During the last debate, Trump said he didn’t think the federal government should be involved in the minimum wage. The chart below shows that it hasn’t. No change since 2009. But the rich have almost tripled their net worth.
Do you really think Trump is looking out for the average Americans? Who are these people at Trump rallies? I wonder what their wages are.
Here are the mugshots of 10 of the 13 would-be Michigan kidnappers.
People who are planning on kidnapping an American Governor and possibly executing her are called terrorists. Since we usually associate terrorism with foreigners, we have narrowed the term down to “domestic terrorists.”
Here are pictures of domestic terrorists. They are all white. I don’t know these 10 men, but I do know our media calls them “white supremacists.” I am actually curious about what goes on in the head of somebody who plans to kidnap and possibly execute a governor. I would like to have a conversation, maybe over a beer in the backyard. What would be their persuasive argument?
But this post is not about the would-be kidnappers. It’s about how our president responded to their story.
If these 10 people where Muslims, with dark beards and Arab head dress, our president would have responded with a further escalation of the ban of all Muslims in this country, and every Muslim American would have had to pay for it with abuse, discrimination, assault in public and pure fear for their safety.
If these 10 people were Hispanic, our president would have told us the Mexicans are murderers, rapists, criminals and needed to be deported, and – by the way – we need to build that wall. All Hispanics would have been further injured and damaged.
If these 10 people were Black, all black people would have been denigrated and the entire black-lives-matter movement would have been attacked as anarchist. The president would have blamed the black community for their crimes.
But these men are all white.
So the president attacked their victim, the Governor of Michigan. Apparently she had it coming.
Hillary Clinton, Donny Jr., Eric and me. The First Lady is a wonderful woman who has handled pressure incredibly well.
— Donald Trump
When Disloyal came out I knew I had to read it. Who is this most powerful of Trump’s enablers? Who is this guy that I read about long before Trump’s announcement of his candidacy, the ruthless wolverine who came after Trump’s victims and threatened to ruin them if they even tried to assert their rights?
When the White House found out that Cohen was writing this book, they tried everything they could to stop him from publishing it. It was going to be a sensational tell-all book.
Well, it is.
Cohen was there from the beginning. He knows Trump intimately, and he was his most loyal and effective confidante and protector. To understand Trump, we need to read Disloyal, because it tells what it was like to work for Trump.
Here is an excerpt:
We all flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin for the event titled Trump: The New Owner of WWE Raw. All of us invited were eager to experience what we knew was going to be a wild, fun night. In the dressing room under the stadium, we could hear the mounting noise of the crowd coming in, and it was obvious that the place was going to be sold out, not to mention the huge pay-per-view audience. This was when Don Jr. spoke out of turn, at least in the eyes of his taskmaster father. “Hey, Dad, are you nervous?” he asked. “What did you say?” Trump asked, his face reddening. “I’m going in front of millions of people. What kind of stupid fucking question is that? Get out of here.”
We all stood in awkward silence, staring at our shoes, feeling sorry for the son and his perfectly innocent question.
“God damn it,” Trump said with a heavy sigh, as if his son wasn’t present. “The kid has the worst fucking judgment of anyone I have ever met. What a stupid thing to say—to put that thought in my head.” Don Jr. said nothing, also inspecting his shoes, and no doubt desperate to flee. The hurt was evident in his face and demeanor, even though this was hardly the first time I’d heard Trump insult his son and remark on his supposed lack of intelligence. I often wondered why the son stayed around in the face of the abuse of his father, though I knew the answer, because Don Jr. had told me the story.
— Cohen, Michael. Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (pp. 83-84). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.
Obviously, the White House said that Cohen is a liar – and he is, by his own admission – but when you read his story, it’s obvious that he is not making this stuff up. He just tells it like it was, like a journal entry, and he doesn’t really “blast” Trump either. He just describes, almost soberly, some of his more atrocious deeds. The personality of Trump comes out, similar to how it came out in Mary Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough.
Most of all I was struck with the realization that Trump USED Cohen, over and over again, until — suddenly — when Cohen fell due to his covering for Trump, he was no longer useful to him. Trump immediately disowned and abandoned him. Cohen is now in prison (at this time serving his sentence under house-arrest) and Trump is — still — in the White House. Trump uses people, everyone, his wife, his children, his best friends, his relatives, his employees, his vendors and contractors, and now the entire population of the United States, to serve him. Cohen’s book shows how he does that.
Michael Cohen’s book is not a “great book” or an exceptional memoir. It is a sober book, well told, revealing, and it shows us what Trump really is: a fraud.
I am reading Michael Cohen’s book right now, and one of the most revealing and interesting chapters to me what Chapter Ten – How to Fix a Poll. It’s not a widely known incident or story, but it tells more about Trump than many of the other stories and scandals that we have heard about.
In 2014, Trump was starting to get serious about running for office, and he wanted his image to be one of a highly respected and famous business man and real estate developer. Around that time, CNBC was celebrating its 25th anniversary as a network, and to do so it was conducting an online poll to determine the twenty-five most influential business people alive. The poll stated that “he or she should have altered business, commerce, management or human behavior – in other words, the person should be responsible for ushering meaningful change, with business being the primary sphere of influence.” Trump was one of the two hundred business people listed as contenders.
Inside the Trump organization, his secretary emailed everyone she could to click on the hyperlink to elevate the boss’ profile.
That is ludicrous to begin with. If I did that in my company, my employees would laugh at me.
But it seems to have been normal at the Trump Organization. They figured that if everyone “inside” were to vote on their computer, their phone, their tablets, the tablets of their kids, etc., it would be enough to get him into the top 10. When CNBC first started publishing results, Trump was near the very bottom, like 187 out of 200. Trump was reportedly pissed. He printed out the results grid, marked it up with a Sharpie and called Cohen: “What can we do about this poll? I am at the bottom of the fucking list. Check into this immediately and let me know.”
Cohen called an IT friend for help. His company knew what to do. They bought several batches of IP addresses to hide the fake polls, and inserted the votes to drive up Trump’s numbers. Their goal was to get him to number 9. Trump wanted number 1, but they thought nobody would believe it and it would create too much scrutiny. The IP addresses cost $7,500 for batches of 100,000, and they needed several. Trump approved the purchase.
They pulled it off, and Trump made number 9 on the list. He was all excited, had hundreds of copies of the list printed, sent it to all his friends and contacts to gloat, and distributed it to his visitors in his office.
Then CNBC completely removed him, no answers given. While Cohen never did find out what happened, CNBC had the right to do so. Being an IT guy myself, it’s obvious that CNBC figured out the fraud and without making much fanfare about it, which they could have, they simply removed him completely.
Trump was furious. He ended up not even paying the consulting firm that had pulled it off. He stiffed them for their services and for the purchases of the IP addresses. After all “they didn’t deliver the objective” so why should he pay them?
He was so incensed, he wanted Cohen to call the president of CNBC and tell him they’d sue him if they didn’t restore his rightful slot.
Think about that for a minute. Here is a business man that is so obsessed with his image that he is willing to openly cheat in a poll. Then he “wins” and is delighted. That’s like a boy scout stealing a trophy and showing it off as his own. Then, when the fraud is discovered, and the trophy is taken away, he is indignant, actually personally offended. The world has it out for him. He obviously believed himself that he “deserved” that award and it was taken away from him. Not only did he cheat, but he himself believed that he earned it.
If any school boy between age six and twelve did this, we would reprimand him.
But Donald Trump did this in 2014. That is the kind of man we elected for President of the United States.
…are those the lie about stuff that is easily proven wrong within seconds.
Does Trump not realize that people keep records of his tweets and archives of his words in video?
He must know that, right?
And if he does, he thinks we’re all ignorant, stupid and lazy and wont’ bother checking.
Either way, he is insulting me.
In Trump’s denial, he said on Twitter and to the media that he had not made these remarks — although, he added, he thinks McCain was less successful than he has been in taking care of veterans.
“I disagreed with him with respect to the vets and the taking care of the VA. I wanted to do it a much different way, and I think it’s proven to be a much more successful way when you look at the success we’ve had with the VA and with our vets — with Choice and with Accountability, all the things I’ve got,” he said after disembarking Air Force One after a trip to Pennsylvania.
Again, Choice — which allowed certain veterans to be covered by the government for receiving care from doctors outside the VA health system — is not something Trump “got.” What Trump actually signed was the VA MISSION Act of 2018, which modified and expanded the private-care program created by the Choice bill.
The full name of the VA MISSION Act honors McCain: it is the John S. McCain III, Daniel K. Akaka, and Samuel R. Johnson VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks Act of 2018.Trump made at least one other false claim in his denial: he said he had “never” called McCain a loser. In fact, he did so at a 2015 event in Iowa, on camera — saying of McCain’s defeat in the 2008 presidential election, “I never liked him as much after that, because I don’t like losers.”
Later the same day, he tweeted out an article that was headlined, “Donald Trump: John McCain Is ‘A Loser.'”
It is dumbfounding to me how Trump and his minions must think we’re all stupid.
During the Obama/Biden administration, the stock market went from rock bottom and steadily climbed for eight years, with occasional dips and peaks. Unemployment went down steadily. Now they keep telling us that the Obama years were “the slowest economic recovery.” Maybe it was slower than they would have liked, but at least it was a recovery!
Steve Scalise says that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. What planet does he live on? Our unemployment rate is 10.2%, which is the worst since the Great Recession, brought on by the last Republican administration in 2008.
Now Trump calls all this the fault of the Democrats?
All this stuff started under Trump’s watch. We’re looking at Trump’s America, and not even Trump likes it.
Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her brother Donald Trump sold 1.35 million copies in the first week after publication. My copy was one of those.
Mary is an educated professional, a psychologist and a very good writer and story-teller. She is the oldest daughter of Trump’s oldest brother Freddie, who died very early in life. She has unique insight into the upbringing and lives of the five Trump siblings by her grandparents. Of course, Trump and the White House tried to stop publication of this book. Trump tweeted:
“Mary Trump, a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me, and violated her NDA,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “She’s a mess! Many books have been written about me, some good, some bad. Both happily and sadly, there will be more to come!”
Some Trump supporters have called the book a “book of lies” but I doubt that when they say this they have actually read it.
There is nothing scandalous about it. It just tells the story of a family in Brooklyn, led by an autocratic and self-absorbed man, Fred Trump, who build a billion-dollar real estate empire, and who shaped Donald Trump into the person we see today.
If Trump hadn’t ascended to the presidency, none of this would have been interesting to anyone, and the Trump Organization would have gone on doing what appears to be shady business for decades to come.
But that is not how things went.
Here is an except:
Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits. Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.
There was a long line of people willing to take advantage of him. In the 1980s, New York journalists and gossip columnists discovered that Donald couldn’t distinguish between mockery and flattery and used his shamelessness to sell papers. That image, and the weakness of the man it represented, were precisely what appealed to Mark Burnett.
— Trump, Mary L.. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (pp. 195-196). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Too Much and Never Enough is a very readable book, not too long to become a tedious read, and it explains Donald Trump. What he does, how he acts, and more importantly, what he doesn’t do or say just makes sense after having read this book.
I would highly recommend it to everyone, both Trump supporters and the rest of us.
Now I get it. All these cases, and these new infections, are only there because we have done more testing. If we did less testing, there’d be less cases. Does that mean that if we had stopped testing completely on June 17, when we had 2.2 million cases, the spread would have stopped, instead of the number of infections doubling in the ensuing six weeks?
This is obviously a flawed conclusion and meant simply to confuse people, rather than educate them with useful information and facts.
If you do less testing, you KNOW ABOUT LESS cases. The cases are still there. The testing itself hasn’t infected people. The virus has. Doing less testing will simply give us a false sense of security, and more people will die, and the death count will go up. The government apparently is only interested in how bad things LOOK, not in how bad things really ARE. Unfortunately, our citizens are dying based on how things ARE, not how they LOOK for the government.
It’s not about the numbers and recording the numbers. This is not like ratings on TV shows. Real people are dying every day, one 9/11’s worth every three days! Yet, our government is concerned with how the numbers look.
Even Trump’s claim that we have done far more tests than any other country is not accurate. We may have done more actual tests, but our test counts per capita are not first in the world. Googling for 10 seconds yields this information for anyone to access: Our World in Data: Testing for Covid-19.
I can’t wait for getting back a government that gives its people useful and actionable information, rather than political propaganda.
Trump has been proclaiming since the day he took office that the market has been the best in the history of the country during his presidency. Looking at the facts, that is just not true.
For every president since we have market indicators, with very few variations, the latest president had the highest stock market numbers. But looking at relative gains from inauguration day forward for Obama and Trump, we see a different picture.
Obama entered his presidency at the tail end of a market crash of epic proportions. The economy was in free fall at the end of Bush’s term in 2008. The chart below shows the S&P 500 index for Obama in blue and Trump in red, aligned on the left side to the inauguration date.
We can see how the free fall continued for Obama for another few weeks and then the graph started going up steeply and steadily for the next year, before it dipped again.
Trump’s index also rose steadily for about a year and a quarter, before its first dip. Trump’s slope is actually more modest than Obama’s was, and Trump’s S&P gains never went over 50%, while Obama’s were beyond 80% at about 1,000 days.
Trump’s stock market rose steadily too over the first 3 years, but then, unfortunately tumbled back to the beginning. It has recovered since, but there is no telling where it is going to go next.
I would certainly not make any predictions right now.
Every morning when I get up I look up into the clouds to check if there are any giant alien spaceships floating above our cities ready to laser-beam us to annihilation. I would not be surprised to see those in the second half of 2020.
It will come early: ‘Fox News is now projecting Joseph R. Biden is the President-Elect of the United States’ The American people are going to throw you out of office. You will be repudiated and disgraced. You’ll leave nothing behind but the stench of epic failure. No American has ever failed this country worse than you. None. Your incompetence, ignorance, ineptitude, and old fashioned stupidity have caused the economic collapse and made the U.S. the epicenter of coronavirus death and suffering. You have shattered American alliances and weakened our military. You are a disgrace. Your name will be a synonym for losing, failure, and weakness. Biden is crushing you, and you want to know why? It’s because he is a good man and you are a bad one. He cares about the American people and you do not. He is respected on the world stage and you are laughed at like some type of grotesque and buffoonish clown. He is capable and you are not. You attack because you are scared. Take a minute to look at the picture of Fred Trump on your desk. Do you think he would be surprised by your failures? He would not. He bailed you out over and over again. He bailed you out because you couldn’t cut it as anything other than a con man. There will be no monuments and no encomiums for you. The whole country has watched you fail. The whole country is watching your increasingly feeble state. The whole country is watching you lose. We will all watch you return to your golf clubs as the biggest loser the American presidency has ever produced.”
– Steve Schmidt: former Republican strategist
Steve Schmidt is one of my favorite Republicans, albeit a “former” one now.
There is only one extremely important bad decision that Steve made back in 2008 that had profound impact on the American political system and truly shaped the world we live in. Remember he was McCain’s campaign manager.
He helped pick (and consented to choosing) Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate.
If he had not picked Palin, I believe McCain would have won the 2008 election. I would have voted for him, and so would have many others. McCain would have been president, presumably for two terms. We would have had eight years of solid conservative leadership under McCain and dignity in the office of the presidency. Obama, still very young at the time, would have risen, and been elected in 2016. We’d now be in the first Obama term. He would be running for reelection right now. The “tea party” movement of 2009 would not have happened. Trump and all that he stands for would never have risen.
Our world now is a truly different world from that, fashioned by Steve Schmidt’s direct contribution.
Hannity asked Trump what his priorities for a second term were.
Here is Trump’s answer:
Well, one of the things that will be really great — you know, the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience, I’ve always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It’s a very important meaning. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times, all of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story, I’m riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, this is great. But I didn’t know very many people in Washington. It wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now, I know everybody and I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.
Word salad.
