Donald Trump is going to turn me into a conservative.
That’s probably not true. But it does feel like I have grown a bit more in tune with conservatives as I understand them – certainly how I idealize them, which I know is about as far away from the truth as are the demonizations of the left that are so popular on the right, that we are babykillers or pedophiles or corrupt Fascist socialists who sell American secrets to China so we can feed that money to Hamas to promote anti-Semitism. But one obvious thing keeps coming up: I have grown much more suspicious of government, and much more frustrated with government inefficiency; and both of those feel conservative-leaning.
I mean, maybe it’s not Trump: maybe it’s because I’m getting older, which supposedly swings people to the right; though to be frank, I’m not getting richer, which I think is the actual reason why people become more conservative as they age. It’s always easy to demand higher taxes on the rich when you aren’t one of them – though it is also true that liberals, masters of NIMBYist virtue signaling, are also fond of raising taxes on other people and not on ourselves. I suspect as well that growing anxiety and paranoia contributes to the stereotypical political changes that come with age; as my own anxiety and paranoia are focused almost exclusively on government and authority, it’s basically driving me closer to socialism – or anarchism, even – rather than the increased fear of crime and of marginalized people which I’ve seen in older people around me.
But I’ll tell you what, I do think there needs to be a rebirth and resurgence of the conservatism that I grew up with (Now THAT makes me sound like an old man), at least the conservatism I think I grew up with; though it would be swell if people would first figure out that trickle-down economics is a lie intended to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of those who already have it and who then espouse trickle-down economics. The economic side is coming along, I think, as Americans may actually be figuring out that the Republicans we elected last year have done somewhere between fuck-all and fuck-you in terms of helping make life more affordable, while they fire thousands of people, reduce useful and vital government services, and cut taxes for the rich, as personified by Elon Musk. (I tell you what, if Musk turns out to be a double-agent for progressives, I will yell “AHA!” Because not a lot of genuine conservatives could have managed to throw as much shit on the GOP as Musk has done. I mean, he’s no Trump, but it still seems too much for it to be coincidence.) But I think the rest of what I imagine as idealized conservative values, like small government, local government, a clear focus on maintaining the rule of law and of the Constitution: that is what I think we actually need. And then, inasmuch as conservatism ever represented the values of independence and personal integrity, “family values,” patriotism and Christianity both in a humble, individual sense, I think people turning back to that would be an incredibly good thing.
Though honestly, it would be best if that happened to the people who are actually supposed to be conservative, namely Republicans, rather than if it happened to me. But I will confess a certain imaginary scenario in which someone like me, and maybe actually me, steps into the void left in the GOP after Donald Trump dies or becomes politically insignificant (and God willing let that happen soon), and helps people to remember that there is nothing particularly wrong with conservatism, that progressive ideas need to be tempered in rational ways, that there is benefit in a marketplace of ideas and a political process that features opposition and negotiation, that a single-minded government is dangerous no matter how right-minded (or left-minded) that government is. That the problem with the current GOP is, first, Donald J. Trump, and second, everything that Trump represents: authoritarianism, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, hypocrisy and narcissism. Not the essential values of conservatives, which, while I generally don’t agree with them, I don’t think they are at all bad. I think the Republican party returning to those values – maybe a little more modernized than the 1950’s Eisenhower Republicans I’m probably imagining – would be the best thing for our country, barring an actual leftist revolution that swept the entire nation along with it, and I keep looking for someone to carry it out.
Can’t find them. Not in Trump’s GOP.
Can you imagine that, though? If someone charismatic enough to actually get Republicans to listen reminded them of what the party of Lincoln should truly be about? I can’t imagine a change in the politics of this country that would have a more immediate positive impact. Not even the hard pendulum swing to the left which I suspect is coming after this particular round of violent greed is over, because as long as progressives and liberals and Democrats in government are opposed by people who will lie with every breath, spread rumors and character assassination with every press interaction, start pretty literal fistfights over every disagreement, and ignore all political norms (Which, to be clear, are the ESSENCE of conservative sensibility, and there is not a much better indication that the Trump movement is not authentically conservative – other than the obvious abandonment of respect for law and order and police authority, in favor of supporting a multiple felon and the complete discarding of all due process) in order to exploit any opportunity to harm their opponents and increase their own power, government will continue to be too dysfunctional to inspire any long-term support for progressive ideas and movements.
Think of it: if the Democrats as they are currently constituted, headed by people like AOC and Cory Booker, Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff, and Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom, rather than Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, trying to actually enact Medicare for All, over the objections of Senators Donald Trump Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Greene-Trump (Dunno if she’ll marry one of the Trump boys or get Trump himself to adopt her, but I promise that she’ll be part of the family in the next decade. I am going to put my money on her taking up with The Nazi Cheeto himself after Melania finally divorces him.), who holds a filibuster on the floor of the Senate to accuse every one of the Democrats of supporting Chinese Triads in smuggling Fentanyl into Gaza to make Palestinian super-soldiers who will be unleashed across the southern US border to rape white women in order to bring about a wave of abortions which will then be used to distill that baby brain juice which keeps the Clintons alive.
What are the chances that any progressive/liberal alliance would be able to survive through that kind of inferno of flaming horseshit?
As long as Trumpian MAGA fanatics remain popular, they will ruin all attempts at a functional government. Because that is the larger Trumpian project: the undercutting of a functional federal government and a social power structure that serves the public interest and the general welfare promised in the Constitution, in service of the two main goals of the movement, namely a more lawless society where wealthy people and the white supremacist power structure can have free rein, and a right-wing-media-fed zeitgeist of apocalyptic terror that allows Daddy Trump to claim that only he has the strength and intelligence to save us all from the dangers and threats that surround us.
I do think that there is real value in conservative ideas and values – at least in real conservative values. It would have been wonderful if the last twenty years had included more genuine attempts to balance the federal budget and reduce the deficit and the debt, particularly in the times of economic growth, so long as it had been done the right way, by raising taxes on the wealthy. You know, the way Eisenhower did it: because asking the wealthy to contribute their fair share would show a respect for individual responsibility, and patriotism in the humble sense that asks everyone to contribute to the betterment of this nation and the people who make it up. (Also, while I’m no expert, I swear that taxing the rich seems pretty dang Christian…) Which value, when taken to a Trumpian extreme, is turned into that your-own-bootstraps nonsense which then justifies – or rather pretends to excuse – cutting Medicaid and food stamps and all of the social safety net, while allowing billionaires to extract all the wealth they could ever want without any return on our investments which made the wealth possible in the first place. I think the progressive desire to create programs that produce positive change is wonderful, but when combined with the liberal/Democratic desire to protect everyone and everything that needs protecting, it leads to levels of red tape and bureaucracy that undercuts the progressive program entirely; and, at least in theory, real conservatives would be useful in tempering or preventing that excess. Take, for example, this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0uxWGBxJWf2oAB9uyDMoOB?si=407ef6fb2213428a
This episode of Jon Stewart’s wonderful podcast features Ezra Klein, the progressive former MSNBC host, who discusses a program intended to build rural broadband access under President Biden’s infrastructure bill. The program had a fourteen-stage process before a region – state or county or city – could receive grant money, which process produced so much red tape that out of 56 regions that applied for grants to build broadband infrastructure, only 3 had finished that process in the three years between the law being signed in 2021 and the end of infrastructure spending in 2024. And none of those three had actually managed to get the money and build the broadband. Klein goes into agonizing detail – he wrote about this in his most recent book – and shows how all of the delays and all of the red tape are well-meaning, but basically none of it is necessary, and taken as a whole, it was destructive: because no rural broadband was built. Multiply that by every other program Biden’s administration passed, and you can see why the Democrats lost the election: because even their important and genuine accomplishments never actually came to pass in the real world. Klein talks about how Biden planned everything on a six- to ten-year timeline – when elections happen every two or four years.
The best line in the podcast was this: “We are stuck between a party that wants to destroy government, and one that can’t make government work.”
I would argue that conservatives arguing for real conservative values could have counteracted the problems that come with a too-singleminded focus on liberal and progressive values. To be fully transparent, I do think that much of the problem is in the liberal influence on progressive movements, because I think it is liberals and Democrats who insist on political correctness and purity tests and virtue signaling, where progressives are focused on functional efforts to improve people’s lives. Klein talks about that, too, that part of the issue was things like a requirement that the subcontractors hired for the broadband installation represent women and non-white minority-run businesses, which is a great intention to have and a wonderful thing to try to do – but it’s not the point. The point was to build rural broadband (Which, coincidentally, would do a hell of a lot to help a large number of marginalized people; remember that women in rural areas are the ones who can’t find meaningful work opportunities, and also remember that the rural areas of the South are largely not white. Or maybe that’s not so coincidental, but it does show why liberals given total control can sometimes step on their own feet.). It’s this desire, not to achieve real progress, but to be liked, to be good, while working through the process, which makes the left twist itself into knots and get nothing done – though what I am ignoring is the fact that progressive goals and projects are frequently unpopular, because they are expensive and difficult and do not tend to aggrandize benefits in the hands of those who already have privilege, and it requires a spoonful of liberal/Democratic people-pleasing to help the progressive medicine go down… if there’s not going to be an actual leftist revolution, that is.
I don’t really know, at this point, if conservatives really do have that no-nonsense gruff exterior that we think of as people just getting shit done; but that’s what I’m imagining. I just picture a 60-year-old white man (Hey, I’m not stupid enough to think that the GOP will suddenly become multicultural; let’s not go too far into the fantasy) in a committee meeting, who just keeps responding to every liberal feel-good virtue-signaling suggestion with a steady beat of “The goal here is to build rural broadband.” Basically, I think we need people in government who just want to get shit done: not necessarily make sure that everything gets done in exactly the “right” way.
There is an important point to be recognized in the conservative drive to demand people work hard: because while government is necessary to make changes for large groups of people, particularly changes that are not profitable for any other group currently with privilege and power, what it comes down to, always, is people working hard. People in government work hard to make it possible for everybody else to work hard, by trying to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to actually benefit from their hard work. That’s the truth. Take it from me, a government employee who works hard to make other people work hard, so they can benefit from their own hard work. That’s what school is. And I don’t know that liberalism actually pushes people to work hard; within my example of myself and schools, liberals are the ones who get 504 accommodations and IEPs enacted and followed, and who make sure that the curriculum includes social-emotional learning and multicultural perspectives: conservatives are the ones who teach math and science and history. (English teachers are all liberals. With very few exceptions, who are mostly psychopaths.)
In the most simple sense (And I know I’m oversimplifying and basing this on stereotypes; doesn’t make me wrong, though), the recognition in liberal politics of the burdens of social marginalization and intersectional oppression, of mental health struggles and of the value of self-care, promotes a deeply valuable drive for people to take it easy, to relax and take care of themselves. But conservatism does value and push individual hard work, personal responsibility, self-reliance. Not Trumpian pseudo-conservatism, of course, which pushes people to hate everyone who doesn’t have dirt under their fingernails (Daddy Trump, as in all things, excluded, of course) unless the skin of those hands is brown, in which case they should be hated anyway no matter what is under their fingernails; but conservatism tells us that people need to do things themselves, and be responsible for the consequences of their decisions: which allows people to actually make those decisions themselves, without approval by a dozen committees, and then (in theory) holds them responsible for those decisions.
Liberalism is necessary to make sure that conservatives don’t treat people like shit in the name of promoting personal responsibility. (Also to make sure that conservatives in this country don’t go full white supremacist; which would naturally occur, as conservatism by definition is trying to retain and preserve a past system, which in this country means an oppressive racist and sexist system.) Progressives are the ones trying to make the world a better place, rather than trying to retain the status quo. I do not imagine that a United States run by conservatives of any stripe would be the best version of this country. But my God, watching the Democratic party fuck up every single opportunity that we vote for them has worn me the fuck out. The 2024 election broke me. The Republicans are going to lose in the midterms next year, and I am looking forward to that: but I cannot stand to watch Democrats win control of Congress in the coming reaction to Trump, and then do every fucking thing wrong again, so that 2028 swings back to the goddamn Republicans.
But right now, there is another reason. The main reason, the real reason, why I find myself wishing for a renewal of a conservative movement that probably never really existed. It’s not policies, not red tape and bureaucracy, not tax breaks, not cuts to the social safety net. It’s not the next election, not the future of how we see government. It’s none of those things.
I want to find a way to ensure that this country will still exist.
I’m trying not to overreact. I’m trying to see this as just more bullshit from Trump. But, I mean — he fucking sent in troops. Thousands of troops. To LA, to California, under his command, his and that fucking idiot Hegseth. He sent them not because they were needed, not because they were asked for, not because their presence will help: just because he wants to start a fight with the left, with California, with Gavin Newsom personally, who has been criticizing Trump for years, and who is willing to fight him back. Because MAGA wants to have the fight with the left — by which I mean the majority of the population of this country, the ones who don’t want a dictator, who don’t want tyranny, who actually want this to remain a Constitutional Republic, a country under the rule of law. They want to fight all the rest of us. They want to hurt us because they think we have stolen their country and filled it with illegal immigrants and trans people and abortions and fentanyl. They want us to pay for that: and Trump wants to help them do it. Not because he gives a shit about this country or what is happening to it; just because he wants to point his finger and see people die at his command. He wants the full might of the U.S. military to obey him, and destroy those he wants destroyed.
This is not about left and right, liberal and conservative. It’s about this asshole sending fucking troops to LA. It’s really just about life and death: life and death of immigrants and marginalized groups in general, life and death of this country and its self-image, life and death of the rule of law and the experiment in democracy that seems, at last, to have failed.
Our President sent troops to LA. Not to enforce the law: to enforce his will. To set off a fight — a fight that people are giving him — so he can escalate the tension until people finally snap, and fight, for real, fight for life and death.
Because Trump wants a war.
If Conservatives, real Conservatives, would help prevent that, then – yeah, I’ll be one.
I am a middle-aged white man, after all.
And whatever else I think of this country, I don’t want America to fall. Not like this.
I’m good at understanding things: especially people. I am extremely empathetic, I am a student of human personality and interactions, and I try never to underestimate the complexity of a person and their actions and the motivations. Because of my vocation, I have spent time with and communicated in fair depth with thousands of people; and because of my avocation, I have spent countless hours imagining people and creating their actions and motivations. So I think about this a lot: why do people act the way they do? And normally, I think I’m pretty good at understanding why people do what they do, and making sense of it.
But I can’t make sense of Donald Trump.
It pisses me off, and that’s part of why I call him a shit-flinging gibbon: that is my own frustrated attempt to fling that would-be dictator, that narcissistic Nazi, that Cheeto-skinned charlatan, the hell away from me, to dismiss him as nothing more than a beast, an animal without complex motivations. He tries to have sex with anyone female for the same reason he tries to eat all the cheeseburgers he can: because he is nothing but instinct, pure id. Just basic survival urges in a primate that is not currently in a survival situation, and so, just as if you imagine that great ape in a fine restaurant, for instance, he screams and climbs on the tables and the wait staff, and he chucks the table settings and steals people’s food, cramming it into his mouth while he threatens to bite anyone who gets too close to him.
I like thinking of Donald Trump as a terrified primate who is trying to bluster his way out of danger so he can hide somewhere with the bunch of bananas he just stole. And based on much of what he does, I think it’s a pretty helpful way to try to understand him.
Take his reaction, for instance, when he was first asked about the Signal group chat where his top advisors and his Vice President acted like braggadocious buffoons, while clearly violating multiple federal laws by chatting about war plans, in advance of an attack, on a non-secure, non-governmental chat app that the Russians had already targeted for hacking – the Russians who are years ahead of us in cyberwarfare.
Now imagine that’s a monkey being threatened by a reporter aggressively asking it a question that it can’t understand at all.
“I don’t know anything about it,” which he repeats several times, is the monkey first grunting and then screeching, backing away and baring its teeth; the nonsense attack thrown out at the Atlantic “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic, to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business” is the monkey swiping with a paw at the aggressor; the line about “Well it couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective” is the monkey trying to look taller, maybe beating its chest to appear tough.
See how well it works?
But it doesn’t explain everything. It’s fun to imagine, and there are some moments when, truly, Donald Trump acts like an unthinking animal just reacting – often overreacting – to what he sees as a threat or a challenge; but it doesn’t explain everything.
My biggest problem is trying to understand Trump’s plans and strategies. Obviously this is where the primate metaphor breaks down, because while the great apes are capable of planning multi-step tasks and so on, they’re still not very good at it; and as far as I know, they are double plus ungood at understanding abstract concepts, which Trump clearly thinks about quite a lot: he wants to be famous, he wants America to be great. He may not understand what he’s actually doing and what really makes America great and what does not, but he does seem to have a grasp on the concepts “America” and “great.” So in this situation, he’s not just a shit-flinging gibbon. But it is difficult for me to think about Donald Trump as a person with a plan, and with a strategy. But I know it’s unfair to consider him as the opposite: having no plans at all, having no strategy – just the shit-flinging gibbon. That’s not right either. I genuinely don’t get it: too much of what he does makes no sense, at all. Take leaving the Paris Climate Accords: all he has to do is ignore it, as every past president has done, even the ones who sign these well-meaning but toothless treaties; somehow we’ve never managed to stop extracting and burning fossil fuels, and never managed to reduce our dependence on individual cars, and never even tried to have a national conversation about our consumption of goods and how it produces excess carbon (Here’s a wild thought: what if the tariffs are really just a four-dimensional chess strategy to reduce America’s carbon footprint by cutting us off from our international consumer goods?). Ignoring the treaty, and then making an ad about American energy production standing in front of some oil-spewing well in North Dakota, right in front of a giant oversized American penis-truck, which is parked in front of, let’s say, a single-use plastics factory which is belching out black smoke, would do all Trump wants to do to own the libs and encourage his base in their worst habits; so why make America look bad internationally by leaving the treaty? It doesn’t make sense, which makes me want to understand Trump as an idiot.
But is he?
Let’s examine the data and try to extrapolate a strategy. It makes sense to me that Trump wants the support of his base. That source of power, that he can sway his base any way he wants, has been much of the secret to his rise to the White House twice (Also twice losing the popular vote); so when he says things that make them cheer, that makes him happy. Makes perfect sense. I like saying things that make people happy with me, that make people clap for me; who doesn’t? And as that base following his lead helps keep the GOP in line, it makes even more sense that he would do things that make them happy. So because they are white supremacists, they hate DEI: thus he tries to crush DEI. Being also intolerant evangelical Christians, they hate trans people: thus he tries to ban trans people from existence. Back on the racism tip, along with the backwards-looking (and insane) patriotism, they like Confederate monuments: he tries to bring back the Confederate monuments that were removed after the murder of George Floyd. I don’t believe Donald Trump, who is a racist but also doesn’t seem to particularly care about anything that doesn’t profit him directly, and doesn’t mind spending time with people of color if they do have something to offer him, particularly cares about all of this stuff, but his base does and he likes to make them happy, so he does these things. I get that. No problem.
Another example: Trump is supported by billionaires, and considers himself aligned with billionaires and the pro-business wing of the Republican party. They do not care about DEI or the existence of trans people (Some of them do, to be sure; there are some fundamentalist Christian people who are obscenely wealthy and would really like this country to be a Christian theocracy; Betsy DeVos springs to mind. But for the most part, they just want more money and less government control over them.), but they hate government regulation: so he tries to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and tries to shut down the EPA, and so on. Okay.
Then there is the crazy shit: renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and Mount Denali, and trying to take over Greenland and so on. Now, to some extent, that is sticking it to the libs, which his base and the billionaires love; and it’s also trying to look tough, which his base loves; and the Greenland takeover offers quite a lot of untapped mineral wealth, which the billionaires love. But also: really? I can’t imagine that he actually sees any of that as critical issues for the US to confront, and I can’t see even his base particularly caring about Greenland or any of the names of national monuments and geographic features that most of us never refer to by any name.
And then there are the things he is doing that are clearly just fucking stupid: the tariffs. I know the billionaires don’t want that to happen; they don’t want any government regulation. The regular folks in the base still love anything Trump does, and he has talked for years about how great tariffs are, so okay – but you know what he hasn’t done? Lowered the price of groceries or gasoline. Which was the most important issue that got him elected, by far, among both his base and the Republican voters in general. And if he wants to achieve anything in his term, he needs the Republican party to maintain control of the Congress, and he clearly knows it as he keeps trying to push the GOP candidates in the special elections, and he took back Elise Stefanik’s nomination so she could stay in the House. So why the hell hasn’t he tried to push the grocery stores to lower the prices of eggs? Why hasn’t he reduced or removed regulations that would make it easier to import eggs? Why hasn’t he cut deals with oil and gas companies to reduce the price at the pump – or even easier, gotten Republicans to remove gas taxes to lower the price a few cents a gallon? Anything he could do on that front would cement his popularity, and make him ironclad against any criticism. Even ineffective but well-publicized attempts, which is mostly how he gins up support from his base, would solidify his popularity.
So why hasn’t he done it?
Why is he working so hard to help Israel slaughter the people of Gaza? Sure, the conservative Jewish population supports Israeli aggression in general, and the right wing has used the Hamas attack to beat the drums of paranoia in order to sell guns to right wing Americans (who really need to be scared of military age men coming over the border, because maybe they are going to start gunning us all down just like Hamas did to the Israelis). And there’s this whole bizarre thing about evangelical Christians making Israel very important in their worldview because the apocalypse will happen there, or something. But as I understand it – I am not an evangelical Christian, which is perhaps an unnecessary disclaimer, and I am also not going to investigate their insanity too carefully – the idea is just that the Jewish people must possess the land of Israel before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can occur. And there’s also supposed to be a bunch of war, and an antichrist (I got a candidate for you…) and a bunch of other things; but it seems to me that none of that requires the full removal of the Palestinian people from Gaza, and nothing else other than religious zealotry would even begin to explain the support for the genocide of the Palestinian people by the most famed victims of genocide in the history of the world. (I also cannot understand the desire of the Israeli government and military to literally just murder every Palestinian person. Don’t they ever get tired of revenge? Have they all just completely lost all humanity?) But there’s Trump, meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, sending all the weapons he can, threatening to rain down hell on the Gaza strip if Hamas doesn’t surrender all their leverage by giving up all the remaining hostages, authorizing (I mean, I assume he authorized it at some point, but maybe it was just Hegseth) attacks on the Houthis for their solidarity with the Palestinian cause – and talking about ethnic cleansing of the Gaza strip so that he can build the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Okay, I get that last part. Trump is a real estate developer who specializes in gaudy, ostentatious, appalling displays of gross wealth and egotism; of course he’d see an opportunity in Gaza, which is beach front property on the Mediterranean. It probably felt like a task he could actually do well, as contrasted by everything political he can’t do, and who doesn’t like a chance to show off their actual expertise? I think he thought about it like a resort development project he was pitching, and he can’t understand why nobody else can see his vision; I bet he made at least one call to a model-maker whose services he has used in the past. And I bet he was stunned that nobody else agreed with his idea. All of which helps to show that he has the mentality of a child, and maybe he’s just pouting until everyone else decides his idea was the best and then they’ll come back and ask him to fix Gaza.
I mean, we literally did that with the Presidency of the United States. So I wouldn’t even consider it dumb for Trump to expect us all to come crawling back, asking him to do whatever he wants to do. I bet he’s counting on it. After all, when you’re a celebrity, you can do anything to them you want.
I hope all of the MAGA voters understand now what it feels like to be grabbed by a sexual predator. I’m sure the Palestinian people – everyone else in the world, really – would very much like to avoid that experience.
Now, if all of this is merely the actions of a shit-flinging gibbon, then that explains the stupidity of it all. There are some understandable motivations – power-seeking, for instance – which explains some of what Trump has done at least adequately. But I have not been able to think of an overarching goal which gets all of it to make sense. If tax cuts and regulation reduction shows a desire to help business, the tariffs fly in the face of that. If his real goal is to help (or just to please) the MAGA base, then that explains the racist culture wars, but not the lack of even attempted action on grocery prices or the cost of living. And if he really wanted to be a dictator for life, he not only wouldn’t have told the country that he was considering a third term, thereby tipping his hand, he wouldn’t have kept Hegseth and Mike Waltz after the Signal chat, because I guarantee you that what they did pissed off the military, whatever they may say in public (or not) and however they feel about Trump. Hegseth and Waltz – and Gabbard and Rubio and all the rest – actually genuinely put American pilots at serious risk of being shot down by the Houthis, who have advanced anti-aircraft weapons systems, and who have channels through Iran to Russian intelligence, which easily might have picked up the Signal chat PARTICULARLY SINCE STEVE WITKOFF WAS IN RUSSIA WHILE HE WAS PARTICIPATING IN THE CHAT.
One complaint I have about the Trump era: I don’t even know when to use all caps any more. Is that the most egregiously offensive aspect of the Signal chat? Or maybe it was the emojis? When is it time to yell? I want to yell all the time, but obviously I can’t do that. I have outrage fatigue.
Now, there is an obvious answer here, which would have pleased Trump’s base since they love when he is a heartless asshole, and it would have pleased the military, and it would have pleased the Republican party in Congress: he could have just fired everyone in that group chat. He loves firing people. It’s not even like he doesn’t want to signal that he made a mistake with his cabinet picks: he fired like 80% of his own picks during the first term, and the rabble just hooted and hollered and clapped their chapped hands and uttered such a deal of stinking breath that it choked him, and he fell down at it. (Sorry: that’s a Shakespeare reference. To The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, which I have taught often enough to have memorized some parts. I will have to write another post showing the comparisons between that play and Trump – and I better do it before he gets Et Tu’ed in the Senate, or else nobody will be impressed by my acumen.)
But no: Trump didn’t fire anyone. Which lost him (I would guess) support in the military and in congress, and indirectly with his base, who do not actually care about Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard or Mike Waltz: they care only about Trump. But they do generally support the military, so again, to shore up his own power and reputation, Trump should have fired them all, and made a big deal out of it. Tell me he couldn’t find another half-dozen nutballs to replace those “advisors” with. Are there no other alcoholic womanizing hyper-masculine douchebags in the military apart from Pete Hegseth? Seriously? And I even have a suggestion for someone to replace Gabbard as National Head of Intelligence: Maria Butina.
If Trump wants to be a dictator for real, he will never succeed without the full-throated support of the military; I don’t have to know any history at all to know that, but of course I know enough history to know that literally every single successful coup, ever, was carried off with the military’s complicity or at least tacit agreement and inaction.
So yeah, I don’t get it. Trump doesn’t make any sense to me.
But then I remembered this book I read with my book club. (By the way: I would HIGHLY recommend a book club like the one I am in. Half a dozen smart, involved people, and we read books that help us make sense of the madness of the modern world. It is – not necessarily comforting, because we read a lot of really disturbing shit; but it feels so very good to know that other people are thinking like you are and feeling like you are. Plus we get to have snacks, and the members who host our meetings make DAMN good snacks.)
This is a fascinating and deeply depressing book. It explains the economic paradigm known as neoliberalism, championed most effectively by the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, and the effect that paradigm and Friedman have had not only on the United States, but on nations around the world. The title comes from another – uh, “expert” – whose ideas have had enormous influence on our world, a psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron. Cameron believed that people who had suffered terrible trauma in their lives, and who suffered the natural and inevitable consequences of that trauma, could be “cured” by replacing their traumatic memories with a tabula rasa: a blank slate. No memory of trauma, no psychological or emotional damage. He thought he could rebuild the person afterwards into a healthy and well-adjusted citizen. He experimented, therefore, with different ways that one could destroy a person’s memories, and eventually, a person’s whole personality, because the personality kept stubbornly resisting the attempts to erase the memories – almost like memory is an essential part of personality, or something. And so the process didn’t work, as any sane person could have guessed it wouldn’t; his attempts to erase a person’s memories and personality essentially just fragmented both, but never erased them. Klein doesn’t say because she doesn’t know what his real goal was, whether he wanted to help people and was just completely soulless, or if he was in fact a monster who wanted to destroy people, but when his theories didn’t pan out, he kept working on them – and ended up working for the CIA, finally creating for them a handbook on torture based on his work. The idea of it was that you could disorient someone so terribly that they would lose the ability to remember things like loyalty to their country or cause, or the consequences of revealing secrets they might have, and would therefore, in an incoherent state following the application of repeated and awful torture, be excellent sources of information because they wouldn’t even realize that they were revealing secrets, and so wouldn’t have to be coerced; and because they wouldn’t know who they were or what they were doing, they wouldn’t do things like conceal key pieces of information or lie at specific moments in order to protect whatever they were telling the CIA about.
The reason Klein talks about Cameron is because the basic system he created was what Klein calls the shock doctrine: in various tortuous and traumatic ways – frequently just literal electroshock, and frequently psychedelics administered without the knowledge and consent of his targets – Cameron would start with an incredible and overwhelmingly destructive attack on the psyche of his victims. He realized – or maybe it was the CIA that realized – that the most effective way to do this to a person was to remove anything that could be used as a solid base to stand on, mentally and emotionally speaking: Cameron is the reason why torturers now disorient their victims as much as they cause suffering, because that makes it easier and faster to eliminate any sense of self, any sense of identity: disrupt sleep, disrupt a sense of pattern or time passing, take away the victim’s knowledge of where they are, of what time it is, of what to expect, of who they are talking to, of anything and everything at all: do it all at once, as rapidly and overwhelmingly and completely as possible. This shock, either electric or psychological, was supposed to create the tabula rasa. And as I said, it didn’t, but it did effectively destroy people’s ability to resist control, and thus interrogation. And Klein’s insight was to recognize that Friedman and the neoliberals he taught and trained, and the political actors they influenced – there are several in the book, which is long and thorough, but perhaps the two most effective examples would be the George W. Bush administration, and Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile from his 1973 coup through his overthrow in 1990 – used the same concept as a way to effectively short-circuit the democratic rule of law in countries they wanted to control.
Pinochet does it first, and he does it with the explicit assistance and advice of Milton Friedman himself, who advised Pinochet on how to establish a capitalist paradise after Pinochet had assassinated the democratically elected leftist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Friedman’s advice was to take advantage of the shock of the coup and the violence that followed – Pinochet had been a general before his takeover, and so he knew very well the value of the military in overthrowing a legal government; he then used them to silence dissent by jailing political opponents, torturing them (of course) and in his own signature atrocity, having his enemies thrown out of flying helicopters – and force through the changes as rapidly as possible, before the people and any potential resistance could recover their balance and begin to push back. Pinochet did it, and it was largely effective (I’m leaving out a lot of this, of course – I recommend the book), and so it became the standard: the Shock Doctrine. Overwhelm people with something so outrageous, so devastating and unbelievable, that they won’t know up from down, day from night, or friend from foe, and then ram through your agenda before any potential resistance knows what’s happening. Exactly how Ewen Cameron taught the CIA (Who, of course, actively supported Pinochet, who replaced a leftist government with a far-right capitalist one – rule of law and liberties be damned) to overwhelm a person with a complete assault on all of their senses and touchstones, any sense of reality, so that their personality and therefore their resistance could be destroyed.
The book is a little out of date now; it was published in 2006. So of course the last use of the Shock Doctrine by neoliberal political actors that Klein talks about is the George W. Bush administration and 9/11. The terrorists created the shock: and the neoliberal Bush administration followed up with their agenda, mostly the USA PATRIOT Act and the rise of the surveillance state, along with, as Klein explains at length, the capitalist takeover of the military, pushing it through before anyone even knew what was happening, let alone how to resist. If Klein had written the book just two years later, she would have had another perfect example from the same actors: the way that the Bush White House got the TARP program passed directly after the economic collapse of 2007, which simply handed hundreds of billions of dollars to the very same corporate actors who had destroyed the global economy, as the administration enabled the Fed to purchase the “toxic assets” of companies that were, of course, “too big to fail.” If she had written the book fifteen years later, she could certainly have made much hay with the COVID-19 pandemic, though also I would argue that the incompetence of the first Trump administration, and the imperfect allegiance to neoliberalism that was held by the Biden administration, meant that less was done to change this country, and that opportunity was – uhhh, “lost.” I guess. But you can definitely see small instances of the Shock Doctrine being utilized, first in the Paycheck Protection Program that allowed anyone who wanted to get free money to apply for loan forgiveness; and then in some of the more controversial executive orders that both Trump and Biden used – such as Order 42, which kept asylum seekers in Mexico in order to quarantine them indefinitely.
But the neoliberal grip on the country, which probably peaked during Bill Clinton’s presidency if not George W. Bush’s (Every president since Reagan has been a neoliberal, regardless of party. George H.W. Bush was bad at it, possibly because he was actually concerned with helping the country; and Joe Biden moved away from his neoliberal roots, partly because he was influenced by our own Wizard of Oz, Bernie Sanders. Trump is a neoliberal, but also a shit-flinging gibbon, so not nearly as effective as Clinton or Reagan or even Obama.), has been slipping, under both Trump and Biden. So I don’t necessarily see the same unified, effective effort to achieve neoliberal goals (Complete laissez-faire economy, total free market – for details, read the book, or listen to Unfucking the Republic, who have a special, warm hatred for Milton Friedman) happening under Trump the first time, and especially not now – the tariffs are, if there is a God and any justice, making Milton Friedman flip over and over and over in his grave – but in thinking about Trump, and why anyone would want to support him in EVERYTHING that he is doing, I remembered this book.
And so now I’m wondering.
Let me also clarify: I do believe that Trump has handlers. The first term it was Steve Bannon, primarily, and maybe it still is; maybe it’s Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025 and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Bannon and Vought are both white supremacists who seek a theocracy, Vought including a neoliberal paradise and Bannon imagining a full-on Reich. I think anyone with more brains than morality, which includes almost everyone in Washington and certainly everyone in the administration (To be fair, Trump has, I suspect, very little in the way of functioning brain cells – but he is entirely amoral and frequently immoral, so “more brains than morality” is so low a bar it’s basically just a floor for the Donald), can manipulate Donald Trump as easily as breathing: tell him he’s a genius, make him feel like he is about to be asked to explain something but you won’t ask him if he just makes this very smart, very good decision, and then when he agrees not only that he should make that decision but it was originally his very smart idea, praise him for his intelligence and his ungodly machismo. Lather, rinse, repeat. I can’t imagine that everyone who wants to wield power in Washington would give up this golden opportunity to be the power behind the idiot.
But I can’t believe anyone would want all of what Trump is doing – or that someone who really wanted to control him would be unable to stop or blunt or reduce some of his stupid fucking ideas. If Vought wants the federal government eliminated so that white supremacy can reign again, why wouldn’t he want the dipshits in the Signal chat to be fired? (Though as I write that, I remember that incompetent government advances the agenda… so maybe this is the right guy to look at if we want to find the puppetmaster.)
So I’m wondering. What if Trump himself, and Elon Musk and DOGE, this whole administration, with its incredible stupidity and its incessant destruction of everything good, carried out entirely haphazardly and with brainless abandon – and yet ALL BAD as though it really was planned – is actually just the shock? What if the goal is to disorient us all so much, to make us all lose faith in so many things, that we don’t resist when the actual agenda is put into place, because we won’t even know who we are or where we are, let alone what is being done to our country?
I don’t know that this is true – I’m a little thrown, now, by realizing that a lot of this might fit in with Vought’s agenda – but I think it does make sense. I’ve always thought of Trump as the distraction: the gibbon flinging shit is impossible to look away from, and hey presto, tax cuts and the repeal of Obamacare. That last was stopped, finally by John McCain, who, I suspect, was not very susceptible to the disorientation of being tortured. (RIP, Senator. We miss you. Even if we don’t miss all of your policies and positions.) And maybe that’s all it is – but the problem is, if I’m right and ALL of this is the distraction, all of it part of the grand application of shock to the whole country and maybe the whole world, then either the plan is already happening while we are reeling – or it hasn’t started yet. And if it hasn’t started yet, I have to assume it is intended to be something so much worse than what we are currently dealing with, that they can’t try to put it in place until after the full shock has sent us all into a tailspin of confusion and desperation, unable to resist control.
I think I need to get my book group to read Project 2025.
Okay. Let’s talk. Honestly. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
The truth.
I’m trying to get my Freshman English students to do that. To talk honestly. They don’t – ever – but I think it’s mostly because they don’t know how.
See, what we have done in education over the last ten or twenty years is reward lying. Reward cheating. To a certain extent that is not new: I lied constantly when I was a teenager, especially to my teachers and my parents, and I would guess that most teenagers had similar experiences. And for the same reason: schools reward lying and cheating. For as long as schools have been product-focused, rather than process-focused, we have given students an opportunity to achieve all the rewards of school (All the apparent ones, at least) without doing the difficult parts. My grade in my classes was based on the work I turned in: which means that if I can find a way to cheat on those assignments, then I get the exact same grade I would if I did the work myself, the hard way. And sure, we also try to stop students from choosing to cheat, through threats of dire consequences if they get caught; but that “if” in what I just wrote is a humming, glowing, throbbing beacon of glorious light. Because teenagers are dumb: we think that we can get away with anything, even while we are actively not getting away with it. The very first time I caught students cheating – and they were cheating on a small, simple, easy assignment, a set of study questions that came after a reading, which they did with the reading in hand, in class – I realized while I was reading their responses that three young women, all friends, had given identical, word-for-word answers. They had copied. And the giveaway was they had used the word “oasis” completely out of context – something like “and the oasis of the story was the courage the characters had.” One of them – the one who had done the work and given it to the other two, the source student – had written “basis,” in cursive, and the other two had misread it. So I gave them all zeroes for copying, two for doing it and one for letting them, and when I handed the work back, I told them they had gotten zeroes. But instead of confessing, they argued with me. Vociferously. Angrily. Denying that they had ever done such a thing. I hadn’t handed back their papers, choosing to keep them as evidence, and just informed them of their grades; when they demanded I show them the evidence, I realized I had left the papers in my other classroom (Like many first-year teachers, I got the crappiest job assignment, so I floated between three different classrooms and taught two different remedial classes), and they insisted on coming with me to see the evidence; they yelled at me the whole way across campus, about how dare I accuse them, and they would never do that, and it was not fair, and so on. We got to my other classroom, I showed them their papers, pointed at where they wrote “oasis” and said, “Explain that.”
And they actually tried. They tried to come up with some bullshit on the spot about how “oasis” was meant to represent the safe space that had been created in the story by the characters… the girl who was talking trailed off in the middle of the sentence. I just shook my head and said, “No.” And they left. Grumbling. Still denying that they had done what they couldn’t actually prove that they hadn’t done – because they had done it.
But what happened? The student who had done the work had her mother complain to the administration, and I had a meeting with one of the vice principals and this mother. Who told us that her daughter was under a lot of stress, and after all, she had done the work, and then had made the poor choice to let her friends copy because they all just wanted so badly to do well. That’s not really bad, is it?? So, as per the decision my administrator made, that girl got the grade. The other two had a chance to make up the work and get a grade. They got a warning.
A few days later, one of the boys in the class told me that he had actually let the first girl, the source girl – the one who got the grade – copy his work.
So. This is the structure we have built for students. Cheating is overlooked; copying is standard; getting “help” with the answers is encouraged. Because the product is what matters, not the process by which you create that product. (It’s the perfect conceptual framework for a life cut short by working yourself to death in order to get the company more profit. But surely that’s just a coincidence…) And onto that structure we have added the internet, with all of its access to perfect information and perfect writing; and now AI, the same perfect information and perfect writing, but now both customizable – and untraceable. And we still grade students on product, not process. We still assign homework, so they can complete the assignments in privacy, without supervision, with full access to resources like AI and Google. We use the same assignments year after year, so students can pass on work they did to the next year’s class. And we tell them that what really matters in school is getting good grades, so you can get into good college, so you can have a good job and make money. Oh, we tell them they need to learn, they need to master the skills; but that’s just talking. Every single reward in school is derived directly from product. (With the exceptions of PE, the arts [which sometimes reward product, but not always – my wife’s Life Drawing class is graded only on process, her AP Art class graded largely on process… though in that last case that’s because if she graded their art work as she would grade a college student’s work, they’d all fail. She has high standards. And we don’t work at an art school.] and a few classes like foreign language, where students are graded on their conversation and pronunciation and so on: performance metrics.) And almost every product can be completed with some kind of corrupting assistance, whether it is copying from a friend, getting help from a family member, or using the online resources they have available. Even just using the excuse of “Oh no, my paper didn’t upload!” to get extra time to complete it and turn it in, with permission, a second time. Because after all, I can’t blame a student if the WiFi went down, right?
Right.
So I’m trying to get my freshmen to think about lying, and whether it is good or bad. They all, without exception, think it is good in the right circumstances, which are always two: to spare someone’s feelings – the classic “Do I look good in this outfit?” conundrum – and to save yourself from getting in trouble. They do usually offer a third circumstance: when someone threatens to kill you if you don’t tell them something, like where you hid the money, then it is acceptable to lie to save your life. Thank you for including that hypothetical, children; surely an important one. But it’s that middle one, the lying-to-get-out-of-trouble, that I want them to think about. Actually, the first one, too, because I gave them the counterargument: if you tell someone they look great when they look terrible, then you’re telling that person to walk around proudly, while they look terrible, and don’t know it. They didn’t have an answer to that. They’re not ready to admit what I think is the answer, that honesty really is the best policy, and the key to getting along is knowing how to speak truth without being harsh and insulting – you don’t have to say “Damn, you look terrible!” when someone looks terrible in an outfit, but you should not lie and say they look perfect when they look terrible – and the key to not getting in trouble is… not doing things you shouldn’t do. I don’t think they’ll all come over to my side, but I want them to think about it, because they lie to me constantly, and I’m sick of it.
But then, last night, I watched our President stand up in front of Congress, his words broadcast to the whole world, and tell lie after lie after lie. After lie. After lie. For ninety minutes. And the whole time, without exception, the Republican majority clapped and cheered for his lies. The two grinning dolts behind him, Mike Johnson and J.D. Vance, grinned and laughed – because Donald Trump didn’t just lie, he was also needlessly, gleefully cruel, and appallingly stupid, again and again and again, and clearly that stupid cruelty was even more popular than his lies. Because the cruelty won’t even get the apathetic next day fact-checking that his bullshit has gotten today; the cruelty we just let go, maybe frowning a little at how our President doesn’t show the same decorum we enjoyed so much from President Obama (When he wasn’t bombing people in the Middle East or deporting families from the US), who was always polite and well-spoken and never overtly cruel and bullying like this guy, with his goddamn shit-eating grin when he tells some joke about innocent people he’s going to harm, because it will save money, or because it will win him points with his equally cruel, stupid, bullying base. But he won’t have to suffer any consequences for his lies or his stupidity or his cruelty; he did all the same things last time, and we elected him again. Because eggs were too expensive.
(Please understand – and know that I am in the middle of writing a piece about that, about grocery prices and inflation and Trump’s broken promises regarding the issue, but I had to address this absolute horror show of a “speech” – that I recognize the genuine damage and stress that inflation and high prices inflict on those of us who are on the edge of not having enough. I am a high school teacher: I can’t afford eggs. I am also a partial vegetarian: eggs are one of my primary sources of protein. So I get it. I only mock the idea of egg prices as a reason to vote for Trump because even if we do see that as a valid reason to elect a president – and I will argue all day that presidents just don’t have that much control over prices in our system – it ignores SO MANY other things about Donald Trump. I get the need for relief from the cost of living: but that’s not the only thing that matters. That’s why I say it. If you disagree with me about the right priorities to focus on for a vote, then so be it. We’ll discuss this more another time.)
For now, let’s start with talking about what Donald Trump lied about last night in his address. This is easy to find, of course – here’s a good source FactChecking Trump’s Address to Congress – FactCheck.org, that gives a clear list followed by more careful analysis – but while they do include some of the things that sometimes slip past fact checkers, like that Trump ignored the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on creating the economic situation that the Biden administration dealt with, they focused on the specific lies Trump told in the speech: and that means they don’t talk about the lies he has used as the justifications for his actions thus far, which he then discussed in the speech. And that’s where I want to focus.
But let me also list out, if you are not interested in following the link – if you believe, as many people do, that fact checkers are unreliable, that only independent media sources are believable, which means you have not thought a whole heck of a lot about why “independent” is more important than “part of an organization whose business model relies on truthful reporting rather than garnering attention” – some of the more egregious falsehoods that Trump spouted.
First, the savings he and Elon Musk have found through the “work” of “DOGE.” They have not found hundreds of billions in waste: they have “saved” about $20 billion, claimed $105 billion, and proved that exactly none of it was savings from eliminating fraud. It’s all “savings” from firing employees. Which, sure, that saves money – but it also eliminates work and productivity. If you have three people working for you and you fire one, you save one-third of your payroll costs – AND YOU LOSE ONE-THIRD OF YOUR PRODUCTION. Seems like this would be already known by two guys who run such huge and successful companies, but maybe not. They do both seem to believe that they personally do the work which is actually done by their employees, so, maybe they’re unclear on the concept.
Or maybe the only fraud here is the one being perpetrated by Trump and Musk and DOGE.
Next: Social Security. Trump went on and on and on about the MILLIONS of people who Social Security “believes” are over a hundred years old, including some that he said were older than the United States. So let’s be clear on this: when we say that “Social Security” “believes” these people are impossibly old… who are we talking about? Is Social Security the name of the person in charge of the organization? Is it the hive mind of all the bureaucrats who work there? Is it the AI who runs the database? Is Social Security here in the room with us now?
No: social security is the much-beloved system whereby we ensure that senior citizens don’t have to starve to death in shantytowns after they stop working. And it is also the biggest “entitlement” in the Federal budget: and therefore it is the one the Republicans most want to cut. But since so many of their voters are senior citizens, they can’t cut it without facing the wrath of their voters: so they try to turn their voters against social security. By talking about it like it’s the Avatar of bureaucrats, and that it’s stupid enough to “believe” that there are impossibly ancient people still getting social security checks.
Here’s the truth: the social security database is enormous. Tens of millions of people receive checks every month; hundreds of millions of people make payments into the fund for those checks every month. When people pass away, there is a form that one’s survivors are supposed to fill out and file with SS to let them know that someone on the roll has passed and no longer need checks. But: people don’t consider that to be an important job, especially while grieving, so they don’t always do it. Also lots of people don’t have loved ones to file the form. I would guess millions of people, over the years. The ancient people in the database are not people that Social Security “believes” are alive, they are people who were on the rolls as alive, and who have never been confirmed to be dead. See the difference?
Trump doesn’t. Well: he does, he just lied about it, and pretended these two different things are the same. They’re not. If you want to see this as a moment when Trump is monumentally stupid instead of a liar, I’m fine with that. And yes, it’s monumentally stupid: if someone told me there were people on the SS database who were over 120 years old, I would assume there was a mistake in the data, not that Social Security “believed” there were Americans living over 120 years old. Especially not the millions whom Trump gobbled about.
And while thousands of those people – thousands out of the millions, which is fractions of a percentage point – may still get checks, and some of them get checks because living people are using the name of a dead person to collect social security (Frank Gallagher does this with his dead mother in Shameless.), which is fraud, the rest of the millions of unconfirmed-dead people on the roll are just – on the roll. In the database. They don’t get checks. Money is not wasted on them, and it would not be saved by cleaning up the database. Of course cleaning up the database would be a good idea, but how many man-hours would it take to confirm that millions of people are actually dead? And if you decide to remove everyone who is over, say, 100 years old, there will be at least 80,000 people who will want to have a word with you.
Several of Trump’s other lies were of a less serious nature: claiming that 38,000 Americans were killed during the construction of the Panama Canal (5,600 workers died during construction, mostly from diseases like malaria and yellow fever. Not all of them were American. Special Wonders of the Canal – PMC), that Biden inherited a great economy and Trump inherited a terrible one twice, that Europe has given less than the US to the Ukraine and that the US has given $350 billion – these are just bad facts; they’re definitely lies, but they are small, because none of them change people’s minds, and none of them serve as the primary justification for Trump’s bad policies: he wants to take us to war over the Canal because China has an influence there, not because some number of Americans died during construction; he constantly lies about his accomplishments and, especially last night, about Biden’s failures, but that doesn’t change anyone’s opinion about either man; Trump is going to give as much of the Ukraine to Russia as he can, because he wants to be allies with Putin, not because of how much Ukraine costs to defend. And he doesn’t want to be allies with Putin to save money, it is to make himself into a strongman, in appearance if not in fact. (Though I have to note here that when I said last night that Trump wanted to be Putin, my wife’s immediate response was “Trump will never look that good with his shirt off.” Savage, she is. But: she ain’t lyin’.)
But the lies I really want to get to with Trump’s speech are the ones about people who are disenfranchised in this country. Such as people who are described, by that shit-flinging gibbon and his handlers, as representatives of DEI: like General C.Q. Brown, whom Trump fired from his position as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and whose fucking resume looks like this:
EDUCATION 1984 Bachelor of Science, Civil Engineering, Texas Tech University, Lubbock 1991 U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons School, Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. 1992 Squadron Officer School, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 1994 Master of Aeronautical Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla. 1997 Distinguished graduate, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2000 Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2004 National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va. 2008 Air Force Senior Leadership Course, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, N.C. 2012 Joint Force Air Component Commander Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2014 Joint Flag Officer Warfighting Course, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 2015 Pinnacle Course, National Defense University, Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C. 2017 Leadership at the Peak, Center for Creative Leadership, Colorado Springs, Colo.
ASSIGNMENTS 1. May 1985 – April 1986, Student, undergraduate Pilot training, 82nd Student Squadron, Williams Air Force Base, Ariz. 2. May 1986 – July 1986, Student, lead-in fighter training, 434th Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, Holloman AFB, N.M. 3. August 1986 – March 1987, Student, F-16 training, 62nd Tactical Fighter Training Squadron, MacDill AFB, Fla. 4. April 1987 – October 1988, F-16 Pilot, 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron, Kunsan Air Base, South Korea 5. November 1988 – April 1991, F-16 Instructor Pilot, wing electronic combat officer, and wing standardization and evaluation flight examiner, 307th and 308th Tactical Fighter Squadrons, Homestead AFB, Fla. 6. April 1991 – August 1991, Student, U.S. Air Force Fighter Weapons Instructor Course, Nellis AFB, Nev. 7. August 1991 – August 1992, F-16 Squadron Weapons Officer and Flight Commander, 307th Fighter Squadron, Homestead AFB, Fla. 8. September 1992 – October 1994, Weapons School Instructor, and standardization and evaluation flight examiner, F-16 Division, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, Nellis AFB, Nev. 9. October 1994 – July 1996, Aide-de-Camp to the Chief of Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va. 10. August 1996 – June 1997, Student, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Ala. 11. June 1997 – September 1997, Student, Armed Forces Staff College, National Defense University, Norfolk, Va. 12. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla. 13. November 1999 – June 2003, F-16CJ Instructor Pilot and assistant operations officer, 79th Fighter Squadron; Weapons and Training Flight Commander, 20th Operations Support Squadron; Operations Officer, 55th Fighter Squadron; and Commander, 78th Fighter Squadron, Shaw AFB, S.C. 14. July 2003 – June 2004, National Defense Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses, Alexandria, Va. 15. June 2004 – June 2005, Deputy Chief, Program Integration Division, Directorate of Programs, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va. 16. July 2005 – May 2007, Commandant, U.S. Air Force Weapons School, 57th Wing, Nellis AFB, Nev. 17. May 2007 – May 2008, Commander, 8th Fighter Wing, Kunsan AB, South Korea 18. June 2008 – May 2009, Director, Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff Executive Action Group, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Arlington, Va. 19. June 2009 – April 2011, Commander, 31st Fighter Wing, Aviano AB, Italy 20. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla. 21. April 2013 – February 2014, Deputy Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command; Deputy, Combined Force Air Component Commander, U.S. Central Command, Southwest Asia 22. March 2014 – June 2015, Director, Operations, Strategic Deterrence, and Nuclear Integration, Headquarters U.S. Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa, Ramstein AB, Germany 23. June 2015 – July 2016, Commander, U.S. Air Forces Central Command, Air Combat Command, Southwest Asia 24. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla. 25. July 2018 – July 2020, Commander, Pacific Air Forces; Air Component Commander for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; and Executive Director, Pacific Air Combat Operations Staff, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii 26. August 2020 – September 2023, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, the Pentagon, Arlington, Va. 27. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
SUMMARY OF JOINT ASSIGNMENTS 1. September 1997 – November 1999, Air Operations Officer, Current Operations Division, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a major 2. May 2011 – March 2013, Deputy Director, Operations Directorate, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a brigadier general 3. July 2016 – July 2018, Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, MacDill AFB, Fla., as a lieutenant general 4. October 2023 – present, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
FLIGHT INFORMATION Rating: command pilot Flight hours: more than 3,100 including 130 combat hours Aircraft flown: F-16A/B/C/D and 20 additional fixed and rotary-wing aircraft
MAJOR AWARDS AND DECORATIONS Defense Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters Distinguished Service Medal Defense Superior Service Medal Legion of Merit with three oak leaf clusters Bronze Star Medal Defense Meritorious Service Medal Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters Aerial Achievement Medal Joint Service Commendation Medal Air and Space Commendation Medal with two oak leaf clusters Combat Readiness Medal National Defense Service Medal with bronze star Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal Global War on Terrorism Service Medal Korea Defense Service Medal Nuclear Deterrence Operations Service Medal NATO Medal Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Tongil Medal) Republic of Singapore Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) Meritorious Service Medal Republic of Korea Order of National Security Merit (Samil Medal) Brazilian Order of Aeronautical Merit (Degree of Grand Officer)
PUBLICATIONS “Developing Doctrine for the Future Joint Force: Creating Synergy and Minimizing Seams,” Air University Press, September 2005 “No Longer the Outlier: Updating the Air Component Structure” Air University Press, Spring 2016
Yeah. That guy was a DEI hire.
People who are endangered by the anti-vaccine movement that Trump supports and promoted last night – which is all of us, but is especially those who can’t work in close proximity to others, for any of a thousand reasons (permanent disability, mental illness, inability to travel, along with being immunocompromised, again for a thousand potential reasons), but who do work, and who who now have to return to work because Trump is a cruel idiot and a liar who claims that “not coming IN to work” is evidence of laziness or fraud. It is not clear to me whether the real goal here is just to fire valuable workers for a reason that Trump’s base can stand behind, so that Trump and Musk can channel the money “saved” from payroll into tax breaks for billionaires, or if it is to undermine the very idea that a person who cannot come into an office can nonetheless, in this day of complete interconnectedness online, still be a productive worker because that idea is, I dunno, woke or some shit. Either way, it is a stupid lie that is cruel to those who need the accommodation of remote work – and also cruel to those who just like it better, because what the hell is wrong with working from home if you can do the work?
Trump is going after people with neurodivergence, in addition to attacking those who need to live in a vaccinated world, by lying about the history of autism diagnoses, in conjunction with his comments about naming the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a post for which he is not only unqualified, but entirely unfit. It is not true that “not long ago” 1 in 10,000 children had autism; it is true that 50 YEARS AGO we did not understand autism nor how to diagnose the entire spectrum of conditions associated with the term. It is also emphatically not true that autism is a disability that would justify removing or changing the vaccine schedule, as Trump was implying. The entire argument that parents would rather risk their children dying of measles than “becoming” autistic because of the MMR vaccine is disgusting, along with being a thoroughly debunked and incredible lie. Even where autism does present as disabling, ask a parent of an autistic child whether they would rather have their child living or dead – and then duck, before they quite rightly punch you in the face. Though I’d be really happy if all of those theoretical punches landed on Elon Musk, and also on whoever suggested that Elon’s Nazi salute was a sign of Musk’s own autism. Remember: “Always Punch Nazis” includes punching those who argue that being autistic explains away Nazism.
But I will admit that, despite all of the terrible and cruel and stupid things that Trump said in that speech, the lies that actually bothered me personally the most were the transphobic ones. Maybe because they got the loudest cheers. Maybe because he seemed proudest of his anti-trans policies like the declaration that there are only two genders in the U.S. – which is both a lie, and a cruel and stupid statement. Or his executive order keeping men from playing women’s sports, which, HOLY GOD THAT I DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN CAN WE STOP? Can we just stop? Can we just agree to never again allow anyone to repeat the absolute and utter nonsense and poppycock that there are “men” playing “women’s” sports? There are women playing women’s sports. Nothing more. And 99.99% of those women are those who were assigned female at birth. And also, this is fucking sports we are talking about. Not something important. Sports are entertainment. They are inconsequential. They don’t matter. They matter plenty to the people who play them, both professionally and passionately, and therefore they are worth consideration for the sake of those people; but the idea that a national policy, as a focus of what is essentially a state of the union address, would make such a deal of opposing the existence of trans people, particularly in relation to sport? What the hell are we doing here?
The answer is simple: we, and by “we” I mean that orange-tinted shit-flinging gibbon and his flying monkeys and most definitely not me, are attacking and belittling and trying to destroy and torment and kill anyone whose destruction would make the stupid, cruel base of the Republican party feel stronger and meaner, which is how they want to feel. Trans people are not the danger, regardless of what nonsense some goddamn volleyball player claims (Want to know how many volleyball players get hurt every year? About 35,000. Volleyball Related Injuries in Adolescents: A Decade of Data | Published in Orthopedic Reviews How many of those injuries were caused by trans athletes? Conversely, how many trans athletes suffer injury and abuse and death because of the way they are objectified and demonized and ostracized and assaulted in every way by the entire Republican establishment of this country? I bet it’s more than the one injury Trump claimed was caused by a trans athlete.)
I don’t know why this one upsets me more than the other loathsome false accusations and attacks that Trump launched at everyone who is morally and ethically and humanistically better than he is himself. But it does. I suppose it doesn’t matter why it bothers me, any more than it matters why the base and the Republicans and the shit-flinging gibbon himself chose trans people to try to destroy: it’s just that they found someone they can harm, and I have found someone – millions of someones – whom I want to help protect from that harm, in whatever way I can assist. I don’t really need to justify which fight I choose to take on: I just need to be aware of who my real target is.
It’s not just Trump. Just like Adolf Hitler, who was a uniquely effective figurehead for the Nazi party and the apparatus that rose during the Third Reich, but neither the brains behind that apparatus nor the one in control of it, Trump himself is not the cause of the problem, he is simply the most visible pimple on the very wide flabby ass of the MAGA movement. It is possible that, after Trump is gone (Hopefully before the end of his term, though personally I’m hoping for impeachment and jail rather than the death that many others think he deserves), JD Vance or one of the other flying monkeys will take over as the chief shit-flinger; and that might even be worse. It’s not even the billionaires who back Trump and who are taking advantage of the distraction he is because of the shit he flings – shit that is flung like no one has ever seen before – because the wealthy have always been there, trying to control things, trying to take advantage of every opportunity to have wealth and power, without being in the spotlight themselves. I know it’s not Elon Musk: there’s a reason why the real power brokers don’t ever do what he is doing, and put themselves out front. It’s because when people get mad enough to pick up the torches and pitchforks – and the more effective Musk is, the sooner that will happen, as it always does when inequality gets too extreme – they look for an obvious target for their anger. We all know who Elon Musk is. Who the hell is Rebekah Mercer?
(Is it wrong of me to point out that, were she to become known to those with torches and pitchforks — or, let’s say, were she to get targeted by the next Luigi Mangione — nobody would miss the ENORMOUS target that is her head?)
Now we know what Megamind’s mom looked like
What I oppose is what Trump represents and distills. It is stupidity, chosen because it is easier than learning, and more comfortable than truth – because stupidity lies to us, even as we lie to the stupid. It is cruelty, because cruelty, also for the sake of ease and comfort, brings the displaced self-hatred of the stupid crashing down on the innocent; and not only do we then have that many more victims, some of whom will lash out at other disempowered people, but we also have those among the stupid who now cannot face enlightenment because then they would have to admit what they did to people who never deserved anything but the kindness and empathy due every one of our fellow human beings, and so those angry, cruel, stupid people will be even more incapable of changing what they are doing, no matter what truth is put before them and no matter what pleas for mercy they hear and ignore.
The worse we act, the less likely we are to stop acting badly. That’s why Donald Trump is the way he is: because he’s always been this way, he’s just been getting worse, for his entire life. And he’s an old, evil, man, now.
*Let me give one disclaimer: I use a lot of ways to call someone crazy in this piece. At no time, not even for one second, not in any instance or in any way, am I actually referring to someone with mental illness or neurodivergence. I’m using every form of “crazy” to mean only someone who holds a position or acts in a way that I don’t agree with, and generally that I can’t understand. That’s it. Okay?
Okay. Here we go.
Conservatives are crazy.
Okay, not ALL of them. And they’re not crazy about everything: taxes and regulations can be onerous, and while society absolutely needs to progress, it needs to do it in a way and at a pace that allows people to grow comfortable with change, which is never easy.
But conservatives created the monstrosity that is President Donald Trump. And before that, they created neoliberal economics, generally known as “trickle-down” economics, which has been devastating people in this country and around the world for the last half-century or more. And they just kept supporting it, that entire time, all facts to the contrary notwithstanding. Libertarians are conservatives, for the most part, and so was Ayn Rand — and between Rand and Trump, I don’t need to say anything else to show that conservatives, broadly speaking, are crazy. A few sandwiches short of a picnic. Daft. Cracked. Meshugge. Bonkers. Non compos mentis. The cheese fell off their cracker a long time ago.
They think that we’re crazy, of course, mostly in how we accept things that seem so obviously counter to what conservatives call common sense — like the existence and worth of trans people, for instance, or like believing the government can do good things and can be trusted (in some ways — we know about the Tuskegee Experiment, too), or thinking that guns are somehow to blame for gun violence — and partly how we are so entirely hypocritical while we accuse them of being the real hypocrites.
I gotta pause on that last one, because — really, y’all, there are some pretty upsetting things that we argue, and never even think about. Like how we argue that guns should be banned in order to reduce gun violence, but that drugs should be legalized in order to reduce drug crime. Abortion and the death penalty is another one: we mock conservatives for being pro-life with fetuses, but very happy to kill people on death row, but somehow we never talk about how we hold exactly the same apparently contradictory positions, just in reverse — we are willing to accept the death of the unborn, while we work to preserve the lives of the worst people imaginable. And that’s not to say that the left is wrong on those issues and the right is right; but it is — I’m going to say disingenuous — that we don’t actually engage with our own apparent hypocrisy while we are simultaneously aghast that the right doesn’t engage with their apparent hypocrisy.
To be clear, since I brought up the examples: the ban on drugs is different from a proposed ban on guns mainly because the users are entirely different. I suppose some gun owners could be characterized as addicts, though I think they wouldn’t enjoy that description; but mainly, drugs create a market for themselves, the members of which have very little chance to refuse to consume the substances. Certainly there are forces that push people to buy and use guns, and certainly those forces would make it impossible to remove all illegal guns from the country, should guns ever be banned here; but they are not the same forces that have made the drug war unwinnable. That’s the essential difference, and the details are worth thinking about and talking about. And with abortion and the death penalty, it is only necessary to point out that “pro-choice” is not and never has been “pro-abortion.” The left does not wish the unborn to die, any more than we wish murderers to die; that is the unknotting of the apparent paradox in our opinions. And I also have to point out that the apparent contradictions in conservative stances can be just as easily explained away: it’s just that they make assumptions that the left doesn’t make, like the idea that innocence makes a child’s life worth more than an adult’s life, or that an armed citizen is the best defense against an armed criminal. Or more simply and more importantly, that God and the Christian faith should be an important part of our political consciousness.
The point is, there are things the left accuses the right of being crazy about, which the right is not at all crazy about, and there are also things that the left thinks which are batshit insane — a whole bunch of people in the Democratic establishment who thought that Hillary Clinton made a better candidate than Bernie Sanders, for instance, and then that Joe Biden also made a better candidate than Bernie: and then that Joe Biden should have ever been a candidate for a second term. Bat. Shit. Insane. And a lot of us swallowed and set our faces right and stood in line. I did.
I have decided that I have been wrong.
I don’t need to rehash the last several elections, though; as I have said several times, Joe Biden was a much better president than I thought he would be, and MUCH better than he gets credit for being, and I don’t know that Bernie could have beat Trump either in 2016 or 2020, and I’m not sure anyone could have beat Trump in 2024. I don’t understand how that could be true, considering all of Trump’s baggage, but the truth seems to be that the economic situation in this country ensured that only a Republican could win in 2024 — and as the primary showed, Trump had ensured that of all the Republicans in this country, only he can be on the top of the ticket.
Because conservatives are crazy.
I’m not going to back off of that, not even with my both-sidesing liberal and conservative positions and arguments: there is no other way to see how the entire right side of the political spectrum in this country has embraced Donald Trump so completely other than as totally nuts; and the way people still — still — STILL!!! accept trickle-down economics as viable even after FIFTY FUCKING YEARS of increasing inequality and the resultant social unrest is proof that those same people are either insane or so utterly drool-fountain stupid that there’s no reason to even talk to them any more, because they can’t understand anything stated in standard English — only things that look or sound like this:
(I would say that conservatives are crazy because they listen to country music — but a lot of country music is good, so that’s not enough to prove that conservatives are crazy. Also, I first heard this song on Dr. Demento in the 80s, so really, who’s the crazier one? The one who listens to country music, or the one who listens to a guy named Demento who also played this?)
I guarantee you nobody in middle America listened to that garbage. I’ve been listening to it since I was in middle school. I think you see my point.
But you don’t, because in my usual inimitable way, I have failed utterly to get to my point. So let me stop screwing around and make it now.
I have for DECADES now thought that conservatives — specific ones, especially the ones in Washington — were crazy because they refused to compromise. Compromise, I hope we all know, is good. Compromise is how people get along, and how things get done. Compromise respects the value of both sides of an issue, both the humanity and the intelligence of people who happen to disagree, which makes it the best possible outcome — two heads are better than one, after all. I have essentially never entered an argument where I was totally unwilling to compromise. Okay, there have been a few online debates, sure — I’ve argued against normalizing pedophilia, and I’m not gonna meet them halfway on that one — but in real life, I have never drawn a line in the sand, put my foot down, in a place I was utterly unwilling to move. I am always willing to compromise, because in every case in my life, I have argued against other rational human beings, who deserve as much consideration as I do; so how could I do any less than be willing to compromise with someone? What on Earth makes me so much better, so much righter, than them that I would not take even a step in their direction? On a larger scale, how can you have a society where people don’t compromise? How do people get along if they can’t agree on at least some elements of their disagreements?
That’s what I thought. And I still think that, because it’s true — you can’t have a society without compromise — but also, that’s a social truth, and a practical idea.
It’s not good politics.
In politics, refusing to compromise is the right thing to do. Compromise is dangerous. And self-defeating.
My point today is this: it is time, and past time, and long past time, that Democrats specifically and the left in general started doing what is actually good politics.
I listened to an episode of Pitchfork Economics — an outstanding podcast which I recommend to everyone; though I would say you probably shouldn’t do the absurd (crazy?) thing I’m doing, which is listening to the entire archive from the beginning, in 2017; it’s a little strange that I have been listening to this podcast for two or three years now, and they still haven’t reached Joe Biden’s election as the 46th President — and they interviewed Professor James Kwak, whose books I now have to read. (One of them is free online! Nice!) But more to the point for this particular writing, in the interview Professor Kwak was talking about the Democratic party, which he both called the most important political party in the world, as the only thing standing in the way of full-on fascism on the part of the Trump GOP (My words, not the professor’s; he said the Dems were the most important party, but was more polite about the rest.) and also described as having drank the Kool-Aid of neoliberalism (Again, my wording) around the time of Bill Clinton’s administration, and thus gave up being the actual party of the people, of labor, of the poor, of progressivism and liberal ideas.
Here, if you are interested. It’s a good interview.
As I listened, I thought the professor was right: the Democrats have had a critical job especially for the last eight years, because it was up to them to stop us from having President Donald Trump, and for two of the three chances they have had to step up and do that critical task, to preserve the United States, to protect the rule of law and government of the people, by the people, for the people — they failed. Pretty badly, really.
And I thought, Maybe the Democratic party is really bad at this politics thing.
It’s not the first time I’ve had this thought. I listen to another podcast which I’ve talked about frequently before, called UNFTR, UnFucking The Republic. One of the essential claims from that podcast is that the Democratic party is bad at politics, and a bad bulwark against Trump and the rise of fascism; but because they are one of the only two parties with full access and the full machinery to mount and win a national political campaign in this country, the answer is not to create a third party: the answer is to take over the Democratic party, much as the Tea Party and then the MAGA movement have taken over the GOP, from the inside, and then turn the Democratic party into what it should be, but currently is not. Progressive. Successful. A party for the left.
But I’ve never been willing to follow that thought to the end, and to start actually arguing against voting for the compromise candidate — for Hillary Clinton, for Joe Biden, for Kamala Harris; none of whom I supported, all of whom I voted for and encouraged others to vote for.
That’s where I’ve been wrong.
In talking about how conservatives differ from liberals in the U.S., and how conservatives have managed to become so incredibly dominant, Kwak said that there were several things that conservatives had done over the last fifty years which had enabled them to become this unstoppable force that managed to sweep Trump back into the White House despite everything (Again, the interview is now five years old, so Professor Kwak is not actually talking about the current travesty in Washington, but it’s not any different, it comes from the same strategy and worked in the same way): and the main one was that they were willing to stand for their ideology, even if it cost them elections. He said that the right had been putting up more conservative candidates against moderates in primaries even when the more conservative candidate was less likely to win the general election. Which sounded crazy to me — but the result is that the right is seen as dedicated to their beliefs, their ideals, where the left is seen as — wishy washy. Because the left will back a politician who doesn’t represent all of the ideals we ourselves espouse, where the right is not generally willing to do that: you can see it in how the GOP has purged all of the members unwilling to support Trump, like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney. Their choice to throw every single bit of their support behind Trump is crazy: but the way they do it is impressive. It shows determination, and dedication, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s own preferences or ambitions for what you see as the greater good. And before this, you could see in how the GOP starting in the 80s forced all national politicians on the right to sign Grover Norquist’s oath never to raise taxes, for any reason — which was one reason George H.W. Bush lost his reelection to Bill Clinton. Which, I mean — that’s crazy.
But it got them the right reputation. A reputation that can resist anything, even facts. This is why the right is seen as willing to fight for what they believe — and why the right is seen as more reliable on the issues that they all stand for, like opposing immigration and making the economy work for people. Do they do those things? Not always: but they ALWAYS stand on those principles, and they ALWAYS stand together, and cast out those who are more willing to compromise.
They’re crazy. The shift in the GOP from the conservative party to the party of Trump has been unbelievable to watch: it has felt like a Soviet purge, removing everyone who did not fawn at the feet of the Great Leader. And the rise of Trump has definitely shown the downside of the GOP’s strategy of absolute loyalty to the ideals of the party.
But on the other hand, they fucking win elections. And then gerrymander the districts so they can win every election in the future. Which the Democrats do, too, because our system is deeply corrupt: but the main difference is that, most of the time, in most states, the Democrats DON’T win elections. And it’s partly because the left is more willing to compromise. So we’re seen as wishy washy. Soft. Unreliable. And in worse cases, or as the stakes rise and the rhetoric gets harsher, as hypocrites, and as liars.
And even worse, as corrupt, unreliable politicians who are willing to do whatever it takes to retain power, whether that requires compromise of our apparently most important ideals, or lying about what is at stake in an election, as we argue that Trump is a fascist who signifies the end of this country — and then the second he takes power, FIFTY-EIGHT FUCKING DEMOCRATS VOTE FOR THAT BULLSHIT LAKEN RILEY ACT. Fifty-eight. How many Republicans voted for Biden’s priorities? Or Obama’s? And, I mean, we claim to believe that white men should not be put ahead of, or above of, women or people of color; we chastise the right for their overwhelming whiteness and maleness. And then what do we do?
We nominate and elect Joseph R. Biden.
And then Biden waited until after the election was lost to do a whole heap of things that he should have been willing to do on day one — if he really believed in what he claims to believe. Only at the very end did he hand out the pardons. Only at the end did he warn us about the technocrat oligarchy. Six months before, he was still taking their campaign contributions.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being strategic with the support a politician has, and the public opinion of the things they want to do; that’s necessary. I love the idea of going in and just doing whatever the hell one wants, what one knows is right — but also, that’s how Trump does it. It’s not good strategy.
It’s just why he wins.
But I don’t think Biden did anything wrong, in waiting until the end of this term to, for instance, commute the sentences of people on federal death row. But when the other side is so bold, so forward, so utterly confident in their rightness that they will do whatever they think is right at any time and damn the political consequences — well. The decision to be strategic in any way certainly seems like political manipulation. Not wisdom.
And while I do not want to imitate the right, because they are crazy, I also do not want to continue losing elections to them.
So this is where I think we need to adopt an aspect of their system, of their overall strategy, that works for them.
I want to stop compromising.
Not on everything: but there have to be some issues that the left is not willing to negotiate on, that we are unwilling to accept anything else because we know, down to our blood and bones, that we are right, and the right is wrong. That anyone who disagrees with us is wrong. That we can discuss ways and means, to some extent, and even compromise on that sort of thing — or on the timeline, or the order of specific priorities; the details can almost always be discussed. But the central idea, the heart, the essential concept: that never goes away. It never stops being the ideal, and we never stop fighting for it. For them. Think of the heroes of the left: the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; think of Bernie, whose appeal was based partly on this fact, that he never, ever changed what he was saying about economic inequality and the need to address it. Not in fifty years. THAT. THAT is what we need to do, that is how we need to fight for our central ideals. (It’s why we should have nominated Bernie, but I guess that train has already left the station, huh?)
I have some ideas about what those things should be — five of them coming directly from UNFTR — but I want to think about them some more before I take a stand. Because once I take a stand on these things, I don’t ever want to back down from them. Not ever. Not for any reason, not under any circumstances. Even if it costs us votes in a specific election — because look at what compromising has gotten us. It’s gotten us fucking Trump, and a Republican congress, and a ludicrously “conservative” Supreme Court. We supported the moderate candidate in order to protect the things that mattered most, like the right to choose; and we lost the things that mattered because we lost the elections. And I think this is quite a large part of why. It’s not all of it, this isn’t the only thing we need to do: but I think this is part. I think we need to do this.
Compromise in politics, on the most essential ideas, is a path only to losing. Which protects nothing, not even the compromises we tried to fight for. Look at Obamacare. Do we think that’s going to live through the next four years? John McCain saved it last time. And John McCain is gone, along with everyone else who thought the way he did, on the right. No disrespect to Senator McCain, who was a remarkable man and a man of principles, who died sadly of a terrible disease; but I think we know that if he had lived, he would have been voted out of the GOP for opposing Trump. Just like everyone else who did so, who was willing to compromise with the left. Jeff Flake. Mitt Romney. Liz Cheney. All gone. They all lost. Just like us.
So I think we should stop compromising, and start winning.
Now we need to decide what we will not compromise on. It can’t be everything: but it has to be something. And once we decide, we can’t ever back down. We can’t every compromise, not on these things.
And then there’s this: it makes sense to me not to compromise with the party of Trump. After all — they are crazy.
There’s going to be a lot about Trump, for the next four years (and then, with any luck at all, there will be NOTHING about Trump, ever again; I mean, I don’t care if he goes around the country on a Fuck The Libs Resentment-Palooza tour until the day he dies, but I very much want him to be irrelevant politically after this second term in office) and I’m certainly not going to apologize for that; I have been accused before of having Trump Derangement Syndrome, and I will be so accused again, but every accusation of TDS rests on the mistaken supposition that Trump is not, in fact, the biggest single influence on American politics and culture right now, and the speaker allegedly with TDS is making an issue about Trump when it’s not about Trump. But he is the biggest single influence on politics and culture right now: not only do half of this country’s elected officials kneel to kiss the ring in all decisions, but somewhere between a third and a half of the voting populace base their identity on him, in part or in total. If I keep bringing up Trump, and blaming Trump for things that go wrong for the next four years, it’s not because I’m obsessed with Trump: it’s because there has never been anyone more successful at taking over this country, mind and soul, in the past. Ever.
God, that’s depressing. The most successful and popular public figure in American history is that fucking stooge.
So when Trump comes up, and we complain about Trump and his actions, that’s not TDS; that’s reality. It is all about Trump. We on the left would really much rather that not be true, believe me. We really don’t want this country to revolve around that asshole. It just does. And so, therefore, does our conversation.
But this? This post, this argument? This isn’t about Trump. Honestly. And I’ll prove it, as soon as I get into the specific argument I want to make.
To show that I’m not simply targeting conservatives (I know, nobody who reads my blogs would think that – except wait…), and not even because Trump is not a conservative (But he’s not) and does not represent conservative thought or values (as he does not), but to show that I’m not simply targeting Trump or his supporters, I’m going to start with myself. I’m going to start with a confession, and then I’m going to proudly declare my innocence of wrongdoing, because that’s apparently what shows that I’m not only innocent, but above reproach.
Okay, that last one was about Trump. More about his supporters. But that’s not the subject.
The subject is wrongdoing.
I did wrong, recently. A couple of times. I have done wrong in the past: not often, because I generally get caught, and then I get in trouble, and I have an almost pathological need to avoid disappointing people – but when I was a kid, I stole, I vandalized, I trespassed; I consumed illegal substances; I threw a big ol’ keg party while my mom was out of town and my “guests” wrecked the house and drove the neighbors to call the cops. I’ve lied, though not a lot and never officially; I’ve certainly been nasty to people in various ways, insulting them or ignoring them or taking advantage of them.
That last one is the kind of wrongdoing I have done recently. On this most recent Election Night, I posted on Facebook, out of a sense of rage and outrage that my countrymen would re-elect the worst president, and the most dangerous man, to hold the office in better than a century (I’m going back to Andrew Johnson for the closest rival to Trump for that title of Most Dangerous, though Warren G. Harding may take the taco for “worst.” Still a century ago.), and I made – something like a threat, I suppose. It wasn’t a threat, but I worded it like a threat: imagine if I said, “If you say that about my mom, I’m going to fluff your pillow until you can’t lie down flat!” See? Sounds like a threat, and in context with the rest of the sentence it might be taken as a threat, because clearly I’m mad about what you’re doing, even though I’m just saying I would fluff your pillow. It isn’t important exactly what I said on Facebook and I don’t want to repeat it, because when I posted it the first time, someone complained to my employer, saying that I was giving the school a bad name, posting political statements and “threats” online. My boss called me in for a meeting to take the post down, which I had already done before the meeting; that resolved the problem because it is clear to anyone who knows me that I do not make genuine threats and I do not cause harm to people, not even over politics, so the only problem was the post.
But the post might, conceivably, have been bad for my employer, because people might have taken it the wrong way, and that might have done harm to my employer’s reputation and so on. So okay: I did wrong. I did the wrong thing in putting other people at risk for the sake of my online statement of my opinion in a less-than-friendly way. I got consequences, then, for my wrongdoing: I got called in by my boss for it, and asked to remove it. Not a serious consequence, but about what the act deserved. My boss was very cautious in that meeting, partly because he and I were friendly and he didn’t want to upset me, but more because I could have raised a big ol’ stink about my freedom of speech and censorship and so on; but I didn’t do that. I accepted that my act was wrong, if not very wrong, and a natural consequence of that was that I should eat my words – or delete them, rather. So be it. Deleted.
Then I got in more trouble for something else I did. That one I don’t want to talk about, because I dispute part of what I was accused of, but not the other part; and again, I don’t want to put my employer or my employment at risk by talking publicly about what happened. It was not that severe, please believe me; my violations fifteen years ago (Wow! Is that really how long ago it was?! Yeah, 2010. Wild. Back when Trump was just a shmuck in New York with a bad reality show, rather than the guy who turned our entire country into a bad reality show.) were much worse, and I’ve written about those in detail before. All I want to say is, I got written up for that recent one, a warning placed in my employee file, and I acknowledge that I shouldn’t have done what I did. My actions – my words, to be a little more specific – were wrong.
When I violated the rules in Oregon fifteen years ago, I acknowledged that, too. What I did was this: I posted angry, insulting things about my students during class, from my school computer, which I should not have done; I named three of my former students and insulted them in a second post a month later. After four years of wrangling, I was found to have committed gross neglect of my duty as a teacher and an employee of the St. Helens School District, and I served a 30-day suspension without pay for it. I accepted that punishment, even though I still think it was undeserved. I mean, sure, I shouldn’t have used class time to write angry things about my students; but how many times have people called friends and bitched about work while at work? How many private messages and emails, and letters and diary entries, have been written by people on the clock, complaining about the people who own the clock? I always thought the violations in Oregon should have been handled the same way these more recent (less serious) violations were: I should have been called in for an uncomfortable meeting; my violation should have been put into my employee file so my future employers can know what I have done in the past; I should have been asked to remove the offensive posts – which I also did, in that case fifteen years ago. Give me a warning, get me in trouble, so I won’t do the same thing again.
It’s funny, though: I thought, when I got called in for that meeting in Oregon about my online activity, that I was going to hear about a complaint filed against me by a local political figure whom I had lambasted a couple of times on my blog, and who I figured would absolutely go to my employer about his ire over my words; I was ready and willing to defend my First Amendment rights, that time. It went further than that because my superintendent was advised by the district lawyers to report me to the state, mainly to cover her and the district’s asses; and, my union lawyer told me, the state wanted to make an example of me because it was 2010 and they wanted to establish a precedent regarding teachers on social media: and my case connected to both a blog and Facebook. (That was another parallel: I had posted something – certainly more insulting, but also ENTIRELY unrelated to the blogs – on Facebook, something which got reported to my district by an irate homeschool parent who had a bone to pick with public school teachers. The district Googled me and found my much-more-offensive blogs. Guess I haven’t learned to keep my mouth shut, huh?) So essentially, mine was a political prosecution: it was a savvy political move for my district, and then an aggressive political move for the state agency. They went after me to serve their own agenda, not because my actions deserved that punishment, not because there was any real risk of me being in front of a class. I spent the entire four years between my offense and my punishment teaching, successfully, without any further incidents. I did nothing else wrong. As I said, nobody who knows me would believe that I would actually do harm to a student, nor to my employer.
But whether my actions were justifiable, or whether the punishment was deserved, or whether I was thrown under the bus for political reasons, or not, the fact is that I broke the rules, and I got punished for it. And I accept that: I accept my punishment as what should have happened to me in response to my wrongdoing. I accept it because there are worse people, doing worse things, and they should also get punished for their wrongdoing, because they actually do harm, which I maintain that I did not do (Mainly because nobody, certainly not the students in question, ever read those blogs.), but if I get away with doing wrong by breaking rules, then it makes it easier for them to get away with doing wrong by doing harm. It is not lost on me that, at the very same time my district was throwing me under the bus for saying mean things on a blog, there was another teacher at the school who was receiving multiple complaints for acting inappropriately with students, but the school ignored those complaints and did not punish that teacher at all; ten years later, I had moved out of the state, and that other guy was in prison for sexual abuse of a student.
And I got called morally reprehensible. (To be fair, I don’t know what they called that other guy. It was probably worse.)
That irony, though, that discrepancy between my crime and punishment and the abuser’s crime and punishment – that injustice – does not mean that I should have gotten away with what I did: it means that both the other teacher and I should have been punished for our actions, preferably in an appropriate way. I should have been written up; he should have been at least fired and banned from being around children, and maybe arrested (I do not know if he had actually broken the law and harmed a student when the complaints were made. Neither does the district: no investigation was carried out.). He did harm. I broke the rules. We both should have consequences.
We live in a society of laws. I actually could have stopped at “We live in a society,” because society does not exist without rules of some kind; and the important ones that restrict the misbehavior of everyone in the society should be called laws. Without laws, there is no society. (I invite any anarchists to explain to me where I’m wrong on that, but not here and not now.) That is not to say that I think that humans are inherently evil and will always do the wrong thing without a threat from the state to keep us in line; but I think we all do wrong things, often without realizing what we are doing. I honestly didn’t even remember doing the thing I got written up for recently, just as I didn’t remember the blogs I had written in violation of the rules in Oregon when I first got called in for a meeting with the superintendent. But now that I have gotten in trouble for doing those things, I can guaran-fucking-TEE you that those things will not happen again: because I do not want to get in more trouble, and now I know clearly what actions of mine will get me in trouble. It’s not just that I don’t want the trouble, either: I don’t want the other consequences of committing those acts again. I do not want to have the reputation of someone who would break the rules like that. I do not want to lose my job, my career. And I recognize, and regret, whatever harm I have done, both actual and theoretical: because I can see that someone who read what I wrote in Oregon could have been genuinely hurt by it, even though I don’t think anyone did. It could have happened, which is why I shouldn’t have written what I wrote and posted it.
Okay. That kind of sucked, honestly; I don’t like talking about the things I’ve done that are wrong: I want to justify all of them, to explain or excuse everything that I have done, so that nobody thinks I am less than a good person. I want to be a good person, and be known as such. It’s important to me. I would hope it would be important to all of us, even if there weren’t direct consequences for misbehavior. But it’s not, not for all of us. Which is why the rules have to apply to everyone, both people who will not do wrong again, and people who will, but who might not want to have consequences again after they have them the first time.
Now let’s talk about Trump.
Donald J. Trump is a felon. He was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, tried, and convicted by a jury of his peers. He is still appealing the decision, under the argument that some of the evidence in his trial should have been inadmissible because the Supreme Court decided that the President of the United States – specifically Donald J. Trump – is above the law (HA I wrote “against the law.” Thank you for that, subconscious. But it is not what I meant. More’s the pity: we’d be a lot better off if Donald J. Trump was against the law.), and that appeal may bear fruit, because every other judge in this country does what the Supreme Court majority has failed to do: actually follow precedent and respect the rule of law and the role of the courts. So if that appeal does bear fruit, then Trump’s conviction will be overturned. And then the breaking of our society will be complete: because then Trump will actually be entirely above the law, untouchable and unrestrainable.
Please understand me. I am not talking about what Trump will do as President; part of me – the cynical, angry, irony-loving part – is looking forward to that, because I want everyone who voted for cheaper eggs to see what they actually brought down on all of us; and more importantly, I want the actual villains, the bastards who want to tear down the government so they can abuse all of us for profit, and who installed Donald Trump (because he was able to bring together all of the disparate parts of his base to vote for him and because he distracts everyone who opposes those profit-driven bastards) to regret the achievement of their actual goals: because they will make the world a worse place, and no matter what they think their money will insulate them from, they still live in the world they are fucking up. There will be consequences for their actions, and I want those billionaire corporate overlords to suffer those consequences along with the rest of us. (I’m tempted to just drop a picture of Luigi Mangione here, but I don’t want anyone to take this as a threat. I don’t think what Mangione did was right, he is a murderer; but it is an example of the consequences you risk when you make the world a worse place, and then live in that same world. I will also note that Mangione is facing the consequences for his actions.) The people that support Trump and who use Trump to achieve their own agenda want him to get away with anything he wants to do because they want him to keep doing what he does: mainly flinging shit everywhere he can, because that’s what distracts the rest of us from the agenda going on behind Trump. I mean, come on: the Gulf of America? Conquering Greenland? He’s just a gibbon flinging shit, and we can’t tear our eyes away.
But when the specific way that Trump is enabled is to take away the consequences for his actions, the damage done is so much more serious than Trump making a fool of us all on the international stage. So much more serious than Trump increasing oil drilling in this country, even though that does nothing good and creates irreparable harm. Trump’s backers only did it, I don’t doubt, so that Trump could keep flinging shit (That’s why the Supreme Court left themselves as the arbiters of what should be considered an official act, and therefore immune to prosecution, so that if a president whose name is NOT “Trump” pulls any shenanigans, the Court can send them up the river), but what they have done is create a situation where there is no consequence for breaking the rules, and more important, no consequence for doing harm.
To be entirely clear: the case where Trump was actually convicted was a rule-breaking case. He didn’t do any immediate harm with that one. But the rules he broke were about election finance, and transparency, and to allow those rules to be broken without consequence allows other people to do the same: and that does unimaginable potential harm in the future, because it allows even worse people than Trump to hide where they got their money, and how they spent it, in pursuit of power. That’s the scary part. And the MUCH WORSE part is that the other cases, the ones that have been dropped or dismissed, those were even closer to doing actual harm: and the January 6th case was entirely about Trump doing actual harm. People were hurt on January 6th. People died. Our country, our democracy, was endangered. Trump was partly responsible for that harm. And Trump got away with it. Without any consequence, at all. The Senate refused to impeach because he would face criminal charges – and then he didn’t face any criminal charges because the Senate didn’t impeach, which allowed him to run for the White House again. And he won because Americans wanted cheaper eggs, and forgot about everything Trump did wrong: because there were no consequences, so there was no clear line drawn as to what is allowed and what is not. If what Trump did was allowed, then he did no wrong: and if he wasn’t punished, then it was allowed. That’s the situation that was created. That’s the damage.
And it was done for Trump, but the problem going forward is not only Trump: it’s everyone else who might now do the same things, or much, much worse, and get away with it because Trump got away with it. I am definitely not saying that Trump should have been singled out for his actions, or that Trump should have suffered extra undue consequences; I don’t think the courts or his conviction should have stopped Trump from running for office, for example. I said, well over a year ago, that I didn’t want Trump to lose the election by going to jail: I wanted us not to vote for him.
I guess the rest of the country doesn’t have my hangup about disappointing people. Or at least 75 million or so of you.
I do think Trump should have been impeached. But when he wasn’t, I was willing to accept that, because I was sure he would be tried and convicted for his crimes; even when the trials got delayed and delayed and delayed, I wasn’t worried, because I was sure he wouldn’t be elected again. Surely people wouldn’t support that guy, the one who did all those wrong things. But since so many of you all did, I don’t want the courts to take away the choice, the votes, the will of the people. As a result of the last election, I now want Trump to be president, and I’m not saying otherwise in this argument.
No: I am saying one thing. Trump was accused of crimes. Credibly accused of crimes, because in all four criminal prosecutions, he went through a grand jury process and was indicted: for falsifying business records in New York, for conspiring to suborn elected officials and steal the election in Georgia, for taking and keeping and mishandling classified government documents in Florida, and for conspiring to overthrow the government in Washington, D.C. Those accusations should have all gone to trial, unless there was a reason in advance to discard the accusation without trial (And the dismissal in the Mar-a-Lago documents case was not, in my opinion, valid, because the judge, an inexperienced political appointee with loyalty to Trump, based her dismissal of all charges on the idea that the special prosecutor does not have authority to investigate and bring charges: and that’s horseshit. But I’ll tell you what, I would be willing to accept the court’s ruling on the appeal that Jack Smith brought to overturn that dismissal and reinstate the charges, because I trust that other judges are willing to do what Aileen Cannon is not, and follow precedent and respect the rule of law and of the courts. I’d even be willing to accept it if our corrupt Supreme Court did their bullshit again and upheld Trump’s invulnerability, because that would be another dagger that might help to get rid of those particular destroyers of our society, which should absolutely be the consequences for the Supreme Court majority’s wrong actions – and the three other prosecutions would have gone forward. I would accept that BECAUSE I ACCEPT THE RULE OF LAW.). The trials should have offered Trump a chance to face his accusers, to see all those who testified against him, and to be competently defended. The proceedings should have been ruled over by an impartial and competent judge, in every case. Trump should have been convicted – or acquitted – by unanimous vote of a jury of his peers, randomly selected and vetted by both Trump’s accusers and his attorneys. And he should then have the right to appeal, to object to any injustice in the procedures: as he has been doing all along, and as has borne him fruit, quite spectacularly.
And then, if any of those convictions happened and held through appeal, Trump should have been punished.
His punishment should be appropriate to his crime. In the case of his sole criminal conviction, I think the punishment given to any first-time felon would be acceptable in this case; I’d expect it to be a fine, maybe some community service, maybe some probation. Maybe an auditor, of some kind, to watch over his business records and make sure he doesn’t do the same thing again. And he should have, and bear, the label “Felon.” The reputational damage, and the consequent damage to his career. I mean, 75 million people decided that Trump was above the law and that he should be put back into the White House to get us cheaper eggs and destroy the lives of as many people as possible, and that’s – well, it’s not “fine.” But it is part of our system: being a convicted felon is no bar to running for, winning, or serving in the Presidency, and I accept that.
Because I accept the rule of law.
This is the part that drives me nuts, the worst part of all of this. I hate Trump and what he stands for, and I hate what he has done to my country, and I dread what he will do to my country in the next four years. But the thing that makes me start yelling cuss words, out loud, even when I’m just listening to podcasts and walking my dogs, is hearing about how Trump has taken such an enormous shit on our justice system: and how it has broken under the weight of Trump’s feces. Forgive my continued scatological metaphors, but they show both the contempt, and the filth, that Trump has dropped onto the fundamental structure of our society, by breaking the law, and getting away with it, with the help of his supporters and backers. Gotten away with doing wrong, without consequences. Of any kind.
Have other people done it before him? Of course: in our capitalist society, there have always been two tiers of justice, justice for the poor and justice for the rich; and Trump already enjoyed all of the protections of wealth – it’s how he was able to delay three of his four trials until after the election, and how he has been able to delay or avoid actually paying all of the money in his two civil cases (He has posted a bond that will pay E. Jean Carroll if he loses his final appeals to her two successful lawsuits, and the other case for falsifying business records, which ended in a $454 million fine, was reduced to $175 million, which he paid. Why did he only have to pay a third of the original fine? Because he’s rich, that’s why.). But now there are three tiers of justice: one for the poor, one for the rich, and one for Donald J. Trump. Maybe for future Republican presidents (Forgive my cynical assumption that our current Supreme Court would be much more willing to find that a Republican president’s criminal acts are immune than a Democratic president’s acts, but – come on. We all know who and what we’re dealing with, now.), but for now, Trump is the only one who gets to get away with everything.
For now.
Again: I don’t want him removed from office for his crimes. (Other than the January 6th case. That crime was sedition, and someone guilty of sedition should not be in elected office of this country. He should have been impeached for it. He wasn’t because of partisan politics, not because he wasn’t guilty or didn’t commit a wrong act. But since the actual charges were conspiracy and obstruction, I am still willing to accept that a conviction of those crimes would not equate to sedition, and would not bar him from running for office. Though in that case I’d be yelling a lot more.) I am not opposing Trump here on political terms. Let him run the country: let him fuck it up and show all of you who supported him what you have done. And hey, if he manages to do some things right, as he did some things right in his first term, I will applaud him for those things. Go ahead and reform prisons more. Release money to the general public to help us endure a crisis, like a good Socialist would. Love it. Thank you for that, Donald. Do it more.
And I am in no way singling Trump out for any of this. You want to put Biden and Obama on trial for having documents in their homes? Do it. If they committed wrong acts, then they also should suffer the consequences for what they did. (Just bringing documents home is not a wrong act. No one is saying that is all Trump did, other than Trump. And he’s lying.) Any Democrat who claimed that Trump’s win in 2016 was illegitimate, who argued that the government should in some way block his election because he received assistance from Russia, and who the right has since accused of obstructing or conspiring to overthrow a legal election – put them on trial, too. Or rather, go through the process: have an investigation, put the facts to a grand jury, and have anyone who is then indicted put on trial, with attorneys, with the full protections of the law.
Right after Trump goes to trial for taking and mishandling classified documents, and for conspiring to overthrow Joe Biden’s legitimate election win in 2020. Because his trials were already in motion. He had already been indicted by four grand juries. He already had attorneys defending him, and judges overseeing the cases – three of them impartial. I’d like to see him go to trial for sedition, too, since he’s guilty of that; but I’m willing to accept the process, and the DOJ’s determination that Trump should be prosecuted for conspiring to obstruct and overthrow the election, and I want him to go to trial for that.
Because I accept the rule of law.
More than that, in fact: I cherish it. I believe in it. I know that society needs it. And whatever may occur with a president who makes bad political decisions, who cuts taxes to raise the deficit and concentrate wealth in the top 1%, who destroys environmental regulations and makes climate change even worse, who flouts international diplomacy and all norms of politics and decent behavior, I will accept all of that. All of it. Because the law in my country says that Donald Trump was twice elected President, and that means he gets to fling shit everywhere he wants to, and we all just have to clean it up. Or live in the stink.
But I will not accept that Trump has gotten away with committing crimes, and suffered no penalty for it. (He is innocent until proven guilty, so even though I’m PRETTY GODDAMN SURE he would have been found guilty in the Georgia case [where he was on tape committing the act] and the Mar-a-Lago documents case [where the crime was photographed sitting in his goddamn bathroom, and he is also on tape committing the crime], I will accept that he has not yet been found guilty of those crimes: but he sure was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, and he should have had a punishment for that. First time offender or not. 34 fucking FELONIES. So I get to say that he has committed crimes. And the fact that the judge in that case had to forgo any punishment because it would interfere with Trump performing the office of the Presidency is horseshit: and it’s why I get to say he got away with committing crimes without punishment.) The fact that he has done so undermines the basis of our entire society. Trump has broken the rule of law, and without law, we do not have a society. Everything the most rabid conservative, who thinks every Democrat is a Marxist Socialist unAmerican Commie, accuses the left of doing, the right has done in uplifting Trump while he committed crimes and avoided paying for other crimes. The outrage over the tearing down of the DOJ and the FBI, the way the Supreme Court just fucking spit on both the Constitution and the separation of powers in deciding that Trump should be immune to prosecution for all of his acts while President, should have been deafening, and it should have come from the right: from those who (loudly) support law and order, who cherish the traditions of our country, who defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. I can’t accept that law enforcement watches this guy commit every crime possible, and cheers when he gets away with it. I can’t accept that military members, in large numbers, watch him destroy this country’s entire system, and still salute him. And vote for him. It is insane. It is deranged. It shows how damaged our country is, by all of this, how broken our society is, now.
75 million people voted for Trump, and even more supported him, even though he committed crimes, simply because people want him to be in office, because they think he will be good for the economy, or hard on immigration, or a strong defender of this country. (All political reasons. Political reasons to oppose the due process of law.) But no matter how much he fights for what he calls America, Trump is destroying it, he is destroying us, because he is destroying the rule of law.
I won’t accept that.
And neither should you. Whether you voted for Trump, whether you support him politically, or not.
No one should be above the law. Not me, and not Trump. Or else there is no law. And no America. At least no America worth defending. And nobody is worth that. Not even Donald J. Trump.
it may seem at times like I am. I get pretty mad about politics, and I say some aggressive and accusatory things, and also some pretty damn insulting things. We disagree, very strongly, about a number of issues; and you may see some of my opinions as representing a threat.
For instance, you see Donald Trump as the best choice for the next President. I see him as an orange fascist, a shit-flinging gibbon, who may be a threat to this country’s continued existence; though I admit, Trump’s not actually the threat; it’s the people who come crowding in with him, who, while we’re all staring at the shit-gibbon, are sneaking around in the shadows trying to make our lives worse so they can gain more of what they already have, wealth and power and the protective bubble of privilege. I don’t understand why you can’t see the threat of those people behind Trump. Though I understand why you’re staring at Trump: we all are. I went to the San Diego Zoo when I was a kid and watched a chimp pee in its own mouth. We like watching primates fling excrement. It’s wild.
I know that you think Kamala is the threat to our country; or, even more likely, you see her the same way I see Trump: you think she is a low-IQ failure, a Communist/Marxist liar who got her start in politics by spreading her legs for Willie Brown, and who never even won the nomination, just stepped in when Joe dropped out, conveniently for Kamala too late for the DNC to run a new primary but not too late for her to take the money he raised; and you think she is mainly a distraction whose job it is to open the door for those same shady characters I mentioned before, who, you think, will strip away our freedoms and the things that make us who we are, that make us the greatest country on Earth.
You worry about what she’s going to do to the economy, and how that will affect the people of this country.
I worry about what he’s going to do to the people of this country while we’re all focusing on the economy.
So, we disagree. Strongly. Often.
But we’re not enemies.
Neither one of us is trying to destroy the country, though we both accuse each other of doing exactly that. I think the threats you see, the things you believe will destroy the country, are absurd non-issues — like preventing trans people from playing sports — and I can’t understand why you don’t focus on the real threats that I see — like climate change. And yes, you guessed it: you can’t fathom why I believe in these things that are barely even real, like climate change, and why I ignore the moral collapse of this country, caused by the rise of DEI and drag queen story hour.
I know that the issue of trans rights is not the biggest issue on your mind, I know that it is the economy, immigration, and crime, in that order; I’m trying to show the starkest differences between us — because people on my side are also concerned about the economy and about immigration in ways I personally don’t agree with. So look on the bright side: you already won both of those arguments, as you won the argument about defunding the police. Whoever gets into office, Trump or Harris, Democrats or Republicans, they will cut taxes (though they shouldn’t, they should raise taxes on corporations and use it to fund Medicare for all, which will then save us more money and, more importantly, more headache than any tax cut ever could — but I also recognize that you think this is socialism gone wild, and you can’t believe I would ever trust the government to do anything important like provide real health care to real people; and I can’t believe you would trust corporations to do it instead of the government — and here we are.), and they will definitely pass that hard-on-immigration bill that the Dems handed the Republicans before Donald Trump told them not to pass it. He’s been taking shots for months, now, about that bill, so you better believe he would pass that same damn bill — except with the wall stuck in there somewhere. So you will get a tougher stance on immigration, and you will get a tax cut, and you will get a better economy (Because the economy during any presidency is largely built by the one before, so whoever wins this election will be hailed as a brilliant economic president because of the work that Biden has done for the last four years. But we can disagree on that, too.). One of the other places we disagree is trans rights, and that one I think is still up in the air; that’s why I used it as an example. I could have picked abortion: but I don’t think we actually disagree on that, not substantively.
I’m explaining this because I don’t want you to think I’m trying to paint you in a terrible way by talking about trans people playing sports or reading to children: I am not. I disagree with you. (If you are a trans person, or an ally and a supporter of trans rights as I am, and you think I am cozying up to people who want to remove your right to exist, hold on. Trust me. Read on to the end. I am not your enemy, either. [I’m just going to go ahead and assume that anyone who actually is trans is not on the Trump side politically. Not really.]) I do not think you, whom I disagree with politically, are my enemy.
I would like you to recognize the same thing about me.
Let’s talk about our disagreements a little more, and see if you can see this my way.
What makes someone your enemy? For me, it boils down to one thing: your enemy intends you harm. They wish to harm you. People who are not our enemies may (and often do) harm us, but they don’t intend it; that’s the difference. Anyone who intends you harm is your enemy.
So look at where we disagree. Start with immigration, because I don’t mean to ignore what many people think is a very serious issue. Here’s my opinion on it: there are too many illegal immigrants coming into this country.
Ha. Didn’t expect that, did you? Want me to really blow your mind? I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, too.
Where we disagree is what should be done about illegal immigration. I do not think illegal immigrants are bad people. I am tempted to explain that position by saying that I am not a racist, because I think a LOT of people who oppose illegal immigration hold that position because they are racist; but not everyone does, by any means. Many people oppose illegal immigration because it is illegal; many people oppose it because they think our country doesn’t have the room or the resources to support countless immigrants, and priority should be given to those who come here legally. I disagree with the first argument because laws can be changed: what matters to me is harm, not the fact of a law prohibiting specific behavior. I talk to my students about laws and morality all the time, and every single one of them thinks that some laws should be broken when the law is bad or the need is severe or the cause is righteous; I presume we agree on that, as well. I don’t like holding one position in one context and then changing it in another context; that is hypocrisy. So the issue is, if illegal immigrants are doing harm, their actions should be illegal, and they should be stopped; but if they are not doing harm, then it doesn’t matter that their actions are illegal: harmless actions that are illegal imply the laws should be changed, not that the actions and the people are bad somehow despite the lack of harm.
The harm illegal immigrants may be doing is taking limited resources. And as I said: I think there are too many illegal immigrants. (I kind of think there are too many people in this country, period, but then I don’t like people, so I’m not going to pay much attention to that thought of mine.) I will only say that illegal immigrants may be taking limited resources because it isn’t clear to me that illegal immigrants are the problem: they are emphatically not the cause of inflation or the housing crisis. But it is possible they are taking too many limited resources, and if so that should stop: one way would be if they should be reduced in number.
Here’s how I think we could do that, if it is the right thing to do: work permits and the right to migrate freely across the border, in either direction, for employment. Doing that would eliminate as an area of concern all of the people who immigrate and reside permanently in the US simply for economic reasons: because they could travel here, work, and then go back home with their families for vacations or when they have enough money. They wouldn’t bring their families here, because they would only come to work and send money home. Most people don’t want to move their family to a whole new country just for a job: they do it because if someone comes to the US for a job, they can’t ever go back, because then they could never return to work more. People used to cross the border to work when the agricultural season called for more workers, and then return to their native country when the season ended. We are the ones who stopped that, and it was stupid, and it caused millions of people to immigrate here with their families, permanently, reluctantly, because they had no economic opportunities in their home country and they didn’t want to be separated from their families forever. But go to the U.S. alone, just to work for a couple of months for picking season? No big deal. And then the only people who migrate here permanently would be those actually seeking asylum, seeking an entirely new life: a MUCH smaller number.
So. That’s my view on illegal immigration. I think immigration does no harm when it is handled reasonably; because of that, I think handling it reasonably is the best thing to do. Not build walls, not deport people, not militarize the border. (We are not, by the way, talking about fentanyl trafficking or human trafficking: one of the ways that we get twisted in politics is by conflating multiple issues that should be considered separately. This is just the immigration discussion.) Work permits and freedom to cross for work.
Maybe you still disagree with me. Maybe you think illegal immigration is illegal and so there should be a penalty involved, because breaking a rule is in itself harmful; okay. Maybe you think that immigrants with work permits would still take jobs that should go to Americans; okay.
Can you see that, even if you hold these opinions, or some other opinion that makes you disagree with my idea — can you see that I don’t intend you any harm? That I don’t mean to harm anyone? I want to make it easier to separate those migrants who want to work and then leave, from those immigrants who want to come here permanently, and I want to make it easier for both to get what they want. I believe that will do the most to decrease harm. (And, not coincidentally, it will reduce the harm done through human trafficking and drug smuggling, because much of that is done through exploitation of desperate people, and if we reduce desperation we reduce exploitation. But this is just the immigration discussion. I just want you to know I’m not ignoring the other problems.) That’s my full intent: and so even if you think I’m missing a critical concern of yours with my solution, I’m not planning anything that is intended to cause you harm. Or to cause anyone harm, but we’re talking about you.
That’s why I’m not your enemy.
Want to do another one? Take climate change. You may oppose the Green New Deal because you think that it will make everything too expensive, and that climate change can’t be affected by making you buy an electric car. You may think that Democratic politicians are using the Green New Deal to give kickbacks to the shady people standing behind them (Though if you do, you are ignoring that one of the biggest recipients of sweetheart environmental laws and policies is Elon Musk, who is not a friend to Democrats.), and you may think that electric cars suck and you don’t ever want to own one. (You may tell yourself it’s because EVs don’t have the range, or that the batteries are dangerous and lithium mining is toxic, or that the power to charge them comes from fossil fuels used to generate power in the first place — but it’s really because EVs don’t make the cool sounds that gas cars do, and you know it. Right, JB?)
I do not believe in a Green New Deal. I think it is a political statement that is now toxic. I wish it weren’t, because I believe in what it represents; but I don’t need the statement, I just want the results. I believe the government should support and encourage the US to move towards a greener economy and a greener infrastructure. I do not want Democrats giving kickbacks or sweetheart deals to their corporate cronies; they are bad at picking them, because they picked freaking Musk and made him the richest man on Earth, and he then fucked up Twitter. I really liked Twitter, so now I hold a grudge. (Mostly against Musk, who sucks for a plethora of reasons.) I believe the government has a role in educating the public, and especially in making sure that the corporations which profit from causing climate change do not get to lie about climate change, as all of the oil and gas companies have been doing for generations now. I admit I think that EVs are better and cooler than gas cars, and specifically because they don’t make the same noises that gas cars do.
It’s okay if we’re enemies on that score.
But again: can you see how I don’t intend to cause you harm? We may have different ideas of what should be done, and how it should be done. I want education. I want encouragement and support, but I want the change to come from the people and the companies of this country, not to be imposed by the government. I want that because government imposition of changes so vast and momentous doesn’t work: and I really think our actions on climate change need to work, and they need to work now. But I’ll bet you anything that we could find a reasonable compromise on the specifics of this issue.
Because I am not your enemy.
Go down the line: you will find the same thing, again and again. I hear pundits and people on both sides say that we are all Americans and we are not that different; I don’t actually agree, I think we are that different. I think we disagree on a whole lot of stuff. But I don’t think we are enemies, because I don’t think we intend each other harm. I don’t think most people intend anyone harm, other than those they see as enemies. I don’t think people who want to deport illegal immigrants want to harm those people, I think they just want to protect this country and they think immigrants are harming the US, and that deportation (and a wall) are the best way to prevent that harm. I know that people who want to impose EV mandates and so on are not intending any harm for those who might get affected; they want to prevent the much greater harm of the onrushing environmental collapse. Talk to citizens who support the idea of a Green New Deal about something like subsidies for those who can’t afford to buy an electric car, to make it possible to switch to an EV, and I guarantee they’ll agree immediately; and if you think that’s socialism, well. Tell me who it harms, and how.
You know what made me realize this? It’s abortion. Over 60% of this country’s citizens support abortion rights. That’s more than all of the people in either party, Democrat or Republican. The people I sometimes think of as white supremacists, the people I sometimes think of as religious fanatics (Don’t blame me for thinking that, you guys have Mark Robinson on your side.) — large proportions of them, of you, support abortion rights. And yet there are whole states — which may not have 60% support for abortion rights, but sure as hell have more than 0, which is the number of abortions some states seem to want to allow — trying to ban abortion entirely.
Even those people, most of them, don’t intend harm. They are trying to prevent harm. I think, vehemently, that they are wrong, that they are causing more harm than they are preventing; but I can have that debate with them. And other than the fanatics who actually want to murder people, I think they would be willing to have the discussion with me, too. Because we’re not enemies.
Now: let me say that there are people who intend harm. There are people who oppose immigration because they are racist; they want to militarize the border because they want people to die trying to cross into the US; they want there to be camps built to hold immigrants because they want immigrants to suffer and die. Those people are my enemies. As I think they are yours. There are people who want to prevent trans athletes from playing on teams with their identified gender because those people hate trans people, and think trans people shouldn’t exist. Those people intend harm to trans people: therefore they are my enemies. But I don’t think that’s you, either. I think most people who oppose trans rights think that it’s fine for trans people to exist; they think trans people shouldn’t play on sports teams, and they think trans people shouldn’t be around children. I disagree with those ideas — but I don’t think the people who hold them intend harm. I think those ideas actually do cause harm, quite severe harm; but I don’t think it’s intentional harm. Where it is intentional harm, where people think trans people — or those they mistake for trans people, like drag performers — should be killed? Those people are my enemies. And they should be yours. Murderers, even would-be murderers, do not get a place in the debate.
But I really don’t think that most people want to commit murder. And I think if you don’t want to kill people, we can talk.
So this, I think, is how we should think about this going forward. I disagree with you, a lot, and I will fight you, tooth and nail, over political points — but not literally, because I do not intend you harm, and you do not intend me harm. We are all Americans, even though we are very different. We are not enemies.
But you know who is my enemy?
People who try to convince you that I am your enemy. People who say that I am, intentionally, destroying our country, which I love dearly. People who say that I should be destroyed, that I should be jailed, or killed, for my beliefs and my political ideas.
So understand this: I don’t hate people who vote for Donald Trump — though I don’t like you, either. But I don’t think that most of you are my enemies. Some are: the racists are, and the anti-trans bigots, and the ones who want people to suffer and die because they disagree politically with Trump and his ilk. Donald Trump, however, is my enemy: because by trying to make you think that I am your enemy, he intends me harm. If you think the same thing about Kamala Harris, then I accept that she is your enemy — though I doubt you think that unless you think that all Democrats are out to kill all Republicans, and if you think that, you’re probably my enemy already. Trump is Kamala Harris’s enemy, and so she says things about him you wouldn’t say about people who aren’t your enemy: and he deserves them.
Because he is the enemy.
You’re not.
So if my enemy wins this election, I’m going to oppose him, and I’m going to be fighting those who supported him because he is my enemy, and I think he intends harm. But then after he is gone — and even if he wins this election, he will not destroy this country, because he has too many enemies and not enough allies — we will need to come back together, and hopefully find a new set of leaders to elect who do not tell any of us that we are each other’s enemies. Hopefully that type will never rise again.
Hopefully it won’t be you.
But I don’t think it will. Because we’re not enemies.
I don’t actually remember when I learned it: but I remember learning the fact about Presidential debates that we probably all remember learning. The fact that they didn’t used to matter, until the first televised Presidential debate, in 1960, between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. That debate was important, I was taught, because Kennedy won it: because Nixon looked bad. Nixon was recovering from the flu, and refused makeup, and so he looked flushed and sweaty, where Kennedy looked dashing and charming. I remember learning that, while people who watched the debate on TV thought Kennedy won, people who listened to the debate on the radio thought that Nixon won: because Nixon, for all he looked sweaty and nervous, actually gave better answers to the questions. (By the way: I have to point out that the Kennedy-Nixon debates started with opening statements that were EIGHT MINUTES long. Can you even imagine either one of these two 2024 candidates giving a coherent eight-minute speech? I assume the 1960 candidates had a teleprompter for that opening statement, but still.) I remember that when I learned that, I thought it was funny; and I was sort of glad of it, because, of course, Nixon was an awful President, and Kennedy was much better — so it was a good thing that Nixon lost that debate. Right?
Right?
I was reminded of this recently when I watched Biden lose his debate against Trump: and then — only then — did it really hit me. No, it was not a good thing that Kennedy won that debate. We should never select our leaders based on appearances, based only on the surface level qualities — based on style over substance. Sure, I guess Kennedy was a good President; he was certainly a better person than Nixon, so I’m glad that Kennedy won the election — though I will say that Nixon actually did a number of good things while he was in office; just not enough to counterbalance the bad, mainly because he was the one who pushed the Southern Strategy on the Republican party, ensuring that they would lean hard into both the evangelical vote and the white nationalist vote, and because of Watergate and the deterioration of norms and standards like “The President should FOLLOW THE FUCKING LAW” — but the fact that Kennedy “won” a debate, despite having presented the lesser argument, because he was better-looking on TV? I hate that. Because that’s style over substance: and that’s bullshit.
And while I was watching the Biden-Trump debate, and cringing, and cradling my head in my hands, and cursing both under my breath and out loud, while I watched Joe Biden reveal the depths of his infirmity, I realized: that’s style over substance, too.
And it should not determine our choice for who gets our vote in November.
No, it’s not that simple. Yes, Biden did more than look bad, he revealed that he has weaknesses; I’m not about to excuse them — I wish he would step aside because of those weaknesses. He won’t, though, and it’s a problem. It’s a problem both for the election and for the administration after it: because if he wins, we will have a President with diminished capacity for four years. Let’s not imagine that no serious crises will happen in that time which would require more immediate resources of cognitive capacity than Biden apparently has.
But see, that’s where the problem lies: in appearances.
As I said, Biden should step aside. He should bow out with dignity, accepting that his best effort isn’t good enough, what we need is an actual candidate who can actually beat Donald Trump, someone who can energize — hell, anyone. Some independents, some core blue voters, some non-white non-majority groups; anybody. Biden excites literally no one. Which puts us all at risk: and why? Because ol’ Scranton Joe “truly believes” that he is the best person to beat Donald Trump.
I don’t doubt that he believes it, with all his heart, quite sincerely. He’s just wrong, is all. He may be able to beat Trump: but he’s not the best person, because right at this moment he’s gone from kinda losing in the polls to definitely losing, and there’s no clear way for him to make up that ground in time to win the election. It still might happen, he still might beat Trump: but he’s not the best candidate to do it, not any more.
The election isn’t actually about soothing Joe Biden’s ego, and it isn’t about helping him prove to the whole wide world that he’s still got it. This election is about stopping the MAGA movement that actually literally wants to destroy the country as it exists currently; and for that, Joe Biden should not be the nominee. I know he wants to fight Trump, and he wants to beat Trump: but if he helps the Dems to transition to a successor — most obvious is Kamala Harris but I’m open to other suggestions — then he is helping to beat Donald Trump, and he would absolutely be remembered for being instrumental in winning that fight. He should withdraw from the race, make a speech, and go down in history; and the Democrats should hold an open primary at the convention, then pull out all the stops for whoever wins the most delegates. I don’t care who it is (As long as it isn’t Marianne Williamson), because the excitement coming out of that convention, and the change from Biden to a younger, more vigorous person will help bring out the votes to beat Trump. That’s what should happen.
But you see, the reason why that should happen is because of how bad Joe Biden looked at the debate. That’s why. It’s not the only reason: he’s uniquely unpopular, because he’s a shitty candidate and always has been; but the truth is he’s done a good job as President. The Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, restoring the economy after the pandemic, supporting NATO and Ukraine — he’s done a really good job, especially in comparison with his predecessor and current opponent. Putting that record against Donald Trump’s should be more than enough to win the election, in the end.
It’s not. Because he looked bad. Not because he said bad things: but because he looked bad — while saying (mostly) good things.
It’s style over substance. It’s his appearance that is actually making the difference in the campaign going forward; if he looked better, sounded better, if the number of his age was about five lower (And age is just a number, so the number is part of appearances as well), he’d be able to overcome his drawbacks and he’d win, I’d have no doubt. Now I have doubt: and it’s because of what I see people saying about the race because of how Biden looked. How he sounded. His appearance, at the debate. Not his ideas, not really what he said: just how he looks, how he sounds, what we associate — what we assume — with someone who is his age.
That is unacceptable. Always. It was back in 1960, and it is now. We should be willing to look past how someone looks and how someone sounds, and examine carefully who they actually are: what they stand for, what they will do to and for the country. We do it all the time in other areas of our lives: we buy fixer-upper houses and project cars; we choose life partners who are good companions, not simply the hottest person available; we buy discount and clearance items that might be slightly less than perfect. Some of us — like, say, Donald Trump — only go for the surface appeal, but that should tell you how empty and terrible it is to do that: do we really want our country to be in any way like the relationship of Donald and Melania Trump?
But then, when it comes to choosing people to run the country, almost everybody picks based on surface traits: and we just accept it, don’t we? We just say to each other, “He looks terrible — he probably can’t do the job.” We watch videos of people stumbling and tripping and fumbling, whether it is over their words or over their feet. We make fun of how Donald Trump stands, how he dances, what his looks like, what his skin looks like. We mock both men for how they speak: not what they say, but how they say it. We talk, with all seriousness, about which candidate looks Presidential.
I don’t even know what the fuck that means. What is it to look Presidential? Wouldn’t it be true that anyone who was the President automatically looked Presidential? Does it really come down to who has a neater haircut and cleaner clothes? Who has a bigger nose, or a squarer jaw? Do we care about the President’s tailor, or their clothing budget? Do we care about their weight? About their height?
Apparently, we do. Because that’s how many of us make our voting decisions. No considerations: just vibes.
Not gonna lie, I kinda want this on a T-shirt.
Here. Let’s try an experiment. Let’s try the other side of this equation. Let’s look at the substance.
**I am not going to ignore the signs of cognitive decline, like that moment that has been soundbited (Soundbitten?) so universally, when Biden froze and then ended by saying “We beat Medicare.” We’ll get to that. But stick with me for now. Don’t focus on a single soundbite.
This is the transcript of the debate. Please read all of it, if you are interested and concerned about the actual issues in this election; but here I’m just going to quote the responses to the first question. (Let me note here, as I have noted elsewhere, that our willingness to blame or credit the President alone with the state of the economy is freaking ridiculous; nothing the President does makes much of a difference in the economy. Congress passing laws regarding taxes or regulations have more influence, but the economy is much larger than most tax laws or regulations can encompass, and while some parts of the economy may be strongly affected by specific actions in Washington, other parts will be entirely separate. Also, things that the government does often take years to actually have an impact: so every time, a President’s economy is mainly the economy of his predecessor. The economy of the Trump years was built by Obama; Biden’s economy was built mainly by Trump; the next economy will be the result of these last four years. And still not really because of the President’s actions alone. The President does nothing alone: please remember that. But regardless, good actions for the economy are good actions, so here it is.)
JAKE TAPPER: President Biden, inflation has slowed, but prices remain high. Since you took office, the price of essentials has increased. For example, a basket of groceries that cost $100 then, now costs more than $120; and typical home prices have jumped more than 30 percent.
What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?
BIDEN: You have to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me.
We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic are so badly handled, many people were dying. All he said was, it’s not that serious. Just inject a little bleach in your arm. It’d be all right.
The economy collapsed. There were no jobs. Unemployment rate rose to 15 percent. It was terrible.
And so, what we had to do is try to put things back together again. That’s exactly what we began to do. We created 15,000 new jobs. We brought on – in a position where we have 800,000 new manufacturing jobs.
But there’s more to be done. There’s more to be done. Working class people are still in trouble.
I come from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I come from a household where the kitchen table – if things weren’t able to be met during the month was a problem. Price of eggs, the price of gas, the price of housing, the price of a whole range of things.
That’s why I’m working so hard to make sure I deal with those problems. And we’re going to make sure that we reduce the price of housing. We’re going to make sure we build 2 million new units. We’re going to make sure we cap rents, so corporate greed can’t take over.
The combination of what I was left and then corporate greed are the reason why we’re in this problem right now.
In addition to that, we’re in a situation where if you had – take a look at all that was done in his administration, he didn’t do much at all. By the time he left, there’s – things had been in chaos. There was (ph) literally chaos.
And so, we put things back together. We created, as I said, those (ph) jobs. We made sure we had a situation where we now – we brought down the price of prescription drugs, which is a major issue for many people, to $15 for – for an insulin shot, as opposed to $400. No senior has to pay more than $200 for any drug – all the drugs they (inaudible) beginning next year.
And the situation is making – and we’re going to make that available to everybody, to all Americans. So we’re working to bring down the prices around the kitchen table. And that’s what we’re going to get done.
Okay: there are some stumbles there, but this is a man with a stutter. Ignore those little slips, as long as he got back on message and made his points.
Look at his points: he was handed a shit show of an economy, coming out of the pandemic (True), which Trump fucked up royally. But they went to work, and created millions of jobs, including 800,000 manufacturing jobs (Both true, the 15 million figure and the 800,000, though it’s also true that many of those jobs were layoffs from the pandemic which people were re-hired for. But also, successfully getting people back to work? That counts, for me.) He knows there is more to be done: he speaks to his own past growing up in a household that had to make ends meet, so he understands the pain we’re all going through, and then he identifies, correctly, the cause of the inflation apart from the pandemic: corporate greed. He points out other places that he has fought corporate greed, specifically big pharma and insulin; and it’s a damn good point.
That’s a good answer. That is an answer with substance.
Now here’s what Trump said.
We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We had never done so well. Every – everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us.
We got hit with COVID. And when we did, we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression the likes of which we had in 1929. By the time we finished – so we did a great job. We got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for the military, and no wars and so many other things. Everything was rocking good.
But the thing we never got the credit for, and we should have, is getting us out of that COVID mess. He created mandates; that was a disaster for our country.
But other than that, we had – we had given them back a – a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-COVID, and nobody thought that was even possible. The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounceback jobs; they’re bounced back from the COVID.
He has not done a good job. He’s done a poor job. And inflation’s killing our country. It is absolutely killing us.
Greatest economy in the history of the world, huh? Since our current economy is better, that’s false. Every time Trump says “Everyone was amazed by it,” assume it’s a lie; it is. Everybody wants our wealth: but our economy is actually a shit show, as evidenced by the income inequality and wealth disparities. Most other countries know why that’s bad, and they work to avoid getting into the hole we’re in. I appreciate that he owns up to spending trillions of dollars to keep the economy afloat, but if you’re going to argue (I don’t agree, but Trump has argued) that money from the government increased inflation, then you should own your own contribution to the inflation. “No wars” my ass; warlike actions and policies likely to increase tensions leading to war are not the same as being peaceful. Trump assassinated an Iranian general, after ending the pact that kept Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons; he backed Israel over Palestine, which, along with pissing off Iran, exacerbated the tensions that helped create the current situation in Gaza (which he blames Biden for); he personally tried to start wars with North Korea and with China by insulting their leaders; he threatened NATO and fucked with the Ukraine while supporting Putin every way he could, TO THIS DAY; he pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord and promoted fossil fuels while destroying the environment: which will most definitely help create wars in the future as people grow more desperate over climate change; he continued the wars in Afghanistan and in Syria. Trump did not get credit for getting us out of COVID because he fuckin didn’t: his administration put in place the shutdowns and promoted the creation of the vaccines, which were instrumental in coming out of the pandemic — but that was despite Trump’s best efforts to fuck everything up; and you don’t get credit for solving a problem you created, which is absolutely the story of the pandemic that Trump blew off for the first three months, when a more careful and rational approach would have saved thousands of lives.
And apart from the lies (But not more important: because while no politician tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the quantity and sheer unreality of Trump’s lies are unmatched by anyone else in public life, let alone in American politics), look at what he says here. It’s fluff. The “greatest economy.” That shit he always does about adding how other people perceive and talk about his actions — everybody was amazed by it, we got credit or didn’t get credit, nobody believed that was even possible; nobody gives a shit what other people thought about how awesome you are, Donny, we care about what you actually did. And what did he say here about what they actually did?
He says they spent the money. That’s it. The rest is vague opinion. And talking shit about Biden, also unfounded — sure, pal, it was the vaccine mandate that was the disaster, not THE ACTUAL FUCKING DISASTER.
Rebuttal, Mr. President?
BIDEN: Well, look, the greatest economy in the world, he’s the only one who thinks that, I think. I don’t know anybody else who thinks it was great – he had the greatest economy in the world.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is that we found ourselves in a situation where his economy – he rewarded the wealthy. He had the largest tax cut in American history, $2 trillion. He raised the deficit larger than any president has in any one term. He’s the only president other than Herbert Hoover who has lost more jobs than he had when he began, since Herbert Hoover. The idea that he did something that was significant.
And the military – you know, when he was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan. He didn’t do anything about that. When he was president, we still found ourselves in a position where you had a notion that we were this safe country. The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any – this – this decade – doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did.
All true. The bit about Herbert Hoover is a weird dig when we all know that Trump lost jobs because of the pandemic, not just because he was a dolt; he is a dolt, but before the pandemic the economy had created almost 7 million jobs during Trump’s term, so there’s serious context there with that statistic which shouldn’t be left out — and the comment about how Biden doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere is false, because troops have died, in Afghanistan, under Biden; it is also callous and meaningless when we are funding two enormously devastating proxy wars. Like I said, Biden isn’t a great candidate, he isn’t the best president, and like any politician he is shading the truth to serve himself.
But he is speaking the truth, and answering questions, and sticking to the subject. And as I hope you’re seeing, when you look at the words and don’t listen to his voice or look at his face, then these are good answers.
As for Trump?
TAPPER: President Trump, I want to follow up, if I can. You wanted…
TRUMP: Am I allowed to respond to him?
TAPPER: Well, I’m going to ask you a follow-up. You can do whatever you want with the minute that we give you.
I want to follow up. You want to impose a 10 percent tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. How will you ensure that that doesn’t drive prices even higher?
TRUMP: Not going to drive them higher. It’s just going to cause countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China and many others, in all fairness to China – it’s going to just force them to pay us a lot of money, reduce our deficit tremendously, and give us a lot of power for other things.
But he – he made a statement. The only thing he was right about is I gave you the largest tax cut in history. I also gave you the largest regulation cut in history. That’s why we had all the jobs. And the jobs went down and then they bounced back and he’s taking credit for bounceback jobs. You can’t do that.
He also said he inherited 9 percent inflation. No, he inherited almost no inflation and it stayed that way for 14 months. And then it blew up under his leadership, because they spent money like a bunch of people that didn’t know what they were doing. And they don’t know what they were doing. It was the worst – probably the worst administration in history. There’s never been.
And as far as Afghanistan is concerned, I was getting out of Afghanistan, but we were getting out with dignity, with strength, with power. He got out, it was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.
As for the Afghanistan withdrawal, which Trump keeps hitting Biden about, everyone should know that Trump negotiated it, not Biden. Biden abided by the agreement Trump signed with the Taliban. Maybe he shouldn’t have — the Taliban hadn’t kept up their end of the deal — but it’s pretty goddamn sticky to discard your predecessor’s treaties and deals, and to escalate tensions by so doing. Only an asshole would do something like that. More to the point, Trump set up the problems with the withdrawal by negotiating only with the Taliban, not the Afghan government, and not setting enough conditions on the withdrawal of troops, just dropping a hard date for the total withdrawal, which made it impossible to accomplish the task smoothly — or as Trump put it, getting out with “dignity, strength, and power.” If Chump had wanted to make that happen himself, he should have negotiated a withdrawal date before he left office — or else won the election.
I’m not going to comment on the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life. But I will post this link.
I don’t want to go through the whole debate, but largely it was like this: Biden answered the question — often shading the truth to benefit himself, sometimes speaking straightforward untruths — while Trump straight-out lied, often avoiding the question while continuing to make shit up about migrants and inflation and Biden’s effect on the US’s international reputation. Here’s a detailed fact check that is worth at least skimming, to see the difference in the candidates’ truthiness.
It is definitely worth noting, without using it to excuse all of Biden’s lapses, that Trump was certainly guilty of using the Gish Gallop to overwhelm Biden with bullshit: and it is particularly effective against an opponent with a stutter, who may get frozen in trying to respond to all of the lies all at once, and being unable to pick a specific starting point while also providing a substantive answer of their own. And, of course, the CNN moderators’ choice to not fact check anyone on anything certainly helped Trump more than Biden, since Trump uses bullshit more often and far more aggressively than Biden.
Let’s just finish up this piece with one more question: the question Trump got about accepting the results of the election. As he failed to do the last time he lost, in 2020, and as he essentially did when he won, persistently claiming that he won the popular vote if you don’t count the illegal votes, which of course do not exist.
DANA BASH: To you, a specific concern that voters have about you. Will you pledge tonight that once all legal challenges have been exhausted that you will accept the results of this election regardless of who wins and you will say right now that political violence in any form is unacceptable?
TRUMP: Well, I shouldn’t have to say that, but, of course, I believe that. It’s totally unacceptable.
TRUMP: And if you would see my statements that I made on Twitter at the time, and also my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say it’s one of the strongest statements you’ve ever seen.
In addition to the speech I made, in front of, I believe, the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to, and I will tell you, nobody ever talks about that. They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol. And in many cases were ushered in by the police.
And as Nancy Pelosi said, it was her responsibility, not mine. She said that loud and clear.
But the answer is, if the election is fair free, and I want that more than anybody.
And I’ll tell you something – I wish he was a great president because I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be at one of my many places enjoying myself. I wouldn’t be under indictment because I wouldn’t have been his political appoint – you know, opponent. Because he indicted me because I was his opponent.
I wish he was a great president. I would rather have that.
I wouldn’t be here. I don’t mind being here, but the only reason I’m here is he’s so bad as a president that I’m going to make America great again. We’re going to make America great again.
We’re a failing nation right now. We’re a seriously failing nation. And we’re a failing nation because of him.
His policies are so bad. His military policies are insane. They’re insane.
These are wars that will never end with him. He will drive us into World War Three and we’re closer to World War Three than anybody can imagine. We are very, very close to World War Three, and he’s driving us there.
And Kim Jong-Un, and President Xi of China – Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, all of these – Putin – they don’t respect him. They don’t fear him. They have nothing going with this gentleman and he’s going to drive us into World War Three.
BIDEN: If you want a World War Three, let him follow (ph) and win, and let Putin say, do what you want to NATO – just do what you want.
There’s a thing called Article Five, an attack on one is attack on all, a required response.
The idea – the idea – I can’t think of a single major leader in the world who wouldn’t trade places with what job I’ve done and what they’ve done because we are a powerful nation, we have wonderful piece (ph), because of the people, not me, because of the American people. They’re capable of anything and they step up when they’re needed.
And right now, we’re needed. We’re needed to protect the world because our own safety is at stake.
And again, you want to have war, just let Putin go ahead and take Kyiv, make sure they move on, see what happens in Poland, Hungary, and other places along that border. Then you have a war.
BASH: President Trump, as I come back to you for a follow-up. The question was, will you accept the results of this election regardless of who wins?
TRUMP: Just to finish what he said, if I might, Russia – they took a lot of land from Bush. They took a lot of land from Obama and Biden. They took no land, nothing from Trump, nothing.
He knew not to do it. He’s not going to play games with me. He knew that. I got along with him very well, but he knew not to play games.
He took nothing from me, but now, he’s going to take the whole thing from this man right here.
That’s a war that should have never started. It would’ve never started ever with me. And he’s going to take Ukraine and, you know, you asked me a question before, would you do this with – he’s got us in such a bad position right now with Ukraine and Russia because Ukraine’s not winning that war.
He said, I will never settle until such time – they’re running out of people, they’re running out of soldiers, they’ve lost so many people. It’s so sad.
They’ve lost so many people and they’ve lost those gorgeous cities with the golden domes that are 1,000-years-old, all because of him and stupid decisions.
Russia would’ve never attacked if I were president.
BASH: President Trump, the question was, will you accept the results of the election regardless of who wins? Yes or no, please?
TRUMP: If it’s a fair and legal and good election – absolutely. I would have much rather accepted these but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous that if you want, we’ll have a news conference on it in a week or we’ll have another one of these on – in a week.
But I will absolutely – there’s nothing I’d rather do. It would be much easier for me to do that than I’m running again. I wasn’t really going to run until I saw the horrible job he did. He’s destroying our country.
I would be very happy to be someplace else, in a nice location someplace. And again, no indictments, no political opponent’s stuff, because it’s the only way he thinks he can win.
But unfortunately, it’s driven up by numbers and driven it up to a very high level, because the people understand it.
BIDEN: Let’s see what your numbers are when this election is over.
TRUMP: We’ll see.
BIDEN: Let’s see. You’re a whiner. When you lost the first time, you continued to appeal and appeal to courts all across the country.
Not one single court in America said any of your claims had any merit, state or local, none.
But you continue to promote this lie about somehow there’s all this misrepresentation, all the stealing. There’s no evidence of that at all.
And I tell you what? I doubt whether you’ll accept it because you’re such a whiner. The idea if you lose again, you’re accepting anything, you can’t stand the loss. Something snapped in you when you lost the last time.
So let’s be fair: he said, directly, that political violence is unacceptable. But he also said that “only a very few people were involved in the insurrection on January 6th: “They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol. And in many cases were ushered in by the police.” And he misrepresented his part in what happened, telling them to fight like hell if they wanted to still have a country, taking three hours to post any kind of statement while people were suffering and dying in political violence instigated in his name. And no matter how clearly Bash asked for his simple yes or no answer, he would only agree to accept the results conditionally, according to his own estimation of those results — which means, of course, that he won’t accept those results, as he continued to reject the 2020 results even in these same answers about accepting the 2024 results.
That is Donald Trump’s substance: lies, misdirection, and the promise of violence in opposition to democracy.
Now go back and read what Joe Biden said here. That’s substance.
This last Thursday, we saw more of Joe Biden’s substance in his press conference after the NATO summit. And yes, he fucked up twice: he called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy “President Putin,” and he called Vice President Harris “Vice President Trump.” But please let us not think that he was actually confused who he was talking about: he caught and corrected himself on the Putin/Zelenskyy mistake, and though he never did on the Harris/Trump one, he talked about “her” qualifications to be Vice President and also President if it was necessary — he was not confused about who his Vice President is, or who the president of Ukraine is. In terms of screwing up names? Come on. I have called students by the wrong names more times than I can count. Students have addressed me with the name of literally every other male teacher I have ever worked with. Every administrator I have ever had has called me Mr. Humphreys. I had a student call me “Mom” once. This is not indicative of cognitive decline, it’s just a slip: it’s just appearance, nothing substantive. It’s a joke, a meme. Make fun of him for it: but don’t pretend it says anything about Biden’s ability to run the country. What, are we afraid that he’ll give the order to launch nuclear weapons, but instead of saying “Attack Russia,” he’ll say, “Attack Rhode Island?” And the nukes will be in the air before he realizes the mistake? Please.
Apart from his gaffes (And has been pointed out by many pundits, Biden has always been prone to gaffes: because he’s a shitty candidate and always has been.), Biden spent an hour answering questions, which he did not have in advance, from various reporters, many of whom asked him directly about how fucked up he was and if he would step aside for someone younger and if he thought he was too decrepit to finish his term — I mean, I’m a pacifist, and some of those questions would have had me yelling “COME AT ME BRO!” The rest of the questions were about serious foreign policy issues, and Biden answered them in detail. Exhaustive detail. Without notes. Without freezing. Without losing his train of thought, though as always, because he stutters, he paused a lot, stumbled and restarted, and often fell back on familiar phrases like “Here’s the deal” and counting out his points and so on. He sounded old, certainly: but he sounded like a man who knew his shit.
Because he is. He does.
All right, so if he knws his shit, what actually happened at the debate? I mean, he was so much worse that night than he was at the press conference, or at the State of the Union: or even how he was at the Biden watch party he visited immediately after getting his ass kicked by the actual worst President we’ve ever had. Why did he freeze so badly? Why did he sound so incoherent, so weak and halting even apart from his stutter? Why did he stand there with his mouth hanging open? Why did he shuffle out onto the stage like a dead man on marionette strings?
Is he actually too old and too incapable to be President for the next four years? For real: is he?
The truth is, I don’t know. Neither do you. Neither does Joe Biden. If he maintains what he can do now, then he can make it; his other appearances over the last two weeks and his substance in the debate both show that. But can he maintain his current level of ability? How far and how fast will he decline? His decline from the State of the Union to the debate was precipitous: but so was his climb back up for the events following it. So which is indicative of his real ability?
I don’t want to get into personal details about people in my life, but let me just say this: I have watched people go through very serious declines, physically and mentally. And I have watched some of those people — but not others — return to a better state, to more capable versions of themselves, after those serious declines. It is impossible to predict, in the absence of an actual diagnosis of something like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, how someone will progress or regress cognitively. We do not understand the human mind, not at all. Believe that.
The fact that Biden came back and gave better answers, and had more energy, by the end of the debate, shows me that his worst moments are not his only moments, not his full capacity, even if he was talking about fucking golf. His performance at the NATO summit press conference shows me that he still has quite a lot of ability to do the things that are necessary for doing his job — even if he can’t get people’s fucking names right.
I think there is a genuine decline in his cognitive ability. That “We beat Medicare” answer was honestly shocking to watch. But let’s look at reality: the Presidency is not a one-man show. He is surrounded by other people, aides and advisors and cabinet members and other political leaders, military leaders: all the goddamn time. People who are not undergoing cognitive decline. While the President makes the final call in critical circumstances, it’s not like standing up on stage during a debate: he is never put on the spot, with millions watching him, under a time clock, with his enemy standing twenty feet away, when he has to make a decision about peace and war, or about declaring a national emergency, or anything else that the President has to do. It’s never a situation where a man freezing for ten seconds would change the outcome. Never. Someone (I would expect it to be Kamala Harris, but I’m sure there are others) might have to grab his lapels, shake him, slap his cheek and yell “SNAP OUT OF IT, MAN!” like in some 1950s melodrama; but more realistically, Ol’ Shaky Joe would be given time enough, support enough, rest enough, and everything else he needs, to make any one specific critical decision. So long as he can come back to his ability to think and reason, to understand and — not even remember, just be reminded of the important points, hold them in his mind long enough to make a decision — then he can do the parts of the job that really matter. He’ll still be able to give shitty speeches, as shown by the several he has given since the debate. He’ll still be able to meet with foreign dignitaries, even if he just gets marionetted out for a handshake and a brief appearance at a state dinner — don’t think he’d be the first or the only world leader who looked like shit when making official presentations. He’ll continue to stumble and freeze in high pressure situations, and that will be awful to watch and make us all feel bad; but Joe Biden has no one to blame but himself for whatever happens to him in his next term, if he wins. If it ruins his legacy, if it makes him the laughingstock of a nation or a world that is focused on appearances, then that’s his goddamn fault. I think we can pretty safely say that LITERALLY EVERYONE has told him to step aside: he is the only one who decided to keep in this race. The only one. I will not feel bad for anything he goes through as he slowly destroys himself trying to do the hardest job in the world for four more years, at his age.
That doesn’t matter: what matters is how his next term, if he stays in and if he wins, will affect the rest of us. As I said, I do not believe that any critical decision will be wrongly made, or be unmade, by a man who makes the slips that Biden makes: because he never acts alone. I do not believe for a second that Biden stuttering, or freezing, or stumbling when he walks, makes Putin more likely to invade another country. Makes Hamas more likely to murder Israelis, or Netanyahu more likely to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. I do not believe for a second that anyone in this world will consider both the horrifying things that this country has done around the world, for decades if not centuries, things we continue to do — and look at Joe Biden looking confused on stage, and think, “Yep, THAT GUY is the reason I don’t respect the US any more.” No. We fool ourselves into thinking we are respected and loved. We are not. We are hated and feared. And we should be: we are selfish, and greedy, and callous, and destructive, and violent, and in every way appalling, to every other people and country on this Earth, and indeed to the Earth itself. We’ll destroy anything and everything for our immediate profit or pleasure.
Please understand that the United States, on the international scene, is Donald Trump. And we always have been.
And that’s why we must not elect Donald Trump. Why we must not double down on our own worst tendencies by giving the epitome of this country’s narcissistic arrogance the power to direct our actions and influence our society and our government for the next four years. Or for longer, if he has his way.
We’re like Joe Biden: we’re pretty shitty, and we’ve always been pretty shitty: but we can get better, or we can get worse. Donald Trump cannot get better.
The final point is this: if Biden wins, and then his cognitive and physical decline reaches the point where he genuinely cannot do the job any more, we have a system in place whereby he can be replaced, by his vice president. Since Kamala Harris would be the automatic frontrunner if Biden did step aside: all we’re risking with Biden now is however long he can last in the office before he can’t, and then we get President Harris, as we hopefully would if Biden were to drop out. If he stays in — and he’s staying in — then we get President Biden, as we have him now, for some period of time up to four years; then we automatically get President Harris.
If Biden wins.
The issue is not whether Joe Biden can do the job: he can (because he has and he is, right now), until he can’t, and then he would have an immediate successor in place who would certainly do a fine job, if not the best job anyone could do. The issue is whether Joe Biden can beat Donald Trump. And that’s not actually up to him: that’s up to us.
There’s the real question, and I’ll leave you with it — because like my above questions, I don’t know the answer.
Do we still have the cognitive capacity to win the election? To make the right choice, no matter how much we dislike the options, no matter how many concerns we may have for the future? Do we recognize the real risks at stake here, the real harm that could be done because of how we vote in November?
I watched the Presidential debate on CNN last Thursday, and I wish I hadn’t. Or rather, I wish I hadn’t seen what I saw, because I wish it hadn’t happened the way that it did. I wish there hadn’t been a debate for me to watch, because it did not go well for my side. Or, even better, I wish the sides were different: I wish the debate had featured entirely different candidates, giving entirely different answers to the questions — which probably should have been moderated by entirely different journalists on an entirely different channel.
Overall, I’m going to give that debate a vigorous No. None of the Above, please. We saw that Biden is too old and depleted to make up for his shitty moderate stances, and we already knew, and had confirmed for us, that Trump is a lying sack of crap who uses rage and cynicism to make up for his catastrophic reactionary stances. The whole thing just made me feel desperate and hopeless.
And that’s exactly the way it is supposed to be. At least according to the preferences of the people and forces which shape the politics of this country. Which, in our current state of affairs, is not the will of the people nor the votes of the majority: because this country is, practically speaking, not a democracy. The simplest understanding of a democracy is that the majority will of the people rules, and no president has ever been elected by a majority of the citizens of this country, let alone the residents. Certainly not these two specimens.
But that’s fine because this is actually a constitutionally limited republic, not a democracy. So there.
ACtually…
No, I’m fucking around, because there are internet bros who always get snotty when people in political arguments say this country is a democracy. It’s not. By the strictest definition, at least — and it’s a distinction that doesn’t even matter at all, and the fact that shitty people use their nitpickery about it to shame and silence people pisses me off: so I’m mocking those people. Sorry if it is confusing. At least the dog in that Actually meme is cute.
But here’s the real actually: whatever the intended shape of the government for this country, we are in truth currently controlled by an oligarchy: a plutocracy (or maybe a kakistocracy and certainly a kleptocracy) made up of people with too much money, who are willing (unsurprising, but still disgusting) and able (appalling and even more disgusting) to influence the political machinery of the country in order to benefit themselves, at the expense of all the rest of us. They have captured both major parties, thanks in large part to the influential power of money in our elections, particularly as unleashed by the Citizens United decision, and sanctioned de facto by politicians’ continued inability to pass election financing reform, solely because they put their own interests before those of the nation or their constituents.
Unsurprising. But still disgusting.
Because the people who run the politicians who run the country are in the business of doing business — namely using their money to make even more money, which is their sole purpose and motivation, their raison d’etre — the corruptions they create in our politics are mostly those which benefit business. They just got their personal Supreme Court to knock down Chevron deference, for instance, which will make it much easier for them — rich people who can afford the attorneys and legal costs, that is — to challenge government regulations in court, because now judges, who are definitely not experts in such matters as workplace safety or environmental impact, but who, like most people — especially these fucking people
Or at least six of them
— like to think they are experts in every way that actually matters, can knock down regulations that they personally don’t think are valid or necessary. Even if the actual experts disagree with them. And do we think that our One-Percenter overlords will be taking advantage of this process?
You bet your sweet bippy we do.
But the point is, the people in charge are best served by the continued dominance of the two major parties. Because both parties rely on enormous infusions of cash in order to defeat — each other. Elections like this one, choices like this one — like the contest between these two terrible old men, the Mummy and the Blob — serve the preferences of the ruling class, because they make us desperate, not hopeful. If we had a good candidate, one who gave us hope — and the last one such was Barack Obama (who still was not a great president, because he, like Joe, was too moderate and didn’t do enough to change the life of the average citizen of this country; though in fairness to Obama, he was trying to make change pretty much on his own, and fighting against the entire political machine, and of course he lost. Donald Trump gave some segment of the populace hope, but he’s a lying sack of shit, so that hope doesn’t count, in my opinion.) — then it would inspire people to get involved, to take action; the rulers do better, have more control, when we despair, and give up, and lie down and take it. Take whatever they give us, and hate everything — and do nothing. Most of us don’t even vote. Which makes it that much easier for the plutocrats to control the votes of those who do turn out. And they like that it is only two parties, and in every specific electoral contest, for every seat and every office, it is winner take all — the person who gets one more vote beats the person who gets one fewer vote — because that also makes it easier to control the politicians. This system means the two opponents are best served by focusing only on each other, cooperatively blocking any third candidate (who already has a named role in most three-way races: “spoiler”) and fighting to the death against their one nemesis, fighting for every single vote: and that means the holders of the moneybags, the distributors of the thirty pieces of silver — the rich fuckers who try to control everything — have a death grip on the entire system, because they have a death grip on both of the two major parties: because they offer either party a way to destroy the other party if the other party dares to try to give up that sweet, sweet dark campaign money. Their money is the best way for both parties to get one more vote than the other party.
See? If the Democrats stop taking corporate One-Percenter cash, they will lose all elections to the Republicans, and vice versa. Shit, even members of the parties who don’t continue to meet with the approval of our corporate masters can’t win elections, because they can’t win primaries in the face of huge amounts of money. And third parties can’t possibly compete with the amount of money that continues to flow to the two major parties — and there’s no need for the One-Percenters to shift their money to the third parties, because the two major parties do everything their masters ask of them, whether it is Trump cutting taxes on corporations (with a bone thrown to the rest of us in the form of a middle class tax cut which had a sunset clause, the tax cuts ending in 2025 [After the end of a hypothetical second Trump term, and no it’s not a coincidence: there ain’t no cynic like a government cynic], while the corporate tax cut did not.) or Biden failing to rein in the corporate profiteering which helped drive the inflation that may cost him re-election.
But if Biden, like Trump, fails to win re-election, that doesn’t matter, of course, at least not to the people who matter; because if Biden loses, our corporate hegemony will be perfectly satisfied with Trump in the White House. The one they couldn’t abide would be Bernie: and that’s why Bernie lost two primaries to deeply unpopular candidates. Because money. And political machinery controlled by money.
Wow. I’m sorry: I didn’t even mean to go that far down this road. Now I’m wrecked in the eternal darkness of the abyss at the end, mired in hopelessness.
No. Fuck that. You know why? Because there is hope. Really. There is hope because, whatever those racist elitist pricks who founded this country meant to do, what they actually did was create a lasting democracy. A democracy — shut the FUCK up about a constitutionally limited republic, please, Internet Bros — because the power to change the entire government rests, in the end, in the hands of the people. No matter how cynical we are, I am, about who is in charge, and no matter how we keep feeling like there’s no way anything can change: there IS a way for things to change, and it is through Americans casting votes for their choice of candidate (and in some cases for their choice of laws). Because we can choose to remove and replace our elected officials, who — money or not — are chosen ONLY by votes, according to our laws, according to our system of government. There is no tiebreaker that counts how much money the candidate has. All that matters, for determining who runs this country, is the votes.
Yes: of course those votes are generally easy to influence through money; that’s how we got to where we are. But influence is not control. No matter how many times I call them overlords and masters and rulers, they are not: the rich influence everything, and so end up getting what they want most of the time. But not all the time. Because it is still votes that change the government. All of it: obviously we could vote in a new President, and new Senators and Representatives; but also, if we stack up enough votes for congresspeople who will actually do what we want them to do, then even the Supreme Court, the one unelected branch, can be controlled: they can be impeached and removed from office, they can be outnumbered by an expansion of the Court, their decisions can be overridden by laws passed by Congress, and even, if necessary, by Constitutional amendments: which are passed by popular vote.
Make no mistake: getting people to vote for anything is nearly impossible, unless you have, at this point, billions of dollars to pour into the campaign. But if something is nearly impossible, it is still possible.
Just like my hopes. Not all dead. Not yet.
(And also, let me note in passing that we have as much money as the One-Percenters: we just spend it on food and stuff. But we could buy ourselves an election, even in the face of all the dark money in the world, if we really needed to. Just think about that.)
It’s possible for us to throw off the yoke and chains of our oppressors. It is. We’ve done it before, in opposition to slavery and the secession of the Confederacy; after the Great Depression; during the fight for civil rights. We can do it again. The way to compensate for a lack of ready money to throw around is: organization. And patience. If I may paraphrase the Doors: they got the bucks, but — we got the numbers.
But that is the long term goal. So. What do we do about this current debacle?
Clearly we don’t want either of these fucking guys — sorry, I’ve gone far afield, let me bring it back:
We don’t want either of these fucking guys to be in control of our lives. Not even a little bit. I’ve been arguing for a while now, going back to 2020, that Biden is the better choice; but I still don’t want him to be President, and I never have. He was my third-to-last choice in the crowded Democratic field in 2020 (The two below him on my list were Marianne Williamson, because combining lunacy with complete inexperience is just about the worst thing you can do, and Michael Bloomberg, because actually putting one of the One-Percenters in charge is the worst thing you can do. [Note that, Trumpers. I don’t know how you got tricked into forgetting that, but that’s who Trump really is. Actually.]), and he was my second choice even in this election where my first choices (Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — and Andrew Yang, and Jay Inslee, and Cory Booker and Julian Castro and John Hickenlooper and Tim Ryan and JESUS CHRIST FUCKING ANYBODY ELSE) didn’t run, because Dr. Cornel West would be a far better President than either the Geezer or the Groper. The Sleeper or the Shitbag. The Fumbler or the Fascist.
So do we vote for the third party candidates?
Do we boycott and refuse to vote?
We do not: because this election will put one of these two into the White House. The system cannot change between now and November; not unless we actually rise up and revolt. I don’t plan to grab a pitchfork and light a torch; if you do, we’re going to have to have some serious talks about what you plan to do and why, because violent revolution is something I can’t support as a pacifist; and as someone who both read AND understood George Orwell’s 1984 (That’s not a dig against you: that’s another one for the internet bros who say things like, “Facebook took down my anti-trans meme! It’s LITERALLY 1984!”), I recognize that revolutions generally don’t change the system, they only change the people who hold the whip: they don’t change who the whip falls on, nor remove the whip entirely. So we can discuss it, but I don’t think violent revolution is the right thing to do.
I think the right thing to do is to work on improving the system. We don’t even need to change it, to tear it down and build a new one, because as I said, this actually is a democracy in the most important sense: no, we do not vote directly on all political matters (which is actually what a “democracy” means, control by the people without representatives), but our votes have the greatest authority. We can vote to change literally anything in our system, even the system itself through Constitutional amendment.
I do think we’ll need to change a whole lot of things to make the system functional in the long term. But there are a couple of specific things that we can work to change in the fairly short term — meaning in the next, say, five to twenty years, but not before November — that will make an enormous difference, and make it much easier — even simply possible — to change everything else we need to change. Those things are the factors which give the plutocrats their ability to influence politics so powerfully: unlimited money in campaigns, unlimited advertising in campaigns, monied lobbying and the revolving-door interactions between the government and industry, the winner-take-all two-party system (and other minority-rule structures like the electoral college). I think there are politicians who would be willing to change those things for the better. Or maybe there are people who would be willing to become politicians in order to change those things for the better. Starting with money in politics: that is the simplest and most direct way we have to challenge the plutocrats, the One-Percenters. And people like John McCain existed. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who unseated a corporate Democrat using only small-dollar donations, exist and are currently in Washington. It is possible. It can be done. It may take years or even decades to get a majority of such people in Congress: but we can do it. And that’s what we need to do.
I know some of you aren’t going to like hearing this, and I don’t like saying it: but the answer is, we have to vote for Joe Biden. The arguments haven’t changed, not even with that incredible faceplant of a debate performance. Trump is still a wannabe fascist, who will do untold damage to the actual lives of real people during the four years he would be in office; not to mention the damage he would do to our democracy. Biden is a failure as a leader of our nation: both because he hasn’t done nearly as much as he should have done, and because he is a miserable excuse for a figurehead — not the most important role of a president, but not a negligible one. But he is not a threat to our nation’s continued existence. Trump really is.
Don’t stay home: the MAGAts won’t. Don’t vote for RFK Jr. (If you would otherwise vote for a Democrat, that is: if you’re a Trump voter, go right ahead and vote for ol’ Brain Worms): he’s a seriously terrible candidate in his own right (and currently only on the ballot in eight states, so literally cannot win 270 electoral votes and take the presidency) and votes cast for him would only result in the victory of Trump or Biden, with no positive effect at all; because he’s not running as representative of a legitimate third party. If you want to vote Green Party or Libertarian Party or another established third party, that has more merit, because a larger number of votes cast for a third party makes it easier for the third party to gain entry into future races, which is part of the way we break the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans; but be aware that, in this election, taking a vote away from a Democrat, even a shambling mound like Joe Biden, makes it more likely that Trump will take over, and that will be very bad for us all. Including Republicans, whatever they think about how much they’ll laugh in all those stupid lib faces once Trump is in charge. The truth is that Donald Trump is not our friend, and will not do anything to help anyone but himself, if he is returned to the White House. I promise you. For the same reason, I will not be voting for Cornel West, even though I like and admire him and would choose him over every other candidate. My vote for Dr. West will not make him win: and I cannot abide the thought of a second Trump term.
So I will do the right thing to protect and serve my country and my fellow Americans: I will not choose None of the Above, and I will not cast a protest vote. I will vote for Joe Biden.
This fucking guy.
And then I will work to make sure this kind of bullshit stops. Once and for all.
My favorite bit is that “Trump appeared to look blankly forward as jurors exited.”
Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts. Class E felonies, sure — but that’s still 34 more felonies than I’ve ever been convicted of, 34 more than anyone in my family has been convicted of, 34 more than Joe Biden has been convicted of.
So that’s that, right? Surely no one would want to vote for a convicted felon.
Except of course they will.
Notice how it isn’t “100% Trump should end campaign.” Which 50% of the population do you think said that he should end it?
Notice this number is higher than 50%: which means a good number of people who would vote for him still will even though he has been found guilty.
I really wish this said “Rootin Tootin” somewhere
This one is amazing. Though I wish I could make out those tattoos. Think there’s a swastika in there somewhere?
They’ve made him an Outlaw. Here is my statement on the tyrannical overreach targeting former President Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/adJM1lKfsy
I just think he should have gone a little lighter on those eye-bags.
And speaking of going a little lighter… ain’t nobody got hair that yellow.
I just want to know: who looks at these images and thinks, “Yes. That is a perfect depiction of how I see this man. This captures my feelings exactly.” I don’t doubt a lot of the images are intended mainly to troll the left, but also, there is literally no sense of irony in MAGA world, and since many of these kinds of images get shared mainly or exclusively in MAGA world, there are actually people there who are encouraged by them. Who nod and think, “Hell yeah!” Seriously.
I can’t imagine feeling that on the other side, not really. I mean, this stuff is insane:
(I do appreciate the strong Dr. Manhattan vibes in that image. Even more than the AR-15 Iron Throne.)
How does that even look like Biden??
I actually like this one, though.
Because they didn’t try to change his appearance. At all. It’s like an old man spontaneously combusting and really confused about it. Hilarious.
But it’s still not going to make me vote for Biden.
No, I’m voting for Joe Biden because I think he’s a decent man who’s done a decent job as president. I’ve talked about it in other posts, I will talk about it more (Now that school is out and my brain has had a chance to recover — this was a really bad year, y’all.), but that’s the reason. Full stop. Not because he’s a Socialist — he’s not, though I wish he were — and not because I fucking hate Trump that much — I do, but that’s not a good enough reason to vote for Biden — but because he’s a decent man who’s done a decent job. Do I wish Biden would step aside with dignity and let somebody else be the Democratic nominee? I do. Do I think that any decent Democratic candidate — who had reasonable credentials on reproductive rights — would kick Trump’s ass in the election? I do, especially now that Trump’s a convicted felon whom most independents already didn’t like. But Biden is worth voting for. That’s my position.
On the other hand, we have this position:
A friend of mine on Facebook shared this meme. (Actually several did; this one was popular.)
And a mutual acquaintance of ours commented thusly:
As much as I dislike both of them I think that whole court case was a crock of shit and shows how people with political power can weaponize the judicial system. That judge on this case was about as corrupt as they get smfh.
So notice how this comment starts by bringing in Joe Biden (Am I presuming too much in saying Joe Biden is the other in “both of them?” I am not. I knew his position, and he confirms it in later comments.), even though the meme had nothing to do with Biden, as the trial had nothing to do with Biden: this was a New York case, brought by the Manhattan DA, about events that happened in 2006 and 2015-2016, and were revealed to the public in 2018. Nothing here to do with Biden’s campaign against Trump. Notice how this makes some pretty extreme accusations — the whole case was a “crock of shit,” people with political power can weaponize the judicial system, the judge was “about as corrupt as they get” — but provides no evidence at all.
This is not unique, of course. This is how American political discourse usually goes. We are all inside our little tents, holding up the collapsing tent poles, ignoring the canvas (or nylon? I honestly don’t know anything about tents, I haven’t been camping since I was 14. Imma go with canvas because I think the metaphor should be circus tents. Don’t you? Uh… circus tents are canvas, right?) falling all around us, completely cutting us off from the outside world, while we yell at people in the other tents that their tent is bad and stupid and they should really be in OUR tent.
To be clear: the Democratic tent is bad, but the Republican party tent has currently been taken over by a proto-fascist cult of personality worshipping a convicted felon. (Love how that last part rolls off the tongue. No, I’m not fucking objective. There are not fine people on both sides. There are formerly fine people in the Republican party who decided to give up on being fine people in order to support the proto-fascist cult of personality worshipping a convicted felon. They don’t get to be fine so long as they are in that tent. If they come out they can be fine people again — even very fine people. There are fine people in the other tents — though not the Libertarians. Libertarians are assholes. But that’s just a joke. The Trump tent comment is not.) They are not the same party, they are not in the same situation. They are not equal, not in any way. I’m just recognizing that a lot of Democrats are blind to reality, too. Including Joe Biden, in some ways. He really should step aside. It would be better for the country.
My first response was fully inside my tent. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it was irate. (I will also say I have a history with this fellow; while he is in some ways reasonable and open-minded, in other ways he is a lot of things I dislike. Even hate. Hence my knee-jerk reaction was not the right one.) It started with “What in the Fox News are you talking about?” (Okay, I admit I’m including that mostly because I’m proud of the phrase, and I want to remember it to use it some other time for real.) I said that there was no political weaponization of the judicial system, the judge was not corrupt, the case was not a crock of shit. I used more words, but that was all I said. And then I hit Post.
I did not provide evidence. I did not explain my arguments. I did not provide context. I just said “NO!” a lot.
It was not a useful contribution to an argument.
So I thought about it. Part of me did not really want to engage in this debate: because I know that there are people who are not worth engaging with because they will not listen and they will not take conversation seriously, they will only take the opportunity provided by disagreement to mock and yell and crow and scoff, which just makes me mad and spreads more distrust and disinformation. That’s what happened the last time I got into an argument with a Trumper (Note: this fellow is not a Trumper, as he hinted and as he said in more detail later), and I specifically didn’t engage with said Trumper because I knew he wouldn’t be an honest participant in a discussion. I said so. He got quite exercised in insulting me and lying about the state of this country — in that case, it was about immigration, because he was also a racist. Shocking, I know.
But part of me knows that this fellow, while he has said things and done things which I dislike and even hate, is also sometimes open-minded, and also sometimes rational, and also sometimes kind.
And more importantly, there is the person I am when I am irritated or angry, and there is the person I think I need to be in order to do what I can to help our society to heal.
So I deleted that comment (Not fast enough, because he was already replying to it, and noted that I had changed my comment; I apologized and invited him to bring up anything from my comment which he wanted to challenge me on. Because I want to be the person I think I need to be.) and replaced it with two questions:
What makes you say the judge was corrupt? And which people with political power weaponized the justice system?
Because I realized something in the last year or two. When I am teaching, I ask questions. All the time. It’s pretty much all I do when my students make comments or observations in discussion. Either I recognize them for their point, and thank them/compliment them/build off of what they said to continue the discussion — or I ask a question. “Why?” is my favorite, of course, though I mostly have to add more words to that — “Why do you think that?” or “Why do you think that character acts that way,” etc. — but I ask other questions, too, all kinds of them, one after another. I rarely make statements, I rarely agree or disagree with them: that isn’t my job. My job is to make them think. And the questions do that quite well. So I realized that I should ask more questions in my political discussions, rather than simply making statements or trying to disprove or deconstruct my opponents’ opinions or ideas. Usually because the positions I oppose do not have internal logic or consistency, and simply asking someone questions about their positions will frequently show the flaws in those positions, without me ever having to get into a fight about what is true and what is not.
And here’s the response I got in this instance, from this fellow. (Partly this was in response to my original combative tone, because he was replying to my first comment, not my questions; I’m not trying to cover up that I reacted badly, just trying to show that I know I did it the wrong way, and my two questions were what I think was the right way. [I will also note that while I am writing this, I am also arguing with a dude who thinks there should be a Heterosexual Pride Day because discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people is mostly gone, and in fact LGBTQIA+ people are now the real bullies, and they are picking on heterosexuals. And I am not simply asking him questions. I am being as polite as I can be, but I am also making declarative statements that he is simply wrong. So I guess I’m not perfect yet. But also — FUCKIN REALLY?!?!?!?!?!])
Theoden Humphrey a NYC DA who campaigned on the sole fact he was gonna find and convict Donald Trump of a crime. Whose campaign was also funded by none other than now ex-WEF leader George Soros.
The trial took place in an 87% Democrat county.
The judge who is a major Biden campaign donor. Also the judge’s daughter works with Leticia James who also has a hard on for convicting Trump.
Evidence of a crime that exceeds the statute of limitation since 2019 but upgraded what is normally a misdemeanor to a class E felony due to other crimes not mentioned being committed.
Corrupt judge tells jury that they do not need to agree on verdict unanimously they just have to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime. Which is a first.
And 34 counts yes. However, they will only sentence him on 1 because all 34 are considered the same 1 “crime”
I just think that this is political persecution to suppress a political opponent. And I’m not really on the Trump train any more. I really enjoy what robert f Kennedy has to offer and think that he better represents the middle isle American who supports the constitution and has left and right leaning views. He’s pro choice and pro 2A I like both those things.
Let’s be real. Biden and Trump are both equally pieces of wealthy filth and we need a big change from what we are being spoon fed. We are stuck with two dog shit choices. Either far left or far fuckin right. All the two parties we have to chose from are doing is further driving a wedge of division in this country.
If Trump is truly guilty throw his ass in prison for 4 years for committing a class E felony. But they should also go after every single politician left and right wing who’s paid out hush money and done exactly what the pos orange man did. I’m just as sick of hearing trumps bullshit as you are too. I’m also sick of genocide joe not giving a single shit about you and I. Neither of them represent us fairly.
I just think that this whole court case crap is only going to fuel the fire of his supporters. Also think it’s coincidental that the sentencing hearing is 4 days before the RNC. Honestly they should have done this 4 years ago when he left office instead of confidently waiting until 6 months before the election. And again I’m not stroking trumps ego on this but I think it’s just in time that now the biden campaign can put ads out talking about how Trump is a convicted felon etc etc.
We are all tired of both biden and trumps shit. And we the people have absolutely no say in a third party member being elected. Here in November 2024 we get two shit ass choice like we have for the last 2 decades. You get to pick corrupt left wing or corrupt right wing. And really your vote don’t mean shit anyways. If you’re a Democrat living in a red state your state is not representing your beliefs same with if your republican living in a blue state.
It’s all a crock of shit Humphrey. Can we atleast agree on that ?
My response to this comment was this:
No, we can’t agree that it’s all a crock of shit. There’s a lot of shit in the mix, absolutely: but there are things here that matter. Things like democracy and the rule of law. Truth. Simple human decency. They matter so much that I believe it’s worth digging through all that shit and wiping it away.
You’ve done something here that we shouldn’t do. That’s not an accusation; I did it too — this was my second reply on your comment, I deleted the first one, because sure I did what you’ve done here: I made statements without evidence, without even fully explaining my point; arguing only by innuendo and implication. I deleted that bad argument, and now I’m going to challenge you on yours. I hope you’ll reach across and work with me on this: because this, too, is important: communication and understanding.
Start with your first point: Alvin Bragg. How do you know he campaigned on going after Trump? And if he did, what would that show about him or what happened in this case? Did he lie? Fake evidence? Bribe the judge? Suborn the jury? Intimidate the witnesses? Same questions about Soros: how do you know he funded Bragg’s campaign? What would it mean if he did? Does that mean Bragg obeys his commands? What is Soros’s goal?
Okay: and here, though it has taken me my customary WAY TOO LONG to get to the point of this, is why I wanted to write about this. I’m not trying to embarrass or criticize my — let’s call him my interlocutor, the fellow I was having the discussion with — and I’m not really trying to argue with him; if I were, I would have continued on Facebook with him. He did post another comment (which I may turn into another post) and when I challenged him on that one, he replied to that challenge and said that he had been writing a long response with the evidence I was asking for, but it had gotten deleted; he then, quite rationally, moved on with his damn life, and the FB debate ended there.
And now here I am, continuing it.
Here’s why. I think there is a ton of misinformation out there in our world. I think a lot of it is spread in exactly this way, in comments on social media posts, which are presented as fact without any support or explanation, as both I and my interlocutor did. I think most of us do not have reliable news sources which we consult regularly, or sources of real information that explain what’s actually going on in our political world. That, I think, is why most of us have opinions that do not change according to new facts or new events: first because, frequently, we are unaware of new facts and new events; and second, because our opinions never were based on facts. I’m not really sure that mine are, either, and so I struggle, every time I write about politics, with the position I should take: should I be neutral and objective? Should I only talk about things I have researched extensively, things I can be considered an authority on? If I just share my opinions, which are not based on facts, how am I different from everyone else?
When I call Trump a fascist, for instance: what is the basis for that statement? Have I studied the history of fascism? Do I know specific instances of actions and positions taken by Trump that align with historical fascism? I have certainly read some history of fascism, and some political analysis of Trump and his GOP supporters that shows him to be aligned with fascism, so I feel fairly comfortable making the accusation: but I surely know that there is room for me to be wrong there, and I surely recognize that I could do more research and more fact-finding to support the opinion.
But the real question is: should I present the opinion? Or should I only present information that is proven to be true, that is purely factual and objective?
Okay, let’s be real. I’m a damn English teacher. And a fantasy/horror writer who likes pirates a lot. My opinions are not the ones that should be taken as proven objective facts.
But what I can offer, what I hope to offer, is what I asked my interlocutor for on Facebook, which he started to provide but then didn’t have time for — and which I now have time for — evidence. Explanation. Enough to show what we are actually talking about, and why we should or should not take it seriously.
So that’s what I want to do here. I want to engage with these talking points, and try to figure out if there is anything behind them. Not disprove them, not show that the fellow who posted this was wrong or bad in any way; but I want to explore these statements a little, and try to see if they are worth considering. If this seems valuable, then I will probably do it again with his second long comment, which I am not including here because this post is already too wordy. But, that’s how we roll here on Just Dusty, so I’m not going to apologize for my verbosity. Just gonna do my thingy.
Here we go.
First: Alvin Bragg. Manhattan District Attorney, who, allegedly, “campaigned on the sole fact he was gonna find and convict Donald Trump of a crime. Whose campaign was also funded by none other than now ex-WEF leader George Soros.”
But here’s the thing: does this matter? Is it wrong if a man running for DA, in a district that is, as was pointed out in the next statement, 87% Democratic, says he will go after the (at the time) current Republican president, who is one of the most hated politicians, especially in Democratic circles, of the past, say, twenty years? Does that show prejudice? We can certainly argue that maybe district attorneys shouldn’t campaign on going after political figures, but the question that has to be addressed is: is that respect for the separation of politics and justice, or is it suppression of justice for the sake of the appearance of respect for the separation of politics and justice? That is: if Trump was actually guilty (or could reasonably be accused, since we’re talking about decisions regarding bringing a case, not the verdict) of crimes, should the man running for DA say that he will prosecute Trump? Or should he back off because Trump is a politician?
Obviously we know what Trump would want in this case. But just as obviously, Trump’s position on this — and the same positions parroted by all of his supporters — are not about the respect for the separation of powers and the political process, because that same former President (now convicted felon) and his supporters said that Hillary Clinton should be locked up, and they’ve never stopped going after Joe and Hunter Biden with claims regarding criminality and the justice system.
Honestly, I can see the point in terms of, say, a judge, or a jury member. They need to have both the appearance of objectivity, as well as approaching as close to actual objectivity as they can. But the DA is not supposed to be unbiased. In fact, to do his or her job well, it seem reasonable that a DA should be as biased as possible: it would motivate them to work hard to find all of the evidence to prove their case in court, to prepare and formulate all the arguments and all the strategy needed to convict their target, to “Get their man.” So long as they can remain rational and uncorrupted in their prosecution, so long as they don’t intimidate witnesses, or bribe the judge, or falsify evidence, or try to suppress information or corrupt the jury, or any of the other ways that a DA could corrupt a criminal trial.
Does evidence of bias against Trump provide evidence of corruption or wrongdoing on the part of the DA?
It does not.
The same with Bragg receiving funding in his campaign from George Soros. My immediate question is: what is the impact of that funding? Did Soros call the man up and say “Here’s what I want in exchange for my money: someday — and that day may never come — I may ask you to do a service for me.” Or does his money buy access? Is there an assumption of what Bragg might have to do to maintain that level of funding in the future? Any or all of those would be a concern. (Though none of them would necessarily show that Bragg did anything corrupt in prosecuting Trump.)
But, actually, now that I think about it, my first question is, Is that even true? What evidence do we have that Soros funded Alvin Bragg’s campaign?
This is Mary Louise Kelly, from NPR, interviewing Emily Tamkin, a spokesperson from Soros’s organization.
KELLY: Let’s start with a basic fact check. What exactly is the connection between George Soros or his foundations and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg?
TAMKIN: So in this case, Soros gave money to a group called Color of Change, which is a social justice civil rights group that in turn gave some money to the campaign of District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Right, okay. So in fact George Soros did not give money directly to Alvin Bragg, which pretty much shows that none of the immediate thoughts on possible corruption would be true. They might happen at one remove — Soros pressures Color of Change, and Color of Change pressures Bragg — but that disconnect makes it harder to believe that Soros had any real influence on Bragg. It does raise a question which Tamkin brought up in the NPR interview, while responding to the important question from Kelly:
KELLY: Yeah. I mean, is there any evidence that Soros got something for this money in the case of Alvin Bragg, that his money bought influence in some way?
TAMKIN: No, there’s no evidence of that. And just more broadly, there are critiques to be made – right? – about a billionaire philanthropist who gives money to prosecutors’ campaigns, right? We could have a conversation about money in politics, the power of billionaires in American society. All of that is fair game, right? But that’s not really what this is. This is over-assigning the influence of Soros over Bragg and also dramatically overstating the agency that Soros has over this case.
But how does the existence of George Soros giving money to a PAC which then gave money to Alvin Bragg show that Soros corrupted the case against Donald Trump as prosecuted by Alvin Bragg? And by the way, where is our understanding of what Soros wants which is corrupt in the first place?
It does not show that the case against Trump was corrupted. And the fact that no one that I have ever heard or seen bring up George Soros’s name can also offer a credible explanation of how he wants to corrupt American politics shows that this use of George Soros’s name to taint one’s political opponents by association is nothing but hot air. (I’m going to leave the description of how people usually go after Soros for another time, another place. Because it’s ugly. And completely off the point here.)
So what is the point here? The point is that the argument, the accusation, being made exists only because so much of it is left out, is unsaid. The argument leaves our imaginations to fill in the gaps. Alvin Bragg campaigned on getting Donald Trump: okay… and? This was why I asked for specific evidence of specific corrupt actions that my interlocutor was accusing Bragg of, and if he had made specific claims, I would have asked for evidence. As it stands, there’s not even really an accusation. He never said “George Soros commanded Bragg, in exchange for his political donation of X dollars, to frame Trump so that Biden could defeat Trump in the election because Biden is trying to create a Socialist state and that’s what Soros wants, so Bragg tampered with evidence and intimidated witnesses to get them to lie about Trump on the stand.” See how that specific kind of claim just screams for evidence? “How do you know all of that?” would be the only thought in my head if I were to read all of that. Which is why that claim wasn’t made: because of course there isn’t evidence for that claim, because it is not true. All this fellow said was “Bragg was funded by Soros.” Never even gave the specifics about how that funding was provided (I’m sure he didn’t know), and neither of us have provided how much funding there was; he didn’t say that only Soros funded Bragg’s campaign, which of course is also not true, but that’s implied in the wording.
This is what I’m talking about. This is argument by innuendo, by hints and implications, accusations left unsaid because we all know what’s really going on here. But what’s really going on here is bad argument, bad discussion: misinformation. We are all doing it, all the time.
We need to stop.
Okay. Moving on.
Next: the case took place in an 87% Democratic county. (Not even sure if that’s true: this website shows it, but — it’s BestPlaces, a real estate website, so not the most reliable source of political information; and the info on this page alone seems to contradict that 87% figure a couple of times, so — I dunno. I’ll stipulate it. [Which is what Trump should have done with his affair with Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, who therefore wouldn’t have had to testify in open court about how she spanked his ass, how she rejected his pathetic attempt to Hugh Hefner her, how he didn’t use a condom — all the salacious details which embarrassed Trump, which his lawyers claimed prejudiced the jury and tainted the verdict, all could have been avoided if they had stipulated the affair had happened; but Trump wanted to pretend he never had sex with Ms. Clifford. So here we are, with Trump hoist on his own petard. But I digress.])
The main question is: does this fact, that 87% of Manhattan voted Democrat, show bias against Trump in the potential jury pool?
You bet your ass it does. Any poll — every poll — shows that Democrats pretty roundly and universally and virulently hate Donald Trump. I certainly do, for all kinds of rational and irrational reasons, which I would be happy to list except I already have so just read this if you want.
But.
Two questions: one cynical but important, and one much more to the point.
The cynical question is: yes, and? How is this jury pool different from any other? It’s Donald freaking Trump: what else would you expect? Of course Democrats hate this guy. Just as, of course, Republicans love him (and I’m going to resist the temptation here to point out that they SHOULD NOT, and just accept that they do); it seems clear that any Republican district would have just as much potential bias in the jury pool, it would just have the opposite polarity, so to speak. Of course Trump would like to move the trial to a Republican district; he likes that bias better. But is there anywhere the trial could be moved that would lead to an unbiased jury pool? Everyone is biased when it comes to the 45th President of the U.S. of A. Do we really think there are a dozen people in any locale in these United States who don’t already have a strong opinion of Donald Trump? And here’s the cynical part: there is, therefore, no possible way to find an unbiased jury, if — if — we think that political affiliation and voting record are prejudicial in terms of a juror’s ability to come to a fair verdict beyond a reasonable doubt. Which is where Trump wants to take this argument: to the conclusion that, if there is no way to find an unbiased jury — he should simply never be tried for his crimes. He should be allowed to act with impunity, because any jury would be biased, and therefore incapable of rendering a fair verdict.
I don’t think I need to say that I would not want that situation to happen. I do not want anyone to be above the law. Especially not Donald Trump.
And now we get to the question that really comes to the point. Do we believe that people who voted Democratic in 2016 or 2020, or at any time in the last fifty years, are incapable of setting aside those political views in order to serve as a juror in a criminal case regarding the President as a private citizen campaigning for political office?
Do we really believe that any opinion, one way or another, means that people cannot be fair? Really? Because then we’re going to have to set aside all judgment in all cases, forever and ever. I mean all cases: which parent could fairly judge their child? Don’t parents have opinions about their children? What teacher could grade an assignment? We all have opinions about our students.
Shall I point out here that my interlocutor is a former student?
Look: this is important, but we all know it’s important, so it is already a carefully considered factor. People knowing about something does not mean they are necessarily incapable of fairly judging an event or person associated with that thing. People having connections to a person, or a party, or an experience of any kind, does not necessarily mean that person is incapable of being objective and judging fairly. But because we recognize that it could, that a previous opinion could create an unfair bias, the entire justice system is designed to get around that fact.
I mean: ALL of it. Twelve jurors, selected randomly, then vetted by the judge and by both sides’ attorneys. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Unanimous verdict. The right to appeal. Every bit of it, and a hundred other things I didn’t mention — rules of evidence, and admissibility in court, and having statements removed from the record, and jury instructions, and alternative jurors, and jury sequestration, and on and on — is intended to address the problem of jurors’ possible prejudice.
To dismiss that simply because someone voted a particular party at some point in the past — no, not even that; because the people who lived in an area voted for a particular party in the past, which does not include all the people in the area because in addition to the 14% or so who didn’t vote Democrat, there are the 50% or so who didn’t vote, and the people who moved into the area since then — and every single person who voted for Democrats and also voted for one Donald J. Trump.
Like this fucking guy.
Donald Trump registered as a Republican in Manhattan in 1987; since that time, he has changed his party affiliation five times. In 1999, Trump changed his party affiliation to the Independence Party of New York. In August 2001, Trump changed his party affiliation to Democratic. In September 2009, Trump changed his party affiliation back to the Republican Party. In December 2011, Trump changed to “no party affiliation” (independent). In April 2012, Trump again returned to the Republican Party. (From Wikipedia, emphasis added)
To dismiss every precaution built into the system, every application of judgment about someone’s potential bias, every possibility that someone could look beyond their bias and be a fair juror — that’s not cynical. It’s downright absurd. It’s bullshit.
I have thought to myself, since the trial started, that I could be a juror. I would never pass the voir dire, because they looked at past social media posts, and I’ve been pretty clear that I have strong opinions about Trump; his lawyers would strike me in a hot minute. And they’d be right to do so, because no matter how much I flatter myself that I could be impartial, I would not have the appearance of impartiality (and, honestly, probably not the fact of it either), and my presence on the jury would undermine confidence in the verdict. So even though I think I could be impartial, I wouldn’t be on the jury. Not because I have voted for Democrats, but because I have railed against Trump more times than I could count. I said in this very post that I hate the fucking guy, and I do. So, biased.
(I still kinda think I could be impartial because I do not like all of my students, but I treat them all fairly and grade them all as impartially as I can. But also, a grade on an essay is not a criminal verdict, and none of my students are as hateable as the Nazi Cheeto.)
There’s a process, a system, for finding the most impartial jury possible, and getting those twelve people to overcome any biases they come in with. It’s an imperfect system. But it’s a good system. It deserves our trust. A whole lot more than Donald Trump does.
I’m going to put the next claim, that Judge Merchan was a “major Biden donor” into the same category here; either we trust that someone can put aside their political affiliations in order to serve as a judge in a criminal case — or else we should TAKE THE GODDAMN MAR-A-LAGO DOCUMENTS CASE AWAY FROM EILEEN CANNON.
But I digress.
(Oh also — the claim that Judge Merchan’s daughter worked for Letitia James, who also “has a hard on for convicting Trump” is not true. My interlocutor is mixing up his false claims here. Laura Loomer, an idiot who pushes pro-Trump messaging on the internet, claimed that Merchan’s wife worked for Letitia James, and since it was Loomer who said it, it’s probably not true at all, and if it is it doesn’t show that Mrs. Merchan is biased in favor of AG James; I have worked for a lot of people, and most of them, I DID NOT LIKE, not even if they were as badass as Letitia James — who, if I may say, is the Attorney General of the state of New York, and the first woman and the first African-American elected to hold that post, which means she is amazing on a scale well beyond what this discussion can capture — while Merchan’s daughter is the president and partner of a consulting firm that works for all kinds of big name political clients, including Vice President Kamala Harris. So I’m not sure that any of this claim holds water at all. But if it does? Absolutely none of this shows any particular unfair corrupting bias on the part of Judge Merchan, so we’re just going to leave this one alone. Now, if the judge’s wife had raised a “FUCK TRUMP” flag over the judge’s house during the trial…)
Okay. Phew. I can see why people prefer to argue without explanations and evidence: this is hard. And time-consuming.
But this is how it needs to be: we need to actually show what the hell we are talking about, using resources from other than our own memory or imagination, and we need to actually explain the claims we make. It’s not enough to just be like “THE JUDGE GAVE MONEY TO BIDEN!” You have to go the next step: tell me how this fact (which you also would need to provide evidence for) shows unfair bias on the judge’s part, which was shown in this specific statement or action.
And if that means we might talk less and raise fewer, better points in our arguments? Well, all I can say is I know how long this post is.
But long or not, let me provide some evidence, in the shape of one quick example: Judge Webster Thayer presided over the trial of Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian immigrants and anarchists who were convicted and executed for the murder of two guards during the robbery of a payroll in 1920. Here’s Thayer’s bias, which did indeed have an impact on the conviction and execution of these two (probably innocent) men:
Thayer’s behavior both on and off the bench during the trial drew criticism. A Boston Globe reporter, Frank Sibley, who had covered the trial, wrote a letter of protest to the Massachusetts attorney general condemning Thayer’s bias. Others noted the frequency with which Thayer denied defense motions and the way he addressed defense attorney Fred H. Moore. Thayer defended his rulings to reporters saying, “No long-haired anarchist from California can run this court!” According to onlookers who later swore affidavits, in private discussion Thayer called Sacco and Vanzetti “Bolsheviki!” and said he would “get them good and proper”. In 1924, referring to his denial of motions for a new trial, Thayer confronted a Massachusetts lawyer: “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” the judge said. “I guess that will hold them for a while! Let them go and see now what they can get out of the Supreme Court!” The outburst remained a secret until 1927 when its release fueled the arguments of Sacco and Vanzetti’s defenders. The New York World attacked Thayer as “an agitated little man looking for publicity and utterly impervious to the ethical standards one has the right to expect of a man presiding in a capital case.”[1] From Wikipedia
So. Get me audio of Judge Merchan saying, “Did you see what I did to that fascist orange motherfucker last month?” and I’ll say he was unfairly biased. Let him deny motions for an appeal or a new trial and then say “I guess that will hold those shitheads for a while! Let them see what they can get out of the Supreme Court!*” and then I’ll say Merchan’s actions were unfair based on his prejudices. Drop some innuendo based on the assumption that political affiliation is a universal source of unconquerable prejudice? I will simply point out that oftentimes an accusation is a confession.
*Also, what they could get from the Supreme Court is: probably any fucking thing they want, because the SCOTUS is, in my opinion, both corrupt and unethical, and also unfairly biased and prejudiced in their judgments connected to Donald Trump. But I digress.
Okay: now we get to the issues regarding the actual case, rather than the people involved. There are three presented.
Evidence of a crime that exceeds the statute of limitation since 2019 but upgraded what is normally a misdemeanor to a class E felony due to other crimes not mentioned being committed.
Corrupt judge tells jury that they do not need to agree on verdict unanimously they just have to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime. Which is a first.
And 34 counts yes. However, they will only sentence him on 1 because all 34 are considered the same 1 “crime”
CLAIM: “They missed the statute of limitations by a lot because this was very old. They could have brought this seven years ago instead of bringing it right in the middle of the election.”
THE FACTS: Judge Merchan in February denied a request from Trump’s legal team to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that the statute of limitations had passed, according to court documents.
In his decision, Merchan cited pandemic-era executive orders issued in March 2020 and April 2021 by former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that extended the limit on filing criminal charges.
New York’s statute of limitations for most felonies is five years. The earliest charge in Trump’s felony indictment was described as occurring on Feb. 14, 2017, while the indictment was filed on March 30, 2023.
(And just in case someone disagrees with this: okay, show me the evidence that this statute of limitations claim is valid.)
The misdemeanor being raised to a felony is something that should be considered; but there is a reasonable argument for the felony: the crime was committed in pursuance of committing another crime, which makes the offense more serious. Reasonably: because someone who will commit one crime in order to commit a second crime is more likely to commit a third crime. Right? So that increases the severity of the initial crime being tried here, the falsification of business records. Alone, it’s a misdemeanor; in conjunction with another crime, it’s a class E felony — which is not far away from a misdemeanor, honestly. We can and should question the step the DA took to try this as an felony, but we can see that choice as reflecting the facts of the case, and thereby necessitating a trial — because if this was only a misdemeanor there’s no way we have this trial — or we can see it as a biased DA corrupting the law in order to go after Trump.
If you think it’s the second one? Prove it.
I think it’s the first one. Not least because the jury, whom I will trust because I trust the system, in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, convicted Trump of the felonies, which at least implies, post facto, that there was validity in the argument. But let’s get into the details a little more.
Let me include the next claim, that Judge Merchan (who is, in the absence of any specific evidence, definitely not corrupt) instructed the jury that they did not need to be unanimous on the verdict, they just needed to agree that Trump committed some kind of crime.
False. Or at least unclearly stated to such an extent that it becomes false.
Under New York law, falsification of business records is a crime when the records are altered with an intent to defraud. To be charged as a felony, prosecutors must also show that the offender intended to “commit another crime” or “aid or conceal” another crime when falsifying records.
In Trump’s case, prosecutors said that other crime was a violation of a New York election law that makes it illegal for “any two or more persons” to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means,” as Justice Juan Merchan explained in his instructions to the jury.
What exactly those “unlawful means” were in this case was up to the jury to decide. Prosecutors put forth three areas that they could consider: a violation of federal campaign finance laws, falsification of other business records or a violation of tax laws.
Jurors did not need to agree on what the underlying “unlawful means” were. But they did have to unanimously conclude that Trump caused the business records to be falsified, and that he “did so with intent to defraud that included an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”
So the crime, the falsification of business records, was well and fully proven by the prosecution; it was what they found him guilty of. 34 times. They also proved guilt in the secondary crime which the falsification was in pursuance of, conspiracy to promote the election of one Donald J. Trump ; that was why they used David Pecker of the National Enquirer as their first star witness.
What they did not need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt was which specific law was violated in the “unlawful means” used to promote the election of Trump. It could have been any of three crimes, all of which had evidence in support provided during the trial; they did not need to prove, and the jury did not need to agree, on which unlawful means were used — or rather, on why specifically those means were unlawful — because that was not the matter being tried here; the jury’s opinion of it was enough for the sake of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump committed the crime of falsification in pursuance of another crime, fraud to promote the election of a specific person. So that’s the answer to the objection: this is part of how the system works. And I should point out that, contrary to the claim that this was unprecedented, this happens all the time: every plea deal involves changing charges up or down the scale of severity, even if the charge that results is not entirely apropos. And every case involving a difficult-to-try person involves crimes that can be proven, which stand in for crimes that can’t be proven but definitely happened; just ask Al Capone. So really, if we don’t like this, we don’t like the thousands of other times it happens in our justice system daily.
I will also say that, honestly, I don’t like that they did this. I have heard legal commentators on NPR saying they think this specific element may lead to a successful appeal of the verdict, and I don’t like that.
But the point here is that I don’t really understand the legal maneuver that the DA used in this case. Not that it was bad, or that it made the verdict bad; just that I don’t understand it, and therefore I don’t like it. Using the same gut-feeling level of decision making, I will say that I believe in my gut that Trump absolutely committed this crime; maybe he shouldn’t have been convicted of it, and maybe he shouldn’t have been convicted in this way — but if he got away with this, that would be a miscarriage of justice.
And we’ll leave this for the Court of Appeals to decide.
Also, not that I want to descend into whataboutism, but if we’re talking about miscarriages of justice? Trump should be on trial in three other court rooms, with stronger evidence of more serious crimes. The fact that he is not, and maybe never will be, shows a miscarriage of justice that FAR outweighs any issue about the misdemeanor felonies and the unlawful means.
Moving on again.
The last one, that Trump was convicted of 34 crimes that were all one crime and so will only be sentenced for one crime — I mean, sure, and that’s why Judge Merchan will probably not sentence him to 34 penalties. This is an area of the justice system that is quite rightly left up to judges to decide in sentencing: sometimes it matters that a crime was committed 34 times, even if it was the same crime. If someone murdered 34 people, that’s different than one murder. If someone raped the same victim 34 times, that is not one crime.
In this case, does the minor nature and the repetitiveness of all 34 counts mean we shouldn’t keep emphasizing that Trump was convicted of 34 felonies?
Sure, maybe. But also: it’s fun to say it. And I’m not going to apologize for, nor draw back, my shit-talking about Donald Trump. This is one case where I will gleefully say “Fuck your feelings.” Karma’s a bitch.
Okay: now we get to the general commentary at the end of the list of factual concerns regarding Trump’s trial and conviction.
First is this: “I just think that this is political persecution to suppress a political opponent.”
Not one thing in all of this so far connected Joe Biden to this trial. Not one thing. Okay: George Soros, and the fact that both Alvin Bragg and Joe Biden — and Judge Merchan, and most Manhattan voters — are Democrats. But man, if everything every Democrat does is in service of and part of a conspiracy involving Joe Biden, then I need to stop writing this blog: I am clearly committing political persecution of Donald J. Trump, at the behest of Joe Biden.
Now, is it convenient for Biden that Trump was tried and convicted? Sure — but let me grab another statement that was made a few sentences later.
I just think that this whole court case crap is only going to fuel the fire of his supporters.
And you’re right. I started out by saying that the verdict doesn’t change very many votes , either way. So why would Biden go after Trump in this way in hopes of changing the election? Doesn’t this show the opposite, that Biden probably didn’t try to do this in order to suppress a political opponent, because this clearly didn’t work, and polls have been showing for months that a conviction wouldn’t swing the election? And I think we all know that a felony conviction doesn’t disqualify anyone from running for president, or from serving if they win. Biden and his advisors knew that. So unless we assume that Biden and all of his political advisors are so completely out of touch or so thoroughly stupid that they didn’t know that Trump’s voters would not change their vote because of the verdict, it’s not reasonable to assume, in the absence of evidence, that Biden masterminded this whole thing. And that Biden and his team were too dumb to recognize the futility is a very poor assumption: after all, whatever else we may think of Joe Biden, the man won election to the highest office in the country. Clearly he knows what the fuck he is doing politically. Especially when it comes to beating Donald Trump, which he also did.
Going on:
Also think it’s coincidental that the sentencing hearing is 4 days before the RNC. Honestly they should have done this 4 years ago when he left office instead of confidently waiting until 6 months before the election. And again I’m not stroking trumps ego on this but I think it’s just in time that now the biden campaign can put ads out talking about how Trump is a convicted felon etc etc.
The sentencing was decided by Judge Merchan. And what exactly will it do when it happens four days before the Republican National Convention? Will they fail to nominate Trump? Will this ruin his run to the November election?
No, seriously: why not point out that it is a week after the Fourth of July? Or on John Quincy Adams’s birthday — and also Giorgio Armani’s? This is another attempt at argument just by unclear innuendo. I don’t know what Trump’s sentencing is supposed to do to affect the RNC, but my best guess is that it will rile them all up and they’ll spend three days screaming about a witch hunt while falling in line behind DJT as the GOP nominee.
In terms of the case going to trial four years ago: Cyrus Vance had to sue Donald Trump to get his tax returns. Twice. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And then Trumps’ lawyers delayed this in every possible way — and it was delayed quite a bit by the fact that the COVID pandemic backlogged all of the courts for years. (PRETTY CONVENIENT THAT DONALD TRUMP DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO STOP THE PANDEMIC AND IT DELAYED HIS TRIAL, HUH??? See? I can argue by innuendo too.) That’s why it took so long. I’m sure they would have loved to try it in 2019 — except for the fact that would have meant trying a sitting president, and honestly, maybe that would have been kinda bad.
Is Biden going to make hay out of Trump being a convicted felon? Absolutely. But you know who else is capitalizing on it?
And there’s another factor here, which connects to all of these points about the timing and how Biden will use this conviction, and so on. Sure: it may be convenient when your opponent’s crimes or scandals or whatever show up — but that doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. Your opponent’s mistakes or wrongdoings are certainly good for you, but that in no way shows that you made them up: it only shows that you took advantage of circumstances, or your opponent’s failures, as anyone would and should in a competition. Do we think the tortoise made the hare take a nap? No: it’s not your fault if your opponent fucks up. It doesn’t mean you made those scandals happen, or drummed up false charges for those crimes. It doesn’t mean the opponent was framed. Not even if you personally have the power to persecute someone, and falsely accuse them of crimes. To show that that happened, someone would need actual evidence that Trump was not guilty of doing what he was accused of.
And did you notice? The one claim that was missing from all of these arguments about this trial?
That Trump was innocent. That he didn’t do anything.
We all know he did it. We all know it was criminal. It’s just a question of whether he should pay, and how much he should pay.
The first answer is emphatically, categorically, YES.
The second question is more to be debated and determined. But it should be determined using facts, using reason, not innuendo and implication and misinformation and lies.
Then we can have something that is not a crock of shit.
There’s my guy. My buddy Joe. Pretty regular fella — other than the fact that his 81-year-old face has fewer wrinkles than my 49-year-old one, which, sure, fine, lots of people use Botox and plastic surgery and all — but Joe is unquestionably at the stage where his face has been so thoroughly Zambonied that it looks more “plastic” than “young.” But other than a flat plastic face, overly-squinchy eyes, and those too-white-pearly-whites? Very normal man. Reminds me of my dad. Especially when he talks, since most of the time he sounds like he’s kind of running out of breath, unless he is particularly excited.
I have to admit, though, that for a normal man — a regular dude — he’s sure fond of supporting some pretty fucked up things. Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Hopefully we can all agree that the ones really responsible for the atrocities and the genocide are Hamas, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war-loving government, both of whom benefit from increased conflict and greater frequency and intensity of atrocity, as it increases their support by radicalizing more of the population; and also creates enough confusion among the smoke and rubble for them to siphon off wealth. I do not for a second believe that my old buddy Joe could put his arm around Bibi’s shoulders, lean in real close, and whisper, “Hey, man, cut the shit, okay?” and get any kind of real result. Netanyahu is never going to stop the war, because when the war stops, so does his political career, as he is epically unpopular now — but when he leaves office, he’ll no longer be able to avoid prosecution for his corruption, which is pervasive and pretty concretely proven everywhere but in that court of law he is avoiding. (Sounds like a certain would-be Fascist dictator in this country, doesn’t it? No wonder they get along.) But on the other hand, even though Ol’ Joe can’t stop the genocide in Gaza, I would very much appreciate not having my country supply the weapons to Israel for their genocide.
And then there’s Joe’s past support for crime bills targeting African-Americans, and a lack of support for abortion access for women, and for clearing Clarence fucking Thomas for the Supreme Court, and his willingness to destroy people’s lives at the southern US border, which he backs partly because he wants to be able to blame the Grand Ol’ (Fascist) Party, the GO(F)P, for their failure to secure the border, undercutting their own main talking point; but also because he’s clearly pretty comfortable with adopting said Fascist party’s framing of the issue as a crisis at the southern border, and the problem being one of too many people trying to live out the American dream and the ideals we claim to stand for, and with the argument that punishing those people as brutally as we can is definitely the best way to handle it.
All of that is garbage. And all of it is Joe Biden.
Plus there’s the simple fact of the man’s titanic goddamn ego, which makes him look in the mirror every morning and say, in all sincerity, “The only man who can be President is you. The only man who can stop Trump is you. You have to run again, Joe. You gotta save the world! All by yourself! LET’S DO THIS!” That’s Joe Biden, too.
But you know what else is Joe Biden?
He’s the most progressive president we’ve had in 75 years — even though he failed to provide Medicare for All or a livable minimum wage or a permanent child tax credit or a Voting Rights Act or a balanced and reasonable Supreme Court.
But the focus on climate change spending, particularly in the Inflation Reduction Act, is brilliant. The Infrastructure bill was good though not enough — but it was good, no question. The change in tone and the reintegration of the US into the world’s leadership, particularly NATO, was necessary. And his administration has done a good job of making sure the US did not fall into the economic malaise that the rest of the world has fallen into. I don’t like everything about the way they did it, because like always, inflation was brought under control mainly by punishing working and middle class families by raising interest rates to levels high enough to make us stop buying houses, even though the rent is too god-fucking-damn high; and like always, the majority of the GDP gains went to the top 1% so the corporations and Wall Street mavens could keep making campaign contributions to Joe and the Democratic party; but still, unemployment is ridiculously low — and there have been some actual gains to wages set against inflation and the cost of living.
So. Considering all of that, I have a request for all of you.
Vote for him. Vote for my man Joe in November.
I mean, to be clear, the only other realistic option for someone who could actually win is the fucking Fascist. And you — yes you, person who is reading this right now, who has felt enough connection to me that you came here to read this piece that I wrote — you better not vote for the fucking Fascist.
But that’s not the issue here. Right? Millions of cultish fans, and millions of people freaking out over the scourge of Socialism, are going to vote for Trump; but he lost the popular vote in both of his elections, so I expect he will lose again. The issue is whether or not enough of the voters on the margins, the ones who maybe don’t want to vote, who don’t care enough to vote, or who are wavering between the two choices, will swing the battleground states to the right side to win the Electoral College. That’s what the issue is, and what I want to talk about: will the undecided voters decide to go the right way?
It should honestly be pretty simple for every Democrat and progressive: Joe Biden is no progressive — but the progressive movement has made major gains with this administration, and importantly, Smilin’ Joe’s worries about his legacy, and also his genuine and historic support for unions and the working class, mean that he would likely continue to move slightly to the left of center, and might be able to enact and solidify some of the gains made in this first term. Any other president, from the left or the right, would be likely to ignore Biden’s accomplishments and try to create their own: but Biden will try to make sure that Biden’s wins stay in place. And Barack Obama doing exactly that is why we still have the Affordable Care Act despite all the best attempts by the fascists and corporate interests to root it out and remove people’s health insurance. Compared to Medicare for All, the ACA is hot garbage; but it was and is progress. It was and is a good thing. The same goes for Biden’s wins. Even though we’d like to have more of them, it would be useful to make sure what we’ve got, we won’t lose; like any other leftist/progressive idea, once it is in place, people realize it’s probably a good thing — and then they don’t want to get rid of it. Just ask Trump and his Republican congress about the ACA.
So re-electing Biden would make sure that we don’t move backwards. And let me point out how important that is: both Trump and Biden did a whole lot of stuff through executive order; and because those come from one man’s pen, they can be (and were) undone by another man’s (or a woman’s) pen. That fact, and the stark contrast between Trump’s foreign policy (Which is basically this) and every sane President’s desire to remain involved with the world on some kind of good terms, are why so much of the rest of the world is now wary of relying on the US for anything. And while I definitely think it would be better for the US and the world not to have the US in any kind of leadership role, since we have fucked up almost every other country on the planet at one time or another for our own desires or aggrandizement or simple profit, I do think that inconsistency from our policies or our economy has severe negative long-term knock-on effects on the rest of the world. So keeping ourselves in check is the best possible thing for everyone: and for that, a second Biden term, with his focus on maintaining American value around the world and renewing and continuing old policies about connection and cooperation, are the best possible choice.
I understand and agree that just maintaining what we have is not enough. We need to have an actual progressive administration, and more importantly, a progressive congress to go with a progressive executive, so they can name progressive judges, and then we can do some of the things we really need to do. And the more often we are given this kind of bullshit either-or, Lesser-of-Two-Evils choice, the longer we have to delay an actual progressive movement and the accomplishment of simple but necessary things that will save lives, like a livable minimum wage and Medicare for All. But to accomplish that, we need to start at the grass roots: and that’s where progressives suck. Don’t we? Because we won’t fear monger the same way the establishment and especially the Fascists will, we can’t drive the same kind of brand loyalty that only comes with paralyzing fear of the other side. We have to educate. And the political education of the populace relies on one thing: actual policy wins. Actual things being done, by government, to help people. And you know what we need in order to achieve that? More progressives in office, which basically starts with more progressives in the world.
And you know what drives more progressives in office? Anger and frustration with Fascists and with the establishment Democrats who appease them. In the large historical sense, the longer we have to deal with these people in charge, the better our side will do in recruitment and inspiration and drive. You cannot stop the pendulum from swinging: the GO(F)P has done a fantastic job of slowing down the swings for a long time now; but there have been lots and lots of little swings — LGBTQ rights, for instance, even though we’re seeing the violent Fascist reaction to that swing — and the big swing? It’s coming. And it’s going to swing a long way.
And then it will swing back again.
Let me also point out that the reason the GO(F)P has done so well for the last twenty-five years is because they started at the grass roots FIFTY years ago, and built up slowly; and the best news I can say for the future of the progressive movement is that Trump and MAGA have completely torn down the Republican infrastructure that helped put Trump into office. So if we can stay focused, and pay attention and do the work, we can take the country back. For real. I’ll write more about that another time.
And if none of that convinces you? Let me just remind you: the guy on the other team is a fucking Fascist. And no, I won’t tone down that language or that accusation: it is appropriate, and accurate. I will express that in greater detail another time, but I hope everyone reading this is already close to accepting that, if you’re not already there.
So let me sum up.
Biden has done a genuinely good job. He should have done more, but he has done more good than harm — and that’s an important metric for any politician. The first line of the Hippocratic Oath is “Primum non nocere” — first, do no harm. Politicians should all swear the same thing. Actually, we all should. And Biden has done good, for the economy, for the country’s manufacturing and infrastructure, for climate change adaptation, and for the international rules-based world order.
The best criticisms against him are: he has failed to end support for the genocide in Gaza, which is an entirely fair criticism, and the reason why I voted against Biden in my state’s primary, as I want him to recognize that this is an issue; he has tried to meet the GO(F)P in the middle of the aisle, particularly on the border, which shows far too much acceptance of Fascism and, essentially, racism and sexism, which were already issues for Biden as they are for so very many white male Americans; and he has accepted the current framing of issues like the economy, where he has failed to support the real change that would actually achieve his “from the bottom up and the middle out” economic growth.
Oh right — and he’s old.
And he sounds kinda dumb when he talks sometimes.
Those criticisms are bullshit.
He’s old. Granted. So why does he need to be young? Because only young people understand the needs of young people? Are we really that wedded to identity politics, that we believe that nobody can understand the needs of a group to which he doesn’t belong? That nobody can be sympathetic to those needs, and supportive of them? How different are those needs, really? Do we actually think there’s that much of a gap between the basic human needs of someone who is 8 and someone who is 80, when both people are human beings? Both love their family, both want to be safe and healthy, both love cheese and naps; must we have an 8-year-old president in order for 8-year-olds to live good lives? And if not: why do we need a 40-year-old President? Or a 50, 60, 70-year-old President?
He doesn’t speak well. And? Why does he need to speak well when he can get other people to deliver complicated policy platform announcements, or to handle press conferences with the piranhas of the press corps? Do we really need Joe Biden to inspire us with his soaring rhetoric? Or could we maybe read a book, listen to a poem, watch a Rage Against the Machine concert video, and get our inspiration from those? If we have a President who needs the help of other people to run his administration, then maybe we get something more like, I dunno, a representative Republic serving democratically. Instead of a strongman who handles everything himself, and who can and might want to build a cult of personality.
Whatever else you say about Old Joe, he is not going to build a cult of personality. None of us can stand his personality. No: he will build a team of smart and capable and driven people, who will help to fill in the gaps where he doesn’t have the best strengths. One of the best things about Biden is that he realizes who he is and what he can do (Other than his enormous ego, but clearly that is a prerequisite for an American politician), and he looks to others for help. He stood behind Barack Obama completely. That says a lot. I am also, despite my criticisms of his past shitty positions, genuinely impressed with his ability to recognize when he might be wrong, and to listen to others with better ideas. The fact that he is not the same man with the same ideas he had fifty years ago? That’s a good thing.
Look. Seriously. The President doesn’t need to be young. The President doesn’t need to be strong. The President doesn’t need to be a good speaker. We like all those things in our politicians, as we like them in all of our celebrities: but the reality is that the President is a politician and a leader. And that doesn’t require strength in a physical, youthful sense. It requires determination and drive: and Biden has those. Even if he needs to take a nap every day (And don’t pretend we wouldn’t all support a President who mandated a daily nap), he gets up and still has the same absolute convictions about the right things: the goodness of America, the desire to help people, the opposition to cruelty and violence. Right? You can’t miss those things when you talk about Biden. That same ego I was mocking earlier actually shows his strength in this area: he believes he is right, and a lot of the time, in a lot of ways, he is.
Let me also note: if our President is strong-willed, so strong that nobody could stop him or oppose him or stand in his way — how do we not end up with a dictator? Hell, we almost got a dictator with the last guy, and he only thinks he is strong and commanding. Someone who actually is? There’s a real risk there. And there’s only a benefit in that if we think that this country is actually carried by one guy.
It is not. The strength of this country is not in the leadership. It is not in the White House. It is not in our politicians, at all: they are all — or almost all — weak people. Weak morals, weak wills, and a lot of weak minds, especially in the GO(F)P.
We are the strength of this country. We are smarter, stronger, braver, wiser, kinder, and better in every way than our political leaders. As we should be: because we are the ones who run this country. We are.
When we abdicate those roles and those responsibilities, when we elect politicians intending for them to carry the load for us, to do our thinking for us, to do everything for us so that we need to do nothing for ourselves — we get exactly what we want. We get controlled. We get exploited. We get screwed: because we put people in power over us, people who want to screw us, and we hand them the tools to do it.
Joe Biden, whatever else he is — old, weak, stumbling, mumbling, moderate, somewhat racist, somewhat sexist — he is not looking to screw us. He just wants to help.
Just Dusty 
