Tag Archives: Donald Trump

national news

Can Trump’s exit get any uglier? Uhh, yeah

REUTERS/James Glover II

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald John Trump’s exit from the presidency of the United States is getting uglier by the day.

I wish I could find a bottom to its ugliness. Sadly, I cannot locate it.

So many reports are coming out daily about Trump’s seeming disinterest in the nation’s actual existential crisis: the coronavirus pandemic that is killing thousands of Americans each day. He is obsessed with an election he lost and fixated on ways he could possibly remain in power.

Trump hates the term “loser,” except when he uses it to describe others. Now that he must wear the label himself, Trump has become some sort of monster in the White House. He convenes meetings that include a disgraced national security adviser who received a presidential pardon and a campaign lawyer who insists that Trump could seize voting machines in precincts that voted for President-elect Biden.

The Russians have hacked into our security network and Trump is silent, except to downplay its significance.

I don’t fear necessarily for the future of our democratic system of  government. It will survive this maelstrom of misery and mayhem. However, it is going to require some repair from the new president and his team. To that end, my hope is that President Biden deploys his vast knowledge of government and its workings to set about restoring the regular channels of communication and retooling government’s machinery.

I guess my deepest concern at this moment, as Trump’s term as president staggers to a close, is the prospect of the commander in chief doing something profoundly foolish and reckless intending to take our attention away from the Russian hacking operation. That would be for Trump to start an armed conflict, thrusting young Americans into harm’s way.

Is that beyond the capacity of a president who appears fixated solely on holding onto power? Absolutely not!

This is a dangerous man and this is a dangerous time.

We have 30 days to go before sanity returns to the Oval Office. I am holding my breath.

International news

‘Blind spot’? Do ya think?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Mitt Romney says Donald Trump “has a blind spot” where it regards Russia.

Really? Does the Utah Republican U.S. senator know something none of the rest of us knows? Sen. Romney has just exhibited a remarkable command of the obvious.

Indeed, Trump’s downplaying of Russia’s latest bit of international maliciousness shouldn’t come as a surprise. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says it’s Russia that hacked into our security systems; so does Attorney General William Barr; same with the FBI. Trump, meanwhile, says that China might have hacked into our system.

He cannot bring himself to say that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, the former Soviet spy master, could lead an assault on the United States.

Then again, he won’t challenge Putin over reports that Russian goons paid bounties to Taliban terrorists who killed Americans on the battlefield. Nor has he ever said Russians hacked into our 2016 electoral system, which every U.S. intelligence official said occurred.

Blind spot with regard to Russia? Yeah! Do ya think?

Donald Trump

What awaits The Donald?

(AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

A friend of mine who lives in Australia has strong feelings about Donald J. Trump. They are so strong, I at times am compelled to share them with you.

He wrote me this weekend to comment on the election and what might await Trump as he exits the White House. My friend writes, in brief:

I dearly, dearly hope that when Trump eventually leaves the White House and Inauguration Day is done, that he is arrested and paraded publicly in handcuffs on whatever multitude of charges currently await him.

The spell he holds over his followers and enablers has to be broken somehow. If not arrested, then humiliation through other means … bankruptcy and/or divorce … a very nasty, messy public divorce … “

Ouch, man!

I don’t expect that to happen. I don’t really even want it to happen to our former president. The “spell” to which my friend refer does need to break into a million pieces. How might that occur without having to send Trump to the slammer?

I happen to agree with my friend about the need to break that spell. My strongest hope is that it will dissipate once it becomes clear that a former president has none of the actual power of the current president and only can speak for himself instead of for the nation.

This might sound naive, but my hope would be that Trump’s relevance will evaporate naturally. I don’t hold out much hope that the Trumpkins will accept that their hero’s defeat came from a wholesale rejection of the man himself, his behavior, the manner in which he conducted himself while representing a nation full of citizens most of whom never endorsed his becoming president in the first place.

Then again, I could be proven wrong on this … just as Trump himself proved me wrong by being elected president in 2016.

national news

Are we better off? Umm, no!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ronald Reagan once asked famously during a 1980 presidential debate with President Carter whether the nation was “better off than we were four years ago.”

The question seared the audience that heard him ask it. Voters responded on Election Day 1980 with a stunning verdict: The answer was “no,” and they delivered a landslide victory to Reagan.

Rahm Emanuel, a former Chicago mayor and an acknowledged Democratic partisan, asked  that question today in terms of Donald Trump’s tenure as president. The answer, according to Emanuel, is an equally resounding “no.”

Therein lies the reason why Trump lost his bid for a second term, just as President Carter lost his own second-term run 40 years ago. The nation is fundamentally worse off today than we were when Trump took office.

Trump has presided over a horrendous coarsening of our national debate; he has inflicted heavy damage on our international alliances; Trump has governed by chaos and tossed continuity into the crapper; the POTUS has made full-throated lying an acceptable form of communication … and we have the pandemic.

I will not blame Trump for the virus that has killed more than 300,000 Americans. I do blame him fully for the shabby, shoddy and shameful response he has orchestrated. He lied to us about its severity from the get-go; he has contradicted the advice of his medical experts; Trump has put Americans at grave risk of death as a result.

The pandemic is an existential threat to our national security and Donald Trump has failed to remain faithful to the oath he took when he became president.

Have there been successes along the way? Sure. Israel’s relationships in the Middle East with neighboring Arab nations gives us hope for a more lasting peace in that region; prior to the pandemic’s arrival a year ago, our economy was experiencing significant growth. I will not short-sell those positive outcomes.

The pandemic and all the other failures, though, have left us worse off today than we were when Donald Trump took office and delivered an inaugural address that produced precisely one memorable moment: that “the American carnage” would come to an immediate end. Well, guess what. It hasn’t ended.

President-elect Biden has a monumental task awaiting him when he takes office in 31 days. Just as Americans spoke decisively 40 years when we elected President Reagan — who posed what has become the threshold question for all politicians — we have spoken yet again in electing President Biden.

national news

Biden lines up many ‘firsts’

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Joe Biden keeps rolling out the executive branch lineup he wants to help him govern the nation he was elected to lead. In the main, I find his selections so far to be an impressive collection of folks.

Biden keeps touting all the “firsts” he is asking to serve with him. The first openly gay Cabinet official; the first women to lead the energy and treasury departments; the first Native-American in the Cabinet; the first African-American to run the Pentagon and the Environmental Protection Agency.

He says he wants the executive branch of government to mirror the nation. It looks as though the president-elect is fulfilling that goal.

One of the remarkable aspects of the government he is forming is the number of individuals who struggled as they came of age, found their way into the world. The new interior secretary-designate talked of being homeless as a girl; the new energy secretary nominee told of her grandfather taking his own life because he couldn’t struggle with poverty.

Sure, there are marvelous success stories in the group. There appears to be a marked absence of billionaires of the type that populated the Cabinet that Donald Trump put together when he assumed office four years ago.

The new government in the making is a diverse group, comprising plenty of ethnic and racial minorities, women and men of various backgrounds. Many of them come to the new government with plenty of prior government experience.

Yes, we see a number of hands brought back from President Obama’s two terms in office. The new veterans affairs secretary served as White House chief of staff, the treasury secretary designate led the Fed during the Obama years, the White House chief of staff once filled a similar role for the VP during the Obama years and the climate envoy once served as secretary of state during the Obama administration.

I want to give Joe Biden a bit of credit for bringing back some tried-and-true government hands who played a role in governing during the successful two terms of the Obama administration. Indeed, the president-elect himself is a creature of the government he is now going to lead, serving 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president. For that matter, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris served in the U.S. Senate, was attorney general of California and was district attorney in San Francisco County; she, too, is fluent in government-speak and one cannot overstate the value knowing the language.

Americans took a gamble in electing a business mogul as president four years ago. To my way of thinking, it didn’t work out, given Donald Trump’s ignorance of how government works and his unwillingness to learn how to operate its intricate mechanism.

The nation will not have to face that particular issue when Joe Biden takes office as president.

So it is that the new president is crafting a government that resembles the nation. Moreover, it will be populated by those who know how it works, which in itself isn’t a “first.” It merely feels fresh compared to the chaos we have seen during the past four years.

International news

32 days to go … hurry up!

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It might be the longest 32 days in memory, but there’s an end to the madness we are experiencing at this moment.

Donald Trump has downplayed what the intelligence community and even our secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have said about the attack on our national security system. Pompeo and the spooks say that Russia is behind the hacking into our system; Trump said it might be China and said the matter is “under control.”

Uh huh. And the pandemic was “under control” in March when Trump was downplaying the COVID virus that has killed, oh, about 314,000 Americans.

Trump had been silent on the Russian attack until today. Then he took to Twitter to say the consequence of the Russian hacking is being hyped up by the “lamestream media,” the “fake news” purveyors.

Shut the hell up, Mr. POTUS! You are a disgrace to the office, to the nation. When I am willing to take the word of your boy, Mike Pompeo, over you … well, then the sun might rise in the west tomorrow morning.

“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo told radio talk show host Mark Levin.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to give his pals in the Kremlin a pass. Oh, my. May the next 32 days zoom past us so we can welcome a president of the United States who will cease making excuses for a hostile foreign nation.

national news

Get ready for the losers’ mantra

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Let us steel ourselves for what I am certain is going to be an incessant drumbeat from those whose candidate for the presidency in 2020 lost the election … by a lot!

It will go something like this: more than 74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump and our voices deserve to be heard; and voices are going to insist that Joe Biden “stole” the election from our guy.

OK. How does one counter such an argument?

I’ll start by reminding anyone who tosses it at me that President-elect Biden garnered more than 81 million votes. He won with a 51.5 percent majority. Biden collected 7 million more votes than Trump. Biden carried 26 of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

I encourage those Trumpkins out there to spare me the argument that for the past four years, many of the anti-Trump forces reminded everyone that in 2016 Hillary Rodham Clinton won more votes than Trump. I have noted that fact on this blog. I have acknowledged — often in the very next sentence — that Trump won where it counted: in the Electoral College. I know what the U.S. Constitution sets out for the election of a president; I honor it and accept that Trump was elected under the rules set forth by our nation’s founders.

So, the Hillary-won-more-votes-than-Trump argument doesn’t hold up. Nor does it matter one damn bit. The issue today is that President-elect Biden won more actual votes than Trump, he captured more than enough electoral votes than Trump and that every bogus legal challenge that Trump has mounted to overturn the results have been tossed out by every court that has heard them. That includes the U.S. Supreme Court.

The mantra will continue at least for the next four years as President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris seek to repair the damage that Donald Trump inflicted on our democratic process.

I will wait for the bumper stickers to appear as well, although I am not sure how you distill the message of discontent onto a foot-long piece of paper plastered onto a motor vehicle bumper.

Speaking of that, my favorite post-election bumper sticker appeared in the 1970s, about the time President Nixon was being swallowed whole by the Watergate scandal. You’ll recall that Nixon won re-election in 1972 in a historic 49-state landslide. Public opinion turned against the embattled president. Then came the bumper sticker that read: Don’t Blame Me — I’m From Massachusetts … the only state that cast most of its votes in 1972 for George McGovern.

That was then. The here and now presents a whole new set of challenges. One of them likely will be hearing from the losers that their guy didn’t actually lose.

Yeah. He did.

national news

Michael Flynn: moronic notion

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The man who for 24 days served as national security adviser for Donald J. Trump has come forward with a patently stupid — and treasonous — idea.

Michael Flynn, the pardoned former Army lieutenant general, said that Trump has the authority to call out the troops, dispatch them to various states and actually order them to overturn the election that resulted in Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden.

Is this individual for real? Has he lost what passes for his mind?

Gen. Flynn has actually suggested that Trump — who continues to insist he won an election he actually lost — can mount what amounts to a military coup against the government. That’s if I understand what the former national security adviser has suggested.

“He could order, within the swing states if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and basically rerun an election each in those states,” Flynn told Newsmax. What the hell? 

Thirty-three days from now, we are getting a new president. His name is Joe Biden. I want to be spared the idiocy that keeps pouring forth from Donald Trump and his cabal of kooks.

national news

Stop the phony outrage!

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The phony outrage and astonishing hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s sycophant brigade just take my breath away.

Here’s the latest.

President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, referred to Trump’s voter base as a “bunch of fu**ers.” Yep, she dropped an f-bomb on ’em.

Now, is that the way anyone should speak of a political opponent? I don’t like it. Then again, nor do I like the response that has emanated from the righteous right wing of the Republican Party that has turned the other way while Donald Trump has done the following:

Admitted to grabbing women by their genitals; mocked people with disabilities; downplayed a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans; ignored a cyber attack that threatens our national security; laid waste to the rule of law; damaged our international alliances … and what else? You get the point.

So now some of Trump’s followers are just enraged that a Biden campaign guru dropped an f-bomb?

Steve Schmidt is a former Republican political operative who went on to co-found the Lincoln Project, a political action committee dedicated to defeating Donald Trump’s re-election effort. I will leave it to Schmidt to offer his response to the faux outrage that’s making the rounds.

Steve Schmidt Tells Rubio to F Himself (maxnewstoday.com)

I cannot say it any better.

national security

POTUS has gone AWOL

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Can there possibly be a more glaring, graphic and grotesque example of a president who has gone AWOL than what we are witnessing at this moment of dire peril?

Never mind (for just a moment) that the nation is suffering grievously from a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 of our citizens. The pandemic is dire enough of a threat. Yet the president ignores it.

Russia has just conducted what is believed to be the largest national security breach in our history and Donald Trump — the current president of the United States — is silent. He hasn’t said a word publicly to or about his pal, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The Russians are now believed to hacked into our national security network in a sophisticated full assault on our cyber system.

What has Trump said or done about it? Not a damn thing!

Hell no! Instead, Trump continues to rant and rail about election “corruption” that simply does not exist. He continues to insist that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate because of “widespread” voter fraud. Courts all over the land have dismissed Trump’s phony allegation out of hand.

Meanwhile, real threats have emerged that have placed the nation in dire peril. Trump’s response has been to, uh, not respond at all!

I’m going to say it one more time with extreme malice: Donald Trump is a menace to the nation he has governed for the past four years. Thank goodness — oh yes! — that Trump’s time in power is coming to an end.