Immigration

Trump Suffers Severe Obama Derangement Fit, Incoherently Babbles that ‘Obama Had Child Separation’

Posted by on April 9, 2019 at 3:11 pm. 3 Comments :

The rapid and public decline in Donald Trump’s mental state is a frightening display of the fragility of his mind and cognitive infirmity. Many professionals in the psychiatric field have observed Trump’s swindling awareness of reality and concluded that he is unfit to manage a Burger King, much less serve as president.

Donald Trump Zombie

On Tuesday Trump validated the diagnoses of his mental failure during a press avail with President Sisi of Egypt. When reporters asked Trump about his administration’s policy of separating immigrant families, he launched into an utterly deranged tirade denying his own policy and lashing out at President Obama over and over again:

https://twitter.com/NightlyPolitics/status/1115668909137379329

“Obama separated the children, by the way. Just so you understand, President Obama separated the children. Those cages that were shown, I think they were very inappropriate. They were built by President Obama’s administration. Not by Trump. President Obama had child separation. Take a look. The press knows it. You know it. We all know it. I’m the one that stopped it. President Obama had child separation.”

That’s about as solid an exhibition of total insanity as you’re likely to see unfold on live TV. Trump name-checked Obama five times in that short paragraph, as if possessed by rabid anti-Obama demons. And each time he associated Obama with a practice of child separation that was demonstrably false. The Obama administration only held children when they crossed the border alone, or when their parents were accused of felonies. It was the Trump administration that created the policy of separating families of asylum seekers, and they even admitted that it was done as a “deterrent.” Nearly a year ago News Corpse wrote this:

“‘If you don’t want your child separated,’ said Attorney General Jeff Sessions, ‘then don’t bring them across the border illegally.’ Of course, these asylum seekers are not breaking any laws. And speaking about family separation, Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, said ‘A big name of the game is deterrence [and] it could be a tough deterrent.’ In both cases they are advocating cruelty and human rights abuse as a deterrent for a civil border violation.”

So in a bizarre way, Trump is criticizing Obama for being tougher on immigrants than he is. Even though Obama didn’t do what Trump claimed and Trump now denies doing it himself. What makes this especially demented is that Trump also praises the policy that he says isn’t his:

“Now I’ll tell you something, once you don’t have it, that’s why you see many more people coming. They’re coming like it’s a picnic because ‘Let’s go to Disneyland.’ President Obama separated children. They had child separation. I was the one that changed it.”

So in Trump’s analysis, the policy works because fewer immigrants come to the U.S. when it’s in place. So is he for or against it now? And obviously it was in place or else how would he know that it worked? Trump also contradicts himself with ludicrous visions of a migration amusement park. It’s just a good old time for these families who are fleeing poverty and violence by walking hundreds of miles with nothing but the clothes on their backs. I’m surprised Disneyland hasn’t already built their Asylum Land attraction.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The evidence that Trump is a very sick man just continues to pile up. And his condition seems to be worsening more quickly every day. He can’t manage to get through any public statement without misstating where his father was from or some absurd ravings about windmill cancer. And the video of these latest remarks is almost too painful to watch.

Fox News Downplays the Chaos as Senior Trump Aide Says ‘He Just Wants to Separate Families’

Posted by on April 8, 2019 at 3:17 pm. 1 Comments :

As Donald Trump begins another week of disastrous White House failures, his State TV division (aka Fox News) struggles to turn mountains of presidential manure into a sweet smelling garden of blooming propaganda. The week begins with Trump bellowing “You’re fired!” at his Secretary of Homeland Security for not being sufficiently cruel. But that bit of reality TV melodrama isn’t playing particularly well.

Donald Trump, Immigrant, Child

The “Witch Hunt” that Trump is still obsessively whining about continues to be uppermost on his mind and in his tweets. Which makes the ousting of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen a convenient distraction. She is said to have been pushed out by Trump and his flying monkey sidekick, Stephen Miller. Insiders report that Nielsen was resisting some of Trump’s latest demands to violate the law with regard to asylum seekers and the babies he thinks are MS-13 members.

If this characterization is accurate, Nielsen doesn’t get any credit for finally exhibiting some signs of human empathy after a year and a half of emulating the evil headmistress of a Dickensian orphanage. But it does introduce a new wrinkle into what may be the most nauseating plank in Trump’s platform. His reasons for casting her overboard certify just how repulsive this president can be. And members of his own team are telling tales out of school. Here is what some have confided to CNN about Trump’s family separation policy:

“Sources told CNN that Nielsen tried to explain they could not bring the policy back because of court challenges, and White House staffers tried to explain it would be an unmitigated PR disaster. ‘He just wants to separate families,’ said a senior administration official. […] ‘At the end of the day,’ a senior administration official said, ‘the President refuses to understand that the Department of Homeland Security is constrained by the laws.'”

And there you have it. Trump just wants to separate families. Just like he wants to kill healthcare for millions of Americans, and cut taxes for the wealthy at the expense of working people, and bomb innocent civilians in Yemen, and promote the interests of neo-Nazis, and cozy up to murderous dictators in Russia, and North Korea, and allow the planet to become uninhabitable by driving it to a climate apocalypse.

In the meantime, Fox News is predictably ignoring these signs of the Antichrist in favor of propping up the aspiring tyrant they created, and in many ways, control. Their Monday morning programs were filled with orchestrated rhetoric asserting that the kids in cages that have shocked and saddened most of the nation were actually props employed by smugglers. Lis Power of Media Matters documented several of these scripted rhetorical fallacies here and here and here and here and here. There are simply too many of these nearly identical versions of the same falsehoods to be coincidental.

Clearly Fox News is working hard to undermine any criticism that Trump might suffer for his heartless assault on children and families. And these poor souls were already suffering so badly from poverty and violence in their home countries that they risked their lives to find safety and solace in the land of the allegedly free. Unfortunately, they chose a time when our president was a loathsome cretin who seems to have a bright orange streak of sadism. Hopefully, those of us who still cherish the principles are country propounds will prevail and we will return to being the beacon of light and that has inspired immigrants for over two hundred years.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The Ludicrous Fox News ‘3 Mexicos’ Chyron Wasn’t Nearly as Bad as What They Actually Said

Posted by on March 31, 2019 at 11:09 am. 4 Comments :

On Sunday Morning Fox News set out reestablish their status as the supreme purveyors of rank idiocy. And they accomplished that goal with a graphic presentation of both their stupidity and racism. This feat occurred during another one of their regularly scheduled segments demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants from south of the border.

Donald Trump, Immigrant, Child

While the three co-hosts of Donald Trump’s favorite morning show, Fox and Friends rattled on about the alleged “crisis” on the border, there was a graphic that said “Trump Cuts U.S. Aid to 3 Mexican Countries.” Of course, there aren’t three Mexican countries. That’s just Fox’s way of disparaging all brown people in Central and South America as being the same undesirables. However, as bad as that careless foul-up was – and even given their hurried correction – what they actually said during the segment was even worse. And that can’t be dismissed as a mistake.

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1112352119900770305

The piece started off with Pete Hegseth summarizing everything wrong that Fox disseminates regarding immigration:

“Cutting payment – aid payment – to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras over the fact that those countries have been unable to contain the flood of migrants heading through Mexico to our southern border. So yesterday we talked about potentially shutting down the southern border … this is a big move. This is one of the few punitive measures the executive branch has still, to these countries to say ‘get it under control.'”

First of all, the migrants from Central America are fleeing the poverty and violence that threatens them and their children. Cutting humanitarian aid will only make it more difficult for these countries to resolve the problems they have with crime and scarcity. So any thinking person would understand that Trump’s actions can only exacerbate the problems he’s pretending to want to solve.

Jedediah Bila then added that Trump “came in strong” with his tweets threatening to close the border and gushed that “It seems to me he’s standing tall on this issue. He’s not backing down. I don’t blame him.” And Ed Henry chirped along in worshipful harmony saying “Yeah, it might take drastic measures.”

Trump’s notion of cutting aid is only surpassed in reckless ineptitude by his intent to close the border. That will in no way advance a solution to the problem, but it will severely harm American businesses and workers. Even Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have ridiculed the idea. And the complaint by the Foxies that the three Mexicos have been unable to “contain the flood of immigrants” ignores Trump’s own whining that it’s the U.S. that hasn’t been managing what he considers to be a national emergency. Hence his wall fetish.

When all is said and done, Fox News continues to say and do the most preposterously illogical things in their mission to frighten and disinform their audience of Deplorables. And sadly, at that they happen to be quite good.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

On Orders from Sean Hannity (His Fox News Boss) Trump Will Sign Border Bill, Declare Emergency

Posted by on February 14, 2019 at 1:34 pm. 1 Comments :

After the unmitigated disaster of the Trump Shutdown last month, Donald Trump is taking steps to avoid another embarrassing loss to his nemesis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Under Pelosi’s guidance, the bipartisan committee in Congress tasked with drafting a new funding bill has arrived at a consensus that does not include any money for Trump’s idiotic vanity wall. So the President is responding in the most ignorant and undemocratic way possible.

Fox News, Sean Hannity, White House

The Constitution of the United States makes clear that the Congress is responsible for all spending allocations by the federal government. Ordinarly, the president would be bound by the decisions of the Congress that is made up of the people’s representatives. But Donald Trump is in no way ordinary. It appears to be his intention to ignore – and even insult – the people (who polls show are overwhelmingly opposed to the wall) and do an unconstitutional end run around Congress to get funding for his precious wall.

Of course, Trump didn’t come to this decision on his own. That would require reading a bill that is over 1,000 pages and being able to grasp what it means. Instead, Trump is merely following orders from his superiors at Fox News who are accustomed to telling him what to do, and having him obey. It was only one day ago that Sean Hannity delivered his command to Trump in the form of commentary on his program. Hannity’s segment was built around this premise: “How Trump can take Congress’ garbage deal, and stick the wall down their throats.” That’s a particularly fascist tone to take with regard to presidential powers (something they are familiar with). What Hannity actually proposed was this:

“Step one: The president signs the deal, and uses the $1.375 billion as a downpayment for the wall. Step two: President Trump has identified some $900 million for additional construction that is already available for the administration’s discretion. That would bring the pot to about $2.3 billion. Step three: This needs to happen simultaneously, and it has the president declaring a national emergency. This is the time.”

So how did the White House respond to the bill that Congress is about to send him?

Gee. That’s exactly what Hannity told him to do. And this isn’t the first time. In fact, the Trump Shutdown was largely the result of Hannity’s insistence that Trump not agree to any deal that didn’t include wall funding. This time, however, they knew that a shutdown would only make matters worse for Trump, so they decided to try to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. But that’s isn’t going to work out any better them.

The emergency declaration will surely be challenged in court, where Trump will likely fail because there isn’t any emergency. And Trump’s own words and actions are the proof of that. He has repeatedly claimed that his administration has reduced illegal border crossings. He said that he already stopped two “caravans” of refugees at the border without any wall. And he has been putting off any executive actions on this for months. All of this affirms that no emergency condition exists.

Trump is engaging in pure theatricality in order to get his way, not to secure the nation, but to be able to say that he fulfilled a dumb campaign promise (that included Mexico paying for the wall, but now that’s been forgotten). No court in the nation will rule that Trump saving face over a campaign promise constitutes a national emergency. So Trump will lose in the end. But in the meantime he will have degraded democracy and divided the country even more than he already has. And that’s the Trump legacy that will endure long after he’s gone.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Freaks Out Over Fake Fox News Report that 42 Million Latin Americans are Invading the U.S.

Posted by on February 10, 2019 at 10:23 am. 2 Comments :

The prospects of Donald Trump getting the funding he craves for his idiotic vanity wall along the southern border are declining with each new day. Even he recognized in a whimpering tweet that the bipartisan congressional Conference Committee hashing out a compromise bill are leaning toward a skimpy sum that couldn’t be used for any actual wall building.

Fox News, Immigration

So naturally Trump is lashing out in the irrational and childish manner for which he is well known. His purpose, of course, isn’t to inspire a constructive dialogue, but to incite fear, hatred, and division. And he employs his usual bag of tricks to achieve those ends, mainly consisting of whining and lying. On Sunday morning he tweeted that:

It goes without saying that Trump’s assessment of the situation is entirely devoid of facts. What he describes as a looming disaster is actually just a set of hypotheticals that he has taken completely out of context. The Gallup poll he’s citing is much more nuanced than in his simplistic retelling. And, as usual, he didn’t provide a link to it for fear that people would be able to see the truth for themselves.

The poll asked a broadly hypothetical question of residents in Latin American countries about whether they would like to immigrate and, if so, what country would be their preferred destination. The survey results said that twenty-seven percent would like to immigrate, and that thirty-five percent of those would choose to go to the United States.

The only thing this tells us is that there is significant dissatisfaction with life in many of the Latin American countries. Who didn’t already know that? Much of the region is burdened with poverty, violence, and corrupt governments. Also, who is surprised that the U.S. would be a popular destination? Would Trump prefer it if our country was regarded as slime hole that no one wanted to move to? Although it does seem like that’s what he’s trying to turn it into.

Trump’s ignorance is further demonstrated by his omission of other relevant data on international migration. In another recent Gallup poll it was found that an even larger percentage of Europeans (41%) also say they would like to move to another country. Similarly, the top migrant destination worldwide is the U.S., with 158 million people – more than three times the number from Latin America alone – expressing an interest in moving here. For some reason, Trump didn’t bother to mention the potential invasion of America by Europeans. I guess that isn’t an issue for him and his white-wing Republican Nationalist Party.

It’s also notable that Trump didn’t come to rant about this after doing some deep research on his own or consulting his “experts” in the State Department. As usual, he was simply live-tweeting what he had just watched on Fox News. His favorite morning program, Fox and Friends, did a segment wherein the “Curvy Couch” potatoes featured this distorted take on the Gallup poll. And shortly thereafter Trump’s tweet appeared.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

This is more proof that Fox News constitutes the “brain trust” of his administration. And, as a result, the nation is mired in the ignorance and bigotry that fills Fox’s programming 24/7. It’s a dangerous recipe that combines the ultra-rightist media with government power to poison the minds of the Deplorables who are most vulnerable to such lies and propaganda. And this Cult of Trump, with its State TV Ministry of Information, will continue to do harm until Trump and company are migrated to where they belong: Federal prison.

Donald Trump Calls 60% of Americans ‘Fools’ Because They Don’t Support His Idiotic Vanity Wall

Posted by on February 4, 2019 at 1:02 pm. 3 Comments :

When the President of the United States is notorious for being willfully ignorant and dismissive of factual data, even when it is provided by the experts in his own administration, he ought not to be calling other people names and disparaging their intellect. But that is a behavioral flaw that is all too common with Donald Trump, whose preference for his own counsel (whatever that means) prevails over that of professionals with decades of experience.

Donald Trump

Trump recently told an interviewer from CBS that he “doesn’t have to agree” with Intelligence team. That’s technically true, but it is not generally considered a good idea for someone who knows nothing about national security to ignore the advice of those who have spent a lifetime studying it. Trump also stated that he has “no confidence” in those same Intelligence experts – who he appointed to their posts – apparently preferring the guidance of his shadow cabinet on Fox News and mentors like Vladimir Putin.

Despite this cognitive breakdown, Trump still manages to cast insults at anyone who isn’t sufficiently deferential to his point of view and ego. And his targets include the American people who he is supposed to be serving as their representative. This betrayal of the people’s will is best exemplified by Trump’s position on building a useless wall along the southern border. Most people knowledgeable about immigration agree that a wall is an ineffective solution to the problems cited by Trump and other Republicans. What’s more, a new poll by Gallup shows that most Americans (60%) “oppose significant new construction on border walls.”

This opposition to what has become Trump’s signature fetish is not new. The Gallup poll confirms the results of nearly every other poll done on this subject. The desires of the American people are well known and firmly held. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his cohorts in the GOP and on Fox News from trying to force their unwise and unpopular plan on a nation that unambiguously rejects it. And what do the citizens of the country get for expressing themselves?

So Trump regards at least sixty percent of the American people as “fools.” Never mind that they agree with the experts while Trump is basing his opinion on partisans associated with flagrantly racist interest groups. This disrespect for the citizens of this country is emblematic of a malignant narcissist who wishes he could be a dictator. Trump forced the nation into its longest ever government shutdown over a policy that the majority of voters oppose. And he is threatening to do it again, or to violate the Constitution with a phony national emergency declaration. And all to advance a proposal for a wall that has been nothing but a scam from the start.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Will Trump Declare a Fake National Emergency to Avoid the Real One in the White House?

Posted by on February 2, 2019 at 4:06 pm. 1 Comments :

Ever since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi masterfully forced Donald Trump to surrender his government shutdown, the President has been openly hostile to the notion of a negotiated compromise on immigration policy and border security. Within hours of forming a congressional committee to hammer out the details, Trump insisted that it was a waste of time and threatened to use his imagined imperial powers to impose a state of national emergency.

Donald Trump Revolt

Every credible expert on the law quickly pointed out that Trump’s case for a national emergency was virtually nonexistent. And much of the evidence was provided by Trump himself by his failure to act on the matter for more than two years and his willingness to put it off while Congress debates it. The only plausible excuse for such a declaration would be Trump’s desperation to deflect the public’s attention from his troubles associated with his conspiracy with Russia to steal the election.

However, there is a crisis in Washington that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. It’s a crisis of competence and leadership. Under Donald Trump the machinery of government is crumbling. Nearly twenty percent of the cabinet offices in this administration are being run by “acting” secretaries or directors. That’s because Trump is trying to adapt his television playacting role to his new job as president. And it’s painfully obvious that isn’t working. His “skills” are utterly inappropriate for the duties of government management and national leadership. He spends more time watching TV (Fox News) and conducting made-for-the-camera photo-ops, than engaging in the people’s business.

Currently serving in Trump’s pretend regime are an “Acting” Chief of Staff (Mick Mulvaney), Attorney General (Matthew Whitaker), EPA Director (Andrew Wheeler), Interior Secretary (David Bernhardt), and Secretary of Defense (Patrick Shanahan). All to serve our Reality TV Acting “President.” None of these department heads have been vetted or confirmed by the Senate as required by law.

It is all the more troubling considering that many of the nation’s most precarious challenges are directly associated with these cabinet offices. For instance, how can Trump’s alleged national emergency be taken seriously when the nation’s top law enforcement officer hasn’t been confirmed? Not to mention the fact that the current director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is also serving in an acting capacity.

Another example of the jeopardy that America faces under the Trump regime is that we have an acting Defense Secretary just as Trump has abandoned the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. At the same time, Trump’s Intelligence team (CIA, FBI, DNI, etc.) have publicly distanced themselves from the President’s positions on the most critical issues facing them, including Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Russia.

This is a terrible time to have a part-time cabinet and intelligence professionals who have no confidence in their boss. But as Washington burns, Trump is fiddling around with pretend declarations of national emergencies that are actually just attempts to bypass a Congress that he is totally incapable of negotiating with. Which is ironic considering the tweet he posted on November 20, 2014:

The outrageous constitutional breach that Trump was ranting about just happened to be related to immigration. Obama had just signed an executive order to “crack down on illegal immigration at the border, prioritize deporting felons not families, and require certain undocumented immigrants to pass a criminal background check and pay their fair share of taxes as they register to temporarily stay in the U.S. without fear of deportation.” It was an entirely reasonable approach in response to a problem that Republicans in Congress refused to address.

But Obama did not declare a national emergency or overstep his constitutional powers, as Trump is now threatening to do. He simply took responsibility for a solution that would have passed in Congress (had the GOP allowed it to be voted on) and enjoyed widespread popularity with the public.

Trump, on the other hand, is the one subverting the Constitution with a threat to impose a bogus state of emergency because of his own pitiful negotiating skills. This is what Trump supporters got for believing the lie that he is adept at the “Art of the Deal.” And anyone who still believes that phony PR gimmick is terminally naive or firmly embedded in the Trump Cult.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Confesses to Violating the Law By Misappropriating Federal Funds for His Vanity Wall

Posted by on February 1, 2019 at 2:13 pm. 1 Comments :

During the Trump Shutdown the President routinely made ludicrous comments about the necessity of building a wall on the southern border that most experts agree would be wasteful and ineffective. But even worse than that, Donald Trump would claim that his idiotic vanity wall would virtually eliminate, not just illegal immigration, but crimes like drug and human trafficking. Never mind that most of these activities take place at legal ports of entry where a wall would be irrelevant.

Donald Trump, Border Wall

On Friday morning, however, Trump went further down the rabid hole to assert that the wall that has become a fetish for him was already being built (video below). “We’re building the wall,” he lied. “People don’t understand that. They’re starting to learn.” This, of course is totally false. There is no new wall being built anywhere. But Trump continued down that path of falsity:

“We’re spending a lot of the money that we have on hand, like in a business. But we have money on hand and we’re building, I would say we will have 115 miles, maybe a little bit more than that, very shortly. It’s being built. Some of it’s already been completed. In San Diego, if you look, it’s completed. It’s really beautiful, brand new. We have other wall that’s under construction and we’re giving out a lot of contracts. So we’re building the wall. It’s getting it built one way or the other.”

The problem with these remarks is that, if they were true, then Trump is actually confessing to a federal crime. There has been no money appropriated by Congress for the construction any new wall along the southern border. And since Congress is the only government body that can allocate such funds, any money spent on a wall would be misappropriation of funds. It would be just as much a violation of the law as it would be for Trump to build a statue of himself at Mar-a-Lago with government money.

Of course, this would be a difficult case to prosecute since Trump is confessing to something that, in reality, he hasn’t actually done. And you can’t convict someone of a crime that they didn’t commit, even if they say they did. He could confess to being Jack the Ripper, but since he wasn’t alive at the time, the London authorities would be unlikely to go after him.

In addition to Trump’s fishy confession, he is also admitting that his obsession with demanding funds from Congress for his wall is a scam. If he is already building hundreds of miles of the wall with “money on hand,” then why did shut down the government, making hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer? Notably, he has also claimed that the wall would be paid for by a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, or that it would pay for itself by reduced law enforcement costs. And don’t forget that Mexico was supposed to pay for it from the start. According to Trump the wall has been paid for at least four times over.

Trump’s fountain of nonsense is overflowing with crackpot assertions and dishonest blathering. Most of it never approaches the fringes of comprehensible commentary. He’s like the schizophrenic homeless guy under the freeway overpass who is yelling gibberish at passing cars.

Among his other flagrant lies in this interview are that El Paso “immediately” became one of the safest cities in the country after a wall was built there (it has been one of the safest cities long before any wall was erected); many Democrats want the wall but are being prohibited by Nancy Pelosi from saying so (because the iron hand of the Speaker is forcing unity among a caucus usually noted for being in disarray); and Trump’s foes take their legal complaints to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that has nothing to do with the case at hand (which, if true, would not be taken up by that court).

This is just the latest display of Trump diving off the plank into the deep end of idiocy. It fits nicely with his declaration of “no confidence“ in his own Intelligence team. Or his freak out over the release of a book (Team of Vipers) by his former communications aide. Or his boasting about a poll that actually showed him failing miserably. If there is one thing that we can be certain of, it’s that Donald Trump is not the “stable genius“ he thinks he is.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Lies About Voter Fraud In Desperate Attempt to Recover from Caving on the Shutdown

Posted by on January 27, 2019 at 10:46 am. 3 Comments :

If there is one thing that Donald Trump can’t stand, it’s being exposed as the loser that he really is. He refuses to acknowledge his six (at least) bankruptcies. He pretends that he wasn’t played for a fool by Kim Jong Un. And the trail of failures – from his businesses to his marriages to his politics – just gets longer with each passing day.

Donald Trump, Loser

Consequently, getting beat to shreds by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who he deridingly calls “Nancy”) is surely gnawing at his substantial gut. He was forced to abandon his pledge to decline any deal with Congress that didn’t include his precious vanity wall – a wall that by his own argument isn’t necessary. Nevertheless, he insisted on building it in order to hurt innocent people.

Now, among the lies he’s telling about the imaginary “emergency” on the border, and his blatant scam in statements explaining how it is being paid for, Trump is diverting to an old and utterly fictional narrative on voter fraud to distract the public and the press from his recent embarrassment at the hands of Speaker Pelosi. It’s a pathetic diversionary device considering his previous attempts resulted in the humiliating disbandment of his phony election “integrity” commission because it couldn’t find any evidence of voter fraud. Undeterred by this shame, Trump tweeted this:

This is, to no one’s surprise, a bundle of outright lies, presumably gathered from his obsessive concentration on Fox News. The data was produced by Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General who has been trying furiously to push the unsupportable case for rampant voter fraud. And Trump, of his own accord, tries to drag California into the controversy without the slightest bit of proof.

However, the Texas Tribune quickly came forward with some of those pesky facts that journalists rely on in order to debunk Trump’s dishonest ranting. In their analysis they wrote that:

“In an advisory released Friday afternoon, the office said it was flagging individuals who had provided the Texas Department of Public Safety with some form of documentation — including a work visa or a green card — that showed they were not a citizen when they were obtaining a driver’s license or an ID card. Among the individuals flagged, about 58,000 individuals cast a ballot in one or more elections from 1996 to 2018, the secretary of state’s office said.” […]

“It’s possible that individuals flagged by the state — who provided DPS with documentation that indicated they were authorized to be in the country — could have become naturalized citizens since they obtained their driver’s license or ID card.”

So while Trump is implying that rampant voter fraud took place in recent elections, the information that he’s basing his lies on was actually accumulated over a period of twenty-two years. And during that time anyone who might have not been a citizen could have become naturalized before ever casting a vote. The Texas Secretary of State didn’t bother to check a single voter to see whether or not they were a citizen at the time they voted. But he still released a report that implied that all 58,000 voted illegally.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Of course, Trump parroted this irresponsible and poorly documented report as if it were valid. Because it fits nicely into his flagrantly racist narrative that nefarious brown-skinned villains are plotting to invade and take over America. And it also serves as convenient distraction from his border wall debacle that is, not coincidentally, aimed at maligning the same group of people. At least Trump is consistent in his raging dishonesty and bigotry.

Donald Trump Just Made a Fantastic Argument Against Building His Idiotic Border Wall

Posted by on January 26, 2019 at 1:53 pm. 1 Comments :

Well, it took thirty-five days and cost about six billion dollars, and incalculable personal suffering, but the Trump Shutdown is now over (temporarily). To say that Donald Trump caved is putting it mildly. He folded like a counterfeit three dollar bill under pressure from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who he calls “Nancy”). And true to form, he emerged from the White House to declare victory in an impotent display of pathetic groveling and forced bluster.

Donald Trump

During Trump’s concession speech he revealed another repulsive side of himself as he admitted that the purpose of his wall is to hurt already suffering refugees by killing any “glimmer of hope” they might have for safety and freedom. And on Saturday morning he followed that up with a Twitter tantrum that was rife with callousness and delusion. This tweetstorm featured one posting that stood out as being a pretty darn good argument against the vanity wall that Trump has been so obsessed with:

So if we have already turned away two “caravans” of asylum seekers, then why do we need to spend billions of dollars on a wall that most experts say will be useless? The next caravan can be handled exactly the way the previous two were, without the expense or the pain associated with shutting down the government in an infantile rage.

Trump has actually admitted that our current ability to secure the border is perfectly adequate. There can be no credible argument that there is anything resembling an emergency at the border. So his yappy whining has no purpose other than to salve his ego. But he won’t let that stop him:

Let’s set aside Trump’s deranged assertion that he didn’t concede. The larger point he is making here is that he finally recognizes that the shutdown he was proud to impose was actually causing great harm and misery to millions of innocent people. But in the same sentence he callously threatens to do it all over again, unconcerned about inflicting more pain. He’s like the bully who uses his victim’s hand to slap his own face while taunting “Why do you keep shutting down yourself? Why do you keep shutting down yourself?”

This isn’t the first time that Trump’s argument for his wall has backfired on him. While his original campaign promise was that Mexico would pay for wall, he has failed utterly to bring that about. Instead, he has since insisted that the wall is being paid for by several different means in addition to Mexico, including: It would pay for itself, presumably by reducing unspecified expenditures on law enforcement; The new trade deal between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, which has nothing to do with wall funding as all the financial benefits of such a deal go to private industry; And the American taxpayer from whom he is currently demanding payment under threat of shutting down our government or declaring an unconstitutional national emergency.

So that’s four different payments for the same wall. How is that not a con game that would land anyone else in jail? Especially since the wall isn’t needed in the first place as Trump has now conceded on Twitter. And along with that concession, Trump has provided a couple of tweeted endorsements that are as phony as a con man’s paid shills. The first is by Fox News regular Matt Schlapp, who also happens to be married to Mercedes Schlapp, the White House Director of Strategic Communications. And the second is a video produced by the Daily Caller News Foundation, which is run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. So these are hardly independent affirmations of Trump’s wall fetish.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The more Trump talks and/or tweets, the less Democrats need to make the case against Trump’s wall. He’s doing a mighty fine job of that all by himself. And the last person who would be surprised by that is special counsel Robert Mueller, who has seen Trump’s public statements as some of the most incriminating pieces of evidence against him, particularly with regard to obstruction of justice. This is just how Trump operates. He is so consumed by his narcissism that he truly believes that everything he says is brilliant and furthers his objectives. By the time he finds out how wrong he is, it will be too late.