Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The Mueller hearings told us almost nothing that we didn’t know already. We knew that the president welcomed assistance from a foreign power in order to win an election, and has fawned over his political patron in this endeavor, Vladimir Putin, since he became president. We knew that though he was not competent enough to construct a conspiracy, he was eager to collude with a foreign foe to defeat his domestic one.

And we knew that he then lied about it as baldly as he lies about almost everything, and tried repeatedly to obstruct the investigation into the affair. His attorney general then blatantly lied about the key conclusions of the Mueller report, distorting the public debate for weeks as he kept the contents under wraps, and then bet that Americans, with our gnat-like attention spans, would simply move on.

We also knew that in contemporary America, none of these facts matter in the slightest. The notion that the average citizen should care deeply about the rule of law and constitutional norms — and even actively defend them — has become terribly passé. Now, all that truly matters is whether we are entertained by someone who can command televisual excitement the way Trump does on a daily, hourly basis. If he can’t, whatever the underlying facts, no one gives a damn.

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The Republicans, meanwhile, are quite simply a cult behind a lawless wannabe strongman, led by cable news conspiracy theorists. Cults guarantee total unanimity, expel dissenters, and seal themselves off from outside information — and the GOP now does all three. That’s why the only actual conservatives left in the Congress, like Justin Amash, have had to leave the party to make their case.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The cruelty is the point. That’s both the defining phrase of Donald Trump’s presidency and the title of arguably the defining essay about our 30-month-and-counting national nightmare, written by the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. His piece last October made clear the silliness of wondering why Trump’s government doesn’t do things like build more humane facilities for immigrants detained on the border — because the pictures of “human dog pounds” are in fact the goal and the basis of his political appeal, a viciousness toward The Other that erupts at his rallies in chants like “Send her back!”

“Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit,” Serwer wrote. “Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs [from the late 1800s and early 1900s] are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.”

The cruelty is the point is also the first thought that popped in my head Friday when I saw the news flash that Attorney General William Barr — increasingly known as “Trump’s Roy Cohn” in his willingness to ruthlessly do his president’s bidding — had seemingly out-of-the-blue decided to bring back executions of death-sentenced federal prisoners. My second thought was: What took the American Caligula so long to bring back the spectacle of executions to electrify the masses (but not the prisoners ... they’d be lethally injected) and juice his 2020 re-election campaign? Indeed, the five executions are scheduled around the Christmas holiday, presumably to remind us of its pagan roots.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Mr. Trump has tapped into that sentiment, winning over white voters with a willingness to buck “political correctness” and voice their anger and anxieties directly. “He says what we’re thinking and what we want to say,” noted a white woman at a Trump rally in Montana. “We wish we could speak our mind without worrying about the consequences,” explained a white man at a Phoenix event. “He can speak his mind without worrying.”

By articulating their audiences’ hatred, both men effectively encouraged them to act on it.

Mr. Wallace’s rallies regularly erupted in violence, as his fans often took his words not just seriously but also literally. Mr. Wallace often talked about dragging hippies “by the hair of their head.” At a Detroit rally in 1968, his supporters did just that, dragging leftist protesters out of their seats and through a thicket of metal chairs. As they were roughed up, the candidate signaled his approval from the stage: “You came here for trouble and you got it.”

Mr. Trump’s rallies have likewise been marked by violence unseen in other modern campaigns. At a 2015 rally in Birmingham, Ala., for example, an African-American protester was punched, kicked and choked. Rather than seeking to reduce the violence from his supporters, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/11/22/black-activist-punched-at-donald-trump-rally-in-birmingham/?utm_term=.e3d242b9b898 (Mr. Trump rationalized it), saying “maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”

This leads us to the significant difference between Mr. Wallace and Mr. Trump. Mr. Wallace’s targets were, for the most part, presented in the abstract. Though he denounced broad categories of generic enemies — “agitators,” “anarchists” and “communists” — he rarely went after an individual by name.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

RACIST ORANGE PIG
Racist Orange Pig

Republicans argue that accusing them of racism is similar to the boy who cried wolf. They accuse liberals of playing the race card against them as a cheap defense against criticism. They continue to make this argument without any hint of detecting their own hypocrisy by ignoring Donald Trump’s accusation of racism against “the Squad” and Congressman Elijah Cummings. But, if you’re a Republican, you have to ignore a lot of what Donald Trump says.

Writing for The Hill, media reporter Joe Concha argues that being accused of racism comes with the territory, and quotes Lindsey Graham who said, “Something I have learned: If you are a Republican nominee for President – or President – you will be accused of being a racist.” Concha excluded Graham’s quotes when he said during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, “Donald Trump is a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” For Republicans, cowardice and hypocrisy “come with the territory.”

Republicans ask, “Why are you always accusing us of being racist?” I’ll answer that with a question. Why are you always being racist?

Donald Trump isn’t just a racist. He also believes his racism should be his 2020 presidential platform. While casting the Democratic Party as the party of socialism, he and his supporters are making the Republican Party the party of racists, if they weren’t that already. In 2016, Trump supporters retweeted Russian troll farm lies that the Pope had endorsed Trump. That was false, but he did score the Nazi publication The Daily Stormer endorsement.

Trump is sore about Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings criticizing his handling of the border situation and throwing children into jail. Saturday, Fox News ran a segment attacking Cummings and his representation of Baltimore, showing the city, as their guest with ready-made video said, one of “abandoned rowhomes filled with trash, homeless addicts, empty needles” and as a place “attracting rodents and cockroaches.” An hour later, Trump echoed the dogma and said the city was “rat and rodent-infested” and a place “no human being would want to live.” This, two weeks after he told four brown, female representatives to “go back to where they came from.”

Of course, Republicans are arguing that none of this is racist, ignoring the history of using “go back where you came from” to minorities in this nation. They also seem to be unaware of Trump’s history with the word “infested” when tweeting about people of color.

Is Trump comparing people of color to disease-carrying vermin? Trump has tweeted the word “infested,” “infest,” or “infestation” eight times, five since his inauguration. Each time, he’s used it when attacking minorities.

Six days before his inauguration, Trump attacked Congressman John Lewis (who is black and a civil rights leader), and described his district as “crime-infested.” The district is 58% black.

Later that same day, Trump described all inner cities in the U.S. as “crime-infested.”

In April of 2018, Trump tweeted that sanctuary cities in California are “crime-infested and breeding.”

June 19, 2018, Trump accused Democrats of wanting illegal immigrants to “pour into and infest our country.” On June 3, he used “infestation” for MS-13.

Back in 2014, he tweeted about “Ebola infested areas of Africa” and that Americans who visit these “infested” areas would “bring the plaque back to the U.S.”

Two weeks ago during his racist tweets at the four Democratic congresswomen, he demanded that they “go back to” the “crime-infested” places from which they came.

While tweeting that he’s not a racist, Trump retweeted a British columnist who promotes the White Genocide conspiracy theory (that immigration is used solely as a mean of wiping out the white race), who used Trump’s own term while describing Baltimore as a “proper shithole.” As proven multiple times by his supporters, it’s really hard to defend a racist argument when you’re stupid.

Donald Trump is a racist. You can’t defend it. As the example above shows, who better to defend Trump from accusations of racism than white people? Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld points out the good things Trump has done for black Americans, as though having a black friend is a get out of racism jail free card. Last week, a conservative cartoonist cast one white guy telling another white guy to leave his house as the equivalent of telling four minority women to “go back to where they came from.” These people can’t think sophistically and aren’t smart enough to be pundits. Just like Donald Trump isn’t sophisticated or smart enough to be president.

I’ve been to Baltimore on multiple occasions. I don’t live that far from it. Like most major cities, there are good and bad areas. I’ve seen both in that city. I wouldn’t call it “infested” by any means, though there are a lot of crabs. But I know this. The White House is infested with racist pigs.