*
Fine.
I’ll give him a chance. I’ll believe what he said. I’ll take his word for it: the polling was rigged, the election was rigged, and he is not bound to honor the outcome of the vote.
Oh—and I’ll also take his word for it about the Electoral College.
Not his backfilling, cover-your-ass tweet from yesterday about its genius (nor its companion boast—proving that he will never get over being a president who lost the popular vote—that if there were no Electoral College, he would’ve simply won bigger).
No—his tweets from the night of November 6, 2012, when Big Brother Trump thought Barack Obama would win the Electoral College vote and lose the popular.
“He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!”
“The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one [sic]!”
“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!”
“Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us.”
“More votes equals a loss . . . revolution!”
“The election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”
“Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble . . . like never before.”
Those tweets the president-elect deleted, that night.
But one other one is still alive, on his account:
“The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”
“A disaster for a democracy . . .”
“Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice . . .”
“More votes equals a loss . . . revolution . . .”
So saith the Almighty Trump.
Whatever you wish, sir.
You asked for it.
PRETEND
Post date • WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16
When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me of a dream he had, again and again, starting in the late fifties. He was at his draftsman’s desk, looking out his office window in Union Square, in New York, watching a perfect spring day trotting toward sunset, hearing the sounds of life and humanity through the open window and perceiving with his artist’s eyes the balance of the contrasting colors in the vivid sky and the city more vivid still, and then noticing—out at the horizon, over the water . . . the mushroom cloud.
It was a nightmare, but one rooted horrifically in a reality of nuclear annihilation that got just a little bit worse every day, and which, as he noted, you then had to pretend wasn’t reality and you had to pretend wasn’t getting worse every day and you had to pretend wasn’t abnormal and you had to pretend wasn’t inhuman, and you had to pretend it wasn’t unacceptable—until you ended the day exhausted by the sheer amount of your life you spent pretending that it was just fine.
Better to find ways—small ones, symbolic ones; if possible, financial ones—to fight back. You’re spending just as much energy.
I was too young to share his nightmare.
And he is gone too many years to share mine.
But wise words stand the test of time. And his words were wise.
*
At the pussygrabber in chief’s victory party, a woman named Omarosa Manigault, who was briefly on television, said of people who didn’t vote for him:
“I would never judge anybody for exercising their right to and the freedom to choose who they want. But let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list.”
We have to pretend that isn’t abnormal.
Then the chief of the campaign is named the chief strategist in the White House, and he has a track record a mile long of antipathy to women and black people, and all of a sudden you realize Ms. Manigault, who is both, is herself pretending . . . that he isn’t abnormal and she isn’t a target.
And then we get half a dozen different answers about whether or not the victor in the presidential election is going to shatter all precedent by fulfilling his campaign boast and becoming personally involved in the prosecution of the loser—and all of a sudden the media is pretending that this isn’t abnormal.
And on Sunday, the president-elect—who lost the popular vote—finally speaks about the Clintons and says, “I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them. They’re, they’re good people”—as if the decision whether or not to prosecute somebody in this country is based on how the president personally feels about them.
And now we all have to pretend that this isn’t abnormal.
Then the outgoing minority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, actually doesn’t pretend, and says the election “has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America” and is being celebrated by white nationalists, Putin, and ISIS, “while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear.”
To which the campaign manager Kellyanne Conway replies:
“He should be very careful about characterizing somebody in a legal sense. He thinks he’s just being some kind of political pundit there, but I would say be very careful about the way you characterize it.”
And then Ms. Conway pretends she wasn’t referring to a lawsuit, even though she used the phrase “legal sense.” Which I guess, necessarily, means she was referring not to a lawsuit but to a prosecution, and once again we must pretend this isn’t abnormal—and the CNN headline actually reads, “Conway, Reid Trade Barbs over Trump,” as if criticism and threats against the First Amendment are equivalent—and the pretending escalates.
And it is reported that the transition team allegedly asked the White House how the children of this man could receive top-secret security clearance. The children who are supposed to be running the anything-but-blind business trust that we have to pretend is a blind trust . . . a trust for the man who we have to pretend did not spend the campaign accusing his opponent of mishandling classified information.
And then the radio conspiracy peddler Alex Jones announces that Trump has phoned to thank him and to promise to be on his show soon, and we have to pretend Alex Jones hasn’t claimed that the massacre at Sandy Hook was staged, and we have to pretend that he isn’t crazy, and we have to pretend that it’s not abnormal for a man elected president of the United States to even acknowledge that an Alex Jones exists, let alone to feed his machine of madness and brutality.
And then the cabinet names start falling and we have to pretend Giuliani isn’t an international political whore who has taken money from repressive elements everywhere from Qatar to El Salvador, and who’s now consulting for Uber.
*
But of course—they all have to pretend as well. Pretend that there aren’t still avenues open to us for economic blowback.
Giuliani? Uber? Stop using Uber.
Alex Jones? That creature is on a hundred radio stations. Google them. Call them. Identify their advertisers. Boycott them.
The ludicrous media equivalencies and the euphemisms that normalize hate and enable pretending? Don’t tweet. Don’t call the writer. Don’t call the editor. Call the president of news, or his boss at his corporation. I promise you, they always overreact.
Trump’s hidden tax returns and the first for-profit presidency? How many Trump businesses can you avoid? How many firms that applauded his election, like New Balance, can you bankrupt?
Just this week, the owners and residents of three New York apartment buildings got the name of the place changed. They are now 140 Riverside Boulevard, 160 Riverside Boulevard, and 180 Riverside Boulevard.
They were . . . Trump Place.
These are the kinds of protests against pretending that we can make—and the kind that will hit the ego-elect hardest.
That—and forever referring to the fact that he lost the popular vote.
*
And then we gear up for the biggest fight against pretending—of our lives.
That man elected by a minority of voters says he will immediately incarcerate or deport two to three million undocumented Americans, which is roughly the same number of people who live in Houston, Texas—which is roughly the same number of people who are already in all of the federal prisons and all the state prisons and all the county jails and all the city jails and all the ICE detention facilities and all the Navy brigs and all the Army stockades and all the military disciplinary barracks—all of them combined—which leaves no inference possible except that he somehow means to take two to three million people off the streets and keep them somewhere until they can be jailed or deported, and that we again have to pretend that this “somewhere”—for a population roughly the same size as all the prisoners in all the jails in this country right now—we have to pretend that this will not involve concentration camps.
*
But don’t worry.
He’s unifying the nation.
Kellyanne Conway said so.
Go back to pretending.
This isn’t getting worse every day.
This isn’t abnormal.
This isn’t inhuman.
This isn’t unacceptable.
ALIEN AND SEDITION
Post date • TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22
Somewhere, Benjamin Franklin Bache and Matthew Lyon are saying, “I told you so.”
These men went to jail, in this country, under our Constitution, for . . . criticism.
Bache was in new media.
Lyon was a congressman—from the party that wasn’t in power.
They were guilty of criticizing . . . the president, and other media that defended the president.
And Mr. Bache and Congressman Lyon would remind us that we have previously completely and nearly fatally screwed up how to handle resistance.
And they would remind us that the right to resist has been destroyed—and the country nearly destroyed with it—by better men than Donald John Trump.
The man behind the imprisonment of Bache and Lyon and twenty or so other publishers and one ordinary citizen who made a joke in public . . . the man Bache and Lyon opposed . . . was President . . . John Adams.
That John Adams.
Founding Father John Adams.
Even a man with the vision of Adams could not see that demonizing dissent and criminalizing resistance could, by themselves, end democracy. The stains upon the Adams legacy were called the Alien and Sedition Acts.
And they threatened jail for anyone daring to “write, print, utter or publish . . . any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government.
And fifty-nine days before his inauguration, Trump and his mob are already clearly laying the groundwork for new criminalization of your right to publicly criticize that which will begin—on day one—as the worst presidential administration in our history.
Much has been made of the distraction Trump provided by tweeting petulantly about how the cast of Hamilton addressed the vice president–elect when he attended their performance last Friday.
The criticism of the coverage paid is valid.
The antimissile crews call it “chaff”—spraying strips of metal in the air to screw up radar.
We spent a day talking about Moron Trump’s moronic tweets instead of his confession-in-everything-but-name to fraud accusations in the Trump University lawsuit.
We spent another day talking about Hamilton and Pence instead of his totally mixing the presidency with his business.
We spent another day talking about disrespect and respect instead of the anti-Semites, racists, and fascists Trump is appointing to his White House—the Bannons and Giulianis and Sessionses and their ilk, who are so scummy it led the great John Cleese to conclude that it looks as if Trump “is assembling the crew for a pirate ship.”
A distraction?
Yes.
But that doesn’t mean his seeming disbelief at the evidence that he is hated is not real.
Bluntly: if he or Pence cannot handle booing, they should get new jobs in a new country, because whether they hear it or not, they will be booed every day for the rest of their lives.
And, more important, that also doesn’t mean he isn’t intending to create a twenty-first-century version of the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams.
A president elected by a minority of the voters has again made threats against those who criticize him or his administration-to-be . . . has again made threats against the First Amendment.
Taken out of the context of the antidemocratic anti-criticism snowball already beginning its descent, the takeaways from his tweets—“This should not happen!” and “Apologize!”—would seem merely like more petulance from the man-baby-elect, and the complaint about lack of respect, merely more amazing self-unawareness from President Pussygrabber.
But those tweets did not come in a vacuum.
Before the election, Trump threatened to loosen up libel laws, singled out reporters by name to encourage abuse from the crowds at his rallies, and promised to sue The New York Times, while an adviser criticized a television host and tweeted, “Watch what happens to her after this election is over.”
Within days of its being over, a performer on one of his television shows said of those who hadn’t voted for him, “Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list.” Responding to criticism from Senate Minority Leader Reid, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said he “should be very careful about characterizing somebody in a legal sense.”
In a legal sense.
Nine days after the election, a federal judge in San Antonio, swearing in hundreds of new American citizens, told them that Donald Trump “will be your president, and if you do not like that, you need to go to another country.”
He then also lashed out against pro athletes who have not stood for the national anthem, then claimed his remarks were “not political.”
If you would like to resist by trying to get the judge ousted, his name is John Primomo, and he can be removed by the U.S. district court.
Or perhaps at least they can send him the copy of the Constitution he appears to lack.
*
But of course, professional demonizing of dissent requires blaming the victim. Campaign manager Conway said that dissent, anger, resistance—your resistance—is the fault of . . . the media.
“Most of the media did the world a disservice by not preparing them for the possibility of Donald Trump winning the presidency. It simply was not part of the conversation.”
So—fascism isn’t the problem.
American media’s reluctance to soften up the public to accept fascism is the problem!
Which brings us back to the Alien and Sedition Acts and a state senator in Washington named Doug Ericksen, a loud Trump sycophant—another one of the Banana Republicans whom our friends publisher Benjamin Franklin Bache and Congressman Matthew Lyon would recognize immediately.
“I respect the right to protest, but when it endangers people’s lives and property, it goes too far. Fear, intimidation, and vandalism are not a legitimate form of political expression. Those who employ it must be called to account.”
Senator Ericksen says he will propose a bill next year that would criminalize protesting—creating a new Class C felony, punishable by fines of up to $10,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years—crimes to be called . . . “economic terrorism.”
“We are not just going after the people who commit these acts of terrorism,” he continues—still digging—“we are going after the people who fund them. Wealthy donors should not feel safe in disrupting middle-class jobs.”
The “wealthy donors” to whom Senator Ericksen refers would also be liable for any economic loss caused by the peaceful assemblies supposedly protected by the First Amen
dment—or, as Ericksen wants to call those assemblies, “economic terrorism.”
*
So. Trump’s Twitter tantrum about how Pence was treated at a play about a vice president so incapable of handling criticism that he shot the former secretary of the treasury may have been a diversion and may have seemed trivial compared with the other nightmares with which we wake each morning.
But do not mistake them. They are preface to new Alien and Sedition Acts—legal or merely cultural—to new demonizing of dissent, to, at best, chilling measures against your right . . . to resist.
And how do you resist laws designed to criminalize resistance?
Happily, there is a method tried and true, and you should prepare for it. It worked in South Africa for Gandhi in 1908, when they tried to create an Indian registry; worked for Gandhi again decades later in India; worked for the civil rights leaders here in the 1960s.
If the laws come to pass, do not seek to evade them; seek to break them—have them broken so often, by so many people, that the jails cannot hold all of us, and the infrastructure collapses, with the government begging for our help. Moreover, if resistance is denied us, the act of being arrested for resistance becomes resistance.
Because we are not going back to the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Matthew Lyon and Benjamin Franklin Bache—and, yes, he was Benjamin Franklin’s favorite grandson—are alive in our history. Even Adams and those who supported them had an excuse—the country was barely twenty years old.
Trump and his mob have no excuse, no moral ground, no precedent, no right, and no chance of success.
Come after our resistance, Trump—legally or culturally or both—and America will kick your ass.
TWENTY-FIVE, SECTION 4
Post date • TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22
And what, this worst Thanksgiving week since 2001, do we have to give thanks for?
One thing.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment, section 4.
History pays little attention to this, but the first time an American president died in office—William Henry Harrison, just thirty-one days after his inauguration in 1841—nobody was sure what was supposed to happen next.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 14