Tag Archives: Salon

national news

Yes, I agree: Something is wrong with DJT

Bob Cesca isn’t a medical or a mental health professional, to which he admits. He writes for Salon. com and is a critic of the president of the United States, Donald John Trump.

That all stipulated, I have to agree with his essay in Salon: There is something seriously wrong with Donald Trump.

Just watch his two-hour tirade at the Conservative Political Action Conference the other day. I don’t know how one can reach any other conclusion after watching the president’s extraordinary rant in front of the CPAC faithful.

Cesca takes particular note of the time Trump — while running for president in 2016 — mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski’s disability. Imagine him doing that for two hours, Cesca wondered. I can’t go there. The image of candidate Trump’s hideous mocking of Kovaleski is just too disgusting on its face.

Take a look at Cesca’s essay here.

And yet the Trump Faithful continue to hang on to his every idiotic statement, every one of the absurd insults he hurls at those who oppose him. They cheer him on. They whoop and holler. They chant things like “Lock her up!” even without prompting.

They have no sense of what they did when they managed to give this fool an Electoral College victory in 2016. Why, he speaks their language. It’s as if they all would do and say the same thing if they had a stage as large as the one occupied by the 45th president of the United States.

Indeed, there appears to be something wrong with this guy. I’m not sure if it’s pathological. It’s just . . . something.

Scary, man. It’s damn scary.

national news

Racist: It’s just a toxic term

Allow me one more comment on a quote taken from an extensive interview with a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who takes a dim view of the president of the United States.

David Cay Johnston said this to Salon. com: He is a racist through and through. He has been found in formal judicial proceedings to discriminate against nonwhites in rentals and employment.

Read the Salon piece here.

The “he” is Donald John Trump.

I am so struck by how easy it is to believe that Trump is a racist to his core.

Think for just a moment about the body of evidence that has been built up, most by the president’s own mouth.

  • He wanted to execute five young black men who had been exonerated in the rape and savage beating of a woman in Central Park, New York City.
  • Trump continued to keep alive the bald-face lie that Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, was born in Kenya and was, therefore, unqualified to run for the office to which he was elected twice.
  • White supremacists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen protested the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. They launched a counter protest by those who oppose their racist views; a young woman was run over by one of the racists. Trump then said there were “fine people … on both sides” of the dispute in Charlottesville, Va. Both sides? Are you serious, Mr. President?

Time and time again, the president seems intent on denigrating people of color. He referred to residents of Haiti, El Salvador and throughout Africa as coming from “sh**hole” countries, while saying he preferred more immigrants from, say, Norway and Sweden.

Huh?

Yep. What in the world are we to conclude?

My conclusion is that 62 million Americans voted in 2016 for a racist as their president.

Shameful.

national news

Trump’s ‘ideology’ centers on … Trump

Some readers of this blog gripe occasionally that it spends too much time and consumes too much emotional energy beating up on Donald John Trump.

To which I say: Too bad; there will be plenty more on its way in due course.

Thus, I want to share some more thoughts from a man who dislikes the president of the United States as much as anyone. I get David Cay Johnston’s bias. He also is a long-honored journalist who has studied Trump up close for three decades.

He answered the question “Is Donald Trump an ideologue?” this way:

No. That’s the whole point of the first chapter of my book, “President Like No Other.” The 44 previous presidents were all over the map. There were smart people and dumb people, there were people of impeccable integrity such as Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, there were absolute scoundrels like Warren G. Harding. We had a murderous racist in the White House whose painting hangs in the Oval Office, now looking down on Trump. What distinguishes all those presidents, particularly Chester Arthur, the one closest to Trump, is that they tried in the context of their times to make America better.

Donald Trump is a man with this desperate need for adoration. He is an empty vessel, the exact opposite of Henry David Thoreau — a “life unexamined.” His only philosophy is the glorification of Donald.

Read the entire Salon article here.

Johnston’s final quote gets right to the heart of why I and many others have opposed the very idea of Donald Trump serving as president.

He has built his entire professional life and career with one purpose: self-enrichment. Trump has succeeded. He tells us so whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Trump’s self-worth is all important. It seemingly matters more than the suffering of others, or the grief of others, or anguish of others.

On Memorial Day, for crying out loud, the president tweeted some hideous message about how those who had fallen in battle would be thrilled that the nation’s economy was doing so well. Of course, Trump took all the credit for that, giving new emphasis to the “me” in “Memorial Day.”

The absence of public service throughout the entirety of this man’s life is painfully evident whenever he opens his mouth.

Ideology? He doesn’t possess one.

As David Cay Johnston has noted so accurately, he thinks only of himself and how he can burnish his own image.

national news

How does POTUS appeal to religious voters?

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David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize some years ago. He considers himself to be a student of Donald J. Trump, having covered him for 30 years.

He sat down for an interview with Salon magazine. Much of his interview has been posted online. I want to break out a few segments of it in the days ahead. Today, I want to post some comments he made about the president’s baffling appeal among Christians.

Johnston told Salon the following:

I think it is very important for religious Americans to know that Donald Trump says that his personal philosophy of life is revenge. He has called anyone who turns the other cheek — which is a fundamental teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount — a fool, an idiot or a schmuck. Trump is a man who says things that are absolutely contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. He also denigrates Christians. Yet you see all of these ministers endorsing him.

This lies at the heart of one of the most bizarre aspects of the “base” that continues to hang tightly onto the president.

Yes, I get that he possesses enormous power to appoint judges who will rule from the bench favorably in the eyes of evangelical voters.

Yet they continue to give him a pass on some of his own many personal failings. The serial philandering. The sexual assault to which he has admitted. The hideous mocking of people with disabilities.

He has acknowledged as well that he’s never sought forgiveness. As Johnston noted in his remarks to Salon:

I’ve followed Donald for 30 years. I don’t see any evidence that he has changed, and he certainly hasn’t repented, which is a fundamental Christian obligation.

Someone will have to explain to me in detail how this liar continues to enjoy the support among those who profess their own deep religious convictions.

***

Here is the rest of the Salon interview.

national news

Is Donald Trump as bad as some say?

I won’t spend a lot of time on this blog post.

Instead, I choose to share a Salon.com article that interviews a journalist who says he has covered Donald John Trump for the past three decades. David Cay Johnston, who’s been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work, claims to know the president well.

I believe that he has the chops to say some of the things he has said about Donald Trump. That the president is “anti-Christian,” that he is a racist, that he comes from a family of criminals, that he is “ignorant about almost everything.”

He also believes that investigators well might have evidence that the president is a traitor.

Here’s the article. Take a look.

It will give you the heebie-jeebies.

So help me. It will.

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Tax return issue just won’t go away

What do you know about that?

Some congressional Republicans have joined their Democratic colleagues in seeking the tax returns of the president of the United States.

Go figure. It seems that some GOP members want Donald J. Trump to disclose once and for all whether he has any business dealings in Russia or has any other kind of relationship with Russian government officials.

The president keeps telling us he doesn’t. He keeps saying it with increasing exasperation. Does he really and truly expect skeptics out here — even in Flyover Trump Country — to take him solely at his word?

The president has broken with tradition set four decades ago in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Every president since that dark time has released his tax returns. Trump has refused.

Meanwhile all these questions about Russia keep swirling around the president and the White House, around his national security team and now, apparently, around the attorney general of the United States.

As Salon is reporting: “It’s something I feel very, very strongly about,” Republican South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford told Roll Call this week. Sanford, along with North Carolina Republican Walter Jones signed a letter from New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell calling on the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee to compel the United States Treasury Department to release Trump’s tax returns for congressional review.

Will there be other congressional Republicans who’ll join this chorus? Perhaps. If they do, will the president finally come clean? I have less faith in that happening.

This never has been a matter of nosy Americans wanting to know if Donald Trump is as rich as he says he is. It’s now a matter of urgent national security.