Trump in a Battle to the Death (Our Deaths, Not His) with Science

The next governor who doesn't want Donald Trump to have one of his experimental virus incubator rallies should insist that they'll allow it on one condition: Trump has to descend from the podium and greet people. No fucking mask. No fucking gloves. He has to walk among the unwashed, untested, unsafe masses and inhale their stench and, possibly, their disease. That's it. You do that, motherfucker, and you go right on and encourage your followers to play death-virus roulette.

But he won't. And one big reason for that is because he knows. He fucking well knows that that's begging for his obese, high blood pressure, mini-stroked comorbidity-ridden ass to get COVID. He knows. That's the thing that's clear from Trump's conversations with Bob Woodward: he fucking knows that the science is right, just like he fucking knew that his charity was a scam and like he fucking knew that his fake-ass university was just another way to con the yokels desperate to get some of that grifter's glow to shine on them. He knew and he pretended otherwise. Did you ever drink his vodka? I did. It tasted like it was Putin's taint sweat filtered through Trump's diaper. But he lied about it endlessly, even charged a premium for it. It didn't matter that it was objectively terrible in an ugly bottle.

And here's the other thing someone should challenge Trump on: If he doesn't think climate change is real or something that requires action now, then he should stop trying to get a sea wall built for his Ireland golf resort. See, a consulting firm for the Trump Organization, in a 2016 application for permission to, yes, build the wall, "explicitly cites global warming and its consequences — increased erosion due to rising sea levels and extreme weather this century — as a chief justification for building the structure." Just this past March, the sea wall proposal was rejected by an Irish national planning board because it would fuck up the natural dunes near the resort.

See, the filthy fucking secret all along has been that Trump and, indeed, most conservatives don't believe the anti-science bullshit. They know climate change is real and happening. What they do believe is in exploiting the yahoos in order to get power to enrich themselves and their corporate masters. And the best way to get tax cuts for the wealthy is to get the masses you've made ignorant to vote their ignorance. So, sure, Skeeter, keep your guns and fuck the masks. Just make sure you vote for Mitch McConnell before you succumb to the 'rona.

(Note: Of course, there are completely delusional elected motherfuckers, like Louie Gohmert, whose brains said, "Yeah, fuck this. I'm outta here" a long time ago. And that growing contingent is the dragon burning the Republicans' village.)

So yesterday, when Trump sat with his dullard's stare at a roundtable in California to talk about the massive wildfires, he was told by that state's Secretary for Natural Resources, Wade Crowfoot, "You may have learned that we broke a world record in the Death Valley, 130 degrees, but even in greater LA, 120-plus degrees, and we’re seeing this warming trend make our summers warmer, but also our winters warmer as well."

That seems to be what Trump was responding to when he said, "Okay. It’ll start getting cooler," as if, no shit, we know winter is real. And when Crowfoot said, "I wish science agreed with you," Trump answered like a stubborn toddler who insists that there are monsters under the bed no matter how many times Mom checks, "Well, I don’t think science knows."

Science fucking knows. Science has known for a long time. Science probably did another shot from the fifth of cheap whiskey it was downing and yelled, "What the fuck do you know, motherfucker, huh?" Science has been falling asleep in a pool of its own vomit lately. Hard to blame it.

At his endless campaign speeches during his western jaunt, Trump mocked science at every turn. He laughed at Joe Biden having social distancing at his speeches: "Do you ever see him with his little circles? The circle? You know why he puts the circles? Because he wants to be like correct with COVID." Then he said it was really because Biden can't get anyone to go to his rallies, putting aside the fact that Biden hasn't held any big, open rallies since the country shutdown because he actually gives a fuck if people die. 

But I don't wanna give Trump too much credit for merely being duplicitous, for telling the public one thing while saying something else in private. It is equally likely that Trump's fucking dumb and said the shit he said to Woodward because that's the last thing someone told him before he picked up the phone. Besides, it doesn't matter what he really thinks. It doesn't matter what any of the Republican motherfuckers really believe because their actions show that they simply don't give a happy monkey fuck about us.

Several times in the last few days, Trump made the assertion that "You go to Europe and different places in Europe, countries where they’re forest countries, and they’re very, very strong on management and they don’t have a problem" and that places like Austria have "forest cities," like they're filled with goddamn Ewoks or something. Perhaps, but Europe has had really fucking bad fires for the last few years. It just so happens not to be as bad this year. But in 2017, 2018, and 2019, things sucked. Sweden had its worst year ever in 2018. Spain had a shit time last year. I know. I was fucking there, hearing the fire warnings, watching planes dropping chemicals over the burning areas. 

Even today, Trump would not answer a direct question about whether he believes climate change is a hoax, answering, "Well, I think you have people that don't want to address China." (By the way, China's seen an increase in wildfires, too. Man, we really need more forest rakers.)

All I can think is that Trump can't acknowledge that anyone has expertise other than him. To do so would puncture the godlike status he has with his idiot hordes. If you've got people out there who are forming vigilante blockades and staying to guard their belongings because they think Antifa is going to come into their fire-fucked town to loot their houses, and if you've got people practically rioting because they think wearing masks is an enormous, anti-freedom burden, something is seriously fucking haywire. 

Which is exactly what Trump and Republicans want. 

9/11 Unity Is a Fond Remembrance from the Past That Never Happened

Look, far be it from me to shit all over your 9/11 unity circle jerk, but let's stop fucking pretending that we all held hands and sang, "Give Peace a Chance" after the terrorist attacks of that day.

At best, most of us on the left held our breath and waited to see if George W. Bush would fuck up the response. We were not optimistic that the dumb motherfucker who had spent a good chunk of his first 8 months in office praying about whether or not to allow stem cell research, passing a tax cut for the rich, and creating an office for "faith-based" programs was all of a sudden gonna put class and culture wars aside to bring us together as a nation. We were not pleasantly surprised. Once the path Bush was gonna take was clear, we knew he'd fuck it up like he had fucked up nearly every business he had ever run. Except now he had a good cover story.

Yeah, Bush paid lip service to not mistreating Muslims, but it was while at the same time his military was rounding up random Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan and shipping them to be tortured in black ops sites until finally opening up our own torture center at Guantanamo Bay. And it didn't stop law enforcement in different areas of the country, especially up here in the NYC area, from randomly arresting Muslims and subjecting them to interrogations and beatings. It didn't stop a range of assholes from firebombing mosques and attacking Muslims and discriminating against them, the Islamophobia taking over mass culture and the news media.

Oh, no, but we were all together, we're told. President Bush had a 250% approval rating or some such shit, as if people who are hurting aren't going to cling to each other. But if I'm telling the truth here, when Bush gave his speech down in the pit in NYC and announced that the world was going to hear from us, I felt embarrassed because of how overwrought it was, and I felt afraid because the attack was a crime, a massive one to be sure, and I knew we were gonna treat it like an act of war, with everything that would follow. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, we didn't go into battle with right-wing fucknuts. The same approach should have been taken with the religious fucknuts involved in the 9/11 attacks. 

We were unified, yes, in one thing: in remembering the dead. We could hold vigils to honor them. Hell, I put together a concert/fundraiser at my college that had everything from the local orchestra to punk rock to poetry readings. We recorded our stories of 9/11 and sent them to the Library of Congress. That was the glue that could bind us, the remnants of the burned and dissolved and exploded bodies, the way we all watched them die.

We were not unified on politicizing the dead. Democrats were degraded and bullied into becoming co-conspirators in the War on Terror. Look at the way in which, for years after, any slight deviation from an absolutist mindset on war and torture was treated as seditious and exploited by vile conservative cockheads like the now-revered Rick Wilson to destroy Democrats who dared to say, "Wait, maybe we should think about what we're doing here." Republicans claimed 9/11 for themselves because it helped cover up that it happened on the watch of a president from their party, and they sure as fuck weren't going to let Democrats get away with blaming him for his utter failure to stop it, even though he had been warned.

What is this unity they're talking about? Republicans took unity and fed it to the pigs, forcing through the Department of Homeland Security so we could have mass surveillance of Americans, calling anyone a traitor who wasn't onboard with the march to two worthless, endless wars, and allowing and encouraging the Bush administration to take steps that increased terrorism and hatred of the United States throughout the world, all while spending us and tax cutting us into oblivion.

Don't fucking talk to me about unity when voices who tried to tell us that what we were doing in response was bullshit were silenced in all but the leftiest of media. Don't fucking tell me how everyone cared for each other. We mourned, yes, as people do when someone dies. But as soon as the funerals were over, Republicans decided that unity only meant doing what they said and fuck you if you try to stop them.

That's what I remember about the post-9/11 United States: a feeling of isolation as my country descended into a madness that it has never recovered from. 

The President Is Our Mass Murderer

Sometimes, oh, my sweet, weary people of Donald Trump's America, it feels like we're sailing in skiffs on a sea of shit and some of us believe we can get across the shit sea to shore and some of us believe that we're gonna sink but we all know we're damned to keep sailing as wave after wave of shit keeps hitting us, and every time we dare to hope that we've seen the worst shit wave, that perhaps we'll get a break and just sail as smoothly as possible through a shit sea, a fucking massive turd wave in a shit storm appears on the horizon and we've gotta batten down the hatches and ride this one out, even though we know that in the best possible circumstances, we'll get over or through but still coated in shit.

What does it change that we now have Trump on audio telling reporter Bob Woodward that he knew back in early February that COVID-19 was airborne and dangerous, far worse, in his own words, than a "strenuous flu"? What does it change that we now can hear Trump say that he downplayed the virus to the public on purpose? In some ways, obviously, it changes nothing. It doesn't bring back the dead. It doesn't rebuild the lives shattered by the shutdown economy. It doesn't really make us understand Trump any more than we already did. We know that he is the motherfuckingest motherfucker anyone has ever met. We know that he was deliberately avoiding action on coronavirus until the mounting death toll and hospitalizations forced him to do something.

But what has changed today is that we know without a doubt that Trump wasn't just spitballing and gambling that the virus wouldn't be bad, despite experts outside of the federal government telling us it would be. He knew. He fucking knew. He knew it and could articulate how dangerous the situation was going to get. And he chose to pretend otherwise and lie to the nation, forcing others to lie, too. After telling Woodward it was worse than the flu, he tweeted the exact opposite, mocking the idea that it's worse than the flu. After telling Woodward that "young people" are susceptible to it, he said that children are "almost immune" to the virus. And no matter how many ways Trump and his ass remoras attempt to spin this as nobly trying not to panic people, there's a fucking world of difference between yelling, "Fire" in a crowded theatre and telling everyone to just sit still while the fire burns out.  This is not fine. 

Every single person who knew should have spoken. They should have given Trump the finger and told us, including Bob fucking Woodward. Because how the fuck do we trust anything now? Most of us didn't trust Trump, but we thought we could look at others, look at the CDC or Anthony Fauci and find the truth. But they all decided to stay silent, out of either blind or craven loyalty to Trump or the misguided hope they could mitigate the damage by staying quiet, the pathetic error that so many tainted public servants have made. 

And now we're supposed to listen when this lying son of a bitch whose face looks like a one-nut pig scrotum and who speaks in barks like a brain-damaged beagle bitch tells us to get an untested vaccine? Fuck off all the way to Moscow.

This is personal, too. I remember wondering all through February and into March whether or not I should wear a mask. I was reading articles about whether or not masks are effective, with many telling us not to worry about it, that the slim supply of masks had to go to health care workers. It gnawed at me until I finally decided, "Fuck it, I'm wearing one" about a week before the CDC changed course and said we should. The thing is that by that point I already had gotten COVID. I didn't get sick until a few days after I started mask-wearing, which means I was doing my part then. As I've said before, I had very mild symptoms, just a low-grade fever, some fatigue, and a bit of a cough. Sure, it could have been far worse, and I'm pissed at Trump about getting sick. But most of the time, you have the goddamn virus before your symptoms show up. I should have been wearing a mask all along. I don't fucking know who I might have spread it to. And that bullshit weighs on me, and that's on Trump and everyone who stayed quiet. 

We knew Trump was busily corrupting every part of the government he could get his shit-stained fingers on. We knew that he was too fucking lazy to really take the action that he needed to take, as simple as that may have been. We knew that we needed to amp up production of masks and gloves and fucking tests. We knew that it was goddamn weird that it didn't happen. We knew that the only thing that matters to Trump is re-election, something that Fauci is quoted as saying in Woodward's book. Fuck, we knew that Trump was actually, actively evil and not just stupidly so. The cockscab wants violence in the streets (which is something that makes his claim of trying to prevent panic utterly laughable). 

I'm not really shocked by what we've learned. I'm frankly only shocked that Trump went on the record with it. Which means that he thinks he was right to lie to Americans. He said that today, like he's some fuckin' hero for shutting down the information we needed to save our fucking lives. And by so willingly talking to Woodward, it also means that, even though he should be forced out of office and arrested, Trump believes he will suffer no consequences for his evil. And every single time, that has been proven correct. Even now, when he's killed people in the middle of every avenue, the president as our mass murderer. And that, dear Americans, is something we haven't seen in a long damn time.

Sometimes it feels like the sails on our skiffs are broken, and so we are just drifting on the shit sea, buffeted by the waves, wondering if we'll float to land before we die of exposure.

A Poem for the Laborers

"Calling Him Back from Layoff" 
by Bob Hicok

I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been
 
confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was
 
and it turns out I’m OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars
 
painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that’s a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle
 
for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said
 
he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean
 
and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through
 
with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions
 
as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried
 
with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward
 
than what you learn in the shower.
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other
 
and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other
 
forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones
 
hear?

What Did That Dumb Orange Motherfucker Say Now? (Laura Ingraham Interview Edition)

Yeah, you've heard some of the appalling shit that Donald Trump squeezed out of his mouth hole while being interviewed by Lauren "Fuck You, Tucker, I'm the Craziest Motherfucker on This Bullshit Network" Ingraham on Fox "news." You heard him talk about how rich people from the "dark shadows" really control Joe Biden. You heard him say how anarchists in black clothes were flying to protests. You heard him compare a cop shooting an unarmed black man to a golfer choking on a putt. 

But did you hear his opinion of Black Lives Matter? No? He said that, upon hearing the phrase, "I said, 'That’s a terrible name. It’s so discriminatory.' It’s bad for black people." 

And what about this completely nutzoid batshittery: "Black Lives Matter came into existence, walking down the street, screaming, 'Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.' And that was about police officers. That was representing police. They were pigs, pigs in a blanket, like the sausages or hot dogs, fry them like bacon." 

First off, no one affiliated with Black Lives Matter said that when it was chanted in Minnesota in 2015. Second, what the fuck with the free association of pork products? Trump brings up this 30-second chant from 5 years ago constantly to discredit the entire Black Lives Matter movement. It's almost as if he's someone who has said a ton of awful shit that should completely discredit him.

Trump wasn't done shitting on protesters who don't fly Trump flags. When Frau Ingraham reminded him that Oregon's governor said that "no one is safe in Trump's America," he responded, "That’s a violent person, frankly. That’s violent. They stick up for the violence. The people that are getting hurt, they don’t care about. They don’t care about these people. It’s a weird thing. It’s like warped minds." And he added, "If it weren’t Donald Trump’s America, to just use the expression as I’m president, you would have riots like you’ve never seen." You got that bullshit? Yeah, there are riots now, but if Joe Biden is elected or if Hillary Clinton had been elected, well, then there would have been real riots. In other words, he's claiming that he's keeping us safe because the violence isn't as bad as he thinks it would be. It would be like if someone shot you outside Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment and said, "Yeah, I know you're bleeding to death, but at least you're not gonna get skull-fucked by a cannibal."

This was followed by whatever the fuck this is regarding protesters: "It is an ideology for the people that are paying them. And the funny thing is, and the strange thing is, the people that are paying them and all this money, because somebody’s doing it. The people paying them, those people will be overthrown. Their lives will be taken away. Their lives will be endangered. They’re all going to be gone. They’re just stupid foolish people that made a lot of money." From what I can make out, apparently, someone (Soros, no doubt) is paying protesters who will then over throw that someone (Soros, no doubt) when the protesters win. That's some next-level conspiracy fuckery.

But there's more about this sinister "they": "If Biden gets in, they will have won. He’s a weak person. He’s controlled like a puppet. So it’s not going to be calm things down. It’s going to be, they will have won. They will have taken over your cities. It’s a revolution. You understand that, it’s a revolution. And the people of this country will not stand for that. They’re not going to stand for that." He's promising more violence. That's what he's doing. He's saying, with almost no obfuscation, that there will be a civil war if Biden is elected. Trump isn't the 45th president of the United States. He's the second president of the Confederacy.

This could obviously go on and on. A Trump interview is like a chocolate fountain filled with shit. You can just dip in and you'll get stained and stinky. 

Here's his view of the history of riots when Obama was president: "Look at all of what happened with Brown and this one and that one." Yes, that's Michael Brown who he's naming dismissively. He had just mentioned Ferguson.

Here he is on Biden's plans, using it as an occasion to rag on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the most patronizing way: "He’s going to do things that are going to cost so much on the Green New Deal, which is done by a child. Okay? That’s the mind of a child."

Here he is completely inflating an accomplishment (funding for HBCUs) like it's the amount of his supposed fortune: "I saved the historically black colleges and universities."

Here he is saying Biden said something that Hillary Clinton said about criminals in the 1990: "He called them super predators." 

And, finally, there's this almost comical take on police officers and the violence they commit: "The vast, not only the vast majority, thousands and thousands of great acts, and one bad one, and you make the evening news for weeks." The vast majorities of members of just about every group go about their lives without doing horrible shit. That's why... you know what? Fuck it. That's falling into his web of fucking moronic nonsense masked as "thoughts."

I can't even laugh at this shit anymore. We are heading into dark, uncharted territory, motherfuckers. We are without a fucking map now. We just have to press ahead, hoping that whoever we're following doesn't lead us off a goddamn cliff. Or that we don't die before we get across these mountains in front of us.

MAGA Terrorism Is Too Familiar

There's a murder that's been on my mind for a few weeks now. It happened in Peshawar, Pakistan, a large city in the northwest of that country. An American man, Tahir Naseem, from Chicago was in a courtroom there on charges of blasphemy, which means that certain Muslims didn't like the way that Naseem had talked about Islam and Muhammad. Yes, that really is a crime in Pakistan, one that is punishable by life in prison or death. 

In this case, Naseem, who had lived in the U.S. since 1978, had chatted on Facebook with some supposed students, who invited him to Pakistan to debate his beliefs. But, instead, in 2018, Naseem was arrested for calling himself a new prophet, and his trial was being held, finally, on July 29 of this year. That's when Faisal Khan walked up to Naseem in the courtroom and shot him repeatedly, killing Naseem right in front of the judge and lawyers. 

There are lots of reasons why this case has been bugging me. First there's the absurdity of the law itself, which has come under a great deal of criticism in recent years but still remains on the books. Then there's the brazenness of the crime. And then there's the fact that this was an American whose imprisonment we heard almost nothing about until this happened. I'll bet you've heard nothing about it until now, although there was a great NPR piece featuring an interview with Naseem's grown daughter. 

But more details in this horrific act are terribly relevant. For instance, Khan is a teenager (between 15 and 19), and the fact that he was able to get through the supposedly tight security at the courthouse shows that he had the cops on his side. Khan said of Naseem, "“He is an enemy of Islam. He is an enemy of Pakistan," and he claimed that Muhammad came to him in a dream and told him to commit murder.

Khan has been hailed as a hero by a large number of people in Pakistan. There was a march of thousands of Muslims in Peshawar in support of his actions, and there continues to be rallies calling for Khan's release. He was hailed as a hero and a "holy warrior," with lawyers lining up to take his case and defend him.  They all believe that the murder was justified to defend their faith. When Khan was arrested, the police took selfies with him, all smiling. Politicians have gone to his family to "congratulate" them. The Taliban in Pakistan support him. 

I don't know if anyone has set up a GoFundMe for Khan, but you can bet that if they could, they would.

Obviously, we see echoes of Faisal Khan in 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down three people in Kenosha,Wisconsin, killing two. Rittenhouse was also deluded by a kind of faith. Khan saw himself as a defender of Islam. Rittenhouse saw himself as a defender of Trumpism. The Illinois teenager (huh - same state the Naseem was from) had heard from President Donald Trump, among others, that the Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha in the wake of the attempted murder of Jacob Blake by a police officer were a threat to a certain kind of American way of life. He decided that he had to act as a holy warrior for his MAGA faith. And he got a chance to murder some infidels, with the cops essentially on his side.

Obviously, the aftermath of Rittenhouse's murders is frighteningly like the reaction to Khan in Pakistan. Conservative commentators rushed to defend him. Sniveling hate worm Tucker Carlson said, "How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?" Sentient genital wart Ann Coulter tweeted that Rittenhouse should run for president. He's got some of the skeeviest lawyers around defending him, and one of them called him the equivalent of the Minutemen, the citizen soldiers who actually trained as militias during the Revolutionary War. Yeah, the Minutemen were well-regulated bearers of arms. Trump himself essentially approved of Rittenhouse's actions today. Meanwhile, instead of rallies (although you can see that coming), Rittenhouse has groups raising money for his defense, including those that are Republican, Christian, and/or pro-gun. All this is for a terrorist. That's what Rittenhouse is. That's the purpose of wandering the streets of Kenosha with his gun visible: intimidation and violence to suppress a political view you dislike.

I mean, it's not a stretch at this point to say that Trumpism is our Taliban. Trump supporters seek to turn back the clock to a time when rights for many people were limited, they expect blind obedience to their leader, and they will use violence to get their way. They consider everyone else infidels. And most people were shocked that they took over and aren't sure how to get rid of them. 

Frankly, at this point, the MAGA terrorists are so much like Muslim terrorists that we should ask everyone who supports Trump if they condemn the violence done in Trump's name. Otherwise, we may as well assume that every member of MAGA nation is a terrorist or a terrorist supporter.

That's the way this works, right? 

(Note: At this point, "right-wing extremist terrorism" and "MAGA terrorism" are the same thing. We need not pretend they're not.)

RNC Night 4: "I Alone Can Fuck It All Up"

One of President Donald Trump's ultimate tells is the phrase "as you know." Whenever Trump says something and follows it with "as you know," it's got one of two purposes. The first is flattery, as in, "I know that you are privy to this incredible insight that I have, too." The second is conspiratorial, making you complicit in his lies. If he says something absurdly false and adds "as you know," barring anyone shouting out, "No, I don't fucking know," he's essentially acting as if you have assented to the lies.

For the idiot hordes of his voters, it doesn't matter. For the rest of us, it should be alarming. Trump could say, "I strangle hobos with Ivanka's panties and lean in to kiss them as they take their last breath because it's the only thing that makes me ejaculate, as you know."  We might raise a hand and say, "I'm sorry. Could you go back to that strangling part? We didn't really know that." Trump voters would nod and say, "Yes, of course, we know about the hobogasm.  Do continue," and then, when Democrats started to complain about the president jizzing on hobo corpses, they'd get outraged and tell us, "Look, we all know that's who he is. We don't care."

Last night, on the fourth night of the GOP's Convention of Horror and Doom, Trump gave his weary, practically mumbled speech accepting the nomination of his party, essentially just doing his stump speech mostly without his usual riffing. But he did manage to deploy one "as you know" in service of one of his most-repeated and most-obvious lies: "We have spent nearly $2.5 trillion on completely rebuilding our military, which was very badly depleted when I took office, as you know." No, motherfucker, we don't know that because it wasn't "very badly depleted," and the only people who know it are liars. 

Lies were legion throughout the RNC. Every single speech by a politician there and most of the ones by "real people" contained lies. If lies were currency, Trump is truly as rich as he says. Practically every single thing said about the coronavirus was false, starting with the ban on travel from China, which was a bullshit action that did almost nothing, and going all the way to the vaccine that is definitely not going to be available before the election except to murder people. But the lies weren't the only fuckery. Perhaps worse were the contradictions between the present and the projected.

The contradictions in the speech and what we used to refer to as "reality" were so ridiculous and clear that the only excuses were Trump's contempt for everyone watching and an expectation that his voters would gobble up whatever he shit out.  Just a sample:

- Trump grunted, "We must always have law and order. All federal crimes are being investigated, prosecuted, and punished to the fullest extent of the law" while he was committing a federal crime, violating the Hatch Act, by forcing employees of the federal government to participate in a political campaign, which also meant that every federal employee there, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, was breaking federal law, too. They will not, one imagines, be punished to even the least extent of the law. (And no one there gave a damn about the abuse of the White House for campaign shits and giggles.)

- Trump talked about how Democrats will allow the federal government to take over your life while he's saying, "We will take care of your problem in a matter of hours. Just call. We have to wait for the call. It is too bad we have to, but we have to wait for the call." In other words, he wants the federal government to take over cities because they are run by Democrats. (Funny how troops aren't sent to Lubbock, Texas, where protests have been ongoing.)

- Trump said of the coronavirus, "To save as many lives as possible, we are focusing on the science, the facts, and the data. We are aggressively sheltering those at highest risk, especially the elderly," while speaking before a mostly unmasked audience that was crowded together, with many elderly people there, like Wilbur "I'm Not Even Sure If I'm Alive" Ross.

- Trump talked about prison reform but fundamentally doesn't understand the justice system, when he said that Biden wants to do away with cash bail and that would end up "immediately releasing 400,000 criminals onto the streets and into your neighborhoods." Except bail is for the accused, not the convicted, as I'm sure he fucking knows, considering all the people around him who have had to put up bail.

- Under Biden, Trump said, cities will essentially be filled with rising murder rates, riots, looting, and more. Like is happening now under Trump. Like right now.

- Under Biden, Trump said, we will "surrender" to the coronavirus as over 1000 people died of COVID-19 nearly every day of the RNC.

- Under Biden, Trump said, the economy will never recover while every week a million more people file for unemployment and more businesses are closing, again, right fucking now.

- Joe Biden is a "Trojan horse for socialism" and a puppet to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Trump said, and he's also an extremist who said he wants to defund police and open the borders, which would mean he very specifically is neither a Trojan horse nor a puppet. (Side note: I'm confused by the idea that providing some of the things that they have in, say, Germany and France will turn the country into the Soviet Union.) 

The lawless, violent, depressed dystopia is here, now. Trump said in 2016, "I alone can fix it" when the truth is, no matter how much they try to paper it over with lies, he fucked it all up. And he fucked it up worse than Republicans usually fuck things up. 

And the promise that he made last night is that he will continue to fuck it up. That's it. That's the platform. "You like how shitty things are? Well, this shitstorm in a shithole can continue for four more years."

What's frightening is how many people will fall for Trump's frankly retro invocation of socialism and crime in the streets (even as overall crime continues to be at incredibly low rates in most of the country).  Fear of non-white people invading the pure white spaces is the driving force behind the Republican Party, as it has been for over 40 years.

But, see, it's not just through crime that they fear Black and brown people. Despite all the useful idiots protesting that Trump is not racist or the GOP does include them, what they really fear is the undermining of whiteness's central power role in the United States. That is the real crime. And for them, this loathsome, sweaty cretin who whines out his grievances is their last, best hope. All roads lead to him and all things are about him and only him. You must thank him, you must honor him, you must obey him.

It was a terrible speech, delivered badly, to an audience of assholes while shitting all over the White House and the law. It was the rhetorical nadir of a movement whose only motivation is hatred of the Other. 

And, frankly, the violent, angry way in which everyone spoke about the left makes me wonder what they have planned for us if they eke out, cheat, and steal a victory. It won't be peaceful. As you know.