic origins may be susceptible of exegesis, his ascent to power in the past as a prelude to the possibility of his re-ascent in 2025 is just that much more daunting on account of it.  To be concise, I think Donald Trump is a danger to himself, but more importantly a danger to others...to society at large not to put too fine a point on it.

If you read these letters, I'm pretty sure you aren't inclined to vote for him regardless of what you read here.  I know that I would never miss my opportunity to vote against him, and I suspect you feel the same way.  It isn't just for the satisfaction of repudiating him and his implicit claim that he is a "stable genius" and the embodiment of the American Way.  It's also because I think it my duty to my real fellow Americans by way of doing my part to protect us all from him.

But just to be clear, I hope you are not considering voting for Trump in November.  He is a miscreant, and I fear that if he ever gets into the White House again, he will legitimize and license in America the loosing of the basest instincts of those who support him.  Until Trump was elected I never entertained the notion that such a debasement of the American ethos was possible, but it sure seems to be a peril that his constituency represents for the rest of us.  So when you go to the polls, stay American.  Don't let the deviants from our national ethic corrupt you.  They aren't the patriots: you are, so act like it.  Save all of our Souls, at the polls.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Though the Republicans are profoundly in the thrall of Donald Trump, it seems possible that he has begun going too far for even them.  His remarks before a group of black journalists regarding Kamala Harris's ethnicity were far beyond imprudent.  They were brash and overtly reckless, not to mention bigoted, narrow-minded and just plain offensive.  The Party will still defend him despite his patent racism, and that has been their normal reaction to Trump's outlandishly blatant white supremacy adherence, but they have always done it blithely in the past.  However now, there is evidence that they are feeling, though still not admitting, that Trump is a step too far even for them.

Trump's "is she Indian or is she black" remarks just fell from his feeble mind yesterday, but yesterday and today I have been receiving text messages from the Republicans asking for money.  Given that we are dealing with politicians, asking for money like beggars with hat in hand is the norm, but I am an old, life-long Democrat living in a state that hasn't even elected a Republican congressman  in a decade or more, and then it was only one in a delegation of about ten.  I don't think Connecticut has ever voted Republican for president or senator.  And in the bargain, these texts...not emails but texts...have been attributed to first "Don, Jr." and then Marco Rubio--even someone calling himself "Senator Kennedy"--not Trump.  I just got another fund-raising text claiming that the Democrats had "breeched" my information.  The Republican Party fund raising based on fabrications and on names other than Trump...I think that means something.

First there is the desperation it must reflect that these importunate texts are coming at all.  The party seems desperate for money, especially in light of the language they use about matching gifts and missing their most recent funding goals.  Thus second, they barely raised two thirds as much money last month as Kamala Harris did in two days, and money is tantamount to ringing doorbells and on false pretenses suborning votes for their man. The more money they raise, the more lies, prevarications and misrepresentations they can run on television.  Less money means less honey in the ears of the politically uncritical and under educated, and thus fewer reliable votes.  And that surely does not bode well for November.  It looks like Trump is getting his oats, and the Republicans rightfully fear that they will get theirs with him.  This "DEI hire" trope is backfiring on them as well, and while we smirk about it and cry crocodile tears over it, The Republicans are experiencing existential fear, and perhaps even loathing for their leader.  It must be remembered that the down-ballot Republicans are counting on Trump to drag them along into control of the House and the Senate by his coattails, and it is looking more and more like they'll get no more than toilet paper stuck to his shoe dragging through the election for everyone to see.

So, it will be interesting to see how the polls trend from this point on.  I don't expect a big bounce in Harris's favor right away.  The Democrats are only slowly making hay out of Trump's absurdly ill-considered contretemps and while they will no doubt continue to do so and even refine their efforts, it will be a progression that will eventually lead to defection of the black constituency Trump has purloined with false pretenses with his claim that he has been the best friend to black America since Abe Lincoln.  That peremptory self-praise has gone from clever, albeit contrived, political meme to absurd canard with one remark from a despicable bloviator.  Remarkably, Trump has never taken that one step too far that would sink him...until now perhaps.  It is not just the black electorate that is antagonized; it is all of the white electorate that isn't of the white supremacist ilk as well as a similarly inclined segment of the white uncommitted contingent as well.  And what we can expect is that his remark will have for the Democrats the coattails that Trump's Republican cohorts hoped to ride to incumbency.

Of course, this potential is all speculation and conjecture.  But one thing is certain: this won't be the last improbably ill-considered thing that Trump will do or say.  Imprudent remarks are Trump's metiér.  He has, as he once said in 2016, the kind of impunity that would, until now anyhow, allow him to kill someone on 5th Avenue and not get arrested.  But if you're reading this Donnie boy, those days are behind you. 

Your friend,

Mike