Last evening, Donald Trump crossed a line in my book. He’s crossed many before, but this, taken in conjunction with his statement a few days ago that he had “total authority”, is the final straw. I hold every person who voted for, and still approves of Donald Trump responsible for handing the ‘keys to the kingdom’ to a cruel and evil tyrant determined to have his way at all costs, determined to destroy the United States.
Why am I ranting, you ask? Believe me, I toned it down a lot from my first draft! Let me tell you …
According to the U.S. Constitution, we have three equal branches of government, but yesterday … Donald Trump threatened to trash the Constitution in order to have his way. Oh sure, he’s been trashing it, shredding it, trampling it and burning it for over three years now, but this is beyond any of his previous abominable moves.
Yesterday, Donald Trump threatened to shut down both chambers of Congress to allow him to fill vacancies in his administration without Senate approval. This is unconscionable … this is the action of a strongarm dictator, determined to get his way … or else! This is the exact sort of tyrant the Founding Fathers worried about, the reason they built checks and balances into the Constitution so that no one person could hijack the democratic principles on which this nation was founded.
He spent much of his daily campaign rally (disguised as a coronavirus briefing), railing against democrats for blocking his nominations when in fact, the nominations are awaiting Senate approval and the Senate is controlled by the republicans … his own bootlickers!
He ended his little tirade with …
“They know they’ve been warned and they’ve been warned right now. If they don’t approve it, then we’re going to go this route and we’ll probably be challenged in court and we’ll see who wins.”
The Constitution grants the president the authority to adjourn Congress if leaders of the House and Senate can’t agree on whether to adjourn. However, in 233 years of governance under the Constitution, that authority has never once been exercised. And furthermore, there is currently no disagreement between the two chambers — they have already agreed to adjourn on Jan. 3, 2021.
In 2014, republican senators challenged some of President Obama’s recess appointments in the Supreme Court and won their case. The Supreme Court ruled that only the Senate — not the president — can decide when it is in session. Seems cut and dried to me, but this is the era of Trump, when nothing follows any logical pattern, when he can browbeat and bully to get his way, when children are thrown into cages by order of Trump, and when justice as we once knew it no longer exists.
And in other news …
Well isn’t that convenient?
The criminal trial for several associates of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani has been postponed until well after the November election. How very convenient!
A federal judge in New York on Wednesday ordered that the trial of Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman and two other men on campaign-finance-related charges be postponed from this October to February of next year.
Parnas and Fruman worked closely with Giuliani on several efforts related to Ukraine, including a successful drive to oust the U.S. ambassador to that country, Marie Yovanovitch. She was removed from her post last May. An indictment returned against the businessmen last year charged them with violating U.S. campaign finance laws by funneling funds from abroad and hiding their source. In the indictment, Yovanovitch’s ouster is discussed as one of the goals the conspirators were allegedly seeking to achieve.
The reason cited for the delay was logistical problems related to the pandemic … my guess is that money or favours changed hands to push it to after the election so that it wouldn’t be ongoing, or fresh in people’s minds on election day. Amazing how this pandemic that is killing the rest of us has played right into Trump’s hands in a number of ways, isn’t it?
Profit over people
In a 24-hour period ending on Wednesday everning, the U.S. recorded more than 4,500 deaths as a result of the coronavirus, an all-time daily high. And yet Trump stands firm that he is re-opening the country, possibly even before May 1st. Later today, he plans to “unveil” his plan for opening the economy. Likely his plan will be disregarded by most, except the republican governors who care far more for the wealthy industrialists in their states than the working people. We, the poor and middle class, are expendable, you know.
Turns out that yesterday Trump attempted a conference call with bankers from such institutions as Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America and others. First, it was a fiasco, as he didn’t give much advance notice and most of the CEOs he planned to touch base with already had other commitments for the time he specified. One of the executives involved in the call referred to it as a ‘shit show’, if that tells you anything.
Trump’s intent was to talk with the bankers about how to re-start the economy, and apparently he expected them to be eager to get back to ‘business as usual’, but he was in for a bit of a surprise. One of the CEOs complained …
“I really don’t understand how they are communicating on this. He’s got to stop talking about turning the economy back on and start talking about making people feel safe, things that are happening around testing and the health care system. That’s the only way you will really get the economy reopened over a period of time.”
Now, as a rule I have little or no respect for bankers, considering them to be a greedy lot concerned more about their own investment portfolios than our lives, but this is one case where I will give them a thumbs up for saying just what the rest of the nation is saying (except money-grubbing industrialists and the politicians in their pockets).
I would like to remind the people of this country that we did not elect Donald Trump to lead this nation. We elected Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes more than Donald Trump. Through corrupt machinations primarily by the republicans in certain states, he was placed into the Oval Office and has been destroying this nation since the first day he took office. But today, in a crisis of astronomical proportions, we are stuck with a person at the helm who does not have a clue what he is doing and does not care, but is determined to claim absolute power, to lead not as a president representing the people, but as an authoritarian who puts his own interests first. Remember all these abominations on November 3rd, please, or we may very well find ourselves in the same situation the German people found themselves in 1933. Think about it.
In March, he filed a lawsuit for $250 million against Twitter, claiming that two parody Twitter accounts (one called “Devin Nunes’ Cow”) and a Republican political consultant defamed him with mean tweets. Awwww … pobrecito! In August, he sued McClatchy news organization for another $250 million, alleging defamation. And in October he sued Ryan Lizza and Hearst Magazines for $77 million, claiming that a story in Esquire about the Nunes family farm in Iowa defamed him.
It seems to me that Mr. Nunes has very thin skin. As I was writing this post, the thought occurred to me that perhaps it would be fun to mail him a box of tissues to dry his tears. Hey, maybe he would then sue me! That could be fun, for as the old saying goes, “you can’t get blood out of a turnip”!
