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.