*
February 5:
Finishes two-day-long siege of Twitter attacks against Washington State judge who ruled against the Muslim ban, writing of possible terrorism, “If something happens blame him and court system.”
Is reported to have signed the executive order placing Steve Bannon on the National Security Council . . . without fully reading it.
Super Bowl interviewer presses him for data to support illegal voting claims, and he replies, “Forget all that” and implies that registration rolls prove him right—suggesting he doesn’t realize that not everybody who is registered votes.
*
February 6:
After one poll showing his first approval rating at a record-low 44 percent and a CBS poll showing his Muslim ban opposed by 51 to 45 percent and a CNN poll showing it rejected 53–47, tweets, right out of George Orwell: “Any negative polls are fake news.”
*
In any other context, business, or country, Trump’s supporters would now be organizing his removal from authority, even if it were only for his own good.
Get. Him. Out. Of. Here.
FOR TRUMP SUPPORTERS: MEET FATEMAH
Post date • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8
If you support Donald Trump, or his ban on travel from seven countries, let me ask you a few questions.
I’m not going to yell, not going to attack the policy.
Just . . . a couple of questions.
*
Where is this beautiful little one from?
What is her nationality?
Where does her extended family live?
What kind of threat could she be to you?
And . . . what would you do to save her life?
What does your religion tell you to do about her? What do your instincts tell you? What do your experiences with children of your own tell you? Your experiences of loss?
Look at her again.
If, when you die, no matter your religion, your idea of an afterlife is even remotely accurate, what happens if you are judged by what you did, or what you would have done, about her?
Because she, of course, is . . .
All the children in the world.
She, of course, is . . .
All the innocence in the world.
She has a name, obviously.
She is Fatemah, and she’s four months old, and all three of her grandparents live . . . in Portland, Oregon.
And all three of them are citizens of the United States of America.
And she has a heart condition—her heart is twisted; there are two holes in it—and she needs at least one operation.
And she and her parents live . . . in Iran.
But they were on their way to Portland because open-heart surgery on an infant is always a mortal risk, and, frankly, her mother and father—and her grandparents, the American citizens, the proud American grandparents—they all agreed: our country is simply better at open-heart surgery for kids than is Iran.
They had filled out every document. They are not indigent; they asked no financial help. The family here—the three American-citizen grandparents and her American-citizen uncle, who is actually named Uncle Sam—they are paying. It’s not a transplant; helping Fatemah does not mean . . . not helping an American-born child.
*
The family was leaving Iran to go to the Oregon Health and Science University Hospital, in Portland—just as the Trump ban was being announced.
That was when the U.S. embassy in Dubai canceled their visa appointment.
Because the president doesn’t want to let anybody in from Iran.
Not even if their grandparents are citizens.
Not even if they need surgery to live.
Not even if they’re four months old.
*
Her uncle says they told him to apply again in ninety days.
Her uncle says he’s not sure Fatemah has that long.
*
The 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt—not on Trump’s list of countries from which travel was banned.
The Boston Marathon bombers were from Kyrgyzstan—not on the list.
The man with the knife at the Carrousel du Louvre mall in Paris last week was from Egypt—not on the list.
The San Bernardino shooters were from Pakistan and Chicago. The Fort Hood shooter was from Virginia. The Orlando nightclub shooter was from New Hyde Park, New York.
Not on the list.
Fatemah Reshad—she was on the list.
*
Is this who you want us to be?
This decision was made in your name.
This. Decision.
To hell with you, Fatemah, you’re from Iran. Try again in three months. If you’re still alive.
Do we have to be cruel?
Is that what you want?
Whatever your fears or your concerns, whatever you think of this man Trump—Fatemah was banned . . . in your name.
And mine.
Luckily for you and me, a week into this nightmare, politicians swarmed this case and Fatemah and her family now reportedly have a waiver to come here to save her life.
But how many other Fatemahs are there, among the sixty thousand or more who had their visas revoked?
*
When you meet your maker and you say how pro-life you were, and how patriotic, and a faithful member of your church . . .
What are you going to say when he asks, “Great—but what did you do about Fatemah? And all the other Fatemahs?”
THE ARREST OF MICHAEL THOMAS FLYNN
Post date • MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13
I call for the immediate indictment of Michael Thomas Flynn on charges of—and his immediate arrest on suspicion of—violations of the Logan Act.
I call for his immediate suspension, resignation, or dismissal as the national security adviser to the president of the United States of America.
I call for the immediate investigation of whether his relationship with the Russian government is limited to activities covered by the Logan Act, or if he is acting as an agent of the Russian government or—as in the past—acting as a paid employee of companies affiliated with the Russian government.
I call for Senators Graham and McCain—and any remaining patriotic Americans on the Republican senatorial roster (if any there yet be)—to fulfill their promise of weeks ago to immediately conduct a full, open, and limitless investigation into:
Russian hacking during the election
Russian coordination with the Republican presidential campaign during the election
the contact between the Russians and the transition team between the time of the election and the inauguration
And, last, I not only call for the grand jury to indict Flynn for his alleged violations of the Logan Act, but also for that grand jury to name at least one unindicted co-conspirator who may have been aware of—and may have colluded with—Flynn’s improper conduct involving the Russian government.
I identify that potential unindicted co-conspirator as Donald John Trump.
The specific crimes included in the Russian hacking of and meddling in our presidential campaign of 2015–16, and in the Russian interference in our presidential election of 2016, are as yet unclear.
But in a series of events last week that seemed like mere individual explosions during a blitzkrieg of Trumpian evil . . . the outline of what has been done by Michael Flynn—who at this moment is still the man officially charged with advising a reckless and mentally unstable president on all national security issues—that outline became substantially more clear.
Flynn, lieutenant general, United States Army, retired.
On Thursday, December 10, 2015, in Moscow, he was photographed next to the Russian dictator, Puti
n, at a dinner for the Russian RT television network, by whom Flynn was paid.
Later he was seen leading a standing ovation for Putin at the same event.
On Wednesday, February 8, Mr. Flynn again denied that he had privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on December 28 and/or December 29, while Barack Obama was still president.
If proven, such discussions by Flynn would be illegal interference in stated American foreign policy under federal statutes referred to as the Logan Act.
If proven, such discussions would also indicate that Flynn misled—or lied to—Press Secretary Spicer and Vice President Pence, both of whom issued repeated public denials on Flynn’s behalf.
On Thursday, February 9, Flynn’s spokesman changed the general’s story. Flynn now “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”
On the same day, The Washington Post quoted nine current and former holders of senior positions in U.S. agencies with access to U.S. intelligence about the Flynn-Kislyak conversations, including transcripts of their phone calls.
According to the paper, all nine insisted, “Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit.” Two sources say, further, that the intelligence indicates Flynn urged Russia to delay any response to the sanctions until Trump was sworn in and could change them.
On Friday, December 30, 2016—after the Flynn-Kislyak conversations—the Russian dictator, Putin, said he would delay any response to the Obama sanctions.
Also on Friday, December 30, 2016, the then president-elect tweeted, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”
*
The likelihood that Trump’s message to Putin, Trump’s close relationship with Flynn, and Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak are all coincidental—reportedly after and before the election—is so small as to be almost laughable.
And if they are not coincidental, Trump had guilty knowledge of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak, and if Flynn can be indicted for violations of the Logan Act, Trump’s awareness of this crime—and his cover-up of it—elevates him to the status of possible unindicted co-conspirator, with other implications relative to presidential impeachment.
On April 27, 2016, then candidate Trump gave his first major foreign policy speech. Seated in the front row of the audience at the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, D.C. . . . Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
As of 5:30 p.m. on Friday, February 10, a White House official quoted by the Associated Press says Trump has “full confidence” in Michael Thomas Flynn.
The interference by a foreign power in our government, in our country, is intolerable.
Collusion between a foreign power and representatives of our government—or representatives of a government yet to be—risks our independent existence as a nation, and renders those who commit such collusion—if not necessarily by legal definition, then in their hearts—traitors.
They will be exposed, rooted out of any position of responsibility in this country, and punished to the fullest extent of the law.
And that begins with the immediate indictment and arrest of Michael Thomas Flynn and the identification as unindicted co-conspirator of Donald John Trump.
GUADALUPE GARCÍA DE RAYOS
Post date • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15
First they came for the undocumented Americans . . . and I did not speak out because I was not . . .
You knew that original speech, from Pastor Martin Niemöller in 1946 . . .
And you knew you heard the first few letters of the first word of the confession of eternal guilt and regret as they began to echo over the last long weekend: In Southern California. In Atlanta. In Austin.
And you knew that ICE—Immigrations and Customs Enforcement—may have said there was nothing unusual about the round-ups.
And yet you knew that the barbarian in chief couldn’t resist boasting about the truth—and making liars out of his gangs of deportation storm troopers.
And you knew that he would say something like:
“The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise. Gang members, drug dealers & others are being removed!”
Others.
Like the mother of two Americans teenagers who has been living here since she was sixteen and who checked in annually for nine years with her immigration officer—just as they told her to—each time receiving work authorization. Until last week, when she checked in and they seized her and drove her to Mexico.
Gang member?
Drug dealer?
No. She was part of the cleaning crew at an Arizona water park.
Her name is Guadalupe García de Rayos.
And Donald Trump is proud of having removed the danger she represented to this country.
Because Donald Trump is a cowardly, hate-filled bully, who was elected on a promise to scapegoat people with dark skin.
Because whether from disease or abuse or—as Clarence Darrow said of the murderers Leopold and Loeb—because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man, something slipped . . .
For whatever reason . . .
Donald Trump thinks expelling people who will uncomplainingly do the jobs that people who were born here will not do is somehow to his credit, and is somehow to this nation’s benefit—when in fact the whole history of this country is predicated on people who came here, like Friedrich Trump and Friedrich Olbermann, and uncomplainingly did the jobs that people who were born here would not do, in the hopes that their children or grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren might flourish in this nation of bounty and goodness.
Instead, we have this Trump adviser Stephen Miller, the one with the dead eyes, shifting side to side as if the eyes themselves were revolting against his racism and deception, insisting on television that “before a job is given to a foreign national, that job is offered first to an American worker.”
Because they’re going to be overwhelmed at that Arizona water park with American workers who want the job—for minimum wage, or less—of cleaning the shit from the toilet bowls.
And again, on behalf of Friedrich Trump and Friedrich Olbermann, I apologize.
To Guadalupe García de Rayos.
And her family.
And the world.
*
And I also have to apologize to Trump’s supporters, so filled with misdirected rage about the failures in their own lives that they have never considered what happens to them if all the people who do all those jobs suddenly disappear.
Step back from Niemöller’s lament for a moment and table the hatred and the racism and the scapegoating and the terror by night and remember, Trump supporters, who is now expected to do Guadalupe García de Rayos’s job at the water park, or somebody else’s job . . . in the kitchen, or yet another’s job . . . in the crop fields on the farms.
You are.
Or your son.
Or the ex–factory worker who isn’t getting his factory job back no matter what Trump promised him, because there’s nobody, anywhere, who will buy the product the factory produces—not at those prices.
Take the emotion out of it—take the rightness and the wrongness out of this un-American spectacle, this Salem witch trial of 2017—and ask yourself what happens to the food on your table when the people who harvest it . . . aren’t here anymore, because you decided they didn’t belong here anymore.
That food rots in the field.
See, the thing is, this “throw out the illegals” purge has been done here before. In America. Recently. And the results were disastrous.
In 2011, the state of Georgia passed a bill called HB 87. The proud state representative from Peachtree City, Matt Ramsey, a coauthor, said at the time that the bill would giv
e the police the right to demand immigration documents from anybody detained for any reason. It would also punish those who hired or harbored undocumented Americans. “Our goal,” said Representative Ramsey, “is to eliminate incentives for illegal aliens to cross into our state.”
And how well it all worked.
An estimated 425,000 undocumented Americans were employed in Georgia in 2010, but by the harvest of 2011 at least 40 percent of them . . . were gone.
The Georgia-born unemployed whose jobs those “illegals” had taken?
They not only wanted no part of the backbreaking labor, but those few who tried it were also no good at it.
Forty percent of the men and women who actually knew how to work the farms of Georgia and survive on minimal incomes suddenly vanished. And as Representative Matt Ramsey and the other racists cheered, an estimated $140 million worth of Georgia produce . . . rotted . . . in . . . the . . . fields.
By 2012, as farmers planted less due to the sudden labor scarcity, the state was forced to find new farmworkers.
Prisoners.
They bused in prisoners.
Georgia’s agricultural economy still hasn’t fully recovered.
Oh, and he’s now former Representative Matt Ramsey.
*
So if you are so lacking in human soul that what this madman bigot Trump has just begun to roll out doesn’t sear your flesh when you embrace it—forget the ethics for a while and think, instead, of what it will do to your wallet when the ticket to the water park doubles because Guadalupe isn’t there to clean it for you, and the price of the meal at the fancy restaurant or the fast-food shack triples because her cousin isn’t there to cook it for you, and the price of the food you buy at the supermarket quadruples because none of them are there to pick it for you.
You don’t have to have the heart of Pastor Niemöller to have the regret of Pastor Niemöller.
In fact, you don’t have to have a heart at all.
Just a wallet.
First they came for the undocumented Americans . . . and I did not speak out because I wasn’t undocumented. And I didn’t realize that without them . . . it would cost too much for me to feed my own family.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 26