Trump blew out of town on Christmas Eve, headed for Hide-a-Lago to thrash the little white ball and wait out the subpoenas to start pouring in from New York.  On the way out the door, he released yet another weird video, this time calling the joint appropriations and coronavirus response bill “a disgrace” for its spending and $600 per month relief payments to Americans, calling for $2,000 per month, which is what the House Republicans proposed IN MAY.  The problem?  Trump’s WH, through Steve Mnuchin, demanded the $600 per month and wouldn’t budge.  Like most things Trump, what’s going on now doesn’t make any sense unless you look at the world through Trump’s ME ME ME lens.

McConnell, as usual, was the cause of the months-long delay in a new relief bill.  Like Trump, McConnell really doesn’t care if you live or die, and is always happy to use you and me as hostages for no other reason than another political win that is only important to him and his circle of criminals. The one constant with McConnell is that he ALWAYS plays brinksmanship, holding legislation until the very last second, using those who need help as leverage to extract concessions from the Democrats and exact pain on the American people.  This time, though, McConnell may have outsmarted himself by waiting so long.

Historian and Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson posted a very interesting piece yesterday on Facebook about she believes is going on.  Her premise is that Trump is exacting revenge against his perceived enemies, including all of us as Americans for voting him out.  He’s also furious with McConnell, Thune, and other Republicans who have recognized Biden as the legal and official President Elect.  Apparently he actually did believe that he could bend reality and the courts and his party to his will to illegally seize power outside of any Constitutional authority.  When our fragile democracy held (at least so far), he has determined to burn down as much as he can, including throwing boxes of nails out of the wagon on his way out of town.

How did McConnell outsmart himself, you ask?  Richardson posits this:  Under the rules, during a Congressional session, the President has 10 days (not counting Sunday) to sign or veto a bill.  However, at the end of a session, though, if that 10 days runs beyond the end date, the bill just dies, called a “pocket veto”.  The current congressional session closes on January 3rd.  Richardson believes Trump received the bill to sign on the 24th, so that gives him until January 4th to sign.  If Trump doesn’t sign by the 3rd, the bill dies, the government shuts down, and millions of Americans suffer.  Millions.

This is the likely end game now for Trump.  The voters said no; the states said no; the Electoral College said no; the courts, including the SCOTUS, said no; the military said no; and the Congress has said no (so far).  If Trump burns it all down, there’s a fair chance that the Dems take the Senate by winning the Georgia runoffs.  The mess he leaves behind will take years for Biden to fix, if ever.  Trump’s stated plan is to run in 2024, and he’ll use the disaster of his own making as the reason to re-elect him to “fix” it.  Our only chance, short of Republicans growing spines, is Trump being convicted of a felony in New York or having one of his thousands of scandals finally stick.

These will be the only things (short of his physical health problems) that can stop him.

The latest:

The birthers are back, and this time with a vengeance.  Trump repeated the lie that Kamala Harris was not born in the US from the podium in the White House briefing room.

Trump’s goon, Louis DeJoy, continues his dismantling of the Post Office, happy to inconvenience 300 million Americans and all businesses for his boss’s benefit.  After the uproar, today he put out a letter acknowledging “unintended consequences” for his actions.  Translation: “Exactly what Trump wanted.”  DeJoy’s letter is laughable since, just yesterday…

Trump admitted he was withholding funds from the Post Office to make it harder for Americans to vote.  The one feature of Trump’s presidency is that he really doesn’t do anything to hide his criminality and corruption.  He just does it and admits it on national television.  Trumpists believe, “He’s just saying it like it is.”

At the same time, he and Melania applied for vote by mail ballots in Florida.  Yeah. They really did that.

Presidency by Chaos continues as the invertebrates in the Senate started their 6 week Labor Day vacation after doing diddly squat for suffering Americans.  We’re truly living in a post democracy country.

We have now been in isolation for 129 days while the president and the morons in Austin spin gossamer tales and fantastical fantasies ignoring the simplicity of science.  As Neil deGrass Tyson famously said, “The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.”  Cases of Coronavirus have exploded in not only Texas, but other red states like Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and Oklahoma.  Even California continues to be threatened due to the idiocy of some of its populace.

Those of us at most risk try to protect ourselves while our leaders do nothing to actually do anything to help.  I’ve never felt so exposed to risk since my draft lottery in 1971 during the horror of the war Viet Nam.  I have no confidence in our state government, and certainly not in the federal government that has devolved into a fascist regime run by criminals and screwballs.  And while all this is crashing down around our ears, what is Trump doing?  Besides firebombing by tweet, he’s sending out federal agents in unidentified combat uniforms carrying weapons of war and driving in unmarked vehicles to attack peaceful protestors against the very violence these stormtroopers are committing.  Against the orders of state and local authorities, Trump has sent these goons in for his own political purposes, trying to appear powerful in the face of his own abject ignorance and weakness.  The result?  Peaceful protests have become violent, turned so by the very agents Trump has declared are there to enforce the peace.  Last night, the mayor of Portland was actually gassed by federal goons in unmarked uniforms while he was speaking to his own people.

This. Is. Enough.  We all know the mental and moral state of the most corrupt president in US history.  He doesn’t care if you live or die, and has actually become the leading cause of death in the US after his unimaginable recklessness and gross negligence as the pandemic exploded in our country during the last six months.  Trump’s most recent assault on American’s constitutional rights and common decency by his unidentified goons has been exposed by Reuters and the Lawfare blog, showing documents that articulate a strategy of “protecting” monuments and federal property from “violent criminals” in America’s cities.  Of course, that’s not at all what they’re actually doing.  What they’re actually doing is starting violence where no violence existed in order to justify Trump expanding this to other cities to cause more violence to give Trump the excuse to expand…you get the drill.

All of this effort was organized in secret by Trumpists in the WH and “acting” officials in the DHS.  It’s designed in such a way that its secrecy makes it almost impossible to exercise oversight by the Congress.  This operation certainly requires funding by illegally using money appropriated for other purposes.  And all this is happening with McConnell laying down and allowing Trump to do what he wants, when he wants as he destroys what’s left of our democracy.

To summarize – Trump is violating the Constitution, federal laws, and two centuries of practice in not using federal forces on its own people.  DHS was founded as a knee-jerk reaction to the 911 attacks.  The problem is that having DHS consolidates too much authority in too few officials with not enough oversight by the legislative and judicial branches.  The DHS must be broken up post haste.  I know that won’t happen any time soon, but this is just one more righting of a wrong on the list of thousands of wrongs that must be fixed after we fumigate the WH and the Senate.

Many of the stormtroopers that cleared Lafayette park the other evening to make a path for Trump to do his photo op in front of St. John’s Church were wearing tactical gear, but no badges, ID plates or insignia.  The press immediately noticed and began investigating.  The Washington Post got to the bottom of it this week – they’re from the federal Bureau of Prisons, called up personally by Bill Barr.  The BOP confirmed this shocking news and lied that they weren’t wearing BOP insignia or identification because they were being used “in a broader mission.”  NO, they wore no insignia to make it harder to figure out who to hold accountable for police violence.

Adding to his mountain of lies, Bill Barr actually denied ordering the BOP officers and others to clear Lafayette Park to give Trump a clear lane to carry out his stunt for the photo op. He said that park police were already clearing the park when he arrived. That assertion doesn’t pass the straight faced test, and that wasn’t the question.  The question is, did he give the order to clear the park so Trump could safely strut over to the church?  Of course he did, and while they were at it, cordoned off the park with heavy security fencing to permanently distance the White House from Americans Trump is hiding from.  And he did all that with his employees from his prisons in unmarked uniforms to conceal their identities.  This is the exact same tactic that Putin used when he deployed “little green men” into Ukraine in 2014 in his attempt to take over that country and Crimea.  The Russian government later admitted that those soldiers were indeed Russian military.

Welcome to the new normal of Trump’s America.

Trump revels in adoring crowds, and is terminally addicted to holding rallies where he rambles for hours, insulting everyone from former presidents to Hollywood stars to poor people just trying to live without violence in their lives.  Whenever any of his staff (this week Scott Pruitt) gets more press coverage from him, you can bet he’ll wing his way out to some remote Red State town and hold a tightly controlled rally where he is the star attraction to make outrageous statements and lie in a continuous stream to bring the attention of the press back on him.  The tactic is as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise.

But it’s worse than Trump just feeding his ego.  The mantras that Trump chants from the stage are corrosive; hateful; untrue; misogynist; racist; divisive; insulting to millions of Americans.  He displays the worst possible behavior of any major political figure in US history, and he gets away with it.  The audience, herded up tightly around the stage to make it look more crowded than it actually is, roars approval to every word of propaganda uttered by His Orangeness. Truth is I can’t even watch anymore, but the few Trumpists I know (and still talk to) love it and repeat the falsehood that he just “says it like it is,” or “says what needs to be said.”  The effect of Trump’s babbling is that he pushes reason and common decency further off the margins of a civilized society.

The problem, though, is that non-Trumpists (especially mainstream Democratic leaders) refuse to confront Trump’s falsehoods head-on.  They worry that they might lose votes from people who wouldn’t vote for them ever, even if their lives depended on it.  Combine the Democrats’ passivity with the GOP’s invertebrates in Congress, Trump dominates our national conversation virtually unchallenged.  Trump’s behavior (even staged like one of his cheesy reality television shows) is that of a tyrant;  he listens to no one; there is no right and wrong, only Trumpisms; truth doesn’t matter.

No one wants to say it, so I will.  Trump’s rise signals the US teetering on the edge of totalitarianism and fascism.  Comparisons to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise to power in the 1930s are not inaccurate.  With the complicity of evangelical Christians and malleable social conservatives, fascism is taking hold of our society.  Our government is now actually engaged in secret prisons holding separated families, violating international laws and common decency.  The government has started a de-naturalization program to revoke US citizenship and deport legal immigrants who have lived in the US for decades.  The US military is now actually discharging immigrants from its ranks who enlisted with the promise of citizenship.  Scholars and academics are persecuted and insulted.  White supremacy is growing at a rate not seen in decades.

The question is, can fascism take hold here in the US?  The answer is, you’re Goddam right it can because it is happening right now.  Do we have an example of this ever happening in the US before?  Again, the answer is yes.  In the late 1930’s while the darkness of fascism was descending over Europe, the same thing was taking hold here.  In fact, it was growing rapidly, and I’ll show you actual incontrovertible evidence of it.  On February 20, 1939, the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization established in the US, held a massive rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City.  Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, together with the American Jewish Committee and American Civil Liberties Committee, went along with the rally based on free speech and free assembly rights.  The result was chilling and even included the beating of a Jewish protestor on the stage.  The only event that stopped this movement in the US was the war in Europe.  Here is a short video of the rally produced from historic footage by Field of Vision.  Watch it.  Then tell me that it’s not ominously similar to what we are witnessing today.

I won’t nauseate you be repeating all of the nonsense spewing forth from Donald Trump’s mouth and fingers these last few days except for the tweet about Confederate monuments:

Today, he’s really, really concerned about the removal of “beautiful statues…”. Never mind that these “beautiful statues” are of racists, oppressors and treasonous turncoats.  Not only is his criticism historically and factually misdirected, he is ignoring his own malfeasance when it comes to preserving sculptures.  Back in 1980, Trump was getting ready to build the building that put his name on the map, none other than Cheeto Tower on Fifth Avenue.  The building was to be built on the site where the Bonwit Teller building stood.  The building had beautiful art deco friezes, which Trump publicly promised to preserve and donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I know you’ll be shocked by this, but he lied.  When he found out that preserving the sculptures would delay construction of his monument to himself by two weeks, he ordered the sculptures jack hammered into a million pieces.  Nice.  Here’s what they looked like before Trump struck:

Here’s the detail:

Yep, these are gone, replace by this:

So, Trump’s crocodile tears over taking down Jim Crow era statues of bigots and oppressors are a little lost on me.

As if you needed another reason to be appalled, I’m happy to help.