President Andrew Jackson: shot at, point-blank. Both guns misfired.
President Truman: saved from being shot by White House police.
President Nixon: gunman Arthur Bremer removed by Secret Service. So he shot George Wallace instead a month later.
President Franklin Roosevelt: shot at, three weeks before his inauguration. Gunman missed, killed the mayor of Chicago.
President Theodore Roosevelt: shot while campaigning to regain the White House.
President Taft: gunman apprehended along his parade route.
President Clinton: gunman shot toward the White House twenty-nine times, thinking a man he saw on the lawn was the president.
President Lincoln: shot dead.
President Garfield: shot dead.
President McKinley: shot dead.
President Kennedy: shot dead.
*
Thirteen of our presidents, Trump.
Thirteen of our presidents—30 percent, nearly one in three—shot and killed, or shot and injured, or shot at but escaped harm, or very nearly shot at.
And you—three times in two months—you dog-whistle to the worst dregs of this gun-crazed, death-wish society—that the “Second Amendment people” should do something, that “guns be taken from her heavily armed Secret Service detail,” that we should “see what happens to her.”
*
When, eight years ago, Hillary Clinton merely mentioned that she hadn’t ended her Democratic nomination bid yet, because a previous front-runner like Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, she was excoriated. She was shunned. I shunned her. It remains her low point.
And she apologized within hours. The same day, Trump.
And she never dog-whistled for somebody to shoot her opponent, as you did.
And she didn’t just change the subject.
She didn’t do what you did.
Enraged as you were that you had to admit to your lie about birtherism, you went out and brought up assassination the same night.
To wish, to incite, to dog-whistle—to do anything but repudiate and fight against—physical violence against a political leader in this country is beyond despicable.
With our history, with our political annals stained with the blood of everybody from Martin Luther King to Ronald Reagan to Harvey Milk!
And I pity you, Trump, that you have so little humanity or decency inside you that you could so cravenly and dismissively say it . . . “Let’s see what happens to her.”
But I know what should happen to you, Trump.
That ex–CIA director, General Michael Hayden, was right.
August 9, after you did this. The first time.
Because of “the prevalence of political assassination inside of American history and how that is a topic that we don’t ever come close to, even when we think we’re trying to be lighthearted.
“If someone else had said that outside the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him.”
You made a call for violence against the other candidate for president, Trump, less than two months before the election. Repeated it three times, once on social media.
And the Secret Service should take General Hayden’s cue.
And you, Trump . . . you should be in the back of a police wagon now, being questioned.
And then, you know what? Let’s see what happens.
IS TRUMP LOYAL TO THE UNITED STATES?
Post date • WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28
Is Donald Trump knowingly acting as an agent of the Russian government?
Or is he just such a stooge that it only looks that way by accident?
We are running out of other explanations.
And we need an explanation now, about an investment banker named Carter Page.
He didn’t come up in the debate—too much time was wasted because of the defective automatic sniffling microphone they gave the Republican nominee.
But Carter Page should have come up.
And we need him explained by you—Trump.
Because Carter Page is one of your guys.
Because U.S. intelligence agents are sifting through reports that Page has met with a top aide to the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow—a man who is Putin’s deputy chief for internal policy and whom this country believes is responsible for the information collected by the Russian intelligence agencies about . . . the U.S. presidential vote.
Translation: your guy reportedly met with the Russian guy spying on our election. In Moscow.
This is a problem, Trump.
This . . . is your problem.
And before you say your people have resolved this . . .
Because Kellyanne Conway said, “He’s not part of our national security or foreign policy briefings that we do now at all, certainly not since I have become campaign manager. If he’s doing that, he’s certainly not doing it with the permission or knowledge of the campaign, the activities that you described.”
Or because another guy said that, relative to the campaign, Carter Page “has no role. We are not aware of any of his activities, past or present.”
What your toadies just said about Page, Trump . . .
Is different from what a different toady said about Page last month . . .
When she called him your “informal foreign adviser.”
And it’s different from what Carter Page now tells an opinion columnist from The Washington Post . . .
That “he is taking a leave of absence from his work with the Trump campaign due to the controversy,” and that in his travels to Russia this July, “Page said he made clear that he was acting in his personal capacity and not as a member of the Trump campaign.”
So now all four of these quotes are different from what you said, Trump, in March.
The Washington Post asked you for the names of your foreign policy team, and the second guy you named . . . was Carter Page.
Who our spies think met with Russian spies about spying on the U.S. election.
Who is on your foreign policy team. Or isn’t on your foreign policy team. Or is an informal adviser. Or is acting without the campaign’s knowledge but has to take a leave of absence from the foreign policy team he isn’t on.
*
We all already know, Trump, about the day you encouraged the Russians—at a live news conference—to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails . . .
To, you know, commit a kind of electronic-age, international version of Watergate that would have benefited you . . .
And we know how you tried to worm your way out of that by calling it “sarcasm” . . .
And we already know about our government’s belief that the Russians have already hacked into the Democratic computers—a conclusion you mocked during the debate, suggesting that the real culprit might be a four-hundred-pound guy sitting on a bed.
And we already know about the day you looked like a complete moron when you said that Putin—a dictator—was a greater leader than President Obama, because Putin—who is a dictator—had higher approval ratings. Because you’re too stupid to realize that the “approval ratings” in Russia—for the Russian dictator—may not . . . exactly . . . be legit.
And we already know about your second campaign manager, this slimy Manafort guy, and the strings that connect him to Putin and a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
But we need to know about this Carter Page, and why his name was the second one on your lips when you were asked for your foreign policy advisers.
Because, Trump, you probably won’t understand any of this, but Carter Page may have also done something even worse than allegedly meeting with the Russian in charge of spying on our presidential elections.
Yahoo News reports that the government is investigating whether your man Carter Page also met with pe
ople in the Russian hierarchy to talk about possibly lifting our economic sanctions against the Russians if you become president—talk which might violate federal law.
Carter Page says of all this, “All of these accusations are just complete garbage.” Which would be easier to believe, Trump, if your campaign hadn’t put out four separate statements about who he is and what he’s doing for you.
You have to explain this buccaneer now, Trump, because if you don’t—if you don’t explain this continuing embrace of the murderous regime of a malevolent country like Russia—you will face far bigger questions than “Who is Carter Page?”
Those questions are simply these:
Trump!—Do you believe our elections are sacrosanct and must not, under any circumstances, be influenced by any other government?
Trump!—Do you already have a deal in place to reward a country that may have already hacked the political party of your opponent in this election?
Trump!—Are you loyal to the concept of democracy?
Trump!—Are you loyal . . . to the United States of America?
THE ATLANTIC WALL
Post date • THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29
If you watch the speeches, if you read the tweets, if you survived the debate, you probably saw something obvious and disqualifying: like when Sniffy Trump went after Rosie O’Donnell, or said we can’t defend Japan, or gave his string of answers in which he did not deny his tax returns would show he didn’t pay anything, and then he said that made him smart, and then said if he had paid them, they would have been squandered.
And as the post-debate polls now come out in force, you are probably saying, “What? How? How is the margin not bigger?”
It’s because some people saw in that debate, in those speeches, in that hatred and stupidity . . . their ideal president.
Why? How? Huh?
The answer is in something not addressed in that debate Monday: the Trump Wall.
Not that wall.
The other wall.
There is another wall—and it may be the most underreported slice of madness in this ceaseless fifteen months of electoral id.
Public Policy Polling (PPP) is one of the few players in this Kafkaesque farce to have maintained some sense of humor. It will ask whom you’re voting for, but also, “What do you have a higher opinion of: Donald Trump or middle seats on airplanes?” Middle seats win, by the way, 45 percent to 42.
And in one poll it asked . . . Question 12.
“Would you support or oppose building a wall along the Atlantic Ocean to keep Muslims from entering the country from the Middle East?”
No, you didn’t just hallucinate that.
But . . . yes—we should look at that one again.
Question number twelve: “Would you support or oppose building a wall along the Atlantic Ocean to keep Muslims from entering the country from the Middle East?”
As you know—there is only one correct answer to that question and it is: “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”
But “Are you out of your goddamned mind?” was not one of the choices.
Yes, no, or not sure.
And this is how those participants identifying themselves as Trump supporters came out on this vital question of . . . the other Trump Wall.
Thirty-one percent said yes, they were in favor of an Atlantic Wall to keep out the Muslims . . .
Fifty-two percent said no, they were not . . .
Seventeen percent said “not sure.”
A . . . wall.
To keep Muslims from entering the country.
Via . . . the Atlantic.
How are they—how are they—I can barely say it.
How are they supposedly breaching our present Atlantic fortifications? Rowboating in from Syria, are they? Swimming from the ISIS-infested region of Molenbeek, in Brussels, straight to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina?
Even assuming some spark of humanity and intelligence among these 31 percent of Trump supporters . . . getting from the so-called Islamic State to Cuba somehow . . .
And then coming up from Cuba on a 1951 Chevy pickup truck repurposed into an oceangoing vessel?
The more you think about this question—and the nearly one in three Trump supporters who don’t know enough about geography or about construction or about how deep the water in the ocean might be or about, you know, life—the less LOL-worthy it gets and the more it takes on a shape resembling the entirety of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Start with a threat that exists only in theory—since 9/11, no act of terrorism has been conducted in this country by people who were here illegally. Add to that a nonexistent paranoid fever—that terrorists are streaming into this country from every corner. Multiply it all by fear and an unthinking desire for mindless revenge and a demagogue happy to exploit it so he can take over this country, and you get Question 12: Do you support an Atlantic Wall to keep out them Muslims? Yes—31 percent!
Let me be clear. Donald Trump has not actually proposed building a wall along the Atlantic, which would have to be 2,069 miles long—or ten times that long if you wanted to be really safe and block off all the rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water that connect to the Atlantic. He has not proposed destroying every beach and every harbor and every marina and every dock and every pier and every bit of shipping and every business and every city dependent on tourism and beachgoers.
He didn’t say it. The people who want to vote for him did!
Wall off Miami. All of Florida. Georgia. The Carolinas. Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. Two thousand sixty-nine miles.
*
They don’t like immigrants, and they don’t like anybody who’s not white, and they don’t like facts, and they don’t like things they don’t understand, and they don’t like Hillary Clinton.
And that’s why he’s still in the race.
He is indeed their ideal president.
What we do about their proud, defiant stupidity—short of finding these 31 percent who want an Atlantic Wall to keep out . . . surfboarding Muslims . . . in burkinis, and forcing them back to second grade to start all over again—I don’t know.
But between now and November 8, do not count them or him out.
Trump and his idiot supporters do not know the meaning of the word “beaten.”
Well, actually, they don’t know the meaning of a lot of words, and therein lies the problem.
Chapter 2
OCTOBER 2016
TRUMP AND DOGS
Post date • MONDAY, OCTOBER 3
“Until one has loved an animal,” wrote the journalist and author Anatole France, “a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”
There is no evidence that Donald Trump has ever . . . loved an animal.
“If Trump has ever in his life had a pet,” wrote Gail Collins of The New York Times, “his campaign doesn’t know about it. There’s some question, in fact, about whether he’s ever even had an animal friend.”
In fact, none of the books about Trump, including his own, refer to a pet dog.
The coauthor or ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, told me he never heard Trump reference a pet, as adult or child.
Google it, fact-check it, do a LexisNexis search on it and you come up blank—save for an apocryphal story about him tweeting asking for prayers for a Labrador named Spinee. There were no tweets, no entreaties, and, for all we can determine, no Spinee.
A man running to lead a nation of 324 million people—and, while we’re at it, 78 million dogs and 76 million cats—and there are solid reasons to believe he’s never had a dog.
Never. Had. A. Dog.
*
But it’s worse than just that—isn’t it?
July 2015: “I hear that sleepy eyes @chucktodd w
ill be fired like a dog . . .”
October 2015: “Wow, great news! I hear [Erick] Erickson of Red State was fired like a dog.”
December 2015: “@GlennBeck got fired like a dog . . .”
This January: “Union Leader refuses to comment as to why they were kicked out of the ABC News debate like a dog.”
Twelve days later: “@BrentBozell, one of the National Review lightweights, came to my office begging for money like a dog.”
Huh?
When was the last time you saw a dog begging for money? In an office?
February: “Wow was Ted Cruz disloyal to his very capable director of communication. He used him as a scape goat - fired like a dog!”
March: Erick Erickson again: “got fired like a dog from RedState . . .”
Eleven days after that: “@DavidGregory got thrown off of TV by NBC, fired like a dog!”
June: “Mitt Romney had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog.”
Huh? What the hell’s wrong with this guy?
Fired like a dog?
Have you ever fired a dog?
He’s also tweeted that Egyptian president Mubarak was “dropped” like a dog, that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was “dumped” like a dog, that Mark Cuban was “thrown off television” like a dog, that Kristen Stewart cheated on Robert Pattinson “like a dog.”
And, worst of all, he said after one of the Republican debates that Senator Marco Rubio had been “sweating like a dog.”
Dogs don’t sweat.
In theory, they could get fired, cheat on someone, beg for money, or get dropped, dumped, kicked out, or thrown off television. But they physically can’t sweat.
Donald Trump has no understanding of this.
No evidence he’s ever had a dog.
No evidence that he understands even the kinds of basic facts that people who don’t have dogs still know about dogs.
What the hell? Is he from Mars?
*
Look, until four years ago last week, I had never had a dog. Allergies as a kid, never at home as an adult, never thought myself mature enough to assume the responsibility.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 4