Jamelle Bouie writes regularly for The New York Times. I subscribed to get extra writing from him. In this one, he asks the question that has undoubtedly occurred to many people.
Bouie writes:
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.

“But they’ll find out soon enough.”
Never underestimate the power of denial.
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And forgetting
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They will not find out. Right wing media, now the dominant media in the country. They will continue to serve up falsehoods disguised as truth. No one will ever know that billionaires have their hands in taxpayer pockets because they will be wondering about that girl who just made their daughter look sick in basketball is really one of the trans athletes. They will never hear that the prices of food and necessities are so oaring due to tariffs because there will be programs aimed at Latino areas in towns.
Still, there is the Brazilian experience, where Bolsonaro was ousted and prosecuted. We could do that. I’m not holding my breath.
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Jon . . . especially if they are so heavily invested, . . . psychically, emotionally, politically, morally, spiritually. (I left out “intellectually” on purpose.)
It’s not like others haven’t been trying to “woke” them up–they have, but Trump voters apparently would rather keep the Fox News Cotton Propaganda in their ears and nah-nah at gays and trans people.
“Don’t listen to the democrats, it’s all just political rhetoric aimed at poor, innocent, Donald Trump.
If anyone here didn’t read that Guardian article posted here yesterday, don’t . . . . before you tape your socks on. CBK
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A lot of denial, and IMO a lot of deliberate ignorance. Low-information voters don’t want to know about any bad things around the demented orange rapist felon because he’s their king. You can’t “know” when you’re basking in the comfort of your Fox News silo. Coupled with all that, a 24/7 firehose of right-wing lying/disinformation; forget the NYT/WaPo legacy media. Social media is spreading propaganda like wildfire, and it won’t stop any time soon. Where is the dem’s counterpoint to all this chaos? They should have had a strategy to buy up the local media outlets a lot sooner, but Sinclair beat them to it. “A 2019 study in the American Political Science Review found that “stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a conservative direction relative to other stations operating in the same market”.[4][5] The company has been criticized by journalists and media analysts for requiring its stations to broadcast packaged video segments and its news anchors to read prepared scripts that contain pro-Trump editorial content, including warnings about purported “fake news” in mainstream media, while Trump has tweeted support for watching Sinclair over CNN and NBC.”
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Correction:
“stations bought by Sinclair reduce coverage of local politics, increase national coverage and move the ideological tone of coverage in a REGRESSIVE, REACTIONARY XTIAN THEOCRATIC direction relative to other stations operating in the same market”
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@Diane – Would it be possible to set up a recurring section of your site to discuss how those of us in our local communities can work to counter the effects of Trump and his team in dismantling education? I am an involved parent with our public schools with access to a local network. And we’re looking for, and will be coming up with ideas that can be shared, connections to make etc.
Given your established audience, is that something you would be able to (or suggest where it could be) put in place?
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Rob: The below was on one of the talk shows (I think it was The Daily Show, but not sure–I erased it already. But I wrote it down and looked it up:
Indivisible.org
I only perused the site a bit, but I liked very much what the guy had to say about it during the interview. It has “tools” for community organizations around this issue. CBK
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Catherine & Rob:
Yes, Indivisible is very well known & it’s all over the place (Illinois even has Rural Indivisible & sure other states do as well). There are always so many Indivisible activities going on that you could be involved in more than one every day. Having been around the block & seen much, Indivisible took a HUGE part in hard work all over the country; great #s of people in Blue states (IL & CA, for example) made weekly pilgrimmages to knock on doors in WI, NV, PA, etc. Phone banking & postcard writing was constant. I attend a weekly Zoom which started out local & small but now includes people from all over the country.
In other areas, Indivisible works on: gun control; preventing mis- & dis-information; labor issues; Project 2025 education for prevention of its implementation; climate change & much more.
Rob, definitely make contact with Indivisible (do go to indivisible.org as Catherine suggested) & you’ll be able to accomplish what you need to do. Good luck (don’t we all need it/need to make it)!
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Retired: I forwarded the website to an online “friend” who I think will use it as an organizing resource for a large group of people–I’ll forward your note also. Thank you. CBK
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Rob,
I don’t know how to divide the blog. But I’ll think about setting aside a day.
Join the Network for Public Education. It’s free. NPE can work on this.
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MUSK WARNED AMERICANS ABOUT HARDSHIPS AHEAD
Hundreds of thousands more Americans are in danger of losing their jobs if Trump carries through with his tariff plans: The conservative Republican Tax Foundation predicts that Trump’s tariff proposals will:
The conservative Republican Cato Institute points out that “the U.S. tariffs imposed in 2018 and 2019 [by Trump] WERE ALMOST ENTIRELY PASSED ON TO U.S. CONSUMERS, RESULTING IN HIGHER PRICES.” That’s INFLATION. (Click on the link below to read the Cato report.)
Deporting 11 million immigrants will kill American farms, leave food to rot in the fields, causing food shortage and sending the price of groceries soaring. More INFLATION.
Trump’s pledge to repeal Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act will eliminate tens of thousands of construction industry jobs which were created by the Act to rebuild America’s roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, and hundreds of other infrastructure projects.
Trump’s pledge to slash a trillion dollars in federal spending will kill even more thousands of jobs because scores of American industries depend on government spending to buy the products they produce.
Americans were warned about this before the election by Elon Musk himself who In his virtual town hall meeting on X on Friday, October 25, warned everyone that when he becomes Trump’s head of government efficiency, Americans everywhere will face economic “hardship” because he will slash many government programs, eliminating jobs that depend on government programs, including slashing Social Security.
Musk gave fair warning.
Voters didn’t listen.
Unemployment and inflation lay ahead for America.
https://www.cato.org/publications/separating-tariff-facts-tariff-fictions
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They will not find out. Too much faux news.
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What Trump is already getting ready to do is unconstitutional and a threat to the U.S. Constitution, no matter what the 6 justices on the US Supreme court rule.
“A sitting president of the United States has both civil and criminal immunity for their official acts. Neither civil nor criminal immunity is explicitly granted in the Constitution or any federal statute.”
Official acts for a president are defined in the U.S. Constitution as are the powers of each of the three branches.
The U.S. Constitution grants the President of the United States a number of powers, including:
The President’s powers are outlined in Article II of the Constitution
There’s also an oath that is in the US Constitution.
The Constitutional Oath is an oath of office that is administered to various officials in the United States government, including the president, senators, representatives, and federal employees:
Everyone who serves or served in the U.S. military also takes that oath. The oath the troops take is a little different than the one the officers take that lead and command those troops. The officers do not have to obey the president even though he is their commander in chief if that president gives them an order that is not considered legal. The troops must obey the president and their officers.
What happens when the officers command their troops to disobey a president’s orders? Officers have the responsibly and power to do that when they think the presidents’ orders are illegal and a threat to the U.S. Constitution
I think those military oaths to defend the U.S. Constitution are going to be put to the test, and we are going to find out what happens on or soon after January 20, 2025.
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The vast majority of working class Trump acolytes are clueless. Sunday “60 Minutes” did a story on Bethlehem, PA, where they said the city has a high level of predicting the winners in presidential races. They interviewed residents that had voted for Trump. One woman said Trump was more “relatable” than Harris because he talked like her and understood working people better. She mistook Trump’s ignorance for empathy. A Latino barbershop owner said he voted for Trump because he is better for business. A commentator said a lot of voters were tapping into their pre-pandemic economic recollections, not our current economic reality.
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The negative effects of T’s planned “improvements” seem reminiscent of Elon Musk’s mass firings in the days immediately following his purchase of Twitter, when he discovered after the fact that he’d fired the people who, in effect, knew how to turn the lights on & had to rehire them. I hope they were all able to retire on what it cost him to get them back.
The best comment on that acquisition is the fact that even now, 2 1/2 years later, any news article mention of “X” includes the obligatory addendum, “the company formerly known as Twitter.”
I’m sure Elon & T will be very happy together.
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NO!
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if Trump does only half of what he promised, there’s lots of misery ahead.
it won’t be pretty. Little Marco as Secretary of State? Kristi Noem as head of Homeland Security? Brainworm Boy as a potential Secretary of Health and Human Services? Elon Musk???
Here’s another take on low-education low-information “swing voters”:
”there’s much to be deeply concerned about, because why a country votes for a candidate, and what they actually get from them, are often completely different. And American voters voted for a candidate promising mass deportations, authoritarianism, reactionary anti-feminism, ethno-nationalism, and a mean, vindictive spirit of revenge, grievance, and retribution. Shit is about to get very real, very soon. And, quick history lesson, the Nazi party was voted into power in 1932 largely because of economic discontent. Once in power, parties do what they want to do, not what voters actually voted for.”
”So I don’t want to sugarcoat anything…I also don’t want to suggest that swing voters took a clear look at the two sides and made some rational, informed decision. They did not. Right-wing media like Fox News, right-wing influencers like Elon Musk, and supposedly “independent” figures like Joe Rogan all ignored or minimized Trump’s past misdeeds, lied about immigrant crime, exaggerated the evils of “wokeness,” glossed over abject racism, and totally failed to connect the dots on the economy. It’s not like swing voters took a long, hard look at Trump’s felonies and mental health and voted for him anyway because of the price of eggs (more on that in a moment). They were, in part, bamboozled. “
”…, he will make things worse. One example: the price of eggs again. Why are eggs so expensive right now? Not because of Biden’s failed economic policies — but because of the bird flu and corporate profiteering. Yet RFK Jr. wants to shred the agencies that help prevent outbreaks of diseases like this, and Project 2025 wants to deregulate the poultry industry. This will make the next outbreak more deadly and more expensive. I’m not suggesting that average voters will follow the news this closely, but they will notice the effects.”
We all will notice the effects of what Trump does. But remember Covid? Remember Trump’s egregious lies and his failed response? Remember the people who said masks and vaccines didn’t work and refused to wear masks or get vaccinated? Which workers were most directly impacted by shut-downs since their jobs couldn’t be performed from home?
When things go wrong- and they will – Trump will bluster and lie – he always does – and the right-wing mediasphere will reverberate the lies and the not-so-smart will believe them.
But, if the pain is particularly acute, maybe not.
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Here’s the link to the article:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-americans-vote-plutocrats-taxes-1235161296/
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Yes, many of them DO know. They WANT what he is selling. As I will keep saying, only 33% of Germans voted for Hitler.
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What do I have to do??????????/I cannot post any thing. wh
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· Shared with Public
I was proud of what I wrote one finger at a time about having Biden wait until September to decide whether to pardon trump or not based on whether he thought president trump was behaving like a president, or whether he was behaving like the idiotic bozo so many people had grown so tired of. Someone told me it could not be done that way and I threw in my experience creating Joe prichard Gibraltar album from 1974 as we were deciding what to do about Nixon …(first song is “ blind man”)…I get no more money for it, but people all over the world do…7 dollars?…it is good—-Michael tomasky on D.ravitch I was responding to…but I could not figure out how to post d r directions were to difficult….maybe having Biden wait until September was a worthless suggestion…Nixon drafted me in 1969 and I was a medic and also a saxophone player (Neal Larsen was great on keyboards) there is picture of us in hammer stones in St. Louis (soulard)
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Well happy veterans day to you and your moderators. thanks a lot.
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I had no idea I was being moderated…three painstaking efforts by a 78 year old fan…………I guess it must have been pretty bad…….I doubt Diane would have pulled this on me.
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It happens sometimes for reasons we don’t understand. Especially if there are multiple links in your comment.
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Joe, I did not put you in moderation. WordPress did. I was out all evening at a charity event and I just saw your note. Most of the time,when comments are put in moderation, it’s WordPress.
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I was truly shocked and stunned when Trump won the presidency. I fully expected Harris to win, I thought there were enough sensible Americans who would do the right thing and vote for a sane decent human being, Harris. Wow, I was wrong by light years and the nightmare will begin in January.
From Huffington Post:
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will appoint billionaire Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to a new government entity nicknamed “DOGE.”
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement,” Trump said in a statement. [snip] DOGE stands for the “Department of Government Efficiency,” which, despite the name, is not an official government agency. The title of the new “department” was coined by Musk himself, seemingly nodding to Musk’s endorsement of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. End quote
Oh my God!!!! Musk and Ramaswamy will be part of the government and will be in charge of DOGE! Unreal and worse than I even imagined.
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Joe, I just posted the same story.
Get this: Trump picked a FOX News host to manage the Departnent of Defense, a mammoth bureaucracy.
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Diane: Apparently (according to Gen. Barry McCaffrey on MSNBC, the Fox News host is a Harvard graduate and former professor of Government at West Point. That doesn’t mean that he is not Trump bat-shxt looney.
. . . McCaffrey: “Hegseth’s . . .policies will upend policies in place since WWII, and the purge of generals . . . is extremely unsettling.” CBK
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CBK, not sure Republicans will confirm him. If they do, he won’t get respect from high ranking military at the Pentagon.
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Diane: If I were the folks at Harvard, I think I’d take a good hard look at the curriculum. It seems it’s almost like Linda and the Catholics–everywhere you turn and see distorted human development and even corruption, you see a Harvard degree.
And speaking of Linda, my guess is that Leo Leonard is not far from the spotlight right now either. (No, I don’t want Linda back.) CBK
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My advice to job hunters: If you’ve worked for Fox News, or robbed banks, or raped women, or spent time in jail, and want to work for the Trump administration, be sure the experience is prominently highlighted on your resume. CBK
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IN MODERATION. CBK
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This is from the LATimes, Nov. 11. It gives a brief but sad history of how journalism got the way it is right now. All copied below with my emphases: CBK
A new low for trust in U.S. journalism
Since Fox News began, the industry has failed to earn confidence. Then came Trump.
LZ GRANDERSON (LA Times Writer)
It’s easy to forget that while the first Watergate article appeared in the summer of 1972, Richard Nixon did not resign until 1974.
Over the course of those two years, Nixon won reelection in a historic landslide, mocked journalism and threatened the Washington Post repeatedly. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ordered the release of tape recordings related to the scandal that Nixon acknowledged the reporting was true and resigned in shame.
Something else happened during these two years as well: The Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought his first U.S. newspaper — the San Antonio Express-News — and he moved to New York.
Fascinating timeline, isn’t it? As the true power of journalism was emerging in the country, Murdoch came to America to pervert the field, just as he had done in other countries with a free press.
Before Watergate, Nixon had often fantasized with his top aide Roger Ailes about running his own conservative television network. Murdoch was already known in his country and Europe for using his newspapers to push a conservative agenda using misinformation. Murdoch’s impulses and Nixon’s seemed almost destined to unite eventually, and indeed, decades later when the mogul made the former president’s dream come true by creating the conservative network Fox News, Ailes was hired to run it.
A couple other pieces had to fall into place first though. President Reagan obliged. In the ’80s, Reagan expedited Murdoch’s immigration status, so that as a U.S. citizen, he could buy more of America’s media companies. As he took power, Murdoch leaned on editors and producers to reflect his political views and not the truth that journalists found through reporting.
Reagan also pushed to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, which had required holders of broadcast licenses to represent multiple sides when covering controversial issues. Freed from that, Murdoch’s television stations could say they were “fair and balanced,” but they were no longer required by law to actually be so. You know what came next, with the rise of Fox News and the decline of an informed public.
While the 1st Amendment clearly protects the free press, what it cannot do is preserve the public’s trust in the free press. That’s up to the industry, and in short, we failed. Donald Trump’s return to political power through last week’s election is just the latest byproduct of that failure.
The decline in trust of journalism was carefully orchestrated. One man who worked for the Heritage Foundation in the ’80s and advocated for repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, James Gattuso, would go on to become a top official at the Federal Communications Commission under the first President Bush.
That would be the same Heritage Foundation that is behind Project 2025, the conservative blueprint to reshape the federal government around Trump.
Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward had broken the story of the Watergate burglary and Nixon’s involvement, wrote in a magazine piece in 1992 titled “The Idiot Culture”: “In retrospect, the Nixon administration’s extraordinary campaign to undermine the credibility of the press succeeded to a remarkable extent, despite all the post-Watergate posturing in our profession. It succeeded in large part because of our own obvious shortcomings.
“The hard and simple fact is that our reporting has not been good enough. It was not good enough in the Nixon years, it got worse in the Reagan years, and it is no better now. We are arrogant. We have failed to open up our own institutions in the media to the same kind of scrutiny that we demand of other powerful institutions in the society. We are no more forthcoming or gracious in acknowledging error or misjudgment than the congressional miscreants and bureaucratic felons we spend so much time scrutinizing.”
The blurring of lines between hard news and opinion — coupled with “hot takes” that have replaced a lot of reporting and informed analysis — has brought billions into corporate media. The industry has more consumers now than ever before, in more media. However, journalism has been hurting in the process for decades.
It all contributed to what we saw last week, when a majority of American voters backed Trump either because they hadn’t heard of his worst failings — which is hard to imagine — or because they did not know whether to believe or how to interpret what they had heard about his failings. That sort of world of distrust and confusion is exactly what Gattuso/Reagan/Murdoch/Ailes had hoped to create, so that criminals like Trump could not be held accountable by a free press as the founders intended.
The questions regarding what Democrats did wrong in this election are certainly worth asking. However, the industry of Woodward and Bernstein is in dire need of analysis as well. More than 70 million Americans apparently trusted the words of Trump, a serial liar, and embraced his “fake news” characterization of the industry.
There’s no getting around it: The 2024 election did not just reflect a new high point for Trump, but also a new low for trust in American journalism.
Threads: @LZGranderson
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Sigh.
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I think the election also reveals a new low point in the thinking abilities of the American people–thinking which has been both in absentia and willing to be distracted and then captured by the manipulations of a master bubble-maker. CBK
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I want to explain….about wanting Biden to wait until September to decide whether Trump should be pardoned or not…..an angry republican told me it was a done deal already……pardon Trump and he will pardon Biden’s son. It all fits together with me getting drafted by Nixon, being trained to be a medic, and then playing my saxophone—-Neil Larsen is on Keyboard.
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When I posted what do I have to do????? I was using it as a test to figure out how to get something posted…..and I made the B / and that other thing all black….and my what do etc. appeared as a surprise to me. I had figured out how to leave a comment. I used my I.phone to make my words about Biden and wait until September to decide whether Trump deserved to be pardoned. One letter at a time to make words. It took over an hour, but it looked reasonably well written. But, unlike my what to do??? comment, it would not appear. I am not sure why, but it might have been word press–I suspect I was still doing something wrong. Meanwhile, two or three people were telling me that my make Biden wait until September would not work. The version that appears “I was proud” was something I typed in a hurry on my laptop for my Facebook, but I was able to copy it and it seemed to appear right under “leave a comment”. But it was not appearing so I said happy veterans day to the moderators, and claimed Diane would not be pulling something like this on me……how on earth, she found what I had said at 1122 PM and explained about word press is a testament to how she must care for those who respond to things we believe is important. ……………………..so, to make an effort to try one more time……I thought Biden should wait until September to decide about any issues regarding pardoning Trump…..people told me no..that wold not work…As the photo above helps you understand, I really was drafted by Nixon in 1969, and served in Vietnam as a combat medic and then as a saxophonist including Neil Larsen who went home to play for George Harrison and then for dozens of others for many decades….I played a few more notes for a lot of years, including a Joe Prichard Gibraltar album in 1974 and I did send some suggestions about the man who drafted me for V
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finger slipped……drafted me for Vietnam…..I am three weeks younger than the man who could not make it because he had sore feet, and I was his replacement I told people this year, just joking, suggestions about how Nixon needed to be treated in 1974…don’t know if Ford had to pardon anything, but thanks if there is any understanding about me, but feel free to raise hell where I need to hear it.
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