Four No Trump

In a week I’m going to say one of two things.

I’ll say

Nooooooooooooo, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not again. This time I’m leaving. Canada. But it takes seven years to get citizenship. I love the Hobbit houses but what do I really know about New Zealand? Would my children visit me in Sri Lanka? Can I get Netflix in Cayman Brac? Are there good restaurants in Antarctica? 

Or, 

I’ll repeat what Gerald Ford said after he took the Presidential Oath of Office:

Our long national nightmare is over.

For 3 years, 11 months, and 26 days I’ve had a low-grade fever of dread. I contracted it the night Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and it plunged into my cells like a disease, haunting and horrible. It has never gone away. 

At the time, absurdly optimistic journalists, government officials, and citizens believed that the gravity and dignity of the office would somehow elevate Trump above the petty, lunatic behavior for which he was famous. I knew that would never happen. He was 70 years old. The vile habits and dark deeds of a lifetime would not change. He was, always had been, and would remain, a baby boy bully.  

His record of public actions was the precise manifestation of his basic nature: mismanagement, indolence, fraud, pathological dishonesty, ignorance, blithering bravado, corruption, racism, self-absorption, misogyny, infinite greed, immaturity, tyrannical impulses, and a sumptuous talent for cruelty. He is a skulking cretin of a man, swarming with evil and utterly without shame. There’s not a single molecule of decency in his entire body. 

Donald Trump’s professional career predicted exactly the kind of President he would be.  

More than 2,800 civil lawsuits have been filed against him. He’s gone bankrupt six times. He defaulted on a $640 million construction loan from Deutsche Bank. Trump Airlines went out of business owing everyone involved in it money.  Trump University was shut down amid accusations of major fraud. Investors who bought his junk bonds lost fortunes. His licensing business was a scam to use his name on buildings that investors and potential residents thought he would finance and build, but he didn’t; most failed and everyone lost money except Trump. 

He was sued dozens of times for refusing to accept housing applications from African Americans. He bought the New Jersey Generals, part of the fledgling United States Football League, but sued the NFL and lost, leading to the collapse of the USFL. For decades he refused to pay thousands of construction contractors, putting them out of business. The hotels he owned in Atlantic City struggled with operating costs and all three went out of business or were sold at a loss. He claimed that he made enormous charitable donations, but the bulk of them were tax deductions with minimal cash outlay. He was also fined for stealing from his own charitable foundation, and it was closed.

Contrary to Trump’s boast that he is a self-made billionaire, he received more than $400 million from his father over his lifetime. He was a millionaire at age three. His father bankrolled his initial plunge into real estate and bailed him out of successive failures. He overspent wildly on hotels, stiffed his vendors, and defaulted on numerous loans. By the 1990’s he was crushed by debt, lack of capital, and vast expenditures. So he turned to his father, by then in his 80’s and suffering from cognitive failure, and for several years tried to have him sign an altered will. He finally succeeded, giving himself an inheritance disproportionate to that of his siblings, and pulling his broken empire out of ruin.

That is the man who promotes himself as an astute and successful businessman.

His history of malice and the sordid content of his character moved into the West Wing in 2017, and it was with those resources that Donald Trump profoundly, perhaps permanently, damaged the United States. Every word and action that emerged from him as President has poisoned our national life, slithering into the spectacle of a thousand reprehensible events.

He forced 59,000 Haitians to leave the U.S., most of whom fled here after a 2010 earthquake demolished their homes.

He has spent four years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, without any plan to replace it.

He signed an executive order to make it easier for fugitives to buy guns.

He abolished President Obama’s Pandemic Task Force, a science-based guideline for navigating through a national health catastrophe. Then he bungled every element of the coronavirus outbreak, causing infections and deaths than that should not have occurred. 

He supports economic and educational policies unfavorable to communities of color.

He drafted a proposal to open 94% of American shorelines to offshore drilling.

He created an international tragedy at our southern border, grabbing as many as 10,000 children, some just infants, from their parents.

Since his election, anti-Semitic attacks have increased 86%.

He refused to condemn the barbaric murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, committed by agents of the Saudi government with ties to crown Prince Mohammed bin Salam. He has in fact continued to support the Prince.

He remained silent when Vladimir Putin put a bounty on the heads of American troops.

He has surrounded himself with a viper’s nest of crooked, inept, power-guzzling low-lifes and criminals who crept in and out of his Administration like jackals. Of the top echelon people he has hired, 78% have left, more departures than during the full terms of the past five Presidents combined.

Part of his initial budget proposal included cutting 20% of the funds for the National Institute of Health, the organization that performs one-fourth of America’s medical research. 

In the past eight years he has been accused of sexual harassment, misconduct, and assault by 27 women.

Those are just the highlights from a list of sins too high to count.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley has said, “There is no other President that has lied as if it were a form of breathing, other than Donald Trump.” Since his Inauguration, two fact-checking sources have verified more than 20,000 false statements. They range from ludicrous fibs only a moron would tell, to consequential lies that have had dire consequences for America.

“And we’ll always protect patients with pre-existing conditions.” For four years the Trump Administration has insisted that ACA laws protecting patients with pre-existing conditions are unconstitutional, and for four years they have tried to repeal it. 

“I’ve given more money to Puerto Rico than, I believe, any President ever. They’ve gotten $91 billion for the hurricane.” The figure $91 billion is the estimate for possible future assistance to Puerto Rico over the course of decades. The amount actually spent on Puerto Rico is $11 billion.

“As you know, just recently I signed the Veteran’s Choice.” The Veteran’s Choice healthcare program was passed and signed by President Obama in 2014.

“…one of the things that people don’t understand, we have signed more legislation than anybody – we broke the record of Harry Truman.” By the end of 2018, Trump had signed fewer bills than any President in the last 64 years.

“…and our military is rebuilding….We got a raise for the people, they haven’t had a raise in 11 years.” America’s Armed Forces have received a pay raise every year for 30 years.

Tired of hearing about the California wildfires, Trump said, “Finland uses forest raking to prevent forest fires. And it works.” Finland does not rake its forest floors. And most forestry experts believe that raking is not an effective fire-prevention tactic.

Hundreds of times, in press conferences and informal remarks, Trump bragged about progress on the border wall he was building. He even said that the section near El Paso was finished. But construction never began. Not one inch of the wall was ever built.

“I’ve done more on knocking out regulations than any other President in our history. You know who was right up there? Abraham Lincoln. He was a regulation cutter.” Lincoln never cut any regulations.

“U.S. Steel is now building seven plants here.” Trump claimed this for months, but the company has no plans to build new plants anywhere in America.

Trump gloated that he had the largest Inaugural crowd in American history. Although exact numbers are difficult to determine, most estimates indicate that Trump had between 500,000 and 600,000 people in attendance. Barack Obama had 1.8 million.

“The U.S. has among the very cleanest air and water in the world.” America is ranked 10^th in air quality and 29^th in water and sanitation.”

“I think the travel ban rollout was very smooth. We only had 109 out of hundreds of thousands…and all we did is vet these people.” The travel ban was imprecise and controversial, and its implementation was chaotic. At least 100,000 people had their visas revoked.

Those are merely lies. Huge hyperbole lies, pompous, egotistical, and ludicrous, the words of a fool. But he muttered another set of lies and the effect was deadly.

In March he said the coronavirus pandemic “was something nobody thought could happen. Nobody thought a thing like this could have happened.” But in a phone conversation with Bob Woodward he said that he knew about it in February and knew it was deadly. 

On March 6 he claimed “(we) have the tests. And the tests are beautiful. If somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested.” In fact, there was a disastrous shortage of tests, and few people had access to them.

On March 26 he told FOX News host Sean Hannity that “a lot of equipment’s being asked for by certain states that I don’t think they’ll need.” On March 29 he denied that he said it.

In April he said he had “launched the largest national mobilization since World War II against COVID-19.” He had launched nothing, delayed supplies, bickered with state governors about what supplies they deserved, squabbled with medical experts, and deceived the public.

On May 8 he said, the coronavirus is “going to go away without a vaccine.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most respected epidemiologist in America, said such a disappearance “is just not going to happen.”

Instead of reinforcing safety guidelines for wearing masks and social distancing, Trump flaunted doing neither. He held crowded indoor rallies, setting an example of indifference to medical advice, and pranced around the stage advertising his delusional manhood by denying the need for protective measures. And at exactly the time he got the coronavirus himself, he hosted a party in the Rose Garden of the White House, an intimate affair with guests in close contact. A week later, 34 people who had attended were infected.

On July 6 Trump insisted that “We now have the lowest fatality rate in the world.” We were in the solid middle of global rankings.

On August 27 he accused Joe Biden of wanting an economic shutdown. “He wants to shut down this country. I want to keep it open.” Biden never said this. He consistently stated that the closing or reopening of the country should be decided by medical experts.

On September 29, during the first Presidential Debate, Trump asserted that “a vaccine could be ready by election day.” Medical experts agree that the spring of 2021 is the earliest that an effective vaccine will be ready for distribution.

At this moment, there is an alarming increase in the spread of COVID nationwide. There have been 8,909 767 confirmed cases and 230,639 deaths. Between the time I found these numbers and rechecked them ten minutes later, there were 2,000 more cases. When asked to evaluate his response to the COVID-19 crisis, Trump has insisted that “We’ve done a phenomenal job. Not just a good job, a phenomenal job.”

Donald Trump doesn’t just have blood on his hands. His body is drenched in it.

Anyone with a clear mind and at least moderately functioning mechanisms of logic is baffled by the erratic loyalties and spontaneous tantrums of Trump. It is perplexing to ponder from beneath what slimy swamp did this man emerge – with mush for brains, Cheetos hair, and the moral rectitude of Satan – and then slither in the dirt to the White House.

The universal question is, “How did he get this way?” 

There is an abundant psychiatric language that explains him. He is an Egotistical Sociopath. He suffers from Delusional Masculinity Disorder as well as Grandiosity Psychosis. There have been increasing episodes of Chronic Infantile Narcissism and in the past he struggled with Fabricated Rhetoric Syndrome.

But those are merely abstract identities that classify various elements of his extensive mental illness. The real truth is concrete and simple. Trump’s father, an unscrupulous, vain, lying, and heartless man, nurtured and rewarded the exact same traits in his son. 

Bad parenting, however, is just the starting point. Trump added his own iniquities to the warped essence of his character. A conglomerate of coarse principles and shabby habits, repeated continuously, formed the petulant megalomaniac he became.

His beliefs and behavior are true wonders of creative malevolence. 

He takes credit for the achievements of others but always blames someone else for his failures.

He’s adept at lying because he has never told the truth.

He treats people like serfs because he thinks he’s a king.

He’s proud of the fact that he never reads.

He’s completely comfortable living outside the law because he’s never lived inside it.

He’s only the 3^rd President to be impeached but the whole thing was really unfair. 

He has unsavory friends like Jeffrey Epstein because people with integrity don’t like him.

He’s had five deferments but still considers himself an expert on military matters.

He confuses brutality with masculinity because he doesn’t know they’re not the same thing.

The only American citizen Donald Trump has ever served is Donald Trump.

He has absolutely no knowledge of the U.S. Constitution, which is why it’s been so easy for him to throw it away.

He instinctively cheats and steals because he thinks those are sound business practices.

He believes he has intellectual superiority because he can repeat person, woman, man, camera, TV. But he still can’t spell covfefe.

If Donald Trump had a personal slogan, it would be The Don is a Dick.

A study by Bill Frisching of Factbase concluded that Donald Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. If a parse vocabulary, errant grammar, and disorganized thoughts were the only flaws in his speech, it would be unpleasant, but not unforgiveable. Unfortunately, he uses that ugly orange mouth to sputter vile, hurtful, random insults. It is not merely a lack of tact. It is the endless noise of crazed mongrel attacks that begin in his depraved mind and splatter across anyone who disagrees with him.

He said writer Gail Collins is “a dog and a liar,” with “the face of a pig.”

He referred to Dr. Anthony Fauci as “a disaster….an idiot who has been around 500 years.”

He called Baltimore “a disgusting, rat and rodent filled mess.”

Talking about Greta Thurnberg, the 16-year-old climate change activist and Time’s Person of the Year, he said, “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her anger management problems, then go to a good, old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill, Greta, chill.”

He said retired U.S. Marine Corps officer Jim Mattis was “the world’s most overrated General.”

He referred to Omarosa Manigault Nenna, who wrote Unhinged, as  “a dog…a crazed, crying lowlife.”

“She is unattractive both inside and out,” he said about Arianna Huffington. “I fully understand why her husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.”

Irritated that Ben Carson had a slight lead in the Iowa Caucus polls, he griped, “How stupid are the people of Iowa?”

He tweeted about Rosie O’Donnell: “If you take a look at her, she’s a slob…..I’d look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers and say, ‘You’re fired!’”

He insulted Senator John McCain, a former Vietnam POW, by saying, “He’s not…a war hero…because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

He said that Katarina Witt, the German ice-skating champion, is “a woman with a bad complexion who is built like a linebacker.”

Trying to win African American support, he addressed a Virginia crowd, suggesting, “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth are unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

He tweeted about his Republican opponent Carly Fiorina, “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?”

He called Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa, “shithole countries.”

Believing that Fox News host Megyn Kelly had been tough on him during a Primary debate, he said the next day, “There was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her whatever.”

He famously bragged about the perks of being a celebrity, explaining “when you’re a star….you can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

On the other hand, he referred to several Neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” And after two men beat and urinated on a homeless Hispanic man, citing Trump’s anti-immigration stance as the inspiration for their crime, he said people who follow him “are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are just very passionate.”

There may be other people as crude and cruel as Donald Trump. But none of them are President of the United States. Not only does he demean beyond comprehension the office he holds, but every lie he tells in public can be identified immediately and will live forever in digital archives. But for him, shame and regret do not exist. 

As an occasional respite from the exhausting wreck of his tenure, Donald Trump has provided a few moments of comic relief, none of which he recognizes as such. What he perceives as great wit and intelligence, people with an IQ over 15 recognize as the amusing prattle of a fool.

“Do I look like a President? How handsome am I, right? How handsome?”

“Barack Obama is the founder of ISIS. He’s the founder of ISIS, okay? He’s the founder. He founded ISIS and I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”

At a meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan at the United Nations, Trump announced, “I think I am going to get a Nobel Prize for a lot of things, if they gave it out fairly, which they don’t. They gave it to Obama and I don’t know why.”

“But you know, I never did politics before. Now I do politics.”

At a factory in Ohio, Trump wondered if Democrats had committed treason by not applauding his State of the Union speech.

He announced that he was thinking about buying Greenland. He said it’s really just “a large real estate deal. It’s just something we’ve talked about. Denmark essentially owns it. We’re very good allies with Denmark.”

“I look very much forward to showing my financials, because they are huge.”

Trump contacted South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to find out what requirements were necessary to be on Mt. Rushmore. “Do you know,” he said to her, “it’s my dream to have my face on Mt. Rushmore.”

Before hiring H.R. McMaster as a National Security Advisor, he considered John Bolton, but didn’t like his mustache. 

“The noise from wind turbines causes cancer.”

When asked for his thoughts on John Lewis, who had died a few days earlier, Trump said, “I don’t know. I never met him. He chose not to come to my Inaugural.”

“This is one of the true, in terms of war, in terms of, probably you can also say, in terms of peace, because this led to something very special.”

Of all the scandals and policies of ruin Donald Trump has created every day of his Presidency, the worst, the most lamentable and obscene, is the immigration travesty at our border with Mexico. What he has done there, with preposterous self-praise, is a crime against humanity for which there is no forgiveness.

His official Immigration Policy was one of “zero tolerance,” enacted in April 2018. It allowed child separations as a deterrent to immigrants crossing our southern borders illegally. But in fact, unofficial separations had been occurring since mid 2017, when Trump implemented a surreptitious pilot program. Adults who entered our country unlawfully were immediately arrested, prosecuted, and put in jail. Or they were deported. Their children were taken from them and sent to improvised Detention Centers, some thousands of miles away. They were released to parents who were found not guilty, or to relatives living in America. Otherwise they were sent to foster homes. During that one year, 5,000 children – probably more – were separated from their families. 

Prior to Trump’s presidency, illegal immigrants were detained for a few days, then released to await trial in immigration courts. 78% of them showed up for their hearings. Only immigrants who had two prior convictions were tried in criminal court. Children were rarely separated from their parents and only when there was evidence that the child was endangered. 

Trump changed that. He wanted to aggressively prosecute, then incarcerate or deport, as many illegal immigrants as possible. His goal was to lower the number who got into America to zero. The force behind this policy was Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s senior advisors and a radical anti-immigrant bigot and known white supremist. Child separations were his idea, and he convinced Trump that they were the key element in solving the immigration crisis.

Outraged lawyers, journalists, and citizens discovered and revealed Trump’s inhumane policy and successfully sued the federal government. Trump was forced to rescind his April Immigration Policy just two months later, in June 2018. To retaliate, the Trump Administration increased crime accusations against illegal immigrants, often with vague of false information. So larger numbers of them were jailed or deported, and more child separations occurred. 

Despite the ban on taking children from their parents, they continued covertly. Amnesty International reported that between the revised policy enactment in June 2018 and August 15, 2018, just eight weeks, 3,000 more children were taken from their families. But on December 20, 2018, Homeland Security Secretary Kristien Nielsen, speaking before the House Judiciary Committee, said that the Trump Administration did not practice child separation.

Asylum seekers have special protections under U.S. law. Immigrations officials may not detain them at the border unless there are charges of serious crimes against them. They are allowed to enter the U.S. at ports of entry to appear for their asylum hearings. In 2017 and 2018, however, there was an increase in asylum seekers, many from Central America. They were fleeing from gang violence, sex trafficking, and drug related murders. The Trump Administration, angered by the growing numbers, arrested them anyway, often for minor violations like a traffic ticket. The federal government also began using data bases from foreign countries to identify incoming gang members. The data was almost always incorrect.

With more arrests, there were more child separations. And the fate of these children became a humanitarian crisis of the worst kind – clandestine child abuse.

Since 2017, separated children have been sent to 121 Detention Centers in 17 states. 

They were housed in tents, old warehouses, and small cages. 

There were very few adult supervisors so 9- and 10-year-old girls took care of the babies and toddlers.

In one warehouse Detention Center, none of the 200 children, including several infants, had showered or changed clothes in two weeks.

At a facility near El Paso, 250 toddlers and babies had been locked up for 95 days without adequate food, water, or sanitation.

Medical care was sporadic and substandard, and many children got sick.

Almost 4,500 accusations of sexual assault were reported by young girls and teenagers. 

At a facility in Texas, the stench was so strong reporters who were writing about it wore nose plugs and double face masks.

In Arizona, the children in a large Detention Center had no toys or books, the overhead light was kept on at all times, and some children slept under sheets of foil.

In a Texas warehouse, all the children were given anti-psychotic drugs, making them listless, dizzy, or unsteady on their feet. One girl fell down and hit her head so often, she ended up in a wheelchair.

Another child in the same facility tried to escape the injection and opened a window. A supervisor dragged her away, threw her against a door, and choked her until she fainted. When she woke up two guards held her down while a doctor gave her the injection.

During Trump’s tenure, more migrant children were in custody than at any other time in American history.

According to official investigators, the most common sight in every Detention Center is sorrow. Two AP sources said that at a small warehouse they visited, “…dozens of children were sobbing. They didn’t know where they were, they were frightened, they missed their parents, they were hungry, and they were exhausted.” 

In April of 2019, the federal government announced that it will take at least two years to identify all the children who were separated from their parents.

Although there may have been more, 4 children died in custody. When informed of the deaths, Trump said ”…the deaths of children or others at the border are strictly the fault of the Democrats.”

Trump didn’t have an immigration policy. He had a policy of hatred, imposed on bewildered, frightened children who were imprisoned in crude shelters of neglect in lonely corners of our country. They were put there by government officials, men and women of immeasurable evil who openly despise children who are brown, foreign, or poor. They are a legion of unnatural creatures in which kindness, charity, mercy and goodwill have never found a home.

How did we as a nation arrive at a moment in our history when it was permissible to grab a little boy from the arms of his mother, put him in a cage, and abandon him? How did this happen without a hundred million voices screeching in sympathy and freeing child prisoners? How do the words freedom, justice, truth, and equality coexist with these children, who know they are being punished but don’t know why.

It happened because one man, by example and by coercion, drunk with the cheers of our worst citizens, led us into the shadow of the valley of death. And he got away with it. He got away with everything he did for four years. Nobody stopped him. His atrocities continued with the raucous cooperation of bigoted, selfish, unreasonable people, rich and poor, who were inspired by Trump’s dead promises and smirking enthusiasm for their brainless adoration.

The majority of Americans did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. But by the convoluted principles and archaic logic of the Electoral College — and the mysterious intrusion of Russia – Trump won anyway. For the 65,844,640 voters who rejected him, these four years have been The Dark Ages. For the voters who believed his smarmy slogan of lost greatness coming back, the disappointment is regret enough. And for those who still support him there is a new national identity, and they are its guardians.  

For Donald Trump’s base, the symbol of America is not stars and stripes billowing in the wind. The Constitution is not a document of rich possibilities; it’s just a jumble of words less entertaining than a comic book. Saying “All men are created equal,” isn’t a sacred promise; it’s an insignificant sentence. For Trump loyalists the new image of America isn’t a flag, an eagle, a monument, the words to “America the Beautiful,” the big lady in front of Ellis Island, or the Fourth of July. 

It’s a 3-year-old girl in her tiny wire prison, wearing dirty clothes, scared and hungry, sucking her thumb and weeping. 

During the past four years, millions of words have been written and spoken to describe the unnatural impulses and flagrant heartlessness of Donald Trump. Shock and disgust have become newspaper reports, magazine articles, TV commentaries, and individual testimonials. Despite all the scribbles and voices, there is still a hole in the conversation. It is not quite possible to convey the enormity of his flaws or the depths of his disregard. He is beyond human comprehension and defies the limits of language.  

In considering the actions of his entire life, in assessing the events of his Presidency, and in all the histories yet to be written, only one thing is consistently true.

There are no words for such a man.