At some point — I guess it’s this point — I’m going to have to start in on the 2020 election. I’m going to have to make a little tag for the posts I’ll write (as I did for the 2016 election), and then I’m going to work myself into a froth and have to spend a lot of money on antacids and beer.
Whatever works, you know?
I was trying to put it off — the election is still way over a year away — and then this guy tweeted this the other day:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381395078000643
Pass me that bottle, wouldja?
Trump has said and tweeted and done a lot of stupid things in his petty, stupid little life (sorry if that sounded a bit too much like him). But that (^), in the battle for Trump’s Top 10 Stupid Tweets, has to rank pretty near the top.
“Why don’t they go back … from which they came.”
Stop. Really. Just stop. Stop and think about that and what it means.
The president of the United States — a country founded by immigrants, built on the backs of immigrants (not to mention the people who were here first and slaves stolen from their homeland) and one in which literally 98 percent of the current population can trace an ancestor, over the relatively short life of this country, to another continent — is telling four duly elected members of the House of Representatives to go back to where they came from.
The problem there — A problem there, I guess, and there are many — is that three of the four were born in the U.S., which makes them every bit as American as Trump. The other is a naturalized citizen. Which makes her American, too.
Exactly where are they supposed to go? They are home. All of them.
As the four slighted congresswomen were holding a news conference the next day — four women of color, four Democrats, not coincidentally — Trump, defiantly, had this to tweet:
Remember when Trump was running for president? Remember his inauguration “speech” — a word never deserved quotes more — about “American carnage.” He painted the country as a crime-filled dystopian dump, even though violent crime in big cities has been dropping drastically for decades. Still, according to this guy, Obama had so screwed up the place that terrorists were moving in next door, immigrants were raping and muling drugs everywhere and every nation on earth saw us as a patsy. It was a joke.
He clearly wasn’t happy. He, unfortunately, didn’t leave.
(Showing my colors here, but the world never laughed at Obama like this. Our closest ally never saw the U.S. administration, at least not openly, as inept and dysfunctional. No American president ever kowtowed to a state enemy like this.)
(But we’re going backward. Which, strangely, is the way Trump rolls.)
My god, where are the Tums?
I don’t want to get too into this, because criticizing Trump and what he has to say is, ultimately, fruitless. He’s not changing. He is who he is, and who he’ll always be. He’s playing to the racists among us. And too many Americans, to our country’s continuing shame, are fine with that.
But to wrap up this first foray into Election 2020, I think it’s important to note one final bit about Trump. It is, I think, maybe the single most damning criticism of this damnable man. (That’s why I’m going to leave it to its own paragraph, to make the point):
He’s not helping. He’s not even trying to help.
As the leader of this diverse and changing country, as heavily divided now as it has been in decades, he should be reaching out. He should be uniting. But he doesn’t know how. Worse, he has no interest in uniting.
Trump wants to divide. He wants critics to go back to where they came from, and if they came from here … well, he just wants them to go away. He wants things his way, and he will mercilessly denigrate, in his childish, schoolboy-tough way, anyone who objects. He treats the half of America that disagrees with him — god, I hope it’s well over half — as the enemy. If you don’t like it, “YOU CAN LEAVE.”
I still wonder, sometimes, how this guy finagled his way into the Oval Office (colors peeking out again: Russia!). I wonder every day what this cruel, narcissistic, self-serving, finger-pointing, responsibility-dodging, classless, morally and intellectually depraved imbecile is doing while he’s there.
And I hope, every day, that we can send him home in 2020 to his stupid tower, where he can live out the remainder of his petty little life tweeting out crap that no one reads (oh, if only) while we try to fix what he broke and go about trying to make this country better. Again. Together.
JD Blogs 