What would stop him from using that immense power to declare an imminent threat against an institution, a city, a state, the nation as a whole, and this time not merely tweet but act—and close borders, or detain critics, or arrest protesters, or suspend laws and liberties?
What would stop him?!
Who would stop him?!
His enablers?
His cabinet?
His supporters?
His political party?
His FBI director?
His conscience?
His news sources?
Nothing . . . would stop him.
Except—removal from office.
THAT SPEECH AGED WELL
Post date • THURSDAY, MARCH 9
I am old enough to remember the high-water mark of the Trump presidency.
Can you cast your memory back that far?
The speech?
The one to the joint session of Congress?
The one so measured, so majestic, so devoid of pants-pooping that it prompted a conservative television pundit to say, “I feel like tonight [he] became the president of the United States” . . . and it prompted a liberal television pundit to say, “He became president of the United States in that moment, period”?
Remember all the way back to that?
That was a week ago.
That was last Tuesday.
That speech has not aged well!
Tuesday: forty-eight words in:
“Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries . . . remind us that . . . we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”
Tuesday, same day:
Trump implied to a meeting of state attorneys general—according to the one from Pennsylvania—that such anti-Semitic attacks were false flags. Josh Shapiro quoted Trump as saying, “‘Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people—or to make others—look bad,’ and he used the word ‘reverse’ I would say two to three times in his comments.”
The next Monday? Another anti-Muslim travel ban.
Tuesday? “Dying industries will come roaring back to life. Heroic veterans will get the care they so desperately need.”
Tuesday.
Friday?
The Trump regime deported Clarissa Arredondo back to Mexico, more than two weeks after unmarked SUVs showed up at her home near San Diego on Valentine’s Day and captured her.
Ms. Arredondo is the mother-in-law of a heroic Navy veteran now working as a contractor in Afghanistan. And the other grandmother of that heroic veteran’s two toddlers is on active service with the Army, and she will now have to retire and become a veteran to take over the deported grandmother’s role helping raise the kids.
What made Ms. Arredondo so dangerous, so needing to be urgently thrown out of here? She may have once falsified paperwork to get her family a welfare check.
Tuesday: “We have cleared the way for the construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines—thereby creating tens of thousands of jobs—and I’ve issued a new directive that new American pipelines be made with American steel.”
Tuesday.
Thursday? Fox News: “The Keystone XL oil pipeline won’t use American steel in its construction . . .” Turns out Trump wanted you to think he meant the Keystone would use American steel when the truth was, his executive order is only for the next “new American pipelines,” because Republicans in the Senate voted down an amendment requiring American steel in the Keystone—an amendment proposed by Democrat Al Franken.
Tuesday: “We will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border. It will be started ahead of schedule . . .”
Tuesday.
Thursday?
Reuters discovers that Trump’s promise to use existing funds to “begin the construction” has a problem. The only existing funds the Trump regime has been able to find is $20 million.
Twenty million dollars will build you a Mexican wall that is . . . four miles long.
Tuesday: Trump says his government “will be guided by two core principles: Buy American, and hire American.”
Tuesday.
Also Tuesday?
Ivanka Trump tweets a photo of herself in the dress she wore to the speech. It is identified by experts as having been designed by a Frenchman, and having been manufactured in the United Kingdom.
Buy American, hire American.
Tuesday: “I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American victims. The office is called VOICE—Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media and silenced by special interests.”
Tuesday.
Wednesday? Countless writers and commentators note that before taking power in Germany, the Nazis published a feature called “Letter Box” in their official newspaper, which provided a voice to those who had been ignored by the media and silenced by special interests and had been the victims of crimes by Jews. Once in office, the Nazi government began publicly disseminating the details of crimes by Jews.
Tuesday: “We are blessed to be joined tonight by Carryn Owens, the widow of U.S. Navy Special Operator Senior Chief William ‘Ryan’ Owens. . . . Ryan is looking down right now, and he’s very happy because I think he just broke a record [for the length of an ovation].”
Even though it had been Trump who gave the order that sent Chief Owens to his death, in a raid the previous president would not approve, in a plan so controversial that Owens’s father has demanded a formal investigation, pundits—particularly on television—fell all over each other to praise Trump.
“I feel like tonight,” said Chris Wallace on Fox, “he became the president of the United States, and everyone is going to have to accept that fact.”
“That was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics, period,” said Van Jones—until that moment a liberal—on CNN.
“For people who have been hoping that maybe he would remain a divisive cartoon, which he often finds a way to do, they should begin to become a little bit worried tonight . . .
“He did something tonight that you cannot take away from. He became president of the United States in that moment, period.”
Tuesday.
Insight that would last a lunchtime.
Not a divisive cartoon. Became president. Have to accept that fact.
Saturday?
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
No. Not a divisive cartoon!
As I said: this speech hasn’t aged well.
Tuesday: “My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America.”
Tuesday.
Thursday?
Trump’s attorney general is forced to recuse himself from any investigations of the Trump presidential campaign’s interactions with Russia, because—at best—he personally failed to reveal his interactions with Russia while part of the campaign, at a meeting he got to by spending campaign money.
Tuesday: “We can only get there together. We are one people, with one destiny. We all bleed the same blood. We all salute the same flag. And we are all made by the same God.”
Tuesday.
Thursday?
A Facebook and Twitter storm about Jeff Sessions—and about the nearly 66 million people who voted for the Democratic candidate: “This whole narrative is a way of saving face for Democrats losing an election that everyone thought they were supposed to win. The Democrats are overplaying their hand. They lost the election,
and now they have lost their grip on reality.”
“We can only get there together. . . . We all salute the same flag . . . we are all made by the same God”—except you 66 million people who voted for Hillary.
Tuesday: “The time for small thinking is over. The time for trivial fights is behind us.”
Tuesday.
Saturday?
“Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t voluntarily leaving the Apprentice, he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me. Sad end to great show.”
The time for small thinking is over.
The man is not going to change.
The man is not going to improve.
The man is not going to be cured.
The man is not going to become presidential.
The man is not going to devote himself to anything except his own extraordinary, irrational, unquenchable, insatiable, unslakable, immeasurable, bottomless, endless, eternal need . . . to . . .
Keep Trump First! . . . and . . .
Make His Ego Great Again.
SEVEN YEARS
Post date • MONDAY, MARCH 13
To Donald Trump:
My father died seven years ago.
March 13, 2010.
He died after seven months in hospitals and six months in the surgical intensive care unit, and after a fight against death so extraordinary that it caused the chief of that unit to mistake him for a professional trained athlete, when in fact he hadn’t exercised since 1951, and when I told him about it, my dad laughed, even though there was a breathing tube down his throat.
He died with my sister and me having to make the decision to let him go, and he died with her holding his hand and me reading him his favorite James Thurber story and him—I swear—waiting until this very long story was over, and only then profoundly sighing and leaving us.
He died leaving me a hospital bill—for six months of twenty-four-hour-a-day surgical intensive care, another month in standard care, one four-hour operation, and thousands of procedures and scans and drugs and consultations—a bill, if I remember correctly, of approximately one thousand dollars. Most of that was for a television he had rented for a few days, early on. My father had a little private policy. And something he got for being in the Army. And government-issued insurance, Trump—a thing called Medicare. Our out-of-pocket costs: about five dollars a day.
He died after seven months in which we talked every day—as the debate raged around us, and as we could hear the practical impact on the lives and finances of the other patients and families in that hospital of what was then called health care reform or insurance reform, and which shortly after my dad’s death became known as the Affordable Care Act and, less officially, Obamacare.
*
Obamacare, which, Trump, you idiot—and that idiot Ryan, and this liar Price, and that liar Chaffetz—now want to undo.
Because, confronted with an independent calculation that repeal by your Republicans will end insurance for at least fifteen million Americans, and asked how many will lose their coverage under his plan, this sniveling little man Ryan who sucks up to you says, “I can’t answer that question. It’s up to people . . . People are going to do what they want to do with their lives, because we believe in individual freedom in this country.”
Individual freedom—like the freedom to die because you don’t have health insurance. The way 122 Americans died every day because they didn’t have health insurance before the ACA was passed as my father was dying.
Individual freedom, Trump.
Go to hell, Paul Ryan.
*
Individual freedom, Trump.
Like freedom from taxes for the rich.
The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan arm that crunches numbers for Congress, calculated that the Republican gutting of health care that you are leading, Trump, will in the next decade reduce the taxes of those making a million or more a year . . . by $157 billion.
Individual freedom, Trump, or, as this condescending jackass Chaffetz put it, “Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice. So rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care.”
The price of an iPhone would not cover those few days my father rented a hospital television, never mind something like cancer drugs or surgery, or the price you are billed to have your father officially declared dead.
Go to hell, Jason Chaffetz.
*
Individual freedom, Trump.
Like the freedom to end the insurance of the 700,000 new Medicaid recipients added just since the reform of 2010, just in Ohio, per the Republican governor there, John Kasich. Kick them off and instead throw them an insurance tax credit of $3,000, and Kasich asks rhetorically, “What kind of insurance are you going to buy for three thousand dollars?”
That’s individual freedom, or, as this liar and con man your health and human services secretary, Tom Price, put it, “I firmly believe that nobody will be worse off financially.” And of course he’s right—if by “nobody” he means insurance companies and Republican donors and the wealthy.
Go to hell, Tom Price.
*
Individual freedom, Trump, like your budget director insisting that you are focused on health care, not insurance coverage, as if, when they hand you your bill at your hospital or your doctor’s office, you could hand it back and say, “I’m focused on care, not on paying you.”
Trump—you said, on September 27, 2015: “Everybody’s got to be covered . . . I am going to take care of everybody.”
Trump—you said, on February 19, 2016: “You’re going to end up with great health care for a fraction of the price. And that’s going to take place immediately.”
Trump—you said, on January 15 of this year: “We’re going to have insurance for everybody.”
Only now your budget director says—because you don’t have the courage to say it yourself—that “insurance for everybody” means health care, not insurance, which means—nothing. Which means you’re on your own.
Go to hell, Trump.
*
Months before my dad died seven years ago, the likelihood that he would became tangible to me. And in that hospital, every day, twice a day, as we talked about that and we talked about health care reform, it began to dawn on me what we were all really debating.
I wrote much of what follows in October 2009.
It’s true again, Trump.
Since you evidently think you’re immortal, have a sane grown-up explain to you what this next part means.
*
This, ultimately, is about . . . death.
About preventing it, about fighting it, about resisting it, about grabbing hold of everything and anything to forestall it and postpone it even though we know that the force will overcome us all—always will, always has.
Health care is at its core about improving the odds of life in its struggle against death, of extending that game which we will all lose, each and every one of us, onto eternity, extending it another year or month or second. This is the primary directive of life, the essence of our will as human beings . . .
And when we go to a doctor’s office or a hospital or storefront clinic in a ghetto, we are expressing this fundamental cry of humanity: I want to live. I want my child to live. I want my wife to live. I want my father to live. I want my neighbor to live. I want that stranger I do not know and never will know to live . . .
And there is the essence of what this is. What on the eternal list of priorities precedes health? What more obvious role could government have than the defense of the life of each citizen?
We cannot stop every germ that seeks to harm us any more than we can stop every person who seeks to harm us, but we can try, damn it. And government’s essential role in that eff
ort—facilitate it, reduce its costs, broaden its availability, improve my health and yours—seems ultimately self-explanatory.
We want to live.
What is government for if not to help us do so?
*
I issue this warning to you, Trump.
Take these steps and you will inherit the wind.
Gut health care in this country so millionaires can save sixteen billion a year in taxes, and you will be killing American citizens.
And before we let you do this, Trump, we will defend ourselves.
Protests? Nonviolent resistance? Good.
A mass refusal to pay insurance premiums? Perhaps—risky.
A general strike? Yes.
Shut the country down, rather than let you kill people.
Health care, Trump, is about life and death.
And right now, you are on the side of death.
And we will not permit this.
RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA
Post date • TUESDAY, MARCH 14
“There’s a lot more shoes to drop from this centipede,” said John McCain about Trump and Russia, shortly after Trump got rid of the United States attorney in New York, as part of what might have been a political purge that Trump saw Sean Hannity suggest on cable, only this U.S. attorney wouldn’t resign, so Trump fired him in a Saturday massacre—you know, like Watergate—and then we were reminded that the guy he fired had prosecuted and put into prison a Russian spy who was based in New York, posing as a banker, and another Russian mobster who ran New York’s highest-stakes illegal poker game, usually in an apartment at Trump Tower, and then the guy he fired was banned from Russia by Vladimir Putin.
It’s not just that McCain’s analogy is apt. It’s as if there are no shoes on the Trump Human Centipede that aren’t about Russia.
*
Russia, Russia, Russia.
Trump claims his phones were tapped.
Then Kellyanne Conway emerges from wherever she was hiding to suggest that—never mind Trump’s crazy claim—there may have been wholesale surveillance of the Trump campaign, possibly including “microwaves that turn into cameras. We know that that is just a fact of modern life.” Microwaves, you say. Obama was spying on Trump, using microwave ovens, to find out about Russia, Russia, Russia.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 30