2017
“I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”
In the beginning, the official beginning, January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump put his hand on the Bible, took the oath of the President of the United States, and opened his presidency with a speech that can be boiled down to two words… “American carnage.”
The day after Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March on Washington set the tone for a worldwide resistance movement. In Washington, D.C., women, men and children peacefully let Donald Trump know that we had his number. Between three and five million people in 408 towns and cities participated in marches in the U.S. In 81 other countries, two million people in 168 towns and cities participated. In the U.S., writers, actors, artists, musicians, comedians, political activists, Democrats and conservative Never Trumpers began their spirited and unrelenting counter-offensive.
On February 4, the following reader-comment appeared in the op-ed section of the online New York Times… "There has always been a contest for our dominant narrative. Until the twentieth century, history was written by the winners. As the historical canon opened to other voices, historical narratives became larger and more complex. The dangers of Trumpism, foretold by the likes of George Orwell in “1984”, include historical amnesia, the reduction of discourse to a simplistic contest of winners and losers, and the obliteration of empirical realities. Trump wishes to replace idealism with power, and diversity with dominion.”
7/2/17
Yesterday evening at six, my brother Ron, his wife Megan and I walked 100 feet up the sidewalk to Paul & Debbie's neighborhood patio party. It was a lively left-wing crowd that quickly hit its stride with a conversation about the Women's March last January 21st. Megan (61) and Polly (71) were there, wearing their pink hats with the cute little pussycat ears. We did not dwell on politics. Enough is enough. I took things in another direction. I wanted to know "the worst job you’ve ever had."
Greg: “Summer. Grand Prairie, Texas. Ten-hour shifts at the Gifford-Hill-American factory west of Dallas. 95-degree heat, 95% humidity. We were casting concrete pipe of diameters up to eight feet, the conduit that is now underneath the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.”
Ron: “Same summer, Dallas. Loading boxcars at the Dr. Pepper plant with an obese parolee named Tiny.”
Paul: “All obese parolees in Texas are named Tiny.”
Megan: “One winter, I was a spinach cleaner at a fancy restaurant in Aspen. It was worth it for the cute Norwegian waiters and the free lift ticket.”
Isabelle: “I loaded tin tops into the canning machine at a fish processing plant in Alaska.”
Betty: “I packed boxes at a bubble gum factory in New Jersey.”
John: “I shoveled dung in the elephant and camel enclosures at the Columbus Zoo.”
Polly: “I worked as a secretary and gofer for a slimy asshole lawyer who was also a crook. God, what a pig.”
It is the July 4th weekend. Thanks to The New York Times, it is also a weekend full of food-for-thought about Donald Trump. Trump posted a snide tweet about Mika Brzezinski’s face-lift "bleeding badly.”
Gail Collins: “Trump once called me a dog and a liar, with the face of a pig."
Susan Chira: "Who is the audience he is playing to? Mr. Trump and his die-hard followers delight in the shock value of violating social and political norms. Mr. Trump's election has released latent anger toward women. The right-wing men to whom Trump appeals are threatened by women in power. Trump has created a toxic subculture of misogyny."
10/30/17
William Rivers Pitt: “Donald Trump is a feckless racist catastrophe who would gladly light the world on fire just to see his name printed in the last newspaper ever published. Fish swimming in the eternal night of the Marianas Trench know the President of the United States is an exceedingly dangerous clod, and yet he rumbles on like some colossal ball of pumpkin cobbler gone wild on hubris.”
12/14/17
Charlie Sykes: “Roy Moore is an unreconstructed bigot and ignorant crank. With Roy Moore’s loss in the Alabama senate race, the Trumpified Republican Party finds itself both defeated and dishonored, with no sign that it has yet hit bottom. Step by step, Republicans have embraced a politics that is post-truth, post-ethics and post-shame.”
Old Lefty: "Charlie, you are right about the play’s four acts, but wrong about the story line, which is not Shakespearean but Faustian, a deal with the Devil. The first act begins with the American Revolution, where at least half the economy is based on slavery. The second act is the Civil War where the slave owning class is severely weakened. The third act is the reemergence of the old slave-owning class during the Jim Crow era, when Southern whites are essentially a fascist/populist branch of the Democratic Party: the Dixiecrats. The fourth act is the Civil Rights era, wherein the Dixiecrats migrate from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and finally take over the Republican Party completely. That is where we are today. Trump is a Dixiecrat president. Roy Moore is what you get when you distill white identity politics down to its nasty essence. Now, for the first time in the history of the country, Alabama has elected a non-Dixiecrat senator, Doug Jones. Is this the beginning of a new fifth act? One can only hope. But don't forget... 48% of voting Alabamians chose Roy Moore. That’s 649,000 people.”
Charles M. Blow: "The election in Alabama demonstrated that for many college-educated, suburban conservatives, there is a limit to their tolerance for regression, fallaciousness, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia and anti-scientific, ahistorical, truth-hostile positioning. Trump is both an anomaly and an abomination, and America must carve him out like a cancer."
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.