It’s over. No thinking person will vote for Trump now. The catastrophe is out of the bagman. How?
At a gathering of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago last weekend, dropping any pretense of caring for anyone but himself, Trump promised that for a billion dollars in donations he’d give them anything they want. Pollute at will, unregulated. Drill everywhere. End support for windmills, solar power, electric vehicles. “You’ll get it on the first day,” Trump said, waving his corruption like a bloody flag.
So much for “He loves America” and “He cares about us.” A billion. Trump’s price to sicken your children and contaminate the planet they’ll inherit. From the day his daddy handed him millions, it’s been about the bucks. Morality? Not even an afterthought. This episode makes it undeniable. Listen to his media buttosculators finally giving it the coverage it deserves, atoning for their servile, perfidious fealty.
Even before this oily solicitation, Geoff Duncan, former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, announced he’d be voting for President Biden. “Unlike Trump,” he said, “I’ve belonged to the GOP my entire life. This November I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant with no moral compass.”
Then there was Charlie Spies, the Republican Party’s top lawyer, who resigned after Trump trashed him for acknowledging the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. The list of prominent not-for-Trump Republicans, which includes Trump cabinet members and current and former office-holders, is long. As Trump might say, “People are saying they’ve never seen anything like it.”
Okay, not everyone. Not Trumpists who show up at his rallies, definitely not a cult, wearing diapers. Not those who didn’t think “wtf” when he praised “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.” Not Holy Mike Johnson, R-LA, Specious of the House, who spoke during a break in Trump’s election interference trial, to which he’d hied along with a bunch of Republicans hoping to become Trump’s VP, announcing plans to “rein in the abuses” of Special Counsel Jack Smith. Because stealing government documents to the having of which Trump had no right, hiding them, lying about them, reportedly sharing them, ignoring subpoenas about them, aren’t crimes about which a government of laws should care.
Mouthing words Trump evidently wrote for him, genuflecting to an adulterous dallier with porn stars, Mike, who, according to Mike, God likened to Moses, who told us his philosophy can be found in the Bible, most of whose commandments Trump has violated, disgraced himself and the office he holds.
On Meet The Press, Senator Tim Scott, R-SC, refused, six times, to say he’d accept election results if Trump loses. He’s another angling for the VP nod, which will go to the grovelliest of grovellers. He’ll need some up-grovelling, as Senator J.D. Vance, R-OH, Trump critic till he wasn’t, is throwing himself, hard, into the grovel pit.
Who else? Johnny McEntee, Trump’s former valet, now adviser to his democracy-destroying Project 2025, personifying the excreta inflowing if Trump is “elected” again, seen here gloating about his heartless cruelty, like Trumpism itself, toward the vulnerable.
Senator Katie Britt (R-MS), spinner of that creepy “rebuttal” to President Biden’s State of the Union speech, proposing a national data bank for collecting data on and tracking pregnant women; intended, she smiles, to provide help at all stages of pregnancy, including funding for crisis pregnancy centers. Not, however, any that mentions abortion. Not creepy at all. Nothing to fear, ladies. To make it happen, vote for Trump.
Among voters, creepy abounds. Seventeen percent blame Joe Biden for the end of Roe v. Wade. Not a huge number, but when reality insists on zero, it bespeaks brain worms. As does the fact that a higher percentage claim Trump would handle the economy better than President Biden. To which the proper response is: “Foxconn.” (“Fox” + “con.” No irony there.)
Remember? The Taiwanese company that suckered Wisconsin’s then-governor, Republican Scott Walker, into gargantuan tax breaks; touted by Trump as validation of his “America First” policy? That invested a fraction of the intended amount, created far fewer jobs than promised, then bailed? Under President Joe Biden, the abandoned buildings will be occupied by Microsoft, who’ll invest $3.5 billion for an AI training hub, creating hundreds of permanent local jobs and thousands of job-ready graduates.
Providing infrastructure funds his leadership created, Biden’s administration has dispersed $450 billion for 56,000 projects in 4,500 communities. It’s fixing 165,000 miles of roads, 9,400 bridges, 450 ports, and 300 airports. 1,400 drinking water and wastewater projects. 8,000 low- and zero-emissions buses. Cleaning up 95 neglected Superfund sites. 12,000 miles of high-speed internet infrastructure. At Biden’s direction, America is benefitting in even more ways than those.
So, who deserves reelection? A democracy-degrading, billion-begging, pollution-promiser, or a results-producing maker of America greater?
“The evidence for dementia in Donald Trump has become overwhelming. Unlike normal aging, which is characterized by forgetting names or words, Trump repeatedly shows something very different: confusion about reality. For example, he might have confused Obama with Biden once, but his repeated error indicates inability to keep track of the facts. Similarly, he recently said that he won all 50 states in the 2020 election. That is not normal aging, it’s loss of ability to think, reason, and know reality. Further, a normally aging person recognizes the mistake and corrects it. For example, Biden recently saw he’d misspoken and joked it was a “Freudian slip”. Trump doesn’t realize he is making errors because he is too demented to see them. Other obvious examples have been Trump saying that the name of the state of Pennsylvania will be changed, or that the names of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would be deleted from buildings. That is not loss of word recall, it’s dementia. Trump has always lied, but these are examples that aren’t even part of his delusional grandiosity (like saying he had the largest crowd in history for his inauguration). These are loss of normal cognitive ability seen with dementia. If he were to become President he would have to be immediately removed from office via the 25th amendment as dangerously unable to fulfill the responsibilities of office. ---Lance Dodes, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
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