Trump recently revealed he's been taking hydroxychloroquine for days. But that — as is true with everything Trump says — was a lie. He quite obviously has been an HCQ addict for years. And I can prove it.
In the online medical magazine HCPLive — "a comprehensive clinical news and information portal that provides physicians with up-to-date specialty and disease-specific resources" — an article was published in April 2020 titled "Adverse Effects of Hydroxychloroquine, Chloroquine, and Azithromycin." I quote:
"The drugs … cause a wide spectrum of neuropsychiatric manifestations, including agitation [check], insomnia [check], confusion [check], mania [check], hallucinations [check], paranoia [check], depression [check], catatonia [could be, at critical times], psychosis [check], and suicidal ideation [really?]."
Since for years Trump has publicly exhibited at least eight of the 10 neuropsychiatric manifestations of hydroxychloroquine abuse, we can be absolutely sure of one of only two presidential conditions: He's gone bananas because of a decades-long HCQ addiction, or he's simply been fucking nuts from the get-go, and his chronic hydroxychloroquine usage has only exacerbated his morbid derangement.
Given my vast clinical psychiatric experience and, by now, countless hours of video observation, I'll go with the latter.
The Guardian surveys David Frum's latest release, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy:
[He] argues that "democracy is tested by its ability to deliver security, prosperity, and justice". By that metric, the Trump presidency is a shambolic failure.
In a book mostly written before the pandemic, Frum details the efforts of the 45th president to gut the rule of law and institutionalize "white ethnic chauvinism", leaving the country reeling, the constitution bruised. Trumpian alchemy has turned gold to lead....
He declares that 21st-century conservatism has "delivered much more harm than good, from the Iraq war to the financial crisis to the Trump presidency". Yet he remains committed to his Burkean worldview, of individual autonomy fused to social cohesion.
Unlike so many of the NeverTrumpers, Frum's views are no recent conversion to a saner side of politics. In his superb, absorbing and eloquent Dead Right, published in 1995, he unfavorably critiqued late 20th-century conservatism as well, writing that it failed to reduce deficits or "big government," that its ally the Religious Right was a dangerous fraud, and that its turn from economic issues to culture wars was a major political error.
Even if you disagree with much of Frum's then-libertarianism, you would find Dead Right entertaining and uniquely informative in its early divergences from the maddening right-wing mindset. I recommend reading it (first) as ideological background to Trumpocalypse.
In a whopper of outlying opinion, Obama administration economist Jason Furman predicts that "we are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country. [A recovery] can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V."
To fellow Obama administration economist and metaphor maven Austan Goolsbee, however, Furman's prediction should be less frightening to the Biden camp: "I view it as Trump left the door open and five rats came into the kitchen and you’re going to brag, 'Look I got two of the rats out?' There’s a high risk you look completely out of touch if you still have double-digit unemployment rates."
Since our short-term economic future is pretty much all guesswork for now, I as a nonprofessional feel free to also predict with as much certainty as Furman. In Goolsbeesque language, I view it as Trump left the door open and five rats came into the kitchen and maybe, maybe one of them will have left by November.
Given the vast number of small businesses (which employ about half of all American workers) that have either gone bankrupt or are headed that way, and given the ripple effect from that dreary phenomenon plus virus-related downsizing at major firms, and, most ominous, given that the economy's premature reopening in so many states virtually guarantees a massive, second-wave covid offensive, my guess is that fall will look more like 1932 than a rosy opening to 2021.
Still, even assuming I'm correct, the Biden camp has legitimate political worries about the Trump camp's divorced-from-reality economic claims. As Sen. Chris Coons puts it: "No matter what the recovery looks like, I expect President Trump to either take credit for things he had nothing to do with or to avoid blame for things he helped cause."
About that, there is no question. The one that will hang for months, though, is how many voters will buy Trump's bullshit?
Wisconsin was once the most progressive state in the nation — Fighting Bob La Follette, his Progressive Party and all that. In 2016, it went a little crazy, but current polls suggest a rather firm lead for Biden. Michigan seems to have regained its sanity, too, with Biden leading in most state polls. Same for Pennsylvania. My money would also be on Arizona and Florida; Biden leads in both, although within the margins of error. In Florida, however, Trump will likely whack thousands more of its citizens in the second, pre-November coronavirus wave, with a huge assist by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
All of this assumes, of course, that the entire country doesn't go completely bonkers as it did four years ago — with Trumpeteers venomously riled up, Democrats lounging at home or forgetting to mail in their ballots, and some dizzy-brained third-party candidate draining the Biden vote.
Out of curiosity I clicked on Paul Waldman's rather oddly titled, Washington Post column, "Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president?" I clicked off after the lede: "At various times over the past three and a half years, many of us have asked what would happen if President Trump truly went over the edge or if his behavior became so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth could no longer be denied."
When did "many of us" start pretending? When has his behavior ever been reassuring? When has his "unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth" ever been questioned? And why would Waldman specify "the past three and a half years"?
That Trump is a bullying imbecile, a racist, misogynistic goon in possession of an extraordinarily narcissistic personality was evident well before his presidential- unfitness clock began ticking.
During the 2016 campaign, he publicly mocked a disabled reporter for the NY Times; he belittled a Gold Star family; he questioned John McCain's wartime valor; of a protester he said, "I'd like to punch him in the face"; of women, I "grab 'em by the pussy"; of his penis, for God's sake, "I guarantee you [it's not small]"; of voters, they'll "get bored with winning"; of Mexicans, they're drug-runners and rapists; of Muslims, there should be a "complete shutdown" of their entering the U.S.; of his sacrifices in life, "I've had tremendous success"; and of honest, fair elections, "I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win."
An improved lede for Waldman's piece: "Repeatedly, over the nearly two years before the 2016 presidential election, everyone of sanity asked why anyone would vote for a man so over the edge; a man whose behavior is so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth cannot in any way be denied."
I still trust that his comments and tweets — such as this morning's — about sabotaging the November election are just more Trumpian stunts designed to distract from his gross mismanagement of the covid crisis:
The United States cannot have all Mail In Ballots. It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history. People grab them from mailboxes, print thousands of forgeries and “force” people to sign. Also, forge names. Some absentee OK, when necessary. Trying to use Covid for this Scam!
My confidence in the security of a stable election, however, is also a bit shaky. If we've learned anything from Trump's nearly four-year reign of unprecedented corruption, it's that there is no political norm, no statute, no Constitutional passage capable of overcoming the president's authoritarian will to power. After all, in the chief executive's pocket are the two other branches of government as well — enabling actors, one might say. Given such unified authority, there exists no official off-switch to Trump's recklessness.
Much of his tinhorn strutting is mere political performance art, of course — such as his preposterous "order" that houses of worship are essential national services and therefore subject to some imaginary manner of presidential reopening. But when confronting the real possibility of electoral annihilation on 3 November, Trump's strutting could turn to something much scarier. His erosion of law and tradition has brought us that low.
As the Democratic National Committee's top lawyer in the battle against voter suppression told the NY Times, there exists no institutional structure in which Trump could simply cancel or postpone the election. "The bigger [and more realistic] threat" to his mind "is the possibility that the Trump administration could act in October to make it harder for people to vote in urban centers in battleground states — possibilities, he said, that include declaring a state of emergency, deploying the National Guard or forbidding gatherings of more than 10 people."
Trump's corruption invariably projects. Thus when he tweets that Democrats will "try to use Covid [as an election] Scam!" we can be pretty sure that's just a reflection of his own, planned thievery.
Came across this clip in @FOX9 video from Monday's protest/rally outside Shady's Tavern in Albany, MN. This is @LouRaguse, a fellow Reporter & friend trying to cover the story. And getting *harassed* for wearing a mask. A judge will decide soon whether the bar can legally re-open pic.twitter.com/iHYXUvysow
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“Mr. Biden and Ms. Warren are members of the same generation, Democrats shaped by modest upbringings who became United States senators and candidates for their party’s presidential nomination. But with Mr. Biden now actively considering Ms. Warren to be his running mate, it’s their ideological differences — and whether they can build a complementary, productive relationship — that will ultimately determine whether she emerges as No. 2 on the ticket."
She won't. (To the right is actually a shot of Sen. Warren waving goodbye, but hoping, post-election, to be appointed attorney general. Which is a damn good hope.)
And with that, there's your ultimate determination.
I enjoy reading opinions I disagree with, since reading nothing but agreeable opinions seems what a sesquipedalian, if I may use that word as a pronoun, would call supervacaneous — or some such asinine flourish, as I just did. Still I insist that opinions incompatible with mine have some grounding in reality. And in Fareed Zakaria's latest Washington Post column, I find very little. For a reliable voice of the most tedious Beltway conventionality, Zakaria's "Democrats are falling into a familiar trap on China" is a journey into the otherworldly and bizarre.
He notes that "if [Trump's] 2016 campaign was centered around blaming Mexico, the 2020 campaign will clearly focus on scapegoating China." By itself, that's conventional but appropriate thinking. Yet then he ventures into the surreal, which gets even weirder as he seamlessly moves from all Democrats to the singular personage of Joe Biden:
"The … puzzle is not that Trump is engaging in China-bashing but why Democrats are joining in. They are falling into a familiar trap: Republicans take a legitimate challenge to the United States and pump it up into a mortal danger, massively exaggerating the threat and accusing the Democrats of appeasement or even of taking part in a conspiracy with the enemy. And Democrats, instead of standing their ground, get scared and join in the scaremongering. In response to ads bashing Biden and China, Biden released his own China-bashing ad, which even competed with Trump in its racially charged tone."
I was unaware of Democratic scaremongering as a party tactic, which in Zakaria's writing also becomes a Biden tactic. That in itself is a puzzle. It gets worse, however, as the columnist then escalates Biden's imagined scaremongering to inexcusable China-bashing — released in an ad, which even competed with Trump in its racially charged tone.
Here's the ad. For thrill-seekers and Biden-doubters, it is, despite what Zakaria writes, utterly void of China-scaremongering, China-bashing, and Trumpian racism:
Rarely is the self-evident so screamingly evident. The ad airs nothing but Biden's insistence that the U.S. should have demanded transparency from China. "You have to be open, you have to be clear, we have to know what's going on," says the former vice president in the bit. The narrator then picks up: "But Trump rolled over for the Chinese; he took their word for it"; he "praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world." The Biden ad also explains, accurately, that Trump failed to send CDC experts to China and that his "travel ban" banned all but 40,000 travelers.
Scaremongering? China-bashing? Racism? Zakaria's piece is an insult to reality; a favor to defamatory sensationalism and the worst sort of muckraking. I'm left with guessing that this voice of Beltway-approved wisdom has at last chosen the conventional path to sought-out relevance: Crank up the volume.
And from now to November, his won't be the last. Which is what profoundly, pointedly disheartens.
When it comes to ideological incest and organizational intercourse, you just can't beat Republicans.
In this Associated Press story on political operatives "recruiting 'extremely pro-Trump' doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy [and killing thousands more Americans] as quickly as possible," observe the fractal organizational chart on the right, also depicted below in prose:
"The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign" and "organized by CNP Action," which is "an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy," which is connected to "the Save Our Country Coalition," which is "an alliance of conservative think tanks and political committees," all of whom are cooperating with "the FreedomWorks Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council and Tea Party Patriots."
In war-room rapid response to the GOP's innovative Campaign to Kill, Democrats have hired 60 old ladies to stand on various urban street corners holding up "Wear a Mask" signs.
There are many things I did not want to know about oldest-son Donald Trump Jr., and this is one of them.
When he's not calling Joe Biden a child molester or defrauding investors in a pyramid scheme along with his grifter siblings and satanic father, he plays with his he-man assault rifle — and here's the part I was perfectly content in not knowing — with a cartoon image of an imprisoned Hillary Clinton pasted to the oversized magazine.
Those might as well be Mickey Mouse ears on his head. The infantile vacuum inside it is 42-years-old, and yet appearance suggests he still thinks such an immature "gag" is some really funny stuff.
Abe Lincoln's oldest son served on U.S. Grant's staff during the Civil War, became a secretary of war and ambassador to the Court of St. James'. Theodore Roosevelt's oldest son was a Medal of Honor winner who commanded D-Day troops at Utah Beach. Dwight Eisenhower's oldest son became a brigadier general and served in combat. My God, even Herbert Hoover's oldest son rose to become Eisenhower's Under Secretary of State.
Trump's oldest? He plays with guns that have puerile pictures.