Tag Archives: Donald Trump

national news

Et, tu … National Review?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

William F. Buckley, the late, great iconic conservative thinker, surely would be proud of the publication he founded.

It has called on Donald Trump, the nation’s lame-duck president, to cease his “petulant refusal” to accept Joe Biden’s election as president. The magazine wants Trump to exit the White House quietly and leave the task of governing to the man who thumped him in the Nov. 3 presidential election.

The National Review — which Buckley founded in 1955 — published an editorial calling on Trump to throw in the towel.

“There are legitimate issues to consider after the 2020 vote about the security of mail-in ballots and the process of counting votes (some jurisdictions, bizarrely, take weeks to complete their initial count), but make no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people,” the editorial said. “The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.”

There you have it. A legitimate, conservative publication founded on legitimate conservative principles has called on a phony conservative — the 45th president of the United States — to pack it in.

William Buckley would be a happy man.

national news

Trump never learned how to be ‘presidential’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump’s pending exit from the presidency really shouldn’t contain too many surprises to go along with the outrage many of us are experiencing.

He once vowed to be “presidential” once he took the oath of office.

It never happened. Even when he spoke to us with restraint, many of us thought: You know, he seems so stilted, so stiff, so … not himself.

I’ll be clear. I disliked intensely the “real” Donald Trump that would present itself when he would fly off on one of those rants. And yet when he would read prepared remarks, he did so with a discomfort level that I could feel in my living room watching on my TV set.

Donald Trump proved to be a bad liar and a president who, when handed opportunities to say the right thing, would do so under seeming duress. He didn’t like the role he was forced to play when he took that oath of office.

What are we getting in place of this? We’re getting a president, Joe Biden, who at some level has been practicing for the role during his entire and lengthy public service career. President-elect Biden chaired Senate committees, presiding over sometimes controversial hearings. He behaved like a distinguished gentleman most of the time.

So I don’t expect a lot of on-the-job training for the new president when he steps into the Oval Office. At least, though, we likely won’t have to endure the sight and sound of a president who never learned how to act and sound like someone elected to the most exalted office in the land.

economic news

OMB pick draws fire

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Neera Tanden wants to become the next head of the Office of Management and Budget in the Joe Biden administration.

But wait a minute. She’s running into some serious headwinds from Senate Republicans. Why? Well, it seems that she has been highly critical of GOP policymakers and policies, and of course of Donald Trump, the guy Biden defeated to become the nation’s next president.

I’ll be candid. Biden’s decision to select Tanden does puzzle me. She has been a sharp-tongued pundit. I really don’t know about her budgetary experience. Not only that, the president-elect’s pledge to “unify” the country seems at odds with the selection of a sharp partisan, such as Neera Tanden.

She runs a progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress. Tanden could be seen and heard throughout the Biden-Trump campaign blasting Donald Trump to smithereens. To be blunt, I have no problem with what she said about Trump.

I do have a problem with an appointment such as hers and whether it is faithful to President-elect Biden’s pledge to heal the wounds that have divided us.

media news, national news

Hoping to eradicate an ‘e-word’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I suppose you could surmise that there is a virtually endless array of things I anticipate with the inauguration of Joe Biden as our next president of the United States.

One of those things is the elimination of certain epithets we hear far too often from the man he will succeed, Donald J. Trump.

I want to discuss one of them briefly here. That would be the term “enemy.”

Joe Biden is wired entirely differently than Donald Trump.

Biden has said categorically and without equivocation that political foes are not enemies. He has worked through many decades in public service seeking compromise with politicians from the other party. He works well with Republicans while being what he calls himself as being a “proud Democrat.”

The president-elect understands that effective legislation quite often is the result of compromise. He doesn’t see the GOP as comprising enemies. They merely are opponents. Donald Trump exhibited an all-too-often and annoying tendency to cast his foes as enemies.

Indeed, he infamously referred to the media as the “enemy of the American people.” My goodness, it is no such thing. Previous presidents have been made uncomfortable by harsh questions posed by the media. None of them to my knowledge ever referred to reporters as anyone’s “enemy.”

I expect to see President Biden restore the sense of respect we all can have for those with whom we disagree. I also expect to see him eradicate the careless and reckless use of the word “enemy” within the White House.

national news

Trump goes out as he came in: amid chaos

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald J. Trump is going out in a blizzard of incoherence, which to my memory reminds me of how he entered the presidency.

He was willfully ignorant of what it took to take the reins of government. He never learned a thing. Now he’s exiting the White House on Jan. 20 while offering a mysterious string of incoherent rants.

For instance, he said he will leave D.C. “if” the Electoral College certifies that President-elect Biden won the election on Nov 3. Whaddya mean “if,” dude? The Electoral College is going to certify Joe Biden as the winner, and a clear winner at that! His margin of actual vote victory is widening daily, surpassing 6 million ballots. The Electoral College count stands at 306-232, with Biden over Trump. Period. End of story.

Oh, but wait. Now comes Trump saying that he would leave the White House if Biden can prove that the 80 million-plus votes he has racked up came about legitimately. That they were all legally cast votes.

Huh? Hey, Donald, I have news for you. The states that have certified the results have declared they all are legal, free and fair votes. They say without hesitation that there is no “widespread” voter fraud. There isn’t even any minuscule voter fraud, they say. These are election professionals who know what they are doing, unlike the lame-duck make-believe president who has been in over his head from the moment he took the oath in January 2017.

Donald Trump is leaving the White House no later than Jan. 20. I am rolling around in my head the idea that he might depart before then, forgoing the niceties associated with attending his successor’s inaugural. I mean, if he’s going to refuse to acknowledge that President-elect Biden, what’s the point of him and Melania even bothering to show up?

I only can imaging what might happen as he and the first lady step aboard Marine One for the flight away from the Capitol. It might get real ugly.

Chaos reigns supreme at the end of the Trump Era, just as reigned at its beginning. Who knew?

national news

Go ahead, Mr. POTUS … pardon yourself

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I am going to make a suggestion that might surprise readers of this blog, which is that I believe Donald Trump ought to try to pardon himself for crimes he might have committed.

Would such a pardon be legal? Is it constitutional? Who in the name of juris prudence actually knows for certain? Hey, so go ahead, Mr. President, give it a try.

A presidential self-pardon could do a couple of things to Trump’s political future that he wouldn’t like. It would brand him forever as someone who is likely guilty of whatever crime he might  have committed. The acceptance of a pardon is an implied admission of guilt, right? Well, that’s how I see it … along with many legal and constitutional scholars.

Newsweek reported: On Thursday, CNN political commentator S.E. Cupp weighed in, saying pardon power should be reformed and Trump granting himself clemency would make him look guilty.

“If the president has designs on running again for president, this would certainly imperil that, and I would think encourage other justice departments to really look at what he had done while in office if he is tacitly admitting he needed to be pardoned for stuff,” Cupp said.

Therefore, if Trump is thinking about running for president in 2024, he will have to explain to Americans how someone who in effect admits to commit crimes can run for the office he lost in 2020? Oh, wait! I forgot that he wouldn’t have to persuade gullible GOP primary voters who think he’s the bee’s knees already, even though he has trashed the presidency, lied through his teeth repeatedly to everyone and made a mockery of every norm associated with the nation’s highest office.

The rest of us? Well, that’s another issue.

I don’t think it’s going to get that far, to be honest. I have serious doubts that Trump is going to run again for POTUS, but that’s just me, you know?

If a self-pardon is ruled to be illegal or unconstitutional were he to actually do it, Trump would face being called a dimwitted dipsh** who thought he could pull a fast one on the federal judiciary. But, hey, I already think that of him as it stands right now. Maybe others might catch on, too.

So, go ahead and give it a shot, Donald. Let’s see what this would do to your “brand.”

national news

POTUS-elect an ‘elitist’?

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By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

The Washington Post reported the following today …

“Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote on Twitter. “I support American greatness. And I have no interest in returning to the ‘normal’ that left us dependent on China.”

I truly don’t know whether to laugh or scream.

A Republican Party with one of its members was elected president as a populist, is now accusing President-elect Joe Biden of being an elitist.

This is the fellow who commuted by train daily between Washington and Wilmington, Del., when he served in the Senate. Why did he do that? Because initially he was a widower with two young sons who needed their daddy home at night while the boys fought through their grief over the death of their mother and baby sister in a motor vehicle crash.

Yes, Joe Biden has appointed some learned individuals educated at Ivy League schools to join the Cabinet.

This “elitist” canard, though, is as phony as the assertion over the voter fraud assertion that the Whiner in Chief keeps alive.

national news

Hey, POTUS isn’t declaring COVID is ‘under control’

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

It occurs to me that Donald Trump’s phony fixation with a “fraudulent” election has kept him from repeating yet another series of lies.

Which is that we have the COVID coronavirus “under control.”

It damn sure isn’t anything of the sort.

Deaths are escalating; infections are skyrocketing; we’re setting “records” for infection, hospitalization, mortality. Donald Trump is silent on the pandemic. Hell, he cannot stop repeating that other lie, which is that “widespread voter fraud” resulted in President-elect Biden’s victory over Trump in the Nov. 3 election.

I am not suggesting that Trump’s silence on the pandemic is a blessing. Oh, no. We need a president who can speak truth on the issue. Trump’s inability to tell us the truth on anything does not bestow positivity on his silence; it merely reminds us of Trump’s penchant for prevarication.

Indeed, his attention is now focused on another bit of “fake news,” which is the phony issue of “widespread” voter fraud that, to put it bluntly, does not exist.

The good news? Donald Trump will exit the office in January. The new president, Joe Biden, will tell us the truth about the pandemic.

national news

U.S. set to resume its historic worldwide role

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 vowing to “put America first,” by thinking first of this country’s interest and, in effect, saying “to hell” with the rest of the world.

That policy didn’t work out well for the Trump administration.

Along came Joe Biden in 2020 to declare to the nation and the world that he intends to restore the United States’ historic role as the world’s most “indispensable nation.” American voters bought the Biden pitch, tossing Trump out of office on Election Day.

So here we are, about to re-enter the world community as Earth’s lone superpower. But here’s the difference between the start of Biden’s presidency and the beginning of the Trump term as president: President-elect Biden intends to offer respect for our allies and likely will refrain from the insults that Donald Trump hurled at them.

Joe Biden brings a lengthy public service career with him into the Oval Office. He served for a dozen years as chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee before becoming vice president in 2009. Biden parlayed the personal relationships he had built around the world as Foreign Relations chair into an effective role as point man for the Barack Obama administration.

Trump’s pre-presidential experience bore none of what Biden is bringing into the nation’s highest office. He ran a real estate company with a checkered history; he became a reality TV celebrity. Trump pointed his career toward the goal of enriching himself. Public service? He had zero experience and, oh brother, it showed.

Voters said “hell no!” to returning the carnival barker to the White House. A majority of them grew tired of the chaos. They are weary of the constant embarrassment that Trump brings with his incessant Twitter rants.

The United States is far from a perfect nation. Perfection is an impossible goal to attain. However, a lack of perfection does not prevent the United States from reasserting its role as world leader.

President Biden will take the oath of office and then will get to work bringing this nation back from its ill-fated electoral experiment that delivered an unfit individual to the nation’s highest political office.

national news

Two presidents … at once?

By JOHN KANELIS / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

President-elect Biden would bristle at the thought, but I’ll express it anyway.

We seem to have two presidents at once while Biden begins the transition into the world’s most powerful office.

Sure, the current president is still doing things that only presidents can do. Such as grant an unconditional pardon to an admitted felon, someone who lied to the FBI and to the vice president about the contacts he had with Russian goons who attacked our electoral system.

Meanwhile, the president-in-waiting delivered a heartfelt Thanksgiving message intended to lift our spirits in the wake of a crippling and vicious pandemic. The current president, Donald Trump, is too busy arguing that Biden “stole” an election that Trump says he won “handily.”

Yes, it is true we only have one president at a time. In a strange sort of way, though, we are seeing a symbolic presidency overshadowing the real thing.

Amazing, yes?