Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, has repeatedly warned about the dangerous character of her uncle. She wrote the national bestseller Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
In the wake of the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I’m reminded just how stark the choice before us is—on the one hand, a man who understands sacrifice and honors service, on the other one who, after strenuously avoiding his own service calls those who died fighting for democracy “suckers” and “losers” and then turns around, as he did last Saturday, and says, telling the truth for once, “unless you are a psycho or a crazy person or a very stupid person, who would say that, anyway?”
Well, Donald, according to your former Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, you would—and you did.
Last Saturday also marked 150 days until Election Day, which means we now have 145 days to save this country. Just as in 2020, we are on a knife’s edge in the choice between democracy and what we can now clearly say is fascism. (Back in the more innocent days of the fall of 2020, we were still calling it autocracy.) The difference now, of course, is that the edge of the knife is even thinner, the stakes higher, and the electorate by turns more misinformed, more checked out, and more demoralized than we were almost four years ago. And all of us continue to be traumatized to one degree or another, a fact that is barely acknowledged.
So, what do we do? I think the first thing we must do, is to make clear to Americans exactly what they’re choosing between — Uncle Sam or the crazy uncle who wants to burn it all down.
Uncle Sam, representative of the best of what America aspires to, was well-represented last weekend in Normandy, France, where President Biden traveled to pay his, and our, respects to the original Antifa activists — the brave allied soldiers who stormed the beaches to liberate a continent and save the world from the dark forces of fascism which the other uncle is currently stoking.
While in France, President Joe Biden visited the Aisne-Marne, the American cemetery in France where many of our heroes are buried. Five years ago, my convicted felon uncle refused to go to Aisne-Marne because it was raining. He didn’t want to mess up his hair. Seriously. But, much worse, he didn’t see the point in wasting his time going to see the aforementioned “suckers” and “losers”—those whose bravery helped turn the tide against the Third Reich.
Joe Biden reminded the world what American leadership and courage look like. He reminded the world of the power of alliances. He reminded the world what is best about America. Every day, my convicted felon uncle holds up a mirror to the worst of us, and it’s long past time people start looking—really looking—at what is reflected there.
While President Biden stood with our allies and argued that the United States should continue to lead the fight against fascism, my convicted felon uncle was being interviewed by “Dr.” Phil McGraw and Sean Hannity, altogether three of the greatest examples of white men failing up in American, and he made it clear that one of the driving forces behind his wanting to be president again is “revenge.” He wants to be free and clear to go after his political enemies. Although the two sycophants tried mightily to steer Donald away from the subject, he could not be dissuaded—and he couldn’t have been more clear:
“Sometimes revenge can be justified,” he told McGraw
“I would have every right to go after them,” he told Hannity.
We are reminded every day that convicted felon Donald Trump hates America — he hates its people, its ideals, its democracy, its judicial system, its leaders, its rule of law. He even hates his own followers. At Saturday’s rally, he came right out and admitted it: “I don’t care about you. I just want your vote.” That he openly courts and aligns himself with the same forces we defeated in Europe 80 years ago makes it all so much worse.
Joe Biden has pulled us out of the hole we were in thanks to the Trump administration’s horrific and willful mishandling of the pandemic and the economic collapse that ensued; he has restored our standing in the world; he honors the memories of those who sacrificed everything so that our democracy might endure. My uncle, the convicted felon, honors nothing and he will continue to rally the darkest forces—that he himself has lifted from their hiding places—to erase those memories and render those sacrifices meaningless.
This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a normal election. In 146 days, Americans are going to choose what kind of country we want to be going forward. Will it be the same country that fought on those beaches against the evil of tyranny and fascism? Or will we choose to align the most powerful country in history with the malicious designs of the enemies we risked so much to vanquish?
There is a palpable sense of fear among the good guys these days. In Europe, our allies wonder who we are. At home, we wonder the same. Are we the good guys or the bad guys? Are we aligned with Uncle Sam or the uncle who can’t seem to speak without lying or act without committing crimes against our country and our Constitution? In just a few months, we will know.
I believe in the America Joe Biden and his party represents. I believe our best chance forward is to make sure the administration stays in Democratic hands, we increase the Democrat’s Senate majority, and make sure we take over the House. Overall, we are a good people, striving to do better. I believe we are better than my convicted felon uncle and the hatred he espouses and inspires.
America has won this fight before. In 146 days, we can win it again.
THE PROBLEM IS that a huge proportion of Trump’s faithful are just that: Faithful — like the members of a cult are faithful to their leader and reject all criticism of the leader. How do you “unconvince” members of a cult? The simple answer is that you can’t. They will drink the Kool Aid and die before they will reject their leader.
The other factor in the MAGA cult is that they are siloed in their own world of disinformation, and there is no way — no way — to penetrate that silo.
The most effective action that can prevent Trump from being re-elected is for the Democrats — and all of us — to reach out to the young people who are simply ignorant of Trump’s history and inform them…relentlessly.
Read the following from MSNBC:
What Voters Don’t Know About Trump Will Astound You
June 13, 2024, 3:00 AM PDT
By Charlie Sykes, MSNBC columnist
An interesting detail emerged from a recent CBS/YouGov poll on how well Republican voters understand the stakes of Donald Trump’s campaign for the White House. Only 35% of Republicans polled, as noted by The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, say they know that Trump has been indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. Almost the same number — 34% — don’t think he’s been indicted for his attempts to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
As readers here undoubtedly know, special counsel Jack Smith has, in fact, charged Trump with multiple counts of conspiring to defraud the government and hold onto power. “The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified,” the indictment charges.
Those charges are on hold pending a Supreme Court decision on Trump’s claims of presidential immunity. But for a majority of Republican voters, those charges simply do not exist.
Welcome, once again to Trump’s fact-free alternate reality universe, in which Trump is relying on disinformation, ignorance, and voter amnesia to propel himself back to the Oval Office.
On the stump Trump freely rewrites history, peddles bizarre conspiracy theories, and aggressively memory-holes the darker parts of his record.
Thus far, it has been working for him.
A recent poll from Marquette Law School found that half of Republicans don’t believe Trump had any classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, despite photographic evidence of their presence. Without evidence, Trump has also convinced an overwhelming majority of his supporters — 80% — that the charges in the New York hush money case came at the direction of the Biden administration, rather than solely by New York prosecutors. There is, of course, no basis in fact for that claim. Even one of Trump’s high-profile former attorneys, Joe Tacopina, has dismissed the allegation as nonsense.
“Joe Biden or anyone from his Justice Department has absolutely zero to do with the Manhattan district attorney office,” Tacopina told MSNBC. “We know that’s not the case, and even Trump’s lawyers know that’s not the case,” he said. “People who say that — it’s scary that they really don’t know the law or what they’re talking about.”
But, as Tacopina surely knows, this is precisely the message that Trump is pushing. And it is working, fueling Republican calls for retribution and payback if Trump returns to power.
Trump is also relying on GOP voters believing his revisionist history of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. At a recent Nevada rally, he called rioters who attacked the Capitol “warriors” who had been treated “horrifically.” Trump has repeatedly suggested he would issue sweeping pardons for the attackers. Increasingly, he has embraced conspiracy theories suggesting that government agents may have incited rioters to enter the Capitol building that day.
“All they were doing is protesting a rigged election,” Trump told supporters in Nevada. “That’s what they were doing. And then the police say: Go in! Go in! Go in!”
Trump also referred to several other conspiracy theories that have flourished in the right-wing fever swamps.
“How about scaffold Joe, the guy on the scaffold?” Trump asked at one point. “Or how about the big FBI guy or wherever he comes from: ‘Go on in, everybody! Go on in! What a setup that was! What a horrible, horrible thing!”
All of those rumors, theories, and allegations have been repeatedly debunked, but that has made no difference to Trump or, apparently, to the MAGA base. Last December, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found Republicans more sympathetic to the rioters than ever. Only 18% of Republicans say the Jan. 6 protesters were “mostly violent,” while 72% of Republicans polled said that “too much is being made of the storming” of the Capitol. Only 24% thought it was an “attack on democracy that should never be forgotten.”
Those numbers are consistent with Trump’s success in convincing Republicans of the big lie. Polls consistently show that most Republican voters do not believe that Biden was legitimately elected in 2020. Last year, nearly 70% of GOP voters thought Biden’s 2020 win was illegitimate, according to a CNN poll — despite voluminous evidence to the contrary.
Trump has especially benefited from this widespread amnesia about his actual record when it comes to younger voters. A recent poll of voters ages 18-30 found that many of them simply don’t know what Trump has said or done in the past.
A poll by the Democratic-aligned public opinion research group Blueprint found that less than half of registered voters under 30 had even heard of Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, his “very fine people on both sides” comments relating to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017, or his insistence that John McCain “is not a war hero” because he was a prisoner of war. Similarly, most young voters have never heard of Trump’s more egregious comments about women, minorities or his denigration of immigrant communities.
“It might shock those of us who eat, sleep, and breathe politics, but young voters really don’t remember the daily controversies of the Trump years and grew up understanding this kind of rhetoric as politics as usual,” Blueprint pollster Evan Roth Smith said. In one sense, this voter ignorance is a kind of superpower for Trump. But it is also a potential weakness, especially because he is relying heavily on “disengaged voters” for his current political strength. A recent New York Times analysis found that Trump’s narrow polling lead “is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.”
Such an important post, Quickwrit!!!
Quickwrit,
Trump Proves the efficacy of the Big Lie. Say it often enough and lots of people will believe it.
Diane and All: Part of the reason such confusion abounds is because someone got hold of the narrative early and called it the Trump “Hush money trial.” Instead of something like:
Trump’s ELECTION RIGGING TRIAL. CBK
Well said, CBK!
Good point, CBK. Maybe the headline writers liked the shorter phrase.
Hi Diane: Or maybe those who hear it would understand better exactly what it was about instead of letting the reality (the fraud of election interference) hide under the ideas associated with “hush money” for a porn star. The name would directly reflect the reality of the felony.
We’re talking communicating with the mentality of MAGA here. The stats say that huge numbers of them didn’t understand what it was about. CBK
CBK,
Historians and psychologists will ponder in years to come how Trump mesmerized his base to believe whatever he says.
Diane: Yes, about historians. I hope they realize and write about the place and influence of FOX News.
The other thing is the oh-so-obvious revelation about the careless and greedy character (and lack of it) on the part of the so called “one percent,” or those with lots of money. We should dust off the phrase, ROBBER BARONS especially for them.
CBK
Magnificent exhortation, Mary Trump!
I listened to an interview this morning with a Trump friend and supporter. The interviewer had about 4 minutes to talk to the guy. Every reason for his support of Trump was based on a string of lies and assumptions. There was no time for the interviewer to question all the BS the guy was spewing. Like Trump, he threw so much falsehood out that most of it stuck. Like Trump, he did not answer the questions but talked past the question into a murky litany of grievances.
ROY: Like with money, a fool and their cherished political institutions are soon parted. CBK
I can’t use my iMac desktop to leave comments, only my Microsoft Windows based desktop that I’m planning to get rid of because Bing AI is sneaky and…. (lots of deleted profanity — use your imagination and take into account that I’m a Marine and combat vet)
Well, sneaky, and I do not like how sneaky Bing AI is. The stress and frustration that sneakiness creates for me triggering my PTSD is off the chart. So, I avoid Bing as much as possible. The only way to avoid Bing totally is to stop using Microsoft Windows.
End of rant.
Anyway, the comment I couldn’t post using my iMac mini desktop follows:
I disagree with one thing she wrote about her uncle Traitor Trump. I don’t think the traitor is the most dangerous man in the world, yet.
At this time, the worst president in US history, twice impeached and then found guilty by juries of rape and fraud, is in third place and 2nd place goes to Putin.
First place goes to the collective that supports Traitor Trump. The majority of those voters are known as Christian Nationalists who do not practice or preach what Jesus Christ taught.
Nazi Germany was a Christian State supported by Protestantism in Germany, not unlike the Chrisitan Nationalist in the United States today that support Traitor Trump claiming his is God’s son reborn.
Nazi Germany as a Christian State: The “Protestant Experience” of 1933 in Württemberg on JSTOR
For many evangelicals, Jesus is their savior and Trump is their candidate | AP News
The Christian Nationalists in the US that support Traitor Trump are fascists who have been working hard for years and maybe decades to undermine the US Constitution and bring back the Inquisition and witch trials. And they now control the US Supreme Court, Texas and Florida, et al.
Lloyd . . . best argument for nationalizing some businesses who retain their sense of ownership and control way beyond their usefulness. CBK
Because of all the hoopla around the Hu report and Mr. Hu’s comment about Biden’s cognitive capacity, this issue of cognitive capacity is much on people’s minds, and so people have been making a big deal of the weird tangents in Trump’s speeches about utter nonsense.
But here’s the thing: Trump has been making these ever since he announced his candidacy back in 2015. THIS IS NORMAL FOR HIM. He is a profoundly ignorant and profoundly stupid fellow (these are two different phenomena), and his command of the English language is that of a sixth-grader, perhaps. So, he falls back on stock phrases that often do not apply to whatever he is talking about, and he makes mistakes, and he recognizes that, and so he tries to cover by rambling on and inevitably makes things worse. And very commonly he says things that a normal adult, with normal cognitive faculties, would never believe and say, like
that we should nuke hurricanes, buy Greenland, send astronauts to the sun, inject disinfectant or
that stealth airplanes are actually invisible or that the Continental Army captured the British airports or that Alabama is on the East Coast or that India is lucky not to have a border with China or that China pays the tariffs we levy on their goods and
brags about passing a dementia test which he has mistaken for an IQ test and claims that having had an uncle who taught at MIT means that he, Trump, is smart and
loads and loads more utter NONSENSE.
He probably has the worst command of the English language of any president other than Reagan in his second term, who was by that time suffering from extreme dementia. I have often referred to Trump’s speech as “toddler English.” That’s just reporting. Trump’s former Secretary of State calls him “a moron.” His former Attorney General has said that he “should be nowhere near the Oval Office.” His former Secretary of Defense says that he “has the cognitive capacity of a five-year-old.” The intelligence officials who were in charge of briefing him said that he “struggled to read,” “didn’t read the Daily Briefing,” and that it was difficult if not impossible to get him to understand things. Tillerson and Bolton have both said that Trump did not understand much of anything about the world and about the law and that it was difficult to explain things to him because of his profound lack of knowledge.
How does one get to be seventy-plus years old and not know the difference between and IQ test and a dementia screening to that stealth airplanes are NOT invisible?
By being ignorant and stupid. This is a man who told a reporter back when he was running for the 2016 election that he got his military information “from the shows.”
Not the brightest bulb at Home Depot. Not the brightest crayon in the box.
cx: How does one get to be seventy-plus years old and not know the difference between an IQ test and a dementia screening or that stealth airplanes are NOT invisible?
Is he really that stupid, or does he exaggerate his stupidity to cover the stupidity he has? His modus vevendi is to create enough sh@$ so that some of it hits the fan and creates some publicity, any publicity. The result of this is that no one knows all the crap he does or would do if allowed.
This term, all those buffers like Bolton and Sessions will be gone. Imagine, Bolton and Sessions are buffers.
I heard a retired vet in a Nashville Dr office talking about Biden and the Illuminati the other day. Am African American guy, he sounded like a red neck.
Almost everyone who worked with him says that yes, he is really that stupid. And ignorant. Do you really think he just made up the stuff about thinking that stealth airplanes are invisible or that we should inject disinfectant or sweep forests to prevent fires? Really? Seems HIGHLY unlikely.
His stupidity is evident any time he tries to put together an argument. He simply can’t do it. He is too dumb.
Anyone who brags about how smart he is is dumb and insecure.
My answer is in moderation. Bet you can guess what it is.
Very stupid mobster types (e.g., John Gotti, Sr.) typically think that they are smarter than others around them because others are so dumb that they are governed by moral and legal scruples. The think they are smart because they are running a scam. Trump is one of these. He has been a con artist all his life. And he thinks that that’s “smart.” But like Gotti and so many other mobsters, he’s actually an idiot. They call them “wise guys” not because they are actually smart or wise but because they are wise asses who think, despite the evidence, that they are better than others are. It is instructive to read the transcripts of the wiretaps and prison recordings of John Gotti, the guy the press presented as the sophisticated “Dapper Don.” He can barely articulate a complete sentence in English. A huge percentage of his speech is made up of expletives that substitute for the word he doesn’t know or can’t think of. Almost everything he says is vindictive or threatening. He’s an ignorant, lowlife thug.
Like Trump.
According to 538’s average of national polls, Trump is ahead by 0.9 percent, and Biden’s disapproval rate is a staggering 58.5 %.
It blows me away that almost 60 percent of voting-age adults disapprove of Biden. He has been a much better president than I thought he would be, and his opponent is an obscenity.
meanwhile there is policy. Given that Trump certainly does not understand policy (or anything else), everything he says he would do—cut rich folks taxes, raise tariffs, keep social programs, control the fed—will make inflation worse.
Long before trump, the Republicans had settled into the practice of engineering the economic policy to make democrats look bad, but it is sure that trump will exacerbate inflation and the debt.
The federal debt increased by 7.8 TRILLION under Trump.
Bob, I remember when Nikki Haley said that Trump exploded the national debt. One he became the last man standing, she forgot. She also forgot that his nickname for her was “birdbrain.”
I suppose the few sane Republicans are competing to see who picks up the pieces when Fascist Don is gone.
J. D. Vance is counting on getting the number 2 spot as a prelude to moving up to number 1.
I saw a comment on Twitter by a prominent economist, who said that Trump’s plans are highly inflationary. You are insightful, Roy.
With Trump, it’s CLEARLY the Crazy Convicted Felon Uncle.
And, the craziness is getting worse. Moreover, it’s been getting worse for years.
The health and medicine news website STAT reported this more than seven YEARS ago:
“STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable…Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain…Now, Trump’s vocabulary is simpler. He repeats himself over and over, and lurches from one subject to an unrelated one, as in this answer during an interview with the Associated Press last month:
‘People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it — you’ve been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it’s funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. … The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall.’ “
https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-speaking-style-interviews/
Ever watch one of those Trump Covid “news” conferences? Dear god. They were unbelievable. How did ANYONE watch even one of those and think that this man should be in charge of taking the trash out, much less national economic, military, environmental, transportation, and health policies?
More recently, last week, at a rally in Las Vegas, Trump riffed on sharks:
“So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question,’ Trump explained. And he said, ‘Nobody ever asks this question,’ and it must because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart.'”
“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’ By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of shark … I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy.”
“So I said, there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, do I get electrocuted? If the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking, do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted? Or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘you know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming to that water. But you know what I’d do? If there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark.”
JUST IMAGINE if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden had said ANYTHING nearly as looney-tune as this? Over at Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski opined that Trump is “unfit” for office. And that doesn’t even count in his felony convictions and all the indictments and his incitement of the January 6 insurrectional sedition.
This man is not JUST the crazy uncle. He’s a pathological liar, a racist and misogynist, a Russian asset, a seditious traitor, and a poor excuse for a human being.