We Need to Be Done With Donald Trump

One of the most stunning things about the last near-decade now is how much the country has been contorted by one man. We're in this fucked beyond fucked moment, teetering on the brink of totally and irrevocably fucked, because of Donald Trump. Yes, it's also everyone who voted for him, everyone who elevated him, everyone who kowtowed to him, and everyone who wipes his ass so that he keeps going. But, in the end, it comes down to one goddamned man. It's perfect example of what happens when your nice little democracy relies too much on basic human decency and when the decent ignore or elide the acts of the indecent.

The seeds for Donald Trump's ascendancy were planted over 40 years ago, with the rise of the Moral Majority and Reagan's openness to a portion of the craziest motherfuckers on the right, allowing the evangelicals and the John Birch Society leftovers a place at the political table. It continued, with the odious Pat Buchanan's nativist campaign, openly saying shit that Republicans had been implying for years. I'm not going to summarize the entire history of the ascension of the modern bugfuck insane conservative movement (besides, Geoffrey Kabaservice has done it far better than I could), but it's a straight line from the 2000 election fuckery to the enforced patriotism of the post-9/11 era to the Imperial Presidency idea of Dick fuckin' Cheney to the Tea Party to Trump, with lots of other events and ideas in-between. 

Trump is the vessel this evolving right-wing oligarchical threat was waiting for. Imperfect, for sure, but a populist who ran for office with a built-in audience that would sustain any efforts he made? That just makes the whole effort that much easier. If you get a skilled carnival barker to get the rubes to drop their hard-earned cash so they can enter the tent, that's half the battle. The other half is convincing them to suspend all reason and logic so that they'll believe it when a woman is sawed in half or rabbit appears out of a hat. They won't believe it's a trick at all, no matter how much someone tries to convince them it was sleight of hand or forced perspective. A skillful barker will get the rubes to not only believe in magic, but to insist that anyone who tells them it isn't magic is a fool: "Goddamnit, that woman levitated, and you can't tell me she didn't."

Metaphors aside, we find ourselves in this extraordinarily dangerous moment, yes, because of that entire history, but primarily because of Donald Trump. Without him, this effort to completely undermine the electoral process of the United States wouldn't have gotten any momentum. How do I know that? Because it didn't get any momentum after 2000, when George W. Bush actually lost but no one did a goddamn thing, and after 2004, when there were allegations of shenanigans involving voting machines in Ohio. No one exploited that to discredit voting all around the country. Hell, John Kerry didn't even challenge the results. 

But Trump challenged results even when he won in 2016 because his fragile little ego couldn't handle that he lost the popular vote. He insisted that he lost California only because of non-citizens voting, which was absolute hogshit. It didn't happen. It's never happened that more than a statistically insignificant number of non-citizens has voted and virtually all of those were mistakes, not malice. Instead of accepting victory with some measure of decency and perhaps humility because of the popular vote loss, Trump barreled ahead with the brazen assertion that he really won the popular vote and anyone who said otherwise was lying. 

And it fucking worked. It became an article of faith among his MAGA idiot hordes that Trump was robbed of full victory. It's magic, and the reality of the trick didn't matter. That set the stage for the 2020 election and all the violence and violent rhetoric that came from one man's refusal to accept the outcome. You might have forgotten or suppressed it, but between Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021, it was one long howl of false outrage and lies, including unnecessary recounts, dozens of failed court cases, and, finally, attacks on the people who take on the job of making sure our democracy functions like a democracy when it comes to voting. Trump called any election officials or state officials who dared to say he lost "enemies of the people" and he and his goons ruined the lives of ordinary Americans earning a paycheck. (Although some have gotten gratifying revenge on these abject cockmites.) The kick in the nuts of the whole pathetic exercise is how many millions of people believed and still believe him. It's like mass fucking hypnosis. 

To put it simply, Donald Trump had no problem completely undermining one of the foundations of this country, and he had no issues with making a significant number of Americans lose faith in how their states and the nation run elections. It didn't matter that the 2020 election was a goddamn miracle because it took place in the middle of a fucking pandemic and should have been one of the great moments of communal triumph in our history. No, we couldn't have that because Trump, who was expected to lose, lost. And now just 28% of Republicans are confident that the votes in the 2024 election will be accurately counted. It's fucking madness, and one man is responsible for that plunge from 55% in 2016. 

It's not that big a leap to say that if Trump can so easily throw aside the integrity of our elections which, 2000 aside, has been pretty fucking decent for a couple of generations, for his own ends, then he can just as easily throw out even more norms and foundational aspects and, well, fuck, laws. He'll keep plodding along, with a Supreme Court decision that lets him basically do whatever the fuck he wants, until none of us recognize the country anymore. It's already fading away in the MAGA haze that can't be penetrated, in a fog of racism and hatred and a desire for the blood of perceived enemies to be spilled. It's not that it can't happen here. It's that it is very much already happening. 

If you feel like I do, like we're existing in a panic attack wrapped in an fever dream covered in a secret sauce of anxiety, then understand this: the only way it ends is to be done with Donald Trump. We need it to fucking stop, so he needs to lose and then we need to go through whatever avalanche of bullshit Trump is going to subject us to as he flails about in his last gasps of electoral relevance, aided by Elon Musk's billions and supported by the MAGA drones who would lay down their lives for their right to continue to be racist and dunk on the libs and beat up trans kids and tear apart migrant families. We need to go through it and come out the other side and see what's left and build it back to some kind of normal again. 

I don't think all of this (gestures at everything) continues as it is once we're done with Trump. There is no one who scratches the celebrity itch and gets the stupidest people to vote. All those wannabe successors are worthless, and even the famous MAGA suck-ups don't have Trump's P.T. Barnum-like ability to corral the rubes and get them to give their money and their freedom to protect him. Unless Trump himself anoints a successor, which he would only do if he won this election. Otherwise, he'll try to insist that he can run again in 2028, and that'll just be sad. 

We can be done. Really. This can be over. Think about how that would feel, how we wouldn't have to hear his slurring, sloppy voice or read his idiot brain droppings and pretend that they matter. Think of the feeling of liberation and the sense that maybe there is a future where we make things better. We need this. 

It's one fucking guy. For fuck's sake, we should be able to step over his ass and move ahead. 

It Really Matters That We Don't Know a Great Deal About Donald Trump

The louche punditocracy of the corporate media made a huge deal about "what we know" when President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and was replaced with Vice President Kamala Harris. Story after story was all about how voters didn't "know" Harris and how that would impact her election chances. And it never really stopped. Hell, at the beginning of this month, Fox "news" was still blaring, "Some Biden 2020 voters say they don't know enough about Kamala Harris," with an article that included such insightful words from supposedly undecided voters like "She has been the vice president for the past four years and not really implemented anything," which means they've probably only been watching Fox "news." 

But there's a fuck of a lot we don't know about Donald Trump and it's some pretty basic, life-or-death shit. I mean, think about what we do know. It's a fact that he's a rapist. It's a fact that he's a 34 times convicted felon. It's a fact that he stole money from a charity. It's a fact that he defrauded people with Trump University. It's a fact that he is currently out of jail on bail. All these are Things We Know.

In the category of Things We Don't Know? You can start with his health. We got a detailed look at Harris's current fitness for the job of president, including that she is up-to-date on her colonoscopies and mammograms. And when you see her on the campaign trail, she is active, ebullient, and engaged, while in interviews, she answers the questions clearly. You might not like the answers, but they are always in the ball park of what was asked. 

Donald Trump's health is, to put it politely, fucking alarming. He's sweaty and exhausted, and his speech is slurred and listless. He can't respond directly to a question, getting so caught up in his repeated lies and bullshit that he leaps from subject to subject like Benjy Compson in the first part of The Sound and the Fury...Sorry, sometimes the literary scholar in me rears its ugly head...how about: "jumping around like a jackrabbit on meth that's been swatted in the nuts"? He's obviously declined mentally, and he was in pretty sorry shape back in 2015, and he's obviously reaching some kind of expiration date on many of the things a body existing on Big Macs and Diet Cokes and no exercise can do. 

But we don't know a goddamn thing about his health beyond what the disgraced and drunk Ronny Jackson said and two paragraphs from some doctor that offered no details at all. And that goes for the assassination attempt, too. We never heard from the medical personnel who treated him in Pennsylvania, only a report from Jackson who visited Trump in New Jersey after he was released. As PBS's Newshour commented, "After a would-be assassin shot and gravely wounded President Ronald Reagan in 1981, the Washington, D.C., hospital where he was treated gave regular, detailed public updates about his condition and treatment."

I'm not saying there's any conspiracy here except one of silence. And maybe voters need to know whether or not they're really voting for JD Vance presidency. 

Then there's Trump's criminal trials. It goes without saying that Attorney General Merrick Garland fucked up by not immediately pursuing investigations and charges against Trump in 2021. But the wanton fuckery of Trump's lawyers and his self-appointed lackey judges has prevented some really important information from reaching voters: Is he guilty? We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of trying to overthrow the government and steal the election. We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of stealing government secrets (or, you know, mishandling documents). We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of trying to overturn the vote in Georgia (or, you know, get others to do it). 

We know he's a criminal, but we don't know the extent of his criminality. And, yeah, I know, I know, I fucking know, that most people with eyes who aren't fully up the ass of the MAGA monster or have a financial interest in Trump being free know for sure that Trump is goddamned traitor who should have been arrested the second Joe Biden was sworn in. On top of the trials, he's supposed to be sentenced on November 26 for his 34 convictions in the New York hush money laundering. We don't know what that's going to be. 

Trump claims that it would be "election interference" for the public to know whether or not one of the two candidates is guilty of dozens of crimes directly related to his fitness for office. But, then again, Trump thinks that if a TV network edits an interview in a way he doesn't like, it's election interference. In her decision allowing the release of an appendix of evidence in the January 6 case, Judge Tanya Chutkan smacked down that bullshit: "If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute — or appear to be — election interference. The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests." Yeah, that's the correct framing: more information is better than ignorance. Of course, more information is like salt to the slugs of the right. 

And more: He's never released his tax returns. We really don't know the extent of Trump's financial entanglement with other nations. We honestly don't have a single detailed plan from him, beyond the Republican platform and Project 2025, which barely mentions tariffs at all, the apparent alpha and omega of his economic plan. 

This shit matters. All of it. But, instead, we hear that voters "know" Trump but not Harris, who has been very clear about what she wants to do and has now done a fuckton of interviews while Trump is practically heading into hibernation because his brain is two cups short of a full pack of pudding. 

Besides, voters should fucking know what Trump did in his first term, but they've apparently forgotten that it was a clusterfuck of terrible policies and attempts to grab the golden ring of fascism, but just missing. We hear very little about all that, too. Our lack of knowledge about some pretty basic shit involving Trump is just a huge, bright warning sign before we go off the election cliff. 

Unfucking What You Can: A Case for Voting for Harris Even If You're Pissed About Israel

I'm going to try to be as clear as possible here in where I'm coming from.

I'm not going to make this about Israel's war with Gaza and Lebanon except to say that I stand with the large number of Israelis and Palestinians and the Lebanese people who want a ceasefire and the hostages and prisoners brought home. Nor am I going to talk about the Biden/Harris administration's continued policy of arming Israel. I've been pretty clear that I oppose the blank check on weapons the United States has given Israel and that conditions need not only to be met but enforced when it comes to massacring civilians. I want the mass killing of children to end. Dismiss me if you want because of that.

This is really about voting for Kamala Harris for president despite her response to a grave and horrific situation in the Middle East. I understand the impulse to withhold your vote because of this. I don't agree with it, but I understand it. As I've said before, I went through it with Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996 (I was pissed at him for his inaction on the Rwandan genocide and welfare reform), although I ultimately voted for Clinton because I didn't want Bob Dole picking Supreme Court justices or other federal judges. 

But I haven't had the same impulse with Harris. It's not that I'm deluding myself into thinking that Harris is going to completely change US policy towards Israel once she gets into office. See, I have a few things I believe about this whole situation when it comes to the politics of this fucked situation. I think that Biden’s treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu has been ludicrously naive and ineffective and based in a fear about an electoral backlash to any hint of opposition to Israel, a fear based in the politics of 30 years ago. I think that the refusal to condemn the actions of Israel and to hold them to international law lessens the credibility of the US in holding bad actors to account. 

However, Harris is still a part of the Biden administration. She cannot state a policy completely at odds with the policy of the president, and I think that Biden has unintentionally screwed over Harris by letting Netanyahu roll him so completely. Harris is showing some tiny signs of shifting away from Biden's position, as when she was asked about supporting Netanyahu on 60 Minutes and she responded, "I think, with all due respect, the better question is, do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people. And the answer to that question is yes." If this means something, it's hard to say, but the right people are freaked out by what she said. It feels like she's testing the waters. 

Again, I don't believe that Harris will all of a sudden take a stand on limiting or stopping weapons flowing to Israel. She might, but I won't hold my breath. But it's pretty clear that Trump will be worse, aiding and abetting whatever extensive war crimes Netanyahu wants to commit, with the added bonus of threatening to deport anti-Israel protesters from the United States and reinstating his ban on people from Muslim countries. I also believe that Netanyahu is, at least partially, prosecuting this war in a way specifically meant to interfere in the US presidential election in Trump's favor.

It's a fucked situation, one of many fucked situations going on right now. My vote can't unfuck everything that's fucked. Even if the most perfect candidate in the world were nominated, it still wouldn't unfuck it all. I will disagree with something; I will still see something as fucked. But I have a responsibility to unfuck what I can unfuck in whatever way I can unfuck it. Frankly, we all do.

If I vote for Harris, I accept that I am probably not doing anything to unfuck the current situation in the Middle East. But I also accept that I am doing something to unfuck so many other things and preventing many more from becoming fucked (or further fucked). I know that if Harris isn't elected, the parade of what's fucked will be grotesque and long, from the suffering of women over abortion restrictions to the suffering of families over mass deportation and threatened denaturalization to the suffering of everyone over the reversal of policies trying to mitigate climate change to the suffering of children in this country over the mad proliferation of guns. I know that rights will be taken away from queer and trans kids and adults. I know that Ukraine will be handed over to Russia and that an emboldened Putin is gonna fuck things up a great deal more. I know that people all over the world will be harmed by the United States moving into an isolationist and racist posture, with the potential for more wars. I know that free speech rights will be trampled by right-wing courts, workers' rights will be crushed by the elimination of regulations, and civil rights will be beaten and shot by the police. And the Supreme Court will be lost for the next generation, at least. That's just scratching the surface of fuckery that Trump and his more effective MAGA apparatchiks are planning to do, along with a huge helping of Christian nationalism. 

I'm not trying to minimize the suffering caused by Israel's decimation of Gaza and its threat of decimating Lebanon. I get the raging anger over it. I'm not even going to pretend I understand your feelings if you're from one of the countries involved or have family there. But not voting for Harris isn't going to solve it at all. That never fucking works. 

Whatever you thought about Hillary Clinton in 2016, you didn't make things better by not voting for her. Whatever you thought about Al Gore in 2000, you didn't make things better by voting for Ralph Nader or not voting at all. The losses in those elections didn't bring about some lesson for Democrats or some great ideological shift that wouldn't have happened otherwise. But we know what they did bring about, and it was fucked. We know that factually and demonstrably. You didn't make anything better. You didn't save a single person. You made yourself feel better, and maybe that's enough for you. (And, by the way, I'm including myself here. I voted for Nader, albeit in a state that was going for Bush anyways.)

So I'm gonna vote for Harris not because I agree with her on everything. I disagree with her on quite a bit. But I know she's the only candidate in a position to unfuck things I want unfucked or at least stop them from being fucked more. And that's a trade off that I'm at peace with. 

Three Things That Matter from Last Night's Vice-Presidential Polite-Off

My quick take on the vice-presidential debate last night between Peter Thiel's gimp and Governor Care Bear is that it doesn't matter who "won." If you give a shit about reality, Walz won. If you prefer your political leaders to be smooth-talking sociopaths spewing bullshit, Vance won. Otherwise, beyond a surprise line or two (like Walz saying that his son witnessed a shooting), it was a disappointingly normal debate where the Democrat was overly deferential and polite and the Republican was a merry liar.

But three things stand out for me. 

First, to that liar point, the most important moment in the evening was when the moderators corrected Senator JD Vance. Talking his usual fuckery about immigration, Vance said, "In Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes." After Walz spoke, quoting the Bible, moderator Margaret Brennan added, "And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status." And that's absolutely, completely true. Vance tried to lump legal immigrants in with undocumented ones. 

And that led to Vance whining, plaintively, "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check" and then his mic was cut off when he tried to explain how something legal is actually illegal, which it isn't. TPS was established by the Immigration Act of 1990, which was passed on a bipartisan basis by wide margins. It's the fucking law, upheld against court challenges up to the Supreme Court. You can't just say you don't like the law and therefore actions using it are illegal. It would be like saying, "I don't give a shit if your stupid laws tell me to pay people. I say it's illegal to force me to do so." You're just an asshole if you try to do that. (Yeah, I know who I'm referencing.)

Even more importantly, when Vance got pissy about fact-checking, he was saying, really, "I was told I could lie and get away with it and now you're telling everyone I'm lying. How dare you." He tipped his hand. He showed his cards. He did other gambling metaphors that show how every fucking word out of his smarmy, bitch mouth is a lie. If you fear fact-checking, you fear being found out. And that ought to be the headline: "Vance admits he's a fucking lying piece of shit" or however you wanna couch it. (Yeah, I know what I did there.)

The other significant moment was when Vance couldn't bring himself to fully lie. It was the end when Vance climbed to the top of fuckery mountain and planted a flag, saying that Donald Trump proved he's no threat to democracy "when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th." Yeah, but that's like saying the rhino that was just charging your jeep is a peaceful creature after you've hit him with the tranq darts. Walz challenged Vance's bullshit head on, in his strongest moment of the evening: "This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?" Vance started babbling some conspiracy theory nonsense about Harris censoring people over Covid and then Walz interrupted to say, "That is a damning. That is a damning non-answer." Vance wouldn't say Trump lost. He couldn't bring himself to say the one thing that would alienate the fucking animals on the MAGA side. And he couldn't bring himself to say Trump won, which would have discredited him immediately with future voters he's trying to sucker into supporting his cruel ass after Trump dies or collapses into an amorphous pile of raging orange goo. It was a moment of utter cowardice that should tell you everything you need to know about this amoral, squamous rich fuck. 

One more thing is worth noting. Throughout the debate, Walz kept talking about what Harris would do as president. Vance kept talking about what Trump would do. Neither of them talked about what they themselves would do as vice-president because what they want to do doesn't fucking matter. It's not the job. As I've said, sure, they can offer advice, but ultimately, they are there to preside over the Senate or replace the president, both on an as-needed basis. Vance and Trump keep attacking Harris as if she is the president, saying that Harris has had four years to do shit. That's another goddamn lie. She's had four years to carry out the policies of Joe Biden that he wants her to carry out. But the policies come from him. (And let's not even get into the "Border Czar" lie.)

The thing that annoyed me most about the whole fucking thing, which I really do think Walz won on points and on likability, is that, with a frustrating assist from Walz, Vance was allowed to seem kind of normal, which he most definitely is not and would not be if in power. Vance is Ted Bundy to Trump's Vlad the Impaler. Trump's slaughtering people left and right. Vance is gonna try to charm you so you don't see the crowbar behind his back. 

The Climate Crisis Should Be a Bigger Issue in 2024

I was finally able to reach my friends in Boone, North Carolina and Damascus, Virginia by text today. They said that they are physically fine, but they have no power, no internet, no water, scant cell service, and no way out, really, right now. Both towns are flooded, mud-covered, devastated. One texted that he's "emotionally wrecked" as he waited in a line to get a shower at a truck stop. Because he's my friend, of course he added, "Just found out I didn't have to blow the attendant." We went back and forth a bit on this lucky truck stop employee before I figured I should let him go for the sake of his battery. He probably had more important things to take care of, like getting the tree off his car. I didn't get to ask him how his dogs did. 

Hurricane Helene was going to be a motherfucker of a storm. Forecasters saw that from the moment it formed, and they predicted the storm surge and the wind damage that would hit Florida, which was, in context, pretty fortunate that Helene didn't turn slightly more east and directly hit Tampa/St. Petersburg. The area that was hit is not densely populated, but it badly fucked up towns in the Big Bend coast, like Cedar Key and Steinhatchee, wiping a couple off the map. 

Helene was a fast storm, which not only meant a significant storm surge, but also that its wind and rains would last as it headed inland. So, yeah, parts of Georgia, NC, SC, Virginia, and Tennessee got drowned. Appalachia was hit ridiculously hard; a good chunk of the tourist town of Chimney Rock in NC is just gone. Weather experts predicted flash floods, landslides, and death, and that's exactly what happened, with roads, bridges, and highways just slammed, making getting supplies in that much harder. This is a catastrophe that will change regions of the country.

And it was made significantly worse by the climate crisis that we've been warned about widely for a couple of generations. If you wanna read the science about how warming waters and seas rising has made things worse for Helene and other recent storms, you can do much better than me summarizing smarter people. 

The climate crisis is the most significant issue facing the world. Period. It's more important than immigration (although it's tied to migration because of how climate change is rendering places unlivable). It's more important than the wars going on or crime or inflation. How can that be? Because you can end wars in a heartbeat if the people at war want to. You can arrest criminals. You can do shit that has an immediate impact on almost anything. But not the climate crisis. You're not shooting your way out of a typhoon. We're a few decades behind where we should be in doing anything, and even if we go full force into mitigating the things that cause climate change now, we're a few decades, at least, from preventing shit from getting worse, let alone better. It's possible (see the ozone layer, which is healing but is about 40 years from finally being whole again). 

But before we get anywhere close, we are going to have to deal with the clusterfuck of awfulness that's going to tumble down on us like a Jenga game we couldn't help but play until the end. That means more weather events - floods, fires, droughts, and more - and it means dealing with the massive refugee crisis that is going to play out as areas of South Asia and elsewhere become too hot for human habitation. 

So you'd think that we might want to hear more about their plans to deal with the climate crisis from our presidential candidates. Well, I mean, really, we should hear more from Democrat Kamala Harris because Donald Trump and his Republican death cult have just decided, "Fuck it. Burn it all. We don't fucking care." 

Trump has stopped calling the climate crisis a "hoax" because someone finally told him it didn't poll well (Trump has no problem sounding like a fucking moron if people applaud the moronic statements). Instead, we get snide obnoxiousness. His brain ever stuck in the 1980s, Trump likes to say, as he did in Michigan this month, that the real global warming is the possibility of nuclear war, "not that the ocean’s going to rise in 400 years and eighth of an inch, and you’ll have more seafront property if that happens. I said, is that good or bad? I said, isn’t that a good thing? If I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property. I have a little bit more ocean." It's all so obviously false that it's shameful to have to fact check it. Otherwise, all Trump says is "Drill, baby, drill" (which is a line he stole from Michael Steele, who coined the phrase in 2008) and both he and Project 2025 talk about eliminating any restrictions on oil, gas, and coal and just basically letting the earth die as rich fucks get ready to leave for Mars in Elon's rockets or what the fuck ever. In other words, more "Fuck it."

It's a perfect opening for the Harris campaign, perhaps another way to appeal to young people, and Hurricane Helene provides the opportunity to bring up how Trump wants to kill any effort to shift to greener energy. Yes, oil production is higher under Joe Biden than under any other president, but Biden is also lighting a fire under the green economy, using the climate crisis as a way to develop new industries and more jobs. Trump would cancel all of that. It's a perfect foundation for Harris.

On her campaign website, here's the entirety of what it says about the climate crisis: "As President, she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all. As the Vice President said at the international climate conference, COP28, she knows that meeting this global challenge will require global cooperation and she is committed to continuing and building upon the United States’ international climate leadership. She and Governor Walz will always fight for the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis." Her economic plan only mentions it in terms of those jobs. It's honestly a little more vague than it should be.

At the presidential debate, asked directly about it, Harris said, "Well, the former president had said that climate change is a hoax. And what we know is that it is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go. We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue." And then she said, "And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels" before using that to pivot to manufacturing and autoworker jobs in a clean energy economy. 

That's all well and good. I mean, hey, jobs that might help are awesome. And, obviously, when it comes to climate policy, Harris is not just head and shoulders above Trump. In terms of relatively giving a damn, she's a goddamn superhero while he's a dried up turd. And I get that campaigns have to respond to the issues that people say they care about, but mostly they care about those because politicans (and right-wing media) are lying to them, hyping things that aren't real. There is no crime problem. There is no immigration problem (other than the need to fund so many pieces of the immigration system better, from courts to caring for migrants). And, yes, there was an inflation problem, but the rate has slowed tremendously.

The climate crisis is very real. People are far more likely to be victims of a weather-related event than they are ever going to be victims of violent crime or get their throats cut by migrants (which Trump actually said yesterday). Voters deserve to hear how fucked things are and how fucked things are getting and they deserve to know Harris is going to work to unfuck it and Trump is going to ensure that they are fucked even more. 

It's more than just oil vs. wind or coal jobs vs. battery plant jobs. It's about communities and lives being wiped away.

Springfield, Ohio Is a Warning About a Second Trump Administration

As odious as the vast majority of her statements and her beliefs are, former Republican presidential candidate and winner of "Most Predictable Hypocrite of the Year" Nikki Haley did get something right about Donald Trump before her defiance crumbled. She spoke frequently about the "chaos" that follows in Trump's wide wake, like Godzilla without the personality marching through Tokyo again. She even had an ad called "More Chaos," where the narrator says things like "The chaos that surrounds him is bad enough" and "with Trump it’s just more chaos." It's an apt, if relatively benign, word for the clusterfuck of madness, violence, hate, and stupidity that Trump brings to pretty much every situation. 

If you want an object lesson in that chaos, you can look at what Trump and his campaign to stay out of prison...sorry, for president has done to Springfield, Ohio. In just a couple of weeks, it went from a community that was more or less functioning, growing, even succeeding, because of the influx of migrants from Haiti to a tangle of anger, threats, and division. The Haitian migrants are there completely legally thanks to getting Temporary Protected Status from the Biden administration, which means that they can stay in the United States as long as that status is renewed (currently until August 2025). They got that status because of how violent and terrible things are in Haiti. The people there really are living with gangs taking over the place, unlike the bullshit that Trump tosses around about that kind of thing here. 

Why did 10-15,000 Haitians (not the 32,000 that Trump is stupidly tossing around) head to Springfield? Because they heard there were jobs that they could get and that the cost of living was low. That's it. It's that simple. It's no different than what any other immigrant ever wanted from this country. See, TPS is different than just letting migrants in while they await asylum claims going before a judge. The migrants under TPS can work. And that's what they did in a town that was on a downslide. They took jobs that were going unfilled. They opened businesses. They worked their asses off in this city of 58,000 and most of the people there were fine with them. Sure, there were motherfuckers because there are always motherfuckers, and, yes, tempers flared after one Haitian ran a stop sign in August 2023 and crashed his minivan into a school bus, killing one of the kids. When Trump and Vance started using the dead child as a prop weapon against immigrants in general, the boy's father told them, in essence, to keep his son's name out of their filthy whore mouths. But mostly, everyone, including the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, saw the influx of migrants as a positive, as an opportunity to make the place grow economically. Indeed, employers are thrilled to have the migrants, with some saying they would have had to close down because of the lack of workers.

And then Trump and Vance fucked it all up by bringing chaos to Springfield. They fucked it up by latching onto a hysterical, third-hand Facebook lie about migrants eating people's pets. You know they have have pets in Haiti, right? Just like people everywhere? Then it expanded to ducks and geese from the parks being taken and eaten. Again, none of it, not a single goddamn case, turned out to be true. But that didn't slow Trump, Vance, and all the MAGA masturbators from spewing hate jizz in the faces of the people of Springfield, like the goddamn Attorney General of Ohio, who has been kissing Trump's ass like it's made of candy and money. The truth didn't fucking matter, not even when Trump got fact-checked during his debate with Kamala Harris. 

He doubled down and expanded the hatred of [non-white] immigrants, and skeevy simp JD Vance went right along with it, declaring that even though the Haitians are here legally, he considers TPS an illegal program (that Trump used to protect Venezuelan migrants - no, really) and thus the Haitians are "illegal aliens" to him. Except you can't fucking do that. You can't just jabber out some bullshit and say that's reality now. They are here legally until that legal status is rescinded by assholes like Trump and Vance. One dick's rhetoric doesn't change that fact.

Every single fucking thing they accused the Haitians of turned out to be a lie. Vance said the Haitians caused more communicable diseases. But according to the Wall Street Journal, "Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015." They said that the Haitians are causing more car accidents. However, the number of car accidents in Springfield has declined in the years since the migrants have arrived, reaching a five-year low. They said that the Haitians cause more crime. The county jail has 199 people in it right now. Two of them are Haitian migrants. None of it is true. Not a single goddamned thing.

And the result of all of these lies is that the anti-immigrant right has turned life in Springfield to shit. No,  again, it wasn't perfect. Obviously, a surge in people moving to a town, no matter where they're from or what their race is, is going to tax the resources of said town, and that has certainly happened. But, for the most part, that was being worked on. 

Instead of steady progress, Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged Springfield into a fucking nightmare of death threats and bomb threats against schools and hospitals and public buildings, taking away more resources from the town. Yes, the threats have been hoaxes, but you still have to have evacuations and securing the location because you don't want to be wrong if it turns out to be real. Events large and small have been cancelled, like a Culturefest and an art project that were supposed to celebrate the diversity of Springfield. Or a debate between candidates for local and state offices, which was to be held in city hall, the site of several bomb threats. 

The Haitian community is frightened, as you imagine, with some saying that they're afraid of leaving their homes. By the way, home prices are rising because one of the things the Haitian migrants do is buy shitty houses and refurbish them. Yeah, they are directly making Springfield a wealthier town. 

And imagine how fucked this must be for the kids in Springfield. Forced out of their schools and back into online classes for the past week, now funding has been diverted to make the school buildings more secure so the kids can return to the classroom on Monday. More childless cat ladies have given a shit about the kids in Springfield than self-proclaimed champion of children JD Vance has. 

The fuckery is not ending, not with Trump promising to visit, despite pleas for him not to. Bottom-feeding child of immigrant parents Vivek "Fuckboi" Ramaswamy held a town hall in Springfield, and every kind of racist backwards-ass fucknut showed up to say how bad the Haitians are. Everything they said was a repetition of a lie they heard from Trump, Vance, and right-wing media twatfleas. And that’s the point, isn't it? Nobody cared about this shit and then Trump and Vance started talking about it and now because a small group of people listened to those fuckheads, they have made this something that we’re supposed to give a shit about. They essentially willed the problems into being. And now all these assholes are giving a shit about something they didn’t give a shit about before, but the only thing that they are right about is that there are Haitians living in Springfield. Beyond that? Nothing. 

It's chaos and it's terrorism, purely and simply. MAGA is a terrorist movement, and we should be treating it as such. Trump and Vance know exactly what their idiot hordes of voters and their conservative media click whores will do when they say something. It's ludicrous when they pretend they don't. And what's going on in Springfield is a warning about the chaos of a second Trump term. Think about what happens if he's reelected, rescinds TPS status, and deports all of Springfield's migrants. The city would be decimated. Businesses would close. Home prices would plummet. The city would die or need a massive amount of aid.

And that's just the beginning. If they can do this to Springfield, they can do it to any decently-sized town they want. Hell, if they start rounding up all immigrants that either are here undocumented, or the ones who are here legally who they just fucking declare need to be deported, it would fuck up the economies of so many places. Or the entire nation, really. 

Trump's doing this because he fucking well can because no one is trying to use legal means to stop him. He is knowingly causing terrorism. He doesn't care how many kids are scared, how many people are hurt, how much it makes communities take economic hits. He doesn't care if he turns neighbor against neighbor. He would rather all that happen than declare he is wrong. His ego is more important than your life. In his quest to get reelected and avoid prison, he will gladly drag all of us down with him. He will make you cater to his racism and his hatreds or he'll make life a living hell for you. He will sow divisiveness and chaos because it benefits him. 

By the way, before you think Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is some kind of profile in courage, he says that he still supports Trump for president and he refused to call what Trump is saying "a lie" because "I don’t know what’s inside his head." So, you know, ultimately, they're all totally fine with this shit.

The Joy of Watching Kamala Harris Beat Down an Old Man

It's not hyperbolic to say that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, beat the shit out of former president (no, really, he was once president. Of the whole United States) and current GOP nominee Donald Trump at last night's debate. She didn't just get the best of him, throwing down genuine facts and insulting observations in equal measure. She beat him down in a way that he probably hasn't been beaten down since his hideous father likely pounded him. She degraded his record, reduced his presence, and obliterated his talking points. She was, to this incredibly biased observer, near perfect in her execution of the execution of Trump's ego. Harris fucked him up good. 

And, goddamn, we needed it. We needed to see someone say exactly who he is with clarity and energy, someone willing to go there, to all those weird and dangerous alleyways where his brain resides, and someone willing to call the Devil "the Devil" to his stupid, evil face. The dichotomy was stark. She's smart; he's dumb. She's poised; he's belligerent. She gives a damn; he couldn't fucking care less. She's lively; he's a fucking lump.

On that last point, Trump barely physically moved the entire debate. It was weird, like he was a mannequin. He looked at Harris very few times. The biggest motions he made were to lean into the mic for emphasis on some moronic point or other or to contort the mushy flesh of his face into a shit-eating grin. Gravity has not been kind to Trump. Always a frowner, his jowls are now pulled earthward by time and weight into a bullfrog-like permanent scowl awaiting a chance to bellow.

Meanwhile, Harris, at her lectern, danced around him with the physical lightness and fierce confidence of a boxer who knows exactly when and where to punch. She baited him constantly, and he fell into every single trap. And when he fell, she hogtied him again and again, like a rodeo cowboy who lassoed a steer. Unlike that steer, which might learn to not leave the pen after a few hog-tyings, Trump would rush out crazily every time, only to end up with his hooves in the air. 

On substance, it was laughable to watch Harris, an accomplished, experienced woman who worked her ass off to get where she is, go up against a convicted felon and rapist whose TV celebrity and blatant racism inspired the worst fucking people in the country to vote for him. You were literally seeing a prosecutor take on a game show host and it went exactly like you'd think that would go.

Every time Trump lied, she tore him a new asshole. When he said, "Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote," she ripped into him about the suffering that the end of guaranteed abortion rights has brought to women in places where it's banned. When he refused to answer whether or not he'd support Ukraine in its war with Russia, she gutted him by saying that he would let Russia have Ukraine and "Putin would be sitting in Kiev with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland. And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor" and talked about how world leaders think he's a fucking joke, an easily flattered bitch boy. By the end, she had torn so many new assholes in him that he'll be shitting out of his arms, legs, and chest for months.

And when Trump would say something completely divorced from reality, Harris would smile as if she thought it was time to give Gramps his pudding cup, shut off Fox "news," and tuck him in. He couldn't deal with her constant emasculation of him. You could see his brain, which is always ready to overheat from the slightest usage, short circuit when she brought up how people leave his rallies because they're bored or when she pointed out all the people who worked with him who fucking despise him now. Once that happened, he couldn't get control again. 

By the way, bragging that you fire people you just hired a few months or a year before isn't the own he thinks it is. It just says that you suck at management. 

But the most disturbing part of the debate was how Trump brings every fucking issue back to his warped view of immigration. Harris nailed it early on when she said, "I’ll tell you something, he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight, even when it’s not the subject that is being raised."And she was right. Jobs? "We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they’re coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African-Americans and Hispanics and unions." His rallies? "What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States." January 6? "I ask what about all the people that are pouring into our country and killing people that she allowed to pour in?" Trump was flailing and always returned to this well. It's like watching the world's stupidest gorilla fall out of a tree again and again and instead of giving up, he shits in his hand and rubs his face with it, thinking it shows how strong he is when all it does is make him have a face full of shit.

The other thing that's clear is the only source of information for Trump is right-wing media because it is constantly fawning over him.  At one point, he cited "Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse, all of these people" for debunking something. The whole "Haitians eat pets" thing came from click-seeking bullshitters on the right and no one who isn't terminally online would understand a single fucking thing about that (trust me - I've had more than a few people ask, "What the fuck?"). When he was fact-checked on that by moderator David Muir, Trump said one of the most pathetic things I've ever heard a grown up say, let alone someone running for president: "But the people on television are saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there." I'd go into hiding from embarrassment, but I'm capable of feeling shame. 

There were too many idiotic things that Trump said to mention. When he said about Putin, "He’s got nuclear weapons. They don’t ever talk about that. He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that," I thought, "Yeah, they do, motherfucker. If he didn't have nukes, NATO would have bombed him into submission." When he said that Democrats wouldn't vote "to change" the Affordable Care Act, I thought, "No, motherfucker. The bill wasn't to change anything. It was to get rid of it and then hope your replacement plan might go beyond the concept stage at some point."

Harris has faced so many smarter, sharper, quicker opponents. It was a joy to see her treat him like the skeevy corner masturbator that he is. 

And, yeah, I know, I know, I fucking know that this debate didn't change many minds. One thing I hear often about what I write is that I'm preaching to the choir. And my response is always the same: "The choir deserves to be preached to. That's why they go to church all the time." If I were to expand on the metaphor, I'd say that there is always a chance that a few sinners will come into the church and get religion. That's not the only reason to preach, but it sure as hell is nice when it happens. 

Harris's evisceration of Trump and the entire empty charade of MAGA ideology might sway a few people in the narrow swath of voters who are still persuadable. But the real accomplishment was in pumping up the rest of us, we the choir, and getting us geared up to get out there and work to make this presidency happen and end the tyranny of Trump's drain on our national spirit. She showed us how to handle it: with the sword of muted rage and a dagger of a smile.