And we are now relocating judges to the concentration camps, with instructions to speed it up. What are we doing? What are we doing?
Exactly what we are doing has been expressed poignantly a thousand times through history, but never more so than by a thirty-six-year-old man who faced expulsion from the country he had called home for half his life but whose government now insisted he was illegal. He was not a professional writer, and the plea he made to the prince of his home region was not written in English. A historian found it last autumn, 111 years after it was written. The translation is by Austen Hinkley of Harper’s Magazine, and I have made minor edits to the text for simplicity and clarity and to remove the fluffy flattery toward that royal prince.
It is painful. But in its own way, it is also beautiful. And it should be heard by everyone in this country—as long as this purge goes on in our name.
My parents were honest, plain, pious vineyard workers. They strictly held me to everything good—to diligence and piety, to regular attendance in school and church, to absolute obedience toward the high authority.
After my confirmation, in 1882, I apprenticed to become a barber. I emigrated in 1885, in my sixteenth year. In America I carried on my business with diligence, discretion, and prudence. God’s blessing was with me, and I became rich. I obtained American citizenship in 1892. In 1902 I met my current wife. Sadly, she could not tolerate the climate in New York, and I went with my dear family back [home].
The town was glad to have received a capable and productive citizen. My old mother was happy to see her son, her dear daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter around her; she knows now that I will take care of her in her old age.
But we were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the . . . Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence . . . We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.
Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree—not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a . . . citizen again.
In this urgent situation I have no other recourse than . . . the most humble request that the highest of all will himself in mercy deign to allow the applicant to stay.
It is signed: “Your most humble and obedient, Friedrich Trump.” Trump’s grandfather. He was, in his native Bavaria, deemed “illegal”—and rounded up, and deported, and sent back to New York with his pregnant wife, Elizabeth, where, literally within months, she gave birth to Donald Trump’s father, Fred.
From the grave, Friedrich, Elizabeth, and Fred Trump, and Friedrich Olbermann and millions of deportees and exiles and refugees and millions more who had nowhere to turn but here, are asking us: What are we doing? And they are asking Donald Trump: What are you doing?
THE ONE HUNDRED DAYS ARE REALLY JUST SIXTY
Post date • FRIDAY, APRIL 28
As we hit the hundred-day benchmark of the Trump “presidency,” let’s review his accomplishments. Not by our standards—not by human standards—just by the stuff he promised to do for those greedy, hateful, and/or naive people who voted for him. Let’s list all he’s done—for them.
(Author’s note: Forty seconds of silence follow.)
Yep.
In “the first hundred days”—he’s gotten nothing done for them. With a Republican House and a Republican Senate and a Russian election in “the first hundred days”—he’s gotten nothing done. With the great nationwide—worldwide—liberating effects of the populist wave to throw the baby out with the bathwater . . . in “the first hundred days”—he’s gotten nothing done. With one television network dedicated to lying on his behalf, to deliberately falsifying reality to make it fit his addled mind as he sits in a bathrobe watching it, with other networks wasting live coverage on his public speeches—his garbled, nonsensical stream of semi-consciousness—as if they were actually news in “the first hundred days,” he’s gotten nothing done.
This truth—utter impotence—is, of course, his greatest fear.
He confessed it, on Twitter, last Friday: “No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!” You don’t need to be a psychoanalyst to decode the sense of failure in that, though it helps to remember the context of that phrase “the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days.”
Who set the ridiculous standard of the first hundred days?
He did.
Here is candidate Trump’s Contract with the American Voter, his “100-day action plan to Make America Great Again.” Contract—his word. Just sign here, like you were enrolling in Trump University. There’s lots of LOL-worthy failure on the first page. Column one ends with “THIRD, I will direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator.”
“Why would I call China a currency manipulator,” he asked on Twitter, “when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” Well, because you put it in the contract that you would—in the first hundred days. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. (By the way, for the uninformed, you’ve just gotten a taste of doing business with Trump: “But it’s in the contract!” “So? Sue me.”)
The second column ends with “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. . . .” Yeah—how’s that going for you, Sparky?
What’s funny is, the thing he boasted about in that desperate tweet? “It has been a lot (including S.C.).” The “S.C.” part, of course, is the confirmation of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Wow. A Republican president got a Republican Senate to approve a Republican nominee because the Republican majority leader is such a craven turtle that he destroyed two pillars of the democracy. Getting that new nominee confirmed? That isn’t even in the Trump contract! Only: “begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Scalia . . .”
As I said, there are some good laughs on this front page of yet another worthless Trump contract, about all the things he guaranteed he would do during his “ridiculous standard of the first 100 days”—that he’s just outright failed at.
But it’s the back page where the fun really begins. Here’s all the legislation he was going to, at minimum, get introduced into Congress: A bill to create 25 million new jobs. Nope. A bill to punish sending jobs out of the country. Nope. A bill to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure. Nope. A bill to give parents total choice on schooling, even religious schooling, presumably at government expense. Nope. A bill to repeal Obamacare. And how’s that going for you, Sparky?
Why, when I think of him threatening to defund Obamacare unless Democrats support the border wall—why do I get an image of Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles holding a gun to his own head and saying, “Hold it! The next man that makes a move, the . . .”
Moving on. A childcare and eldercare act that hasn’t been written. A bill to fund that wall that not one congressman or senator from the states where the wall would be has said he’ll support. An anti-gang bill. A bill preventing international cyberattack. (Yeah, kinda “swing and a miss” right there.) And finally, the “Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act. Enacts new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Presumably, that was to be commemorated by a series of “Ivanka Trump Signature Brand Drain the Swamp Formal Wear and Accessories,” manufactured in China and available exclusively at the “Spa by Ivanka Trump,” at Trump Old Post Office Hotel for Wayward Diplomats, Washington, D.C., 20004.
He’s. Gotten. Nothing. Done.
And remember—nobody, nobody said to him, “You have to do this in the first hundred days or you’ll be a failure.” He said that! So what do you do when the homework has to be handed in, in the morning, and you haven’t ev
en found your textbooks yet?
You claim there was no such homework: “I think the hundred days is, you know, it’s an artificial barrier. It’s not very meaningful. . . . Somebody, yeah, somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan.”
You put it out!
The somebody with the concept of a hundred-day plan was you!
That’s your name, moron—moron! T-R-U-M-P, moron!
So what do you do when your denial that there was homework fails utterly? You claim the teacher got the due date wrong! “The hundred days is just an artificial barrier. The press keeps talking about the hundred days . . .”
“I’ve only been working on the health care, you know, I had to get like a little bit of grounding, right? Health care started after day thirty, so I’ve been working on health care for sixty days . . . we’re very close.”
See, this isn’t really one hundred days.
This is only sixty days.
Who you gonna believe?
Me? Or your lying calendar?
*
If ever you needed additional confirmation that this man’s brain does not work, there it is.
At the hundred-day mark that was so important to him that he wrote up a phony contract predicated on it, he is such a failure that he is blaming the hundred days on the media, and actually claiming that it isn’t really a hundred days anyway. “No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!”
His greatest fear. So let’s help him celebrate the hundred-day mark. He doesn’t desperately search Twitter for compliments as much as he used to—but it’s clear he still does it once in a while. Let’s flood it with tweets congratulating him on having completely failed at everything in the first hundred days—including counting to a hundred days. Let’s have him, figuratively, wading knee-deep in tweets at the White House. And don’t forget! Since he claims this isn’t really a hundred days, but only sixty—we get to flood Twitter again and congratulate him on even more failure on the “Hundred-Day Mark in Alternative-Facts Land,” which I calculate to be Thursday, June 8.
Mark your calendars.
Unless by then he’s ordered that we change all the calendars. Which would make that date Trumpday, the third of Trumpvember.
Chapter 10
MAY 2017
TRUMP’S PLAN: SUE DISSENTERS
Post date • MONDAY, MAY 1
In the span of one weekend, a man who usurped the office of the president of the United States with the assistance of this nation’s most powerful and venomous enemy . . . has himself attacked the structure of our Senate and our House of Representatives because their rules are archaic and they inconvenience him; has himself dismissed the two-party system because he believes it is “obstructionist”; has himself attacked the constitutionally protected freedom of the press because the media has repeatedly caught him lying; has himself let his chief of staff confirm that he may try to eradicate those freedoms of speech and yours.
In sum, this man has himself so endangered the freedoms and the liberties of this country that if anyone does not understand that they and you and I and every individual in this country, and everything we love, and everything for which every American soldier has ever fought, all of it, is under attack, right now, by this crypto-fascist Trump—if they do not see that their freedoms hang by a thread, they are sheep headed to the slaughter—or collaborators leading the rest of us there—
For the sake of Trump.
“‘The failing New York Times has disgraced the media world,’” Jon Karl of ABC said, reading Trump’s tweet from March 30. “‘Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?’” To Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, Mr. Karl continued, “That would require, as I understand it, a constitutional amendment. Is he really going to pursue that? Is that something he wants to pursue?”
And Priebus answered, “I think it’s something that we’ve looked at. And how that gets executed or whether that goes anywhere is a different story. But when you have articles out there that have no basis or fact and we’re sitting here on 24/7 cable companies writing stories about constant contacts with Russia and all these other matters that have no basis at all . . .”
Here Mr. Karl interrupted, to refocus Priebus on whether or not Trump should be able to sue The New York Times. Priebus replied: “And I already answered the question. I said this is something that is being looked at.”
Wrong goddamned answer. The correct answer is that freedom of speech is the purpose of the United States of America. And every time this country’s government has tried to alter that fact, or has ignored it in the slightest, it has met with disaster. The correct answer is that constitutional change to limit free speech would not just be a step on a slippery slope, but would be putting the entire nation in an eighteen-wheeler and driving it full-speed down that slippery slope. The correct answer is never. Never!
Do not be sidetracked by Priebus’s milquetoast disclaimer about “whether that goes anywhere.” Do not be reassured that, at its worst, this so-called government would only attack the news media. Do not “settle down” because a constitutional amendment is the longest of long shots; this is about the threat, the chilling effect, as much as the execution. Priebus started by saying, “It’s something that we’ve looked at,” and then upgraded the threat to the present tense by saying, “This is something that is being looked at.”
For the sake of Trump.
If—as Trump first suggested more than fourteen months ago—“We’re going to open up those libel laws”—it would not be The New York Times or ABC News that would be the victims; it would be you. The New York Times and ABC News and the like could, even in those nightmare scenarios, be able to defend themselves legally—at least for a time.
Would you?
If the libel laws were “opened up”—if writing or publishing a story the government found was merely inaccurate now subjected the writer or publisher to a libel lawsuit, with financial damages—or worse—exactly who would be a writer or a publisher? Would writing a blog post be writing or publishing? Would sending a tweet be writing or publishing? Would speaking at a protest be writing or publishing? Armed with changed libel laws, Trump’s target would be you. What he would stop would not be a newspaper article or a cable news story that his supporters would never read, nor see, nor believe even if they were forced to do so. What he would stop would be dissent. What he would create—what his attacks on the media on Twitter, and at that white nationalist circle jerk in Pennsylvania Saturday night; what that little rat Priebus was getting at—was invoking fear inside you, a hesitation before you protested or spoke out or wrote or tweeted or posted a comment. That moment in which you ask yourself, “Is this going to get me sued?”
It has worked for Trump all his life. Family members, ex-wives, business contacts, customers, the suckers of Trump University. Lawsuit after lawsuit. The blight of financial ruin if you violated the nondisclosure clause. That is how Trump has gotten away with nearly every crooked deal and every broken contract and every threat to the middle wife that nobody talks about anymore, because if she says anything, she and her Trump child get cut off or sued. That’s what Trump and his minions like Priebus want for America.
Before you criticize—even if every fact is on your side—they want an America in which a voice inside your head screams: Remember that the government could sue you for libel, and keep you in court, with lawyers, for years, indefinitely—and even if you prevailed, the government could ruin your life, erase your savings, destroy your family, and that’s if you win.
And as you envision that nightmare, something else not to be missed in the snarling little throwaway comment by Trump’s toady Mr. Priebus: what was the first example he gave, of what kind of free speech needs to be erased? You know, for the sake of Trump?
Which topic just happened
to come up when phrases like “change libel laws” and “constitutional amendment” were invoked? The first story to which the Trump brand of fascism turns, the first story about which they want to criminalize dissent, is the Trump connection to the Russians. And that just happens to come up as Trump invites the murderous strongman of the Philippines, this pig Duterte, to the White House. Duterte, who said last year, “Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination, if you’re a son of a bitch.”
Coincidences, no doubt.
“You look at the rules of the Senate, even the rules of the House,” Trump said on Fox on Saturday. “It’s really a bad thing for the country, in my opinion. They’re archaic rules. And maybe at some point we’re going to have to take those rules on, because, for the good of the nation, things are going to have to be different. You can’t go through a process like this. It’s not fair. It forces you to make bad decisions.”
And now we change the rules of the House and the Senate. Because they don’t move fast enough for the sake of Trump. Because the bureaucratic delay—built into our system by the Founding Fathers to prevent despots or foreigners from changing our way of life overnight—is keeping Trump from changing our way of life overnight.
Oh, and that two-party system, the right of the opposition to exist? That has to be changed, too, for the sake of Trump. “I also learned, and this is very sad, because we have a country that we have to take care of,” he said on CBS. “The Democrats have been totally obstructionist. Chuck Schumer has turned out to be a bad leader. He’s a bad leader for the country. And the Democrats are extremely obstructionist. All they do is obstruct . . . and you know what that’s hurting? It’s hurting the country.”
Change the House and Senate rules for the sake of Trump.
Get rid of the rights of the Senate minority—even if they represent the rights of the majority of voters in the last election—for the sake of Trump.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 37