Today, President Donald Trump, a man who could reasonably be called "addicted to his daughter," had a "listening session" on drug abuse, especially the plague of opioid addiction that is ravaging the nation, hitting the working class especially hard. And while you could say, "Hey, man, give the guy a pass on this one because he's actually talking about something that matters," I could answer, "Hey, straw person, fuck off. That son of a bitch couldn't give a single tweeting shit about people hooked on oxy and heroin."
First off, Trump did what he always does. Instead of simply acknowledging the problem and that people are working on it, he turned it into the Next Thing Donald Trump Lies About Everyone Not Knowing About When It's Really Just Him That Doesn't Know It. Early in his remarks, he said, "This is a total epidemic, and I think it's probably almost untalked about compared to the severity that we're witnessing." Then, because Trump always takes a claim and pumps it up like he's injecting Edex right into his little dick to get it hard. "It's really one of the biggest problems our country has, and nobody really wants to talk about it," Trump said later, adding, "Vice President Pence mentioned this coming into the room. He said, this is a problem like nobody understands."
Let's put aside the fact that an HIV crisis broke out in a county in Indiana because Pence didn't understand shit about heroin addiction when he was governor. And let's acknowledge that there is a great deal more that needs to be done about the problem across the country. But as far as "nobody" talking about it? Motherfucker, it's being talked about everywhere. Maine, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Alaska, fucking everywhere.
But it takes some dickish delusion to ignore one giant goddamn flaming hypocrisy here. If Trumpcare had been passed, it would have wrecked funding and coverage for people suffering from opioid addiction. Yeah, in order to massage the throbbing balls of the cruel Freedom Caucus, the plan was to drop the mandate for addiction services in Medicaid. You got that? Poor people would be subject to the whims of their state on whether or not they could get treatment. And it would have taken addiction treatment out of the essential health benefits that all marketplace insurers and even Medicare are currently required to cover.
Donald Trump was supporting a bill that would have taken a crisis situation and tossed a fuckin' grenade into it. So, yeah, he can shove his listening session and his Drug Addiction Commission that he's proposing right up his own voluminous ass. The only way it will do any good is if he fully funds and supports the Affordable Care Act, you know, the law of the land.
One last thing here: Trump seemed to take a twisted pleasure in hearing the gory details of the misery people suffered while addicted or in treatment, like he's getting off to it. Here's an actual exchange that occurred between Trump and A.J. Solomon, a former addict:
MR. SOLOMON: And they put me in the center, and I detoxed cold turkey. And --
THE PRESIDENT: And what was that like?
MR. SOLOMON: It’s like 20 times worse than the flu, but the anxiety is the worst part, the suicidal ideations crawling out of your skin. I mean, if I had drugs in front of me, I would have done them.
THE PRESIDENT: So he was right?
MR. SOLOMON: Oh, yeah. Yeah, he was right.
THE PRESIDENT: But you got through it? How long did that take?
MR. SOLOMON: Two weeks.
THE PRESIDENT: It was two weeks of -- they used to call it cold turkey, right?
MR. SOLOMON: Cold turkey.
THE PRESIDENT: Do they still do that?
MR. SOLOMON: Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: No way. So you went through two weeks of that, and that was hell?
Jesus Christ, a few more months of this disgusting presidency and we're all gonna need to shoot up just to make it through a news cycle.
