Trump's Tyranny
Donald Trump has summoned the first violent fascist attack on the American government, which is now under way.
Thousands of Trump-inspired neo-nazi attackers have physically assaulted the Capitol with the explicit goal of stopping the Electoral College from certifying the election of Joe Biden to be the next President of the United States.
In US history, this is the first physical attempt by fascist forces to overthrow American democracy by force.
Under Trump’s direction, law enforcement has been virtually absent. Had this been a Black Lives Matter assault, or one coming from the Peace Movement, the Capitol grounds would be littered with dead bodies.
Media reports now indicate a woman has been shot and seriously wounded.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has issued feeble tweets and is now allegedly calling out the National Guard.
Stay tuned….
From ancient religious figures to poets to today’s self-improvement gurus, observing the New Year has conveyed a forward-thinking sense of optimism and possibility. Of wiping the proverbial slate clean and starting over, leaving the past behind in order to go on to bigger, better things. Buddha extolled followers to believe, “No matter how hard the past, you can always begin again.” T.S. Eliot noted: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.” While motivational speaker Tony Robbins proclaims: “New Year = A New Life! Decide today who you will become, what you will give how you will live.”
Dr. Seuss wrote about “How the Grinch stole Christmas” – but is President Trump the Orange Ogre who will steal New Year’s? Since coming into office Trump has been the ultimate annual buzzkill, casting a pall and ominous shadow over January’s glad tidings, as if he’s determined to ruin the sensibility of hopefulness that usually accompanies the passage of the old year into the new.
The era of Trump irrelevancy has dawned, and too many people are slow to see the light. No matter what Trump has the nerve to do now, none of it is likely to matter much, since the man has so little real nerve. The presidential election is effectively over, and now we’re going through the formalities. So get Trump out of your head! He had no business being there in the first place.
Two important provisos: (1) Keep an eye on what he and his family steal between now and January. The Biden administration should be prepared to try to recover the millions (or billions) of ill-gotten Trump gains from public pockets. (2) And keep an eye on his destructive appointments and policies. For now, he can do whatever any president could do, but all of it (or most) can be easily reversed soon after January 20. The Biden administration has to have the will and the courage to make the undoing quick and thorough.
“Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit. Thank you. This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. And I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support, millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.”
It’s Wednesday morning. The election is still up for grabs as I write, creating a post-Election Day void of painful proportions. A blue wave didn’t wash over the newly constructed wall around the White House, flush out the least competent president in American history and present the planet with President Joe, the guy who would make it all better.
"There is a kind of an official view about democracy—it says that you, the public, are spectators not participants,” activist and scholar Noam Chomsky points out in a new video. “You have a function. The function is to show up every couple of years, push a lever, go home, don't bother the important people who run the world, you’ve done your job. We can’t accept that.”
At the same time, Chomsky is vehement about the urgent necessity of defeating Donald Trump. "Sometimes it's worthwhile to take a little time away from real politics, an interlude, and make sure you get somebody out. This time it is critically important," Chomsky says in the video (produced by my colleagues with the Vote Trump Out campaign). "There's a real malignant cancer that has to be excised."
A megalomaniac is a pathological egotist, someone with a psychological disorder who exhibits symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with greatness, power or wealth.
A sociopath is a person whose behavior is antisocial, often criminally greedy, who lacks a sense of moral responsibility, empathy or social conscience. Sociopaths never sincerely apologize nor are they capable of exhibiting remorse for wrongs that they have committed.
A narcissist isperson who has an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration, sexual gratification, applause and a lack of empathy for others.
A paranoid person or group exhibitsexcessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of other individuals or groups.
A xenophobe is aperson who is fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or of people from different countries or cultures.
How can you prepare for the US Presidential election resulting in a disaster?
The cutting edge nonfiction film Totally Under Control co-directed by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger documents the Trump regime’s tragedy of errors and terrors in its catastrophic reactionary reaction to the coronavirus. Indeed, Control is a veritable cinematic Nuremberg trial convicting Trump and the psychopath’s sycophants of crimes against humanity and mass murder of 215,000-plus Americans by systematically undermining science to enable Covid-19 to wreak havoc across the land they were sworn to protect.
Control takes its ironic title from one of Trump’s invariably wrong plague pronouncements and predictions. Instead of Nostradamus, the buffoon who keeps prognosticating that the virus will just “go away,” when it gets warm (hey’ how’d that work out for you this summer?), etc., and other fantasy flights of fancy should be called “Nostra-Dumb-Ass.” As this doc shows, Trump is to prophecy what Casanova was to monogamy, Pinocchio to honesty and Louis XVI to good governance (and hopefully he’ll meet the same fate).
Where, oh where, is the United States of America — global leader, creator of democracy, hope of humankind? It certainly wasn’t up there on the debate stage last night.
When 9-year-olds start slinging insults at each other — “Is not!” “Is too!” — it’s hard for platitudes to step in and re-establish a sense of situation normal. Indeed, the almost total absence of platitudinous rhetoric during the debate may be the one positive takeaway from this bizarre event, which otherwise put a naked president on display before the world, showing off his dystopian immaturity.
The unofficial term for Donald Trump’s condition may well be “hubris syndrome,” as discussed several years ago in an Atlantic article by Jerry Useem, titled “Power Causes Brain Damage.”
As events swiftly spiral out of control and the capitalist system teeters on the brink of collapse, Americans must plan ahead for completely unprecedented, uncertain times. It’s clear that Trump, who is obviously responsible for the mass murder of 200,000-plus Americans and economic disaster, can’t win a majority vote in the presidential race – and that he knows this. So he’s desperately setting the stage to steal the election, ranting and raving about “voter fraud” and how “mail-in ballots” are rigged. Rigging, of course, is de rigueur for the “rigger-in-chief,” and desperate to stay in power – in order to avoid being charged with a variety of crimes, not payoff hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, et al – sober people must expect this frantic conman to pull any dirty trick on (and off) the books to remain president.