Quote of The Week: “We need to take away children.”
On the glass half full front, if you survive the Trump Era, you will be a firsthand witness to the most bizarre and disruptive episode in American history, in what seemed almost a national suicide attempt, electing Donald Trump as President. That’s of no help now of course as the pandemonium is still underway and gets exponentially worse daily, but you might want to gather your thoughts on the matter because our grandchildren surely will ask us someday what the holy fuck America was thinking in 2016.
But surviving the Trump Era got trickier on Friday when the President got medevacked on Marine One to Walter Reed Hospital with an acute case of Hoax-19, and it soon became apparent that the president was a one-man plague, a super-spreader who would see scores of people around him also test positive for the virus this week, and send the Attorney General, most of the Heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top government officials into quarantine, just 6 days after the Rose Garden Massacre, a dangerously crowded and unmasked gathering of a Who’s Who of the Republican elite to celebrate the nomination to the Supreme Court of a Handmaiden (seriously, she held the title Handmaiden for years, you can look it up).
There was no way Coronavirus was missing that party. For her part, Judge Coney-Barret showed poor judgement indeed by showing up to this Covid Swap Meet with young children, none of them wearing a mask, and by forgetting to mention that she signed onto a public advertisement calling for the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Vice President Pence and Democratic nominee Biden were immediately tested and came up negative, their security protocols heightened (at least in Biden’s case, while Pence mirrored Trump’s irresponsibility) and the Secret Service extended its protective shield around Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, 3rd in line to the Presidency should both the President and Vice President become incapacitated. Not so lucky were Kellyanne Conway and Senators Mike Lee and Thom Tillis and over 30 others by week’s end.
None of whom were treated to the smorgasbord of powerful antiviral cocktails given to Trump, or given the full-court press by the best doctors in the world, making sure the fat old reprobate doesn’t (a) drop dead and (b) infect the entire hospital with his reckless behavior, such as recording pep talk videos and posing for pretend work Photo Ops signing blank pieces of paper with his trusty Sharpie (making us wonder if we’ve ever seen him using a normal writing implement).
On Saturday we learned that Trump was being treated with Remdesivir, steroids and kid gloves, as he was given free reign to make more hospital videos (another Presidential record, being the first Covid patient to take over a hospital), his familiar orange face paint missing, revealing a pallor almost as white as that of Mike Pence. Trump promised to return to his crowded rallies “very soon.”
Not going anywhere soon were his debate prep coach, the former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, his campaign manager Bill Stepien, and Senator Ron Johnson, all testing positive, with Christie checking in to a hospital immediately.
On Sunday, with the President absent, the White House staff was having trouble deciding on which lie about Trump’s condition to tell the public, after Trump got furious with chief of staff Mark Meadows for accidentally revealing the truth, telling reporters in an unguarded moment that the President’s condition is far more serious than they had been led to believe. Trump’s latest Game Show Host refugee of a personal physician (in the same sense that Michael Cohen was his personal “attorney”), Dr. Sean Conley, tried to explain that it was routine (it is not) to administer the steroid dexamethasone, in addition to the Remdesivir, while a moment’s research reveals that Dexamethasone is used on those who are severely ill with Covid-19, not in the mild case Trump seeks to portray.
Senior Trump Campaign advisor Jason Miller (famous for getting 3 women pregnant at the same time, one of them his wife), ridiculed Joe Biden for wearing a mask like a responsible adult, saying “Biden uses masks as a prop,” an allegation easily proven by Joe’s suspiciously healthy status, while his non-mask wearing boss proved his manliness by getting rushed to the hospital with dangerously low blood oxygen levels, meaning there was even less oxygen getting to his brain than its usual slow trickle, a frightening prospect.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was not so pleased with the Trump Administration since he complained he has not been contacted by the White House about potential Covid-19 exposure in his State following the Ohio debate, after multiple reports of Covid-positive Trump staffers and campaign workers emerged, with no names provided for the required contact tracing.
Then the Patient-In Chief really jumped the shark when he decided that life in the hospital was “very boring,” the exact same conclusion arrived at by every other hospital patient ever. Difference is, no other patient had the power to take over the hospital, break quarantine (and every other hospital rule), while controlling the flow of information about his status, and then ordering the Secret Service to take him on a Queen Elizabeth-style waving tour as the Presidential motorcade slowly made the rounds outside Walter Reed, where crowds of Trump supporters had gathered for the past two days making a nuisance of themselves in a Hospital Zone.
A driver and 2 Secret Service Agents were forced to share a hermetically-sealed (in case of gas attack) limousine with a very sick Covid-19 patient because the man was unable to last 2 full days without public adulation, a man whose biggest fear is appearing weak (strong men have no such concerns), as bizarre a spectacle as has been seen on the nation’s roads since the OJ Simpson slow motion chase 26 years ago.
Then Trump announced (!) “I might be released tomorrow,” which of course meant that a satellite ICU would have to be immediately installed at the White House, along with a full 24/7 medical staff, since Trump was far from recovered, but no one would say how severe is his case. The only definite information on Trump’s true condition coming out of Walter Reed was his weight, a robust 322 pounds of American greatness.
On Monday we were blessed to learn a great deal more than most of us knew about the effects of steroids on the unstable, as Trump unleashed perhaps (and this is really going some) his single-craziest torrent of Tweets in one day, mostly in shouty ALLCAPS solidly supported with multiple exclamation points, prompting even his bug-eyed loudmouth son Donald Junior to voice the opinion that his father is “steroid crazed.”
His other crazy adult son, Eric, was busy at the time giving a deposition to the New York State Attorney General’s office concerning criminal charges against the Trump Organization, consisting of Eric, Ivanka and the 2 Donalds Trump, plus their longtime accountant-turned State’s Witness, Allen Weisselberg, who knows where all the financial bodies are buried and has agreed to tell the truth about Trump family crimes in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution.
And if that’s not crazy enough for one Monday to satisfy you, that was the day that our country’s top health official, HHS Secretary Alex Azar, met with 3 of the top crackpots advocating the achieving of herd immunity by (!!) infecting every single person in America with the Coronavirus, nothing short of the genocide of an estimated 6 million Americans, with countless more severely disabled by Covid-19. For most of us, as we scan our extended families, there are surprisingly fewer ‘spare people’ to throw into the volcano than Azar and Trump might imagine.
Funny how Trump “Didn’t have a lot of time to meet with Fauci” about the biggest threat to the United States, but found the time to appoint a Herd Immunity quack as the new head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist with no experience in viral diseases but a guy who has a hunch about such things, sort of like asking the Magic 8 Ball if this is the right wire to clip when you’re dismantling a ticking time bomb.
The question is, as always, “how do you tell when Trump goes nuts, since he’s always been a raving lunatic?” Fair question, that, and one that Trump did his utmost all week long to illustrate. It was as exhausting as it was disturbing, a relentless onslaught of insanity that just would not stop, like Fellini’s most mind-blowing movie on an endless loop. Only it was not Fellini’s most mind-blowing movie on an endless loop, but the horrifying reality of the President of the United States stripped bare of the last vestige of even the pretense of sanity.
While White House officials were trying to block strict new Food & Drug Administration guidelines for the emergency release of a coronavirus vaccine, complaints poured in from Washington DC and from Bedford, New Jersey, where Trump met with 206 donors just prior to his diagnosis, about the lack of White House cooperation with providing names so that local health officials can conduct their life-saving contact tracing.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell and his Republican loyalists plan to go on with the Speed-Confirmation hearing of Judge Amy Coney Barret, despite several of them falling ill with Covid-19 from attending the Rose Garden Massacre. Senator Ron “Rona” Johnson, who is sick and highly infectious to others, declared “I will go in a moon suit” to the Senate floor to vote for the first Supreme Court Justice that speaks in tongues.
It was unclear who will provide said moon suit, Space Force or his own personal wardrobe, or if Johnson will even be upright at that point. Less fortunate than his fellow Senators were Johnson’s fellow attendees at an Oktoberfest fundraising dinner the same evening he tested positive, where Johnson attended mask-less and minus his moon suit, mingling with the crowd. But don’t try that at home, boys and girls, because for regular Joes and Janes that just may be considered attempted homicide.
Tuesday found yet another letter to the American public signed by 1600 Department of Justice alumni warning us about Attorney General William Barr using his influence to undermine free and fair elections, which tells us that they didn’t exactly need to employ their considerable collective sleuthing skills, since Trump and Barr have been saying out loud over and over and over again that they are determined to undermine free and fair elections by every means at their disposal. Nice to hear reasoned objections, though.
The Secret Service and Twitter seconded their opinion of All Things Trump when an agent said “He’s never cared about us,” in reaction to Trump’s insane and risky motorcade, and Twitter removed his false claim that Covid-19 is less deadly than the seasonal flu, for being “a public health hazard.”
And speaking of public health hazards, Coronavirus is exploding in multiple states, causing an NFL game cancellation in Wisconsin, where field hospitals are being set up as hospitals are overwhelmed with Covid patients and deaths are devastating small communities. The corpses piling up in refrigerated trucks all over America are being called Trump Steaks.
Meanwhile, another famous Covid patient, First Lady Melania Trump, was quarantining in the White House, just in time to hear tapes of herself being aired on CNN saying “Give me a fucking break!” about children forcibly separated from their parents, and referring to her annual duty of decorating the White House for the Holidays with “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration? But I have to do it.” Many people are saying that the oddball results of her efforts bear out that sentiment.
Another woman in Trump’s life made headlines on Tuesday when Donald Junior’s domestic partner, who is somehow (!) an advisor to the President, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was exposed as a not only a frightening apparition when she spots a microphone, but a sexual predator too as we learned that Fox News paid Guilfoyle’s female assistant a large financial settlement and terminated Guilfoye’s contract 2 years before it expired, proving that her gender was no barrier to being a true Fox big shot and a budding Republican star, all bellowing and weird like a Giuliani protege, but easier on the eye, and totally on board with sexual misconduct towards the vulnerable.
Then we learned that New York State District Attorneys are investigating a small bank in Russia with ties to Russian intelligence that moved $330 million into our old friend in this interminable Trump Era narrative, good old Deutsche Bank of New York, at the same time it was lending that sum to Trump, explaining how such a bad credit risk as Trump (a pariah to every other major bank) was able to secure such an astronomical loan.
It seems that Deutsche Bank is somehow tangled up with almost every crime Trump and his family are accused of committing for decades, including the Trump organization partnering with Deutsche Bank to run a money laundering operation for Russian mobsters, exchanging Trump’s condominiums for dirty mob money, which then became instant “clean assets” for Russian gangsters and Kremlin-connected oligarchs, and could only grow in value. That’s something to bear in mind the next time Trump bellows about the Russia Hoax.
Only such an Administration could possibly distribute the memos described in an internal document at the Department of Homeland Security showing how “unnamed DHS officials” were pressured to make comments (!!) sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse, the gunman who shot three people in the middle of a protest rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them, a young man praised by Trump because he is an avid Deplorable known for praising Trump on social media before he heeded Trump’s call to arms, just like some of his kindred spirits did in Michigan later in the week.
As news of Trump’s internment camps becomes harder to come by amid the Covid crisis and the DHS wall of silence in the face of rumors of systematic sexual abuse of minor children, we learned of the program’s inception and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions weighing in on immigration policy with “We need to take away children.” Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, the man who took away half of Robert Mueller’s case and buried it, went even further, telling five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were, and government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were (!) barely more than infants.
Joe Biden said the second presidential debate should not be held if Trump is still infected with coronavirus, but that he would base his participation in the debate upon recommendations from medical experts, a clearly radical notion to Republicans long accustomed to relying on Trump’s hysterical claims to judge reality, even unto their mortal peril (See: The Rose Garden Massacre and the Superspreader Tour 2020 and its trail of of infections and corpses). A compromise was struck for a virtual debate with Trump, Biden and the moderator in separate locations, an easily manageable bit of technology, but Trump rejected the idea because he would not be able to shout over his opponent and make screwball faces.
Meanwhile Congress found that 4 Big Tech mega-corporations has monopoly powers and should be broken up, at the same time they are forced to rely on the social media giants to fight 3 major problems; foreign and domestic election interference, a deadly pandemic misinformation campaign being conducted by the President of the United Sates and his allies, and the vicious attack on our Postal System by our own government. Indeed, Facebook and Twitter closed all Q-Anon accounts that same day and have been labeling Trump’s most offensive messages as “False Information” for weeks.
While his immigration policy designer and all around creep Steven Miller tested positive for Covid-19, Trump did a little cancelling of his own when he abruptly ended talks with Democrats on an economic stimulus bill for the other 330 million people suffering untold hardships and economic distress in this worsening pandemic. Any thought that his brush with the virus would open Trump’s heart to the suffering of his country were dashed when everyone caught themselves and realized this was Donald Trump they were talking about, a self-absorbed old miser who sees sees only the letters “m-e” in the word empathy.
As the White House grudgingly approved the strict FDA vaccine guidelines it tried to derail, Dr. Rick Bright, a senior vaccine scientist who was demoted for complaining about cronyism and political interference in science, resigned his final government post on Tuesday, saying he had been sidelined and left with nothing to do, one of the most respected virus scientists in the world, a man who will no doubt be hired immediately by a big pharmaceutical company for big bucks.
As it happens, this eventful Tuesday was also when the Department of Homeland Security released it Annual Security Assessment, reiterating their earlier statements that White Supremacist extremists will remain the deadliest domestic terror threat to the United States “for the foreseeable future.” Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf added “as Secretary, I am concerned about any form of violent extremism, however, I am particularly concerned about White Supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.”
Former CIA director John Brennan chimed in, accusing current intelligence chief John Ratliffe of selectively declassifying documents ahead of the November election that benefit President Donald Trump, telling CNN that the decision to release materials gathered by the agency on Russian allegations that Hillary Clinton was planning on “stirring up a scandal” and saying “John Ratcliffe is anything but an intelligence professional. It is appalling his selective declassification of information. It is designed to advance the political interests of Donald Trump and Republicans who are aligned with him.”
On the legal front, Trump lost one when his challenge to the legality of New Jersey’s mail-in laws was shot down by when Federal Judge Michael Shipp found those provisions to be “legal and sound,” while lawyers for E. Jean Carroll, the magazine columnist who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in an upscale Manhattan department store dressing room, asked a judge to block the Department of Justice from taking over her slander case against Trump on the grounds that he slandered her while he is President, presumably making it okay, calling Barr’s unprecedented move “an attempt to distort the law,“ arguing “there is not a single person in the United States, not the President and not anyone else, whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted.” On top of that, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals said Trump can’t block Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance’s subpoena for his tax records & financial statements. Next stop, Supreme Court.
Then Trump decided to check himself out of the hospital, certainly against doctor’s orders, and unheard of for a recently admitted Covid patient. He Tweeted a dementedly upbeat message saying Americans should not be afraid of the virus or let it dominate their lives. You know, like those 7 million sick and 210,000 dead, exactly none of whom had a helicopter on the lawn and world class teams of doctors with advanced therapies at their fingertips.
Then he had a film crew waiting for him to ascend a staircase to the White House porch to make a campaign video upon his return, where he immediately pulled off his mask, a huge no-no for a covid patient, then started spouting gibberish about feeling better than he has in 20 years, the first of many steroid-induced rants, matched by scores of increasingly unhinged and paranoid Tweets in rapid succession, as White House spokespeople filled in for Trump by repeating his lies about completing contact tracing, while Trump waxed eloquent about contracting Covid-19 (!) on purpose, since that was the (!!) Presidential thing to do.
That bit of lunacy didn’t last very long when, as if he never said anything about getting sick on purpose and magically no one would remember him saying that, he suddenly decided it would be better to blame (!) Gold Star families instead, explaining “they want to hug and kiss me, and I let them,” while the facts are that they want to do no such thing, and absolutely no unvetted, unscreened and untested person has been allowed anywhere near the President since March, never mind touch his person. It was Trump’s own recklessness and disregard for his security bubble that got him and half the people in his orbit sick (the people running the country).
Wednesday evening gave us the Vice Presidential debate, which, if little else, showed us why Trump picked Mike Pence as his running mate when Pence showed that he is the least likely person on Earth to steal Trump’s spotlight. At his debate with the composed and formidable Kamala Harris, the most fascinating thing about the man was the fly that roosted on his head for over two minutes, and the only thing that was discussed afterward.
Thursday morning found Trump still shrilly objecting to a virtual debate, Joe Biden urging him to stay home, follow his doctor’s’ orders and stop being a one-man superspreader event, and the whole mess wound up being postponed by the Debate Commission until such a time as Trump regains his health and/or is no longer infectious.
Naturally, Trump’s reaction was the opposite of how a reasonable human being would conduct themself, and he decided that instead of debating he would hold another large and undisciplined campaign rally in Florida on Saturday, one of the States suffering the most from a deadly Covid spike, perhaps figuring “what’s the harm in one more old codger with the Rona stopping by Florida to spread the love?”
That day Trump’s old pal Elliot Broidy collected the inevitable reward of being Trump’s friend or business associate, a criminal indictment, on charges of illegal lobbying to stop a prosecution, a serious obstruction of justice, and we found out that a top White House security guard has been very quietly hospitalized since September with Covid, kept secret from even the White House staff with whom he interacted daily.
Meanwhile, Trump’s steroid-magnified rage-Tweeting continued apace, disjointed, delusional and paranoid to the point that Trump began demanding that his Cabinet Secretaries begin immediately (!) filing criminal charges against his political rivals, even calling into the Rush Limbaugh radio show to conduct an hour-long rambling pity party that was so very redolent of madness and paranoia that Congress began preparing legislation on how to deal with a clinically insane President.
Which brings us to Quote of The Week #2 to end this craziest of Trump Era Weeks, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”, a Tweet from Trump several months ago in support of (!) armed militias storming the Michigan Statehouse because they were too big a bunch of sissies to wear a mask while Covid-19 ravaged their State.
Trump had been steadily bashing Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer for acting responsibly and formulating a science and data-driven response to the pandemic, and Trump’s endorsement of Michigan’s Redneck Brigades came to its inevitable conclusion when the FBI arrested a whole bunch of them for planning to (!) kidnap Governor Whitmer, (!!) overthrow the government of Michigan and (!!!) put Ms Whitmer on trial for treason.
Luckily for Governor Whitmer, the State of Michigan and the rest of the country, the plotters are all Trumpers, and thus unable to plan a meal, never mind a Governor’s kidnapping and a successful coup d’ etat. This ragtag collection of tubby drunks and cockamamie ideologues with more guns than solid information at their disposal are not the only unstable nincompoops out there either.
The people Trump himself implored to “stand by” last week, and who he almost daily encourages to intimidate voters at our polling places, consider themselves deputized defenders of Trump’s America, a White America with its knee forever on the necks of those they consider subhuman. Americans are firing right back with our greatest weapon, our votes.