My republican colleagues are right. I have never liked Donald Trump. I do not like vulgarians, bullies and liars. I began to dislike him when he challenged the citizenship of Barack Obama. I was living in rural Utah at the time and I can tell you, a lot of insufficiently educated people believed this treasonous lie promulgated by Mr. Trump. I lived in a town with a banner across the main street that said, “Show me the birth certificate”. It was the beginning of Mr. Trump’s brilliant campaign to de-legitimize actual facts, academia and responsible journalism.
Lets say I am an instructor in the history department of a major university and I discover that my chancellor does not believe in the Holocaust. Sure, the university is thriving with winning sports teams, high enrollment and lucrative government contracts. He tells his students it was all a hoax perpetrated by the Jews to further their Zionist aggression in Palestine. He gets a LOT of press for this outrageous falsehood. Not only is this an egregious lie, but also it foments a climate of hate and anti-Semitism across the entire campus. Would I be wrong to blow the whistle on this charlatan?
I began to hate Trump when he asserted his right to grab unacquainted pussy. Even if it was just “locker room talk” do I really want a president, a Commander in Chief who talks like that? My loathing has never abated as we learned about his counterfeit university along with his refusal to release his tax records. Along in there somewhere we learned that a lot of contractors have been “stiffed” by Mr. Trump. There is in fact no constitutional reason to release tax records but it had become protocol for the past several decades and protocol used to be important.
My loathing grew actually as he lied and lied and lied, purportedly thousands of times so far beginning with his insistence on being a multi-billionaire and the size of his inaugural crowd compared with his predecessor’s. Doesn’t a president have more important things to think about? We know now that this is a man who has been a plaintiff in over a thousand suits and filed for bankruptcy four times. What about all the women who claim to have had disagreeable sex with him? Are we to conclude seriously that many, many women have colluded in fabricating such a prurient falsehood? Was Michael Cohen lying about Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal? I would remind my republican colleagues that two years behind bars is a high price to pay for fabricating dalliance about a guy you had said you’d take a bullet for.
Russia is America’s most dangerous adversary and Donald Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening check out Hillary’s emails”. During the republican primaries I was horrified at the petty name calling of Donald Trump. He LOVES calling people names. Did Ronald Reagan call Jimmy Carter names? Did George Bush make fun of Bill Clinton? Did Barack Obama say anything uncharitable about George Bush? Donald Trump cannot seem to forget Obama, Clinton and McCain. This perseveration is NOT a good thing when problems like Brexit, North Korea, Iran, Opioids, climate and nuclear proliferation loom large on the horizon.
Why did we have to take American History and World History if not to learn about American native genocide, slavery and The Holocaust? What is the point of reading about Dachau when we ignore a president who separates families and puts children in cages? What is the point of learning about the Statue of Liberty and that wonderful inscription, “Give me your huddled masses” if we ignore Donald Trump’s loathing of immigrants from just about anywhere except Norway?
There is a good reason for the emoluments clause in the Constitution. Donald Trump has so many business interests that I can imagine it would be almost impossible to divest himself of all of them but only a blind and deaf individual would conclude that he has made even a modicum of effort to separate The White House from innumerable hotels and golf clubs as president. Mr. Trump has lived his entire life in a back-scratching environment. That is business. The presidency should be above such vulgarity; okay Vladimir I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.
Racism, misogyny and bigotry have always been a significant part of the American political melting pot but never since George Wallace has a national politician fanned the flames of suspicion and odium the way Donald Trump has. He courts racists and bigots rather than, at least publicly, eschewing them. He encourages hate and violence at his rallies. Are you republicans not embarrassed by a president who says at a rally, “I’d like to punch him in the face”? I mean, really, do you guys want a president or a thug, and you wonder why I, we, hate this guy. Yeah, the economy is great and unemployment is down but at what moral, philosophical cost? The economy was great in Germany in 1936. There were people in Germany who were criticized for their behavior at Versailles and during the Great Depression and their purported fiscal DNA and look what happened. Okay, okay, Trump is not going to use Zyklon B but he sure as hell is using a noxious rhetoric and racist policy to put millions of Americans or wanna-be Americans at risk.
So Bob Mueller did not find irrefutable evidence of collusion between the Trump team and the Russians (but lets not pretend that he didn’t find an awful lot of contaminated stuff). How many of Trump’s friends and team members have been indicted, convicted and sent to jail because of mischief with the Russians in and around the time of the 2016 elections? Again, I ask, how would it look today if we knew that half a dozen of Roosevelt’s close cohorts had spent days and weeks in Berlin just prior to the election of 1940? You republicans just refuse to acknowledge that Russia is our ENEMY. Russia is trying to mess things up in England and Europe. President Putin’s first priority is to reestablish Russia as a super power and if wreaking havoc on our electoral system, our confidence in government and our intelligence agencies helps his cause so much the better. We were invaded by a foreign adversary in 2016 as surely as if Russian T-34 tanks, Russian Mig-29s and Russian Spetsnatz troops had flooded across the Canadian border. Donald Trump is a narcissistic idiot who does not appreciate the significance of Russian neo globalism. His embrace of Vladimir Putin is treasonous.
Which brings up Syria and our former allies the Kurds. I grew up in a rough part of Syracuse, New York. It was important to have reliable, dependable, honorable friends in case you ran into the wrong people on your way to school. It was important that France knew she could rely on England in 1914 and again in 1939. It was important that Churchill knew he could rely on Roosevelt’s friendship. It was wonderful the way our NATO allies stood behind us after 9/11. This kind of thing is called honorable statesmanship. Mr. Trump has ridiculed “The Paris Climate Accord”, made fun of our European allies, alienated our neighbors north and south and embraced some real assholes like Kim Jong Un, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orban and Putin. And now he has effectively abandoned the Kurds.
So far, about half a dozen of Trump’s closest associates have been indicted. I’m sure there is a fancy French aphorism that goes something like: we are who our friends are. “No drama Obama” got through eight years without a single White House indictment. No matter how much you might hate Barack Obama there was never a hint of mischief around him and lets be clear, republicans looked under every rock and bush and all they could come up with was Drones and Benghazi. Donald Trump attracts unscrupulousness the way fecal matter attracts a certain variety of winged insect going back to his close acquaintance with Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn was not known for high-mindedness. Then there was Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Mike Padopoulus, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort. These are not guys from whom you would want to buy a used Jag.
You republicans have made a Faustian contract. At least in Marlowe’s Faust, Mephistopheles was an elegant fellow who kept his bargains. You’re crazy if you think Donald Trump gives a rat’s ass about any one of you.
It began with birtherism, then pussy and then Putin. I just mentioned about ten other unflattering things about Donald Trump, which leads me to say that I am not the least bit surprised that he would quite naturally ask President Zelenski for a little “favor”. Joe Biden is a narcissist and his son Hunter is a jerk. We all know this. If Joe Biden is elected president in 2020 you can be sure a heluva lot of us democrats are NEVER going to fawn over him. Sorry, but not happening. You “never Trumpers” on the other hand, have cultivated fast flip-flopping and plebian ass kissing to a new art form the way you kowtow to Donald Trump. History will not be kind to you. I know you say you don’t care about history but your grandchildren are gonna have to keep a low profile at Andover and Yale. I yield my time.
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