The Grubby Little Man Still Lost

 

I hate sharing these dumb statements but will make an exception in this case given that the clear intent to keep on lying about the election really clarifies Facebook's decision that is coming this week on his account. pic.twitter.com/iHVaIAjMPr

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) May 3, 2021

The Phantom of Mar-a-Lago urgently wants to flip the term "The Big Lie" from meaning the relentless propaganda of his followers that he somehow actually won his election to meaning the actual reality in which we live--the one where he lost, isn't in office anymore, and is actually just a sad, broken human being who doesn't happen to occupy the highest office in this country. The one where people breathe a sigh of relief some mornings because they don't turn on the tv or log onto social media wondering what atrocity of poor judgment the gilded-toileted orange fucknut has managed while his handlers were passed out from exhaustion. The reality where our allies think maybe we aren't on a slalom down the rugged chute to hell in a leased golf cart. 

The one where he doesn't have executive privilege or immunity.

This looks like something simply sad, but it's really malicious. (Sad is actually Lin Wood, who is pretending that he has seen Trump still in the White House and purports that Biden is dead and/or lost in a landslide. I don't understand what this sort of thing is for, and suspect there is an organic issue going on. Or one hell of an play at an insanity defense for an as yet committed or disclosed crime. Sheesh.)

Right now more than half of Republicans think that Trump probably did win, but there was significant voter fraud. 

There's no proof of that. There never has been proof of serious voter fraud. PACs and what not were preparing the field for claims of voter fraud before the election even took place. The claims of voter fraud seem to be what Republicans want to talk about because they can't address why their policies of, basically, "tax cuts for the rich and fuck everyone else" aren't more wildly popular. But instead of litigating how a party hopes to manage their future with increasingly hopeless lying fuckwits who will do actively nothing except chum the discourse with treats for their Pavlovian-trained audience, I'd like to focus on Trump, because I have been Ahabed and now I can't do anything but hunt the white supremacist whale now. 

He never should have won in the first place, and in the second place, he wanted to offer Puerto Rico and cash value for Greenland, and lied about ever trying to get aid to the island after two hurricanes, and even blocked investigation into why aid was being delayed. For another thing, whatever shakes out from plumbing his campaign (in 2016 or 2020) and its relationship with Russia, he was badly compromised. He was a corrupt real estate developer and reality tv personality. How in the hell was this supposed to make him enough to lead a country? And after four years, multiple failures, a miserable COVID-19 response and a severe economic downturn--all of which he showed no capacity to handle in terms of policy, as he tried to finesse them as PR challenges--was he supposed to win?

The short-fingered vulgarian, the serial philanderer, the grubby little man--this is the Pied Piper of Scamming that the entire Republican party is following so blindly? To give her her due, Liz Cheney is trying to set the party straight. And it isn't because she' s so uniquely upright or honest, but because she understands the grotesque error of letting the party lead with the dumbest possible motherfucker on the planet and fail to reverse course when shit is fucked up. You have to acknowledge failure in order to show you have learned. That's just reality. 

Trump is a grubby little man, and he lost. The Republicans who want to do better than he did should be kicking him in the slats on the way out the door of his fail-basement, instead of trying to give him little awards and hoping he'll play nice. He's a nevershouldabeen. A fluke. He prospers because Republicans are mostly too weak to fail him properly. Again and again and again I will say, the power he has is that which he was yielded by the immature and spineless people (Ryan, McDaniel, McCarthy, and, sadly, McConnell--old enough to know better and too yellow to care) who let him rampage. And the yellow press on the right needs some real looking into for who funds them. Whoever funds Trumpaganda needs shutting down. He's the wedge of an axe against our unity at home. He is our weakest link.

The America First Problem

“As we outpace what we need we’re going to be sending [ventilators] to Italy,” Trump insisted at his coronavirus briefing. “We’re going to be sending them to France.” https://t.co/1iE0uCD9wz

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 31, 2020

It's hard for me not to hear that Trump envisions ventilators sent all over the world "as we outpace what we need" without sarcastically wondering if he might consider "America first". After all, in the weeks after the first COVID-19 case was detected in the US, instead of ramping up national stockpiles and proceeding with a plan for testing and containment, the administration thought to bundle up medical supplies for China. Which was awful nice of the US, truly. Maybe it was supposed to help with trade talks or something. But it didn't do much for us here (and makes a bit of a mockery of the claims that the Obama Administration left stockpiles so low--so, after three years, we had enough to give away? And Trump and friends couldn't figure out how to fix that? At some point, Trump gets to own the results of his particular form of leadership. (And yes, the problem is his.)

I guess I also wonder about this because there's a nonzero possibility that all states are not going to be treated equally. Beyond his petty slams at Governors Whitmer and Inslee for not being sufficiently grateful for his interest in doing his job and his fairly straight-forward discussion of the need for Governor Cuomo to basically kiss his ass publicly to get what he needs (for the people of New York, who last I checked were Americans), there's little things like the 170 broken ventilators that were sent to California. I'm not saying something like that was on purpose. I've just got no reassurances from available data that it can be ruled out. When Illinois gets a shipment of the wrong type of masks, certainly it could be just a clerical issue, but is it, though?

I note with a little irony that some stooges for the administration are admitting that Trump didn't have his eye on the ball, but whiffed the potential pandemic response because of the impeachment. To which I guess I'd have to say, he should have realized he didn't have the range for the job before he tried fancy extras like extorting foreign allies if he couldn't hang. Also, too, the Republicans in the Senate acquitted him (despite his having pretty much used Godfather-esque language to shake down a foreign leader) even if they should have realized his general attitude towards government was self-directed. Except for the one guy who--get this, was a nominee for that job and had an appreciation for the intelligence involved. Also ironically, this scenario was a part of the discussion for whether this exact attitude of Trump's was reason enough for him to be removed:

Serving as one of several expert witnesses in the first public impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Karlan said:

"Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that's prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided for? What would you think if that president said, 'I would like you to do us a favor? I'll meet with you, and send the disaster relief, once you brand my opponent a criminal.'

Wouldn't you know in your gut that such a president has abused his office? That he'd betrayed the national interest, and that he was trying to corrupt the electoral process? I believe the evidentiary record shows wrongful acts on those scale here."

Karlan used this analogy to contextualize Trump's broad efforts to urge Ukraine into launching investigations that would aid his reelection campaign.

And just like a Republican president before him, it wasn't that he was never warned that there would be a problem with a potential pandemic, or that he had inadequate warning about this one (regardless of whatever happy horseshit we suspect China was putting out so as not to looked weakened). We had the intelligence. Trump just didn't see fit to act. Maybe he might have even considered waiting a virtue, against messing up his economy with uncertainty, or letting bad infection counts mess with his poll numbers. He could allow a little epidemic (as a treat) and then somehow, things would shake out (a vaccine or a cure) and he'd be golden again! (He doesn't know any better. He doesn't know that you can't just change the label on a flu vaccine and confuse the new bug with it. His fixation with chloroquine stems from the same hope for a miracle delivery.)

And he believes his flummery over how good testing is going now ("we're testing more than anyone else!") as if in denial that we're doing more testing, in part, because of the poor start we had. He has told governors he "hasn't heard" there was a problem with testing, which is dangerously absurd.

Trump hasn't. in all of this, been putting America first at all. He's using press conferences with random CEOs who praise his leadership to the high heavens (like the "My Pillow" guy!) to look in charge when he should probably shut the heck up, and leave the talking to the experts. "America First" was always just a racist slogan to discuss a certain kind of white, English-speaking American who Trump wanted to represent. And now his failure to actually know how to put anyone besides himself first is going to get that American's mom-mom killed. And his Administration's attitude to non-citizens, like the folks who plant and pick our food and work in our food producing factories? Here, in what some people still call a "first world" nation, we very probably will even see food shortages.

How was anyone, so unaware and ignorant of what even made America livable, going to make America great? How would this flag-humping signifier pretend to put America First, when he himself is only tolerable to a certain population (who somehow can't separate his reality show self from the one in the mainstream news) once he wrapped himself in a flag and had solemn grifting snake oil squeezers rap Biblically over him? His core is nuclear waste.

Of course he's incapable. He will never put America first, and will play games with aid, and people will die. Didn't you all watch Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria? When he threw paper towels and lied about how much aid they already got and slandered people because he didn't want them to get more? And how he denied the death toll because it made him and his response look bad? And they are Americans. And we are all seeing what that Puerto Rico treatment looks like when applied all over the rest of the US.

"America first" was a slogan. The truth is Trump does Trump. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Stay Bull Jean Yuss 2: Code Orange

Trump at NRCC dinner:
-vows to "take back the House"
-says “They say the noise [from wind farms] causes cancer”
-tells crowd he's just sure someone will leak "his whole damn speech" to the media while it's being broadcast on C-SPAN

But everyone just sits and grins cause money. pic.twitter.com/73yQXBEfjT

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) April 3, 2019

Donald Trump is having a bit of a "normal one" today, I'm afraid. I mentioned earlier that he was reprehensibly lying (as was his minion, Hogan Gidley) regarding Puerto Rico, but did not also mention that he was also going volte-face over his earlier claims that he was fully exonerated by the Mueller report. Now, he says Dems are crazy for wanting the full report that allegedly fully exonerates him, which does suggest that crowing over not-quite four pages of a summary of a summary might have been overselling things a bit. This was, sadly, not the entirety of Trump's dysfunction and incompetence on display.

In an event with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump was simply bizarre. He was unable to say the word "origins", saying instead "oranges". He stated his own father was born in a nice place in Germany (he was born in the Bronx). He also seemed to indicate that part of the problem with immigration was judges.

Judges. Mkay.

I've joked recently about Trump being a "Stay Bull Jean Yuss" because of his quite obvious ignorance about how wind power even works and his own crowing about his supposed intelligence. Indicating that wind power causes cancer comes from the same place anti-vax bullshit does (oh, wait up, he's about that bullshit, too)--the fake news sewer of the internet.

I've also kidded that maybe some part of Trump's ignorance and apparent incapacity is a work, not a shoot, on the off chance that he needs an insanity plea for whatever shit he fears all the investigations surrounding him will eventually lead to.

Yeah. But it still isn't funny and needs to be looked into, though. There is something very not okay with this picture. It looks bad because it is bad, you guys.

Accidentally on Purpose?

MSNBC's @HallieJackson to WH dep. press secretary Hogan Gidley: Trump "says Puerto Ricans are taking from the USA. Puerto Rico is part of the United States. People who live in Puerto Rico are U.S. Citizens. You're rolling your eyes and I don't know why you're rolling your eyes." pic.twitter.com/mDn9lWQA5E

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 2, 2019

Treating Puerto Rico as if it was not a part of the US is how the Trump Administration intends to get away with continuing to treat the island like crap. People speaking for the White House, including Trump, who has been his miserable lying self on this subject recently, should be called out every single time.

Pence and Nonsense

So, VP Pence flew to Indianapolis to show up at a game he had no intention of staying at to make a BS point about "an event that disrespects our soldiers, etc.". I guess that went better than the last culture war-signifying event he "had" to leave.  But I think the grotesque thing about this was how very obvious his display actually was. He even had the press pool wait while he made his little show because he knew he wasn't going to be that long.

Every bit of it was kind of obvious. The Tweeting of a three year old picture like "Whheee, I love some sportsball!"  Being just shocked that the 49ers, who've had players kneeling since the beginning, were still participating in silent protest. And of course, not having enough time on his actual itinerary to stay for the whole game since he had things to do. Like fundraise for Dana Rohrabacher. I mean--I'm sure VP flights don't take as long as commercial flights, but even straight-through commercial:

And this was not a cheap stunt either--think about the taxpayer-funded flight and the Secret Service coverage and all that...

But of course, the real giveaway that this was just some culture war-signifying was that Donald Trump says it wasn't. He Tweeted:

Just marvelous. You can almost imagine wee Donnie playing hide'n'seek as a youngin', crowing from his hiding spot "You won't find me, because I have the best, biggest, most beautiful hiding space!" He thinks this is brilliant political work, and wants credit!

Of course it's a damn distraction from the mutiny over the Bounty towels, the questions arising from the Tillerson not-quite disavowal of calling Trump a "fucking moron", and who know what all else. The health care reform clusterfuck, the bad jobs numbers and crappy polls. Trump and Pence seem to think that if this display gains a news cycle, we will all forget the other stuff (North Korea? Iran?) and just hate on people taking a knee to protest...

Police brutality and racism. Not the flag, not veterans. Police brutality and racism. Screw Pence and Trump for this game. There are real issues out there that should occupy their time. But this trifling is where they prefer to linger. Lying about honest protesters to make up a BS concern of their own as a distraction. 

UPDATE: And apparently, Trump is still very proud of his stunt in the wee hours of the morning:

"Long planned." A stunt. Just remember who to thank/blame!

Puerto Rico Is Incognito on FEMA's Website

There's something to be said for the Trump Administration's response to the devastation in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria, but FEMA's website does not care to say it. 

FEMA spokesman William Booher noted that both measures are still being reported on a website maintained by the office of Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, www.status.pr. According to that website, which is in Spanish, 9.2 percent of the island now has power and 54.2 percent of residents have access to drinking water. Booher said that these measures are also shared in news conferences and media calls that happen twice a day, but he didn't elaborate on why they are no longer on the main FEMA page.

“Our mission is to support the governor and his response priorities through the unified command structure to help Puerto Ricans recover and return to routines. Information on the stats you are specifically looking for are readily available” on the website maintained by the governor's office, Booher said.

Maybe it's just me, but that sort of seems like the Trump Administration would prefer not to make notice of how slow things are going. See, in Trump's photo op the other day, he was in a place that wasn't as terrifically impacted by the storm, and wasn't really directly confronted with the full extent of the privations these folks were experiencing. I can't 100% say why Trump's response to Puerto Rico's situation was different from how he responded to Hurricane Harvey in TX or Hurricane Irma in FL, but there seems to be a difference. And if there was measurable good being done there by FEMA and other US agencies in the aid effort, I know, that I know, that I know, that Trump would be ready to witness their good deeds, and would be happy to spread that word.

But that is not what is happening. It is almost like FEMA already knows this story is not going to be a great success story regarding government effort, just like Oxfam knows that they need to step in to make sure pressure is put on to ensure government effort is coordinating with NGO relief agencies to do all they can.

I just feel like doing right by Puerto Rico in the first place would have been the best play if the Trump folks were so concerned with appearances. But there I am, giving shits.

Letting Trump Be Trump in Action

Every now and again, someone makes the funny/sad recommendation that everyone should just "Let Trump be Trump". It's part tarnished lining, part resignation. On one hand, something about Trump being himself must have worked thus far for him to be where he is. On the other hand, no really, try and stop him. Correct him--see what happens. Tell him he's wrong or not to do something. My bet is, this tactic is so useless that people are trying to tell themselves they've given up strategically.

I mean--take today as your example of Trump just being Trump. He went to Puerto Rico because, you know, they had the Category Five Hurricane that no one has ever seen before (except of course, they have). They, according to him, haven't had a real catastrophe, like Katrina, because they luckily only had 16 people die (a toll revised upward to officially 34, but with the difficulties in reporting and the scope of the accumulated problems of failed communications, power, and health care access, this figure will doubtless rise as the raw ability to even assess the extent of fatalities goes up).

His performance was appallingly tone-deaf in staggering ways.   He made the privations of other people about how he was so great to come along and fake-alleviate them. With things like flashlights, that they might still need, even while he pretends they don't really.  He goofed up who was representing the Coast Guard (nope, he was Air Force). He touted the invisible F-35, which is very expensive, kind of like Puerto Rico's recovery, haha, right? And invisible. Like the help Trump was being, haha, right?

It was almost bad enough to make everyone forget that he just beforehand suggested that what happened in Las Vegas was "a miracle".  Not me, of course. But he could have made people forget that! He was even gonna not waive the food stamp rule that they can't be used for prepared food (like fast foods) until people starting giving him that look--you know, the these people don't have houses and kitchens and power to even do cooking with, what are you, nuts? look.

This is Trump. When he is him, it is kind of really bad, and he tells people who lost everything to "have a good time."  (No, this is not the first time he did that one. ) He's, and I'm trying to be delicate, here, kind of fucked in the head about needing cookies and pats on the head for showing the barest kind of human warmth and also kind of failing at it.

This is who he is. This is the guy who will be selecting the best people and making the best deals (hasn't and won't, respectively) according to his campaign boasts.  I already had a miserable opinion of him, but I lose respect for anyone who saw anything good in him a little every day.

All the Pretty, Shiny Failures

It's really hard to do President Trump's very busy weekend at his Bedminster, NJ golf club justice, but just posting screen caps of the Tweets strikes me as a very good start. If you start from "To the people of Puerto Rico: Do not believe the "FakeNews!" you might be struck, as I was, by the insufficiency of brain a person must have to think that people without electricity are huddled by tv sets watching CNN or MSNBC. I'm not sure who Trump is citing as the "people who really matter"--I think they may actually live in his head. Polls show that Trump's endorsement did not help Luther Strange one bit. 

Even the military does not think that the hurricane response in PR was all it could be. There is no reason to believe all PR buildings have been inspected for safety. And for some godsforsaken reason, Trump wants to turn to his diplomatic ineptitude regarding North Korea into another distraction (I guess? from his failure regarding the ACA repeal that never was and the firing/resignation of his HHS Secretary, Swamp Pricey?) by acting as if Kim Jong Un (North Korea' leader for about five years) was the guy the US has been dealing with for 25 years. And calls him "Rocket Man", because Trump is a child, and wants to impress the other babies in the sandlot.

Trump's Twitter feed isn't just stream of conscious grousing, it's an influence campaign aiming at telling low-information people that Trump is dealing with such awful rigging--the media, the haters, the awful Democrats.

But even while he's trying out that line, you can see what he's really doing--blaming Puerto Ricans for their own disaster--for not doing more when they have no access to power, drinkable water and food. Like his spoiled ass thinks they can magic those things up from nothing, the way he can push a button and get a Coke.   Puerto Rico's community is working--he probably posted this from a golf cart.

This is the flailing of a failure--the unattractive self-petarding of a Peter's Principle promotion gone horribly wrong. And the sick thing is--he knows what his failures are. He knows! He just uses Twitter to blame them on absolutely everyone else.  But if you must know, at least Speaker of the House Paul Ryan thinks Trump's heart is in the right place.  That might mean "under his ribcage and between his lungs", but between you and me--I still think Donald Trump is mostly racist as all hell. And no tax cuts for Paul Ryan's donors or cutting off of small, sick children from access to health insurance makes Trump less of a monster--it just reminds me of how much many Republicans are, as well. Because they see these pretty, shiny failures, and go turd-gilding.

If you were Wondering--

Is the PR debt the reason Trump isn't rushing any military assistance, like the USNS Comfort,  down there?  He is Commander-in-Chief after all. Also, I would say as a good old fashioned techno-capitalist, if Google isn't shushing on down there with Project Loon and AT&T and others aren't thinking of ways to get them some cell-signal boosts--they are missing out (I am serious, they need this help, but let me talk dollars and cents) on a great display of technical know-how and a great advertising opportunity.

Same deal, you guys who do solar panels and electric generators. If you have the warez, send 'em down PR way. They need it. The Virgin Islands also need your skills. Bring them, and show off what you can do. We are on a warming planet where floods and disasters like these are going to occur more and more. Display that you have the know-how to sort out these technical difficulties. You will get repaid, I can goddamn guarantee.

It looks like the US Government is not the best of us at the moment (except for you civil service professionals that I know are champing at the bit to help)--so it might just be up to the rest of us. No grifters need apply. But these folks haven't just lost domiciles and cell connections--the island of Puerto Rico has had its vegetation stripped and its potable water fubar'd--inventors and investors, bring your solutions. These people need you.

These are Americans, and their status as debtors means not one thing at all. They are our brothers and sisters, and they need help.