Tag Archives: donald trump

A Message from Senator Bernie Sanders

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Green Mountain Daily is grateful for the opportunity  to bring you Bernie Sanders‘ own words on this troubling occasion.

BURLINGTON, Vt., Nov. 9 – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement Wednesday after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States:

“Donald Trump tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media. People are tired of working longer hours for lower wages, of seeing decent paying jobs go to China and other low-wage countries, of billionaires not paying any federal income taxes and of not being able to afford a college education for their kids – all while the very rich become much richer.

“To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.”

Republicans: Be Careful What You Wish For

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In the incredulous aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory, we have many things on which to reflect.

The so-called “leader of the free world” is now a vain, thin-skinned demagogue with the temperament of a child and a complete disinterest in the details of our constitution or the workings of government in general.

He has just been given carte blanche by the electorate to follow his every selfish whim, which he will most certainly do since the venal and castrated Republican Congress is clearly prepared to do his bidding.

What this means for the millions of minority citizens whom Trump openly despises, and in the sphere of U.S. power and influence is almost beyond comprehension.

Since he was never prevailed upon by his followers and the toothless media to provide either his taxes as evidence of any possible entanglements, nor anything in the way of policy beyond general platitudes about making America “great again,” no one (not even his Republican Congress) has the slightest idea of what he might do in office other than strut his plumage and plot revenge on his many, many perceived enemies.

It is doubtful that even he has any plan beyond what immediately will satisfy his vanity and desire to swiftly punish anyone who crosses him.

Welcome to the United Banana Republic of America.

Republicans may enjoy their hegemony in the lead-up to inauguration, but they should be prepared for the worst when King Donald begins his reign for it will most certainly be marked by epic dysfunction of unprecedented scope and consequence.

Unfortunately, we will have to live through it, too.

Prepare for a long, brutal four years of uncertainty, chaos and, when Trump fails to deliver on his promises, riots and rebellion from a heavily armed populace who have been fed on hollow promises and hate.

Coal is not coming back, despite what Donald Trump might have promised. Too much infrastructure has already been replaced.

The election wasn’t “rigged,” unless you count  FBI Director Comey‘s inexplicable acts of bad judgement; or Russian email hacking and other efforts at influencing the election; or voter suppression against minorities supporting Hillary Clinton.  By God, Trump was right about that one thing: the election was rigged…in his favor!

Trump will not be able to replace Obamacare with “something much better.” Far brighter minds have already struggled to bring universal healthcare this far and Donald Trump hasn’t given the matter even a passing thought. An irresponsible tyke to the bitter end, I am sure he would simply end it on the first day of his administration, were that possible, and hang the consequences for the millions of people left abruptly without healthcare.

Mexico will not pay for a wall to be built on its border and only the most paranoid and localized of Trump’s supporters will still think it’s a good idea when the complete impracticality of the plan and it’s cost to the American people ultimately plays out in real time.

The women he has mistreated will not be silent; and, if the Bill Cosby experience is anything to judge by, more are likely to come forward. He will find that the women of America will not forget his abusive past, and God help him if he pulls any of that crap in the Oval Office.  Bill Clinton, he ain’t.

As much as he likes to call Hillary “crooked,” it is he who is currently under active investigation for Trump University indiscretions, has numerous complaints of sexual assault unfolding around him, and may be implicated in Russian attempts to influence the election…which we now understand to have been effective.

Isis becomes his problem now; as does Kim Jung Il and thousands of other more subtle international challenges to which he has devoted little or no thought. Who is his ‘brain trust’ on international relations going to be; Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani??

He’s promised tax breaks for everyone, but closer scrutiny of the plan reveals it’s mostly for his own economic class and he has finessed the question of how to pay for those tax breaks.

Prisons and roads will likely be further privatized because we will be paying for his wall and tax breaks for the well-heeled.

Oh, yes, and he has promised “law and order.” Yay; just what is needed to calm minority Americans already alarmed by his hateful rhetoric. That’s going to go well.

The Republicans allowed themselves to be married to so many whoppers during his campaign for class president that they are beyond count. Right now, I imagine hoards of GOP staffers scrambling to compile the list of promises and misrepresentation for which they will be held accountable by the gullible electorate, which, when disappointed will transform into a tide of angry rabble.

There are lessons to be drawn by everyone from last night’s rude awakening; and there is blame enough for many.

Lesson number one is that the impossible is never impossible and assumptions are begging to be disproved.

Why do we still refuse to believe that the American people will vote against their own best interests, over and over again?

The media played patti-cake with their own Frankenstein creation for far too long; until he turned on them when, too late, they began to hold him somewhat accountable for his lies and hate speech.

The Republican establishment couldn’t summon a collective backbone throughout the primaries and allowed themselves to be bullied into submission by a whiney crybaby. Then, once Trump secured the nomination, after a brief and weak resistance, they all, for the most part, fell in line behind this insult to democracy, preferring the dangerous chaos of a Trump administration to any loss of power to the Democrats.  Rather than strengthening the Republican hand in the long-run, unless Donald Trump really does begin mass deportations of immigrants, this election will only hasten the collapse of an already emasculated party.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Democratic establishment? Well, what can I say?

There will be some Democrats who will be quick to blame Bernie for running against Hillary in the primary and starting the conversation about her faults; but he didn’t reveal any secrets. Those vulnerabilities were already in evidence and the ‘annointing’ of Hillary as the only Democratic candidate would not have done her any favors in the general election. I can’t imagine how Joe Biden is feeling this morning!

Two people who can’t be blamed, however, are Michelle and Barack Obama who gave the campaign every advantage from a stellar approval rating to a relatively strong economic report; and they campaigned like rock stars!

We’re all grieving right now, but after a decent interval, we have to pick ourselves up and go on fighting to win back our democracy. That will take a clear-eyed look at institutional political thought and a willingness to consider a whole new paradigm, perhaps outside the two-party system.

There’s no better time to start than now.

Will Hell Freeze-Over?

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I came to world awareness by the fluorescent glow of a “Sylvania Silver Screen,” at the tender age of twelve, as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded before my very eyes. Never before were children subject to the real-time spectacle of adults playing dangerous war games that tempted Armageddon while they sat powerless in their living rooms.

I was absolutely terrified and vividly remember the nightmare I had one night while convinced I wouldn’t live to see thirteen.

In the dream, I found myself cowering beneath the bay window in our living room, attempting to hide from the sight of Satan and his minions looming large in a battle orange sky of smoke and hellfire through which they sailed triumphant in a “brand new swept-wing Dodge.”

Credit Catholic school and Madison Avenue for that lurid flight of fancy, but it was one of those dreams that used to stay with me for days and made me afraid of going to sleep at night.

Fifty-five years later, on the eve of another historic moment, I feel drawn to that memory like never before.

It is perhaps an appropriate juxtaposition, because as we learned much later, the events we witnessed on TV brought us closer to nuclear oblivion than ever before or since. Only the restraint exercised by President Kennedy at the critical moment prevented an exchange of nuclear warheads that would have most certainly made my worst nightmare come true.  Imagine how Donald Trump might behave under similar circumstances.

This weekend was our last before the final chapter of an election that has seen bigotry, misogyny, boldface lies, saber rattling, threats of revenge and incitement to violence characterize the campaign of the Republican nominee; a man with absolutely no policy experience, no record of public service, no curiosity to learn the basics of our governance, and a personal history of cheating, meanness, childishness and incivility.

Thus described, Donald Trump sounds like he could have only reached this apex in a fevered adolescent dream such as I had so many years ago. Yet, here we are in the grips of a madness that appears to have ensnared upwards of half the nation.

If our democracy survives the next four years, it’s not sufficient to breathe a sigh of relief and go on as we were.
  The Trump response, which has brought us so dangerously close to the precipice this time, is the proverbial canary in a coal mine.

The practice of representative democracy that has worked for us reasonably well throughout the twentieth century is beginning to wear down the fabric of our functional federation in the twenty-first. Gerrymandering has further undermined the “representative” nature of that relationship and heightened the sense of disenfranchisement among significant populations.

Resolved long ago into a two-party system, there was an unspoken agreement that partisan politics must nevertheless adhere to certain rules of pragmatism in order to allow government to function. As the population grew and diversified and economic power became further consolidated in a ruling elite, that unspoken agreement was no longer acceptable to a growing sector of the population whose values and priorities could not be easily be resolved into two competing but cooperative interest groups.

What the Republican party has been experiencing in recent election cycles amounts to a hostile takeover by a coalition of extreme right wing factions and so-called Christian “conservatives.” That take over seems almost guaranteed to formally bifurcate the party following this election.

Hostile even to the rule of constitutional law (apart from the second amendment), the Republican base has come to reward bad governing behavior that does nothing more than prevent business from being conducted in a responsible manner. They have broken the contract with “we the people” to represent the interests of the majority who simply want their government to function smoothly.

It is no accident that the Libertarians have become more and more of a factor in every election cycle.

So far Democrats have managed to contain their friable factions, but many are far from satisfied with the nomination process and the role that corporate wealth has been allowed to play in party priorities.

Democrats, being fundamentally more inclusive and forward thinking than Republicans, seem to have pulled off one more unity drive successfully in 2016; but many in the party’s establishment are blaming Bernie and his supporters for their troubles rather than accepting that his strength is a sign that Democrats are in their own early stages of sclerotic deterioration, relying too heavily on political retreads like the Clintons and assuming that everyone will just fall in line “for the good of the party.”

Personally, I think we will see the two party system weaken more and more in future election cycles as the internet shapes new alternatives into viable “third party” options. I hope that the attraction of the Alt Right to working class white voters will be diminished as saner alternatives allow them to feel more civilly empowered.

Coalitions may be the wave of the future, giving more individuals reason to feel better represented, and quite possibly bridging the two-party gulf that has held twenty-first century American progress in handcuffs.

One can only hope so.

***Meanwhile, get out there and vote for Hillary, for crying out loud!  This is not a drill!!

Trump, Treason and “America’s Mayor”

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As he rages through the Democratic process like King Kong on steroids, Donald Trump has few remaining national figures endorsing his behavior.

One of the most steadfast of these is Rudi Giuliani who was once-upon-a-time christened “America’s Mayor” in the national gush of emotion following 9/11.

He seemed the very model of a modern mayor-general, briefly symbolizing the resolution of all New Yorkers to rise from the ashes of the World Trade Center. A hero.

The rest of the nation didn’t really know him before then, so they warmly embraced the narrative.

Pausing in his rush to war with the wrong country, then President Bush addressed the nation and told us to go out shopping. The terrorists were enemies of “our way of life,” and we were not going to surrender that way of life, allowing the terrorists to ‘win.’

But they did ‘win’; not after years and years of resistance, but practically overnight. The transformation began with paranoia and the War Powers Act. It was all downhill after then.

Rudy Giuliani’s unblinking loyalty to Donald Trump, as he attempts to discredit the foundational process in our democracy, is testament to the terrorists’ victory over American ideals.

Giuliani and the hate filled “basket of deplorables” driving the Trump ‘movement’ have handed the 9/11 terrorists a victory beyond their wildest dreams.

Those terrorists only succeeded in killing people and destroying buildings. On the morning after, our time honored democratic institutions and tradition of generosity and civility were still intact. They had yet to be undermined by the enemy within.

Capitalizing on a decade and a half of festering ignorance, fear and xenophobia, Trump and his minions have ginned-up an angry mob that threatens the very foundations of our democracy.

By his example, he has given them license to hate, ridicule and intimidate virtually anyone who doesn’t look like them; and hinted darkly of Armageddon should they not succeed in carrying him to power.

Together they have sold this extremely suggestible sector the fiction that the historic first female candidate for president, with whom they sympathized in the 1990’s when her Democratic dog of a husband did her wrong, has somehow turned into Darth Vader and is about to destroy the Empire.

Donald Trump has so much contempt for the nation he fatuously claims to love, that he refuses to familiarize himself with even the most basic principles of checks and balances that serve as the framework to our democracy. His interest in the law is limited to how it can serve his selfish interests or be exploited for personal revenge.

The steady stream of vindictive hyperbole has finally become sufficiently toxic so that even some traditionally conservative media outlets are beginning to awaken to the danger they’ve unleashed by encouraging this dancing bear. But it’s too little and it may be too late.

Like Hitler planning the destruction of Berlin when the inevitable defeat loomed before him, Trump is readying his followers for schism and revolt by prematurely and openly challenging the legitimacy of the election process.

It surely is treason to sow distrust in the Democratic process among the electorate, tease at the idea of retribution and gleefully fan the flames of violent uprising.

…And Giuliani is aiding and abetting this treasonous madness!

“America’s Mayor” indeed!

Rudy Giuliani: “Voter fraud is this big!”

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Calling Doctor Dean

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The frequency and blatancy of Donald Trump’s lies seem to be increasing under the pressures of the campaign. Sometimes the effect is so bizarre that one is tempted to think that Trump has a little internal Trump, a voice inside his head perhaps, that compels him irresistibly against his, or at least his handlers’ best judgement.

The Nile may be a river in Egypt, but Donald seems to have denial hardwired into every fiber of his being.   Take these Trumpian recollections just around the debate:

.  He didn’t sniff throughout the debate. It was a bad microphone, which he has alternately claimed didn’t carry his voice because it was too short, or was so sensitive that it created the illusion that he was sniffing. Which is it?

.  A truly record breaking audience heard him clearly respond to a Clinton statement that perhaps he never pays federal income tax, “That makes me smart.” The very next day, he vehemently denied making any such statement.

This, in addition to the numerous documented lies he told during the debate, and the body count on his lies in general (roughly 70% of his statements), allow even amateur psychologists to venture a guess that his disaffection for the truth may be pathological.

He lies even about unimportant things, like the sniffing. He lies unstrategically, like a child, to protect his vanity; even when the truth is undeniably evident to all but his most loyal supporters.

Like the Emperor parading in his birthday suit, he has grown accustomed to sycophants indulging him in whatever fantasy flatters him most.

Watching a series of blonde female handlers, like Stepford wives, try to justify his whoppers makes the experience that much more surreal.

I am not a journalist, nor a doctor; I am nevertheless possessed of ordinary powers of observation. As it did to Dr. Howard Dean, it occurred to me, after about the twelfth sniff Sunday night, that Mr. Trump does indeed exhibit the signs of a cokehead.

After all, we have only his word that he never drinks or does drugs; and how good has that word proven to be?

Something is toodling around in that noggin of his, causing him to drift into the imaginary rather too frequently for a Presidential candidate.

If not coke, may I suggest (from an amateur standpoint, of course) that Mr. Trump’s “id” may be a fully formed second personality, wedded to the idea of an alternative reality?

He may well be a loving husband and father and a functional business person in the workaday world.

Much of the time, that second personality may be content to sit in the passenger seat as Trump’s ego struts its stuff; but when overcome by excitement or anxiety or a challenge to his manhood, it takes the wheel like a reckless child, driving the bus straight over the cliff.

Think of all those whacky conspiracy theories he’s flirted with or fully embraced. He has even created a conspiracy myth about general media bias to answer the evidence that lies in decades of his own recorded words.

Is that not worthy of scrutiny for clinical paranoia?

Mr. Trump is a whole different kind of candidate for President who refuses to be held to the standards of the past.  He has absolutely no record of public service and refuses to open his personal records to satisfy basic questions of competency and trustworthiness.  Ordinarily, that would be enough to raise an alarm among middle America, but his skill as a snake-charmer seems to have precluded that native caution.

“Gentlemen’s agreements” and custom must be replaced with definite rules regarding what standards candidates for the highest office in the land must satisfy in a timely manner.

These should certainly include financial records of their taxes and the taxes of any entities with which they are formally associated; and detailed medical records covering at least a decade. The rules should also require a psychological evaluation by an independent practitioner acceptable to both parties.

If the two parties survive to another general election (and I say that with only half a winking smile), it behooves them both to make this happen.

Nobody does it better.

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In case you’ve missed it, Garrison Keiller has just taken Donald Trump to the woodshed as only he could.

In an open letter appearing on the op-ed pages of many American papers (including, I am happy to report, the St. Albans Messenger) America’s Grandpa has penned the ultimate response to Donald Trump’s public year of personal bad behavior.

A sample:

“You are in the old tradition of locker room ranting and big honkers in the steam room, sitting naked, talking man talk, griping about the goons and ginks and lousy workmanship and the uppity broads and the great lays and how you vanquished your enemies at the bank”

Like a modern day Mark Twain, Garrison Keillor, older than dirt and considerably wiser than the spoiled septuagenarian man/child he lampoons, has brought his unique perspective to a presidential race that has been too long on sensation and too short on self-awareness.

His letter is destined to be one of the great literary relics of our political times, a highlighted footnote to the report card on twenty-first century U.S.-style democracy that I am sure we have coming to us in the not-so-distant future.

“Well, I’ll eat my hat ! It’s Donald Trump.”

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Donald Trump along with a small squad of body guards and plenty of cameras visited an ongoing Louisiana flood relief effort the other day. He actually handed out a box of food (and Play-Doh) to victims…reports are Trump was at this “tough” compassionate task for all of 49 seconds.

His visit came despite the governor suggesting he not visit the relief effort.

“We welcome him to LA but not for a photo-op. Instead we hope he’ll consider volunteering or making a sizable donation to the LA Flood Relief Fund to help the victims of the storm.”

He also autographed some “Make America Great Again” hats for the hungry.

Trump’s recent twitter insults compiled

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It is the Wrath of Donald in 140 characters.

The New York Times compiled and has now updated a list of hundreds of people, places, and things Donald J. Trump has insulted on Twitter since he began his run for president. You have got to love the Times – they even thoughtfully highlighted the most recent of his insult tweets on the listing. trumpshoe

Trump’s rage knows no bounds, he even took an Oval Office presidential lectern to task on Twitter: “looks odd” …“not good.”  This problem with furniture must be a Republican thing. Who can forget Clint Eastwood’s historic interview with an empty chair on primetime TV at the 2012 GOP convention?

Few things are spared Donald’s limited-character wrath on Twitter. Those most recently insulted by the GOP presidential candidate include: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, the Democratic National Convention, hacked/leaked D.N.C. emails, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Tim Kaine, the system, Elizabeth Warren, the American delegate system, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Bill Clinton Democrats, The New York Times, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Megyn Kelly, Republican presidential candidates, the mainstream media, CNN, and Juan Williams.

For now, Trump has backed off the Oval Office lectern – but it was warned. Can you believe that some dare say Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president!

Off the top of Trump’s head

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I’ve been offline and not able to read or listen to any extended news the past couple days. While catching up this afternoon I realized how numb I had become to the fast, furious, and crazy pace of the 2016 presidential campaign news. It is like returning to a street corner to find Trump, the wild-eyed man, from days before still perched on his little soapbox, ranting crazily and demanding more than his share of attention.trumphead

Donald Trump urged Russian agents to “find” his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s emails and release them, an unprecedented move by a candidate for president encouraging such a foreign breach.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you can find the 33,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” he said at the presser.

And that remark prompted Senator Harry Reid to suggest Trump not be given the usual security briefing. But if he must be briefed Reid advises: I would suggest to the intelligence agencies, if you’re forced to brief this guy, don’t tell him anything, just fake it, because this man is dangerous,” Reid said in a Wednesday interview with The Huffington Post. “Fake it, pretend you’re doing a briefing, but you can’t give the guy any information.” [added emphasis]

Trump’s comment is alarmingly weird enough, but it is even more so after my stepping out of the news cycle even for short time. This is clearly not a normal election.

Trump: Pedophile and Rapist?

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The morning news dump brought with it a story from the Guardian in which Jill Harth breaks her long silence about a sexual assault by Donald Trump back in 1992.

The account given by Ms. Harth is extremely compelling and prompted me to research other allegations of sexual assault that have been seriously lodged against the Republican nominee over the course of his public life.

Perhaps the most disturbing example is his implication in the rape of a thirteen year old girl at a sex party hosted by his friend Jeffrey Epstein in 1994.

“Epstein has been named in multiple similar lawsuits over the last several years, served 13 months in jail, and is registered as a sex offender for life.”

Trump famously said the following about Mr. Epstein in  a New York Magazine profile some years ago:

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Rather than going into all the offensive details contained in a variety of reports concerning the alleged pedophile rape, I thought I’d cut straight to the chase by citing an analysis of the available evidence by Snopes which provides about as much objective perspective on the story as might be hoped for.

Once again, the available record suggests that the story is true, but one of these claims is the subject of current legal actions, and the other was only made public after the Trump campaign preemptively called the alleged victim a “liar;” so we cannot legally draw a line under his guilt. Of course, Trump uses that ‘l’ word as liberally as he does the other ‘l’ word: ‘loser.’

This verbal tic always reminds me of the old retort, “It takes one to know one.”

Then there is Ivana Trump’s charge, made during their divorce proceedings, that Donald indulged in angry rape against her when procedure to address baldness, performed by someone she had recommended, went horribly wrong. She later withdrew the word ‘rape’ from her testimony but the account remained pretty much the same. He aggressively forced her to have sex after subduing her by pulling her by the hair of her head…hair that was in roughly the same position on her scalp as had been affected by his own botched baldness procedure.

To me that sounds pretty much like angry rape. That his accuser later modified her allegation is not particularly surprising, considering that the two shared three children, a business relationship, a divorce settlement, and the clear understanding that nobody…absolutely nobody… crosses Donald Trump.

Why does the major news media seem to be avoiding discussion of these and other allegations of Trump’s predatory sexual appetites? Apart from very occasional sly jokes about his inappropriate remarks concerning his female offspring, virtually no mention has been made of this unsavory aspect of the candidate.

He has been free to call Hillary Clinton a liar, and to traffic in her guilt by association with Bill Clinton and his infamous indiscretions, but it almost seems as if there has been some agreement that his own accusers will receive network and cable silence.

Everyone knows of the smoke = fire scenario that eventually played out in the case of Bill Cosby; so, why isn’t more attention being given to an alarming pattern that appears to be emerging in credible stories about a man who is now just inches away from the Oval Office?