Things have been going pretty shitty for our goddamned president this last week, so he needed a little pick me up. And while allowing ICE to keep pregnant women in custody might have lifted his spirits, Trump is always happiest when he prances in front of a crowd of the slavering dogs who still support him and performs his ongoing one-man show, Can You Fuckin' Believe I'm President?
Trump was speaking to workers at a training facility for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 18 in Richfield, Ohio, right new Cleveland. Yeah, the guy who is dismantling and wrecking whatever scraps of union support are left in the government was welcomed to this local of an organization that endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in order to brag about a plan that isn't even a plan yet so he could pretend he gave even a tiny fart about the union members.
Every Trump speech has levels of deranged and weird and alarming as whatever combination of shitty eating habits, mental illness, normal aging, and brain worms reduces his capacity for thought from emo tween back in the early 2010s to toddler who wants that goddamn cookie. And yesterday's was no exception.
There was a mini-rant about the stupid, useless border wall: "We are building a really state-of-the-art, very, very efficient — have to be able to see through; it makes a lot of sense. You have to be able to see who is on the other side. Nobody would even think of it." You know he's not talking about some enormous plexiglass wall that'll just totally fuck with coyotes chasing roadrunners, right? He's talking about a fuckin' fence. You can see through a fence. A fence ain't a wall, but that's really what we have already. In fact, he touted pictures of what he called new construction on the wall, but they were really photos of a replacement fence for an existing section.
That was started in 2009 when, apparently, if Wikipedia is correct, Barack Obama was president. But Trump said that Democrats don't want border security at all. "They want people to come in from the border. And they want — I guess, want — I can’t imagine they want — but, certainly, drugs are flowing across borders. We need walls," he babbled.
Things went batshit and lie-filled throughout the entire long-ass speech. Here's Trump on job creation: "We are keeping our promises, and the results are in: 3 million new jobs since Election Day. Three million. And if I would have said that to you during the campaign, where we had tremendous support in this great state, the state of Ohio — if I would have said 3 million jobs, they would have said, the fake news, 'He’s exaggerating.'" It would have been pretty fuckin' dumb for anyone to say, considering how that number was reached a couple of times in Obama's presidency, including 2014, where nearly 3 million jobs were created in just 12 months, not 17 (and, hey, over two of those months "since Election Day" were during the Obama presidency). So when Trump added that, if Democrats had won, "You wouldn’t have 3 million jobs; you’d probably go negative," it's objectively wrong since, under a Democratic president, we had had 3 million jobs multiple times.
Trump leaped from topic to topic like a pissed of bunny that got into the meth but now can't find any more meth and goddamnit, it wants some more meth. In one section, he ping-ponged from judges to the Second Amendment ("But your Second Amendment will always be your Second Amendment. We’re not doing anything to that. Not doing anything.") to building roads ("We’ll transform our roads and bridges from a source of endless frustration into a source of absolutely incredible pride.") to school safety to gun laws ("We fixed, very strongly, the background checks. We got rid of the bump stocks," which "we" did not do at all) to opioids and back to, no shit, the fuckin' wall to electing more Republicans and then back to infrastructure. It's less stream of consciousness and more "Can we take Grandpa back to the home now?"
If Obama had ever bragged about himself even a quarter as much as Trump does, well, we don't have to wonder because Obama would have never said any of this shit. But Trump sure as fuck wanted to get credit for everything. "I got it approved," he said of the Keystone XL pipeline. "I did it." This was before he lied that the CEO of Transcanada never thanked him for the approval when the CEO did, right to Trump's face, in the motherfuckin' Oval Office.
The pure, bugfuck idiocy was there in the speech in spades. Talking about spending on the Middle East, "We spent, as of three months ago, $7 trillion — not billion, not million — $7 trillion, with a “T” — nobody ever heard of the word 'trillion' until 10 years ago," he said, as if we never imagined you could count that high. About worker training, he said, "I don’t know what that means — a community college. To me, it means a two-year college. I don’t know what it means," as if community colleges hadn't been around for centuries and had a well-established reason for existing and are, for the most part, quite different from vocational or technical schools.
And for uncut weird, there's "We dug out the Panama Canal. Think of that. Thousands of lives were lost to the mosquito. To the mosquito — malaria. We dug out the Panama Canal." It's like beat poetry for the deranged.
He ended by saying how he talked to Roseanne Barr about her ratings.
Every time Donald Trump speaks, the nation gets a little worse, a little sadder, a little dumber, and it makes sense just a little less.
