A Rant: I'm Done

I’m done with his deflections and the lies; I’m over his idiotic, change the narrative Tweets.

With over 100,000 Americans dead—though 35,000 or more who could have been saved had he acted earlier—he Tweets about the fake Obamagate.

With 44 million Americans unemployed, he Tweets some debunked theory about Joe Scarborough murdering someone.

With George Floyd, another black man murdered by a police officer, following Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, following Breonna Taylor’s murder, following Chris Cooper being racially profiled in Central Park, he holds a press briefing and talks about China.

He deflects while Americans die; he deflects while millions are unemployed; he deflects while racism continues to erupt in this country and more black Americans are murdered.

When thousands upon thousands of Americans protest police brutality, he shuts off the White House lights, and hides in a bunker; and then like some chickenshit groundhog, he reappears to declare that he is “YOUR” president, and then fires tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd so he can walk through a park to a church where he was not invited to have a photo op with a Bible.

Here’s the truth about him, no deflections: he has changed policy in ways that affect the lives of millions of Americans, and this should be our focus, not his side show antics. I’m going to remember how he has ruined this country and not some inane three in the morning stuffing Big Macs into his mouth childish Tweet rant. This is what he’s done; this is who he is:

White-collar criminal prosecutions have hit a 33-year low under _____; the rich get away with crime.

His DOJ defends state laws that could kick thousands of people off the voting rolls; it’s called election tampering.

Tens of thousands of people have lost health insurance by his administrative order, and millions are in the process of losing their nutritional assistance; but big pharma keeps making coins.

He’s installing conservative judges at twice Obama’s pace, and has established a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that may endure for decades. Be prepared for changes in a woman’s right to choose; look for changes in LGBTQ equality; in immigration; in healthcare; look for the cessation of any kind of meaningful progress for anyone other than a rich white man.

He gave a permanent tax cut to the richest Americans with his Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 [TCJA]. He said the tax cuts would pay for themselves through faster economic growth, but that hasn’t happened—and thanks to his ineptitude with COVID-19, it’s only gotten worse; the rich get richer, and everyone else loses.

When he ran for office he supported the idea of bringing back Glass-Steagall regulations that would have required the breakup of large financial services companies; in office, he has done the opposite; the rich get richer, and a banking system that was made safer after the 2008 crisis—thanks to Obama—is getting riskier again.

He rolled back environmental regulation; he doesn’t believe in climate change, even though he vowed “to promote clean air and water.”  He has given big boosts to fossil fuel production which comes with a deterioration in air quality … 9,700 more Americans died due to air pollution in 2018 than in 2016, in part due to regulatory changes he put forth; add that to the number of people he’s killed.

He tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act [ACA] but failed in Congress.

He wants to allow states to impose work requirements on their Medicaid programs. He wants to limit federal spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP]. His tougher work requirements could cost 755,000 people their benefits and new rule changes now make over 3 million beneficiaries of a different anti-poverty program ineligible for SNAP.

But worse than all that; worse than being the president of the one percent and for the one percent, is that he stokes the fires of racism in this country; since 2016, every single racial incident in this country can be traced back to him. He is a racist, plain and simple. Now, that’s not just an opinion, that’s what he says, and does, time and again.

On day one, running for office, he called Mexicans ‘rapists’ and ‘drug dealers’.

He’s locked up immigrants seeking asylum; he’s made that a crime.

He put children in cages after taking them from their families.

He has cut refugee resettlements by over 80%; he’s made it more difficult to get H-1B visas for skilled technology workers and is in the process of stripping their spouses of work permits.

He ended the DACA program, which protected an estimated 800,000 young undocumented immigrants, including 36,000 LGBTQ DREAMers, from detention and deportation. 

Of note, these are aimed only at people of color trying to enter this country; white Europeans who don’t come from “shit hole countries” are welcome.

In 1973 he was accused to racial bias in renting his properties to people of color; he paid a fine and promised to change, but he didn’t. Elyse Goldweber, a Justice Department lawyer who brought the first federal suit against his management company says he told her at one point:

“You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”

He told an architect of one of his buildings to remove the Braille numbering inside his elevators because:

“No blind people are living in my building.”

He took out newspapers ads in every major New York City paper saying that the so-called Central Park Five, a group of black and Latino teens who were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park on April 19, 1989 “should be forced to suffer” and “be executed.” And when those same men were exonerated through DNA evidence and the confession by another individual to the crime, in 2002, he again took out newspaper ads calling the settlement “a disgrace.” In 2016, during his presidential campaign, he once again insisted the men were all guilty and should have been executed.

For a crime they did not commit.

In the early 1990s, he  tried blocking the construction of new Native American casinos in Connecticut and New York that could cut into his casino operations in Atlantic City—of note, every single one of his casinos went into bankruptcy. He again took out ads claiming there would be illegal drug use at those casinos.

He also claimed before the House Subcommittee on Native American Affairs of the Committee on Natural Resources that there was a lot of corruption and organized crime around Native American casinos, but when asked to prove his claim, he said the FBI had the evidence—the same FBI he would call corrupt in 2016; he did not produce a single shred of evidence.

He also asked that the hearing examine some Native American tribes’ application as Indian tribes because, saying:

“They don’t look like Indians to me.”

In the summer of 2005, he pitched an idea for an upcoming season of The Apprentice: a black versus white season; seriously; the concept never made it to air, but his treatment of black contestants on his show generated controversy.

He criticized one such contestant, Kevin Allen, a graduate of Emory University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, for being too educated as a black man, and said that Allen was an intimidating figure to the women on the show.

In 2005, he asked Randal Pinkett, a black man who won that season, to share his title with the white runner-up, Rebecca Jarvis. Pinkett refused.

In February 2011, this statement made at the Conservative Political Action Conference, marked his inching toward a presidential campaign, when a speaker said of Barack Obama:

“Our current president came out of nowhere, came out of nowhere … The people who went to school with him—they never saw him; they don’t know who he is.”

Birtherism had been festering for several years until _____ embraced it; in March, on The View, he called on Obama to show his birth certificate, while in April, he said that he had sent a team of investigators to search for Obama’s birth records.

His embrace of birtherism appears to have started when a Manhattan developer proposed an Islamic cultural center on a site in Lower Manhattan; the so-called Ground Zero mosque. In 2010, on the Late Show, he told David Letterman:

“I think it’s very insensitive to build it there. I think it’s not appropriate.”

When Letterman pushed back, saying that blocking an Islamic facility would be akin to declaring “war with Muslims,” he replied:

“Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”

Muslims are terrorists.

He again stoked Muslim sentiment while appearing on Fox News’ The Laura Ingraham Show when he said of Obama:

“He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him. Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea whether this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion,’ it might have ‘Muslim.’” 

This all came after he lied about seeing Muslims in New Jersey cheer as the towers fell on 9/11.

On April 27, 2011, Obama released his long-form birth certificate, and a few days later, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama and comedian Seth Meyers mocked _____’s birther claims, leaving him red-faced and seething as the crowd laughed at him.

And so, he bashed back; in May 2012, he told the CNN host Wolf Blitzer that “a lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate.” In August, he called the birth certificate “a fraud.” Finally, in September 2016, under political pressure during his presidential campaign, he finally acknowledged that Obama had in fact been born in the United States, but in private he was still swearing that Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent.

Minutes after being was sworn into office, any mention of the LGBTQ community was erased from White House, Department of State, and Department of Labor websites; we were invisible.

After previously committing to protecting LGBTQ Americans from discrimination, _____ drafted a "License to Discriminate" executive order which would usher in across-the-board discrimination against the LGBTQ community. 

He rescinded Title IX protections for transgender students in our nation's schools. 

Under his proposed budget, he offered to cut HIV and AIDS research funding under the National Institutes of Health [NIH].

He has consistently declined to issue a presidential proclamation designating June as LGBTQ Pride Month, breaking with an eight-year precedent set by President Barack Obama to honor and support LGBTQ Americans during Pride Month; he says The Gays love him.

Vice President Michael Elizabeth Pence advocated for removing healthcare benefits for transgender servicemembers. Days later, _____ used Twitter to announce a ban on transgender Americans from serving in "any capacity" in the U.S. military, and threatened to fire 15,000 currently serving troops.

In 2017 he left out the LGBTQ community and people of color in his World AIDS Day Proclamation.

He backed the position that businesses owners should be able to put up signs saying they won’t serve gays. 

He fires the entire White House Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

He rolled back protections for incarcerated transgender people that were intended to mitigate their exposure to sexual assault and abuse, allowing the Bureau of Prisons to “use biological sex as the initial determination for designation” when placing trans people for housing, screening, and programs and services.

In December 2018, his administration discharged two service members in the Air Force after disclosing their HIV-positive status to the Department of Defense. 

His administration announced plans implement a new policy to allow adoption agencies to deny LGBTQ couples the ability to adopt based on so-called "religious exemptions."

His administration announced a new policy stating transgender Americans would not be guaranteed health care protections under the ACA.

After using the Pulse shooting as a campaign move in 2016, he has continually failed to recognize the anniversaries of the shooting at Orlando's Pulse Nightclub, which killed 49 LGBTQ people. 

He enacted a Muslim ban.

He created a commission to investigate voter fraud—which is virtually nonexistent—claiming that he would have won the popular vote but for millions of ballots cast by illegal immigrants in this country.

He shut down the government for 35 days in an attempt to secure funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

He referred to African countries as “shithole” nations—asking why the U.S. can’t have more immigrants from Norway instead—and complained that, after seeing America, immigrants from Nigeria would never “go back to their huts.”

His administration favored victims of Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston over those of Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico. He sent three times as many workers to Houston and approved 23 times as much money for individual assistance in Houston than in Puerto Rico.

August 11, 2017. Hundreds of neo-Nazis and white supremacists descended onto the University of Virginia’s campus in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and a Nazi slogan,  “Blood and soil” to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, called it a “turning point” for his own movement, which seeks to “fulfill the promises of Donald ____.”

August 12, 2017. DeAndre Harris, a black man, was beaten by at least four white supremacists, while later that same day, James Alex Fields Jr., a white supremacist from Ohio, drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.

So, you have a black man beaten by white supremacists, and a woman killed by a white supremacist, and what does _____ do? From a golf course, he denounced “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” He paused, then repeated: “On many sides.” The next day he walked back his initial statement and specifically condemned “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups.” A day after that, he walked back his walk-back, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

White-nationalist leaders welcomed his remarks. That speaks volumes.

And this past month, as white MAGA hat wearing asshats took assault weapons and stormed several state capitals because they were tired of the lockdown and wanted a hamburger and some new highlights, he called them “very good people.”

But when black Americans, sick of yet another police murder of an unarmed black man, took to the streets to protest racism in this country, he called them “thugs,” and then said, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

That’s a lot to digest, I know. But it just shows how much damage he’s done to this country, to people of color, to minorities, to the LGBTQ community, to the poor, the disenfranchised, while we’ve all been focusing on idiotic Tweets and publicity stunts.

I’m done with that. I will not discuss his stunts any longer. I will just keep saying, and saying loudly, until November 3, 2020, that he has fucked this country.

And it’s time to unfuck it.

Vote out a racist.

Vote out a thug.

Vote out a man who has done nothing for anyone other than rich white men and his own family.

Vote out a rapist.

Vote out a pussy grabber.

Vote him out.