Tag Archives: Trump

06.14.16
by

Just a Normal Day on The Campaign Trail

Donald Trump

Let’s look at what happened in the 24 hours following the Orlando shooting.

  • Donald Trump gave a speech proposing a ban for immigrants from any Muslim country, and any country that has ever committed terrorism against the US and its allies (Ireland?), because, if you follow the logic of it, their children, or their children’s children might do something bad.
  • He suggested, to multiple outlets, that President Obama might in fact be in league with ISIS, or at least sympathetic to it. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.” Now, in his lying way, he said that he believes Obama just doesn’t get it, but you know, people might think otherwise, and it’s really unbelievable, and it’s also hard to believe. To recap: a Presidential candidate is repeating, and heightening, the idea that the sitting President is actively helping, or at least hoping for, and ISIS victory.
  • When a major publication called him out on it, he revoked their credentials. Nixon didn’t revoke the credentials of the Post during Watergate. Nixon! And they aren’t the first. “Among the news organizations whose reporters have been blacklisted: Gawker, BuzzFeed, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.” That these bans are haphazardly enforced doesn’t make them any less scary.

To recap: this is not normal. The blood-and-soil race-hatred, the wild paranoia, the fiercely shouted conspiracy theories, the dismissing of noncompliant press. There is no way to normalize this. This is not a campaign strategy. It’s exactly how he’d govern, as the tinpot strongman of our nightmares.

I actually think the Post thing will backfire, as the mainstream media, who have been desperate to  treat this as a normal race, albeit one with an unusual candidate, will finally see it happening to one of their own. It was easy when it was local papers like the Union-Leader or the Register. And what’s this BuzzFed? And didn’t Gawker do the Hogan? Mother Jones? Fuck you.

But it’s different with the Post. As much as it has fallen, it is still the Post, the paper that brought down Nixon. I hope that this is when they realize that telling both sides and covering the debate is enabling an authoritarian the likes of which this country has never seen. I worry, and will worry until proven wrong, that the press will self-censor so they can stay in bed with the campaign. Access! That’s what most tyrants want. Self-censorship out of fear and preservation is so much more effective than having to line people up against the wall. Voices that are compliant in their own silence are usually too ashamed to ever speak up. That’s what Trump wants.

But maybe this will be different. Maybe this is so outrageous that they’ll push back. Maybe they’ll be fully awakened to the danger of this American monster.

06.10.16
by

Last Trump Post of the Week!

Everywhere today has been stories about the incredible garbage fire/dumpster fire/train wreck-plane crash combo that is the Trump campaign. There’s really little need to rehash it: thinking he can put California in play (or at least pretending to); trying to compete in New York (!) with his top NY aide Carl Paladino (!!); not raising money, not building a staff, having no national or regional ground game, thinking that his twitter feed is enough of a rapid response team (that’s literally true), etc. The polls are beginning to separate, even before the Obama/Warren/clinching the nomination bump (and well before Bernie’s voters step back and realize the real stakes).

There’ll be some ups and downs, and some Clinton scandals and “scandals”, more of the latter, but this will be a dominant theme. And it’ll hurt. After all, the predicate of his entire fucking campaign is that he’s the world’s best manager, and everyone says he is the best leader, and it’s called leadership, ok, and a lot of people say that Mr. Trump, you’re the best leader in business, ok?  That he can’t be bothered to hire a single competent person outside of Paul Manafort- that he thinks Carl Paladino is his New York whisperer- shows that, again, to be as big a lie as anything in his lifetime full of them.

But just for fun, let’s have one more quote about why he doesn’t need to raise money, certainly not the $1 billion he pledged to raise a month ago (sensing a pattern?):

 Naturally, he’s backtracked on that figure, telling Bloomberg, “I just don’t think I need nearly as much money as other people need because I get so much publicity. I get so many invitations to be on television. I get so many interviews, if I want them.

What an unbelievable chump. Never mind that his calculations are ridiculous. He’s such an insecure and arrogant dipshit that he’s bragging about being able to get interviews when he is the nominee for President of the United States. You know who else can get all the interviews they want? Hillary Clinton. And every single major party candidate for President in the history of any medium. This is not a strategic edge. What a ludicrous chump.

06.09.16
by

Trump Grows Up! Again! Why You Shouldn’t Be Worried (And Also Be Very Worried)

In Talking Points Memo EdBlog this morning, John Judis outlines why Trump’s victory speech the other night could be cause for worry for Democrats. In it, Judis talked about  how Trump was reaching toward a less-racially tinged populism which could peel off enough white voters to have some kind of winning collation, or at least message. Judis certainly admits that it is probably too late for Trump to change his basic image, because his “incendiary racist, nativist, psycho-sexual and self-promotional provocations” are not the heart of his campaign, but the heart of who he is.

Still, though, the “Trump gives grown up speech” got some play the other day, for the umpteenth time. He used a teleprompter! He didn’t  spittle out “Mexican” as a pejorative! Is he finally pivoting?

Luckily, thankfully, this kind of nonsense didn’t get much traction. Everyone seems to understand that this was, despite Trump’s protestations to the contrary, the real act. His bombastic racist jackass routine is the real Trump, and his saying that he “can be so Presidential your head will spin” is just part of the act. But say he did start acting more like this on a daily basis (which he can’t, but pretend). Should we worry?

I say no, and here’s why.

trump-psu-2-1024x565

Image from ThinkProgress

Trump has built up his active base (though not all his voters) out of the dumbest, meanest, pastiest juvenile psychopaths filling alt-right message boards and hideous 4chan threads in the country. ThinkProgess has been doing a great job highlighting the racial hatred and misogynistic vitriol he’s unleashing and giving voice to, especially on college campuses. He’s empowering these awful people, these sniggering “anti-PC” cowards, who feel that the voice of white men is being buried under trigger warnings and safe spaces, and now feel like it is an act of courage, and revolutionary radicalism to say things that would have been acceptable in corporate boardrooms 40 years ago.

So even if Trump somehow moderates his rhetoric, his disgusting movement, the human and political equivalent of the Boston molasses disaster, a tidal wave of bitter and choking sludge, will fill in the gaps. These people will get louder as the summer moves on. Especially is he tones it down. There is a tribal connection, and they’ll think the boss is winking at them, playing the game so that he can get in power. They’ll pick up his slack. That’s why you shouldn’t worry about Trump being able to change his image too much. These are the people who will help sustain that.

Of course, while I still don’t think he can win, it is also why you should be worried on the very off-chance he does. And even if he loses, even if it is a historical nut-stomping that will make him history’s greatest loser, these forces he’s unleashed will be with us a long time.

06.07.16
by

It’s Different Now: What Buzzfeed Gets About 2016

Ullrich has strong feelings about the way Hitler came to power in January 1933, enthroned by a ‘sinister plot’ of stupid elite politicians just at the moment when the Nazis were at last losing strength. It didn’t have to happen. He constantly reminds his readers that Hitler didn’t reach the chancellorship by his own efforts, but was put there by supercilious idiots who assumed they could manage this vulgarian. ‘We engaged him for our ends,’ said the despicable Franz von Papen. A year later, in the Night of the Long Knives, von Papen was grovelling to save his own neck.

Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books, June 2nd 2016

“What protects us in this country against big mistakes being made is the structure, the Constitution, the institutions,” McConnell told CBS News last month. “No matter how unusual a personality may be who gets elected to office, there are constraints in this country. You don’t get to do anything you want to.”

via Talking Points Memo

Neal Ascherson, the Scottish travel writer, wrote The Black Sea, which is my favorite kind of history book. It shows the long scope, how areas change slowly (and then very quickly) through migration, demographics, and the slow glacial push of cultural shifts becoming norms, and of violent revolutions mutating slowly into evolutions. It’s the long view of history, the kind that understands there aren’t black lines dividing epochs and periods, much in the same way that Masters of Empire explores how native culture didn’t hit a quick reboot when the Europeans arrived, and that understands (as we’ve argued) that the misery of Syria is part of the long night of Ottoman dissolution.

We tend, in this country at least, to see history as buried, and something that doesn’t impact us. It’s sort of the national myth, and it relies heavily on cognitive dissonance, since it is clear that our major issues still spring from the legacy of slavery and the historical memory and political divide of the Civil War. But we admire amnesia, and always look forward. This was accelerated by the 24-hr news cycle, and made manifest in the 24-second news cycle. When discussing yesterday’s tweets marks bloggers such as this one as hopelessly behind the times, understanding how we got to this point is an exercise in futility.

This isn’t just a little rant either; a lack of historical knowledge of American political trends has helped lead to the rise of the first openly white nationalist campaign we’ve seen in modern times. The elite media, and most of the non-elite, failed to understand how 40 years of Reaganite nonsense, 60 years of conservative takeover, and 150 years of post-Civil War resentment could factor into today’s election, and help facilitate the rise of Donald Trump. We live in the immediate present, which is where a man as completely removed from the truth as Trump thrives, and why he has, until the last week, managed to get away with whatever he wanted. It’s in this eternal present that it was believed that a man like Donald Trump couldn’t win simply because he was a man like Donald Trump. This is an ahistoric tautology, in the literal sense, because it ignores the factors that enabled his victory. It was obvious in August that he was appealing to the most violent lizard part of a broken party, one torn apart by geographic and demographic pressures. But he was still treated like a joke.

Now, as he shatters all norms, threatening to “look into” judges and to jail his likely opponent should he win (a statement that should be breathtaking, but barely makes noise), we wonder how we got here, and how we should react. It’s why it is interesting that Buzzfeed, who has generally symbolized the memory-free nonsense of the internet, has broken ties with the RNC over Trump’s nomination. (It should be noted that over the last 5 years BuzzFeed has created some excellent journalism, but its reputation is still that of the constant present, a man seeing the sunrise every morning and wondering what he could possibly be seeing.)

BuzzFeed, which accepts ads from GOP and Democratic candidates, had a $1.3 million ad deal with the RNC, but cancelled it, because Trump is beyond the pale. In a statement, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said:

The tone and substance of his campaign are unique in the history of modern US politics. Trump advocates banning Muslims from traveling to the United States, he’s threatened to limit the free press, and made offensive statements toward women, immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and foreign nationals.

(cont)

We don’t need to and do not expect to agree with the positions or values of all our advertisers. And as you know, there is a wall between our business and editorial operations. This decision to cancel this ad buy will have no influence on our continuing coverage of the campaign.

We certainly don’t like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company. However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don’t run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won’t accept Trump ads for the exact same reason.

This is a big deal. This is exactly how the media should be covering Trump. We’ve never had anything like this in our modern history, and he shouldn’t be treated as just another nominee, albeit a flamboyant one. We’re at a hinge in our country’s history. It could go either way.

I began this piece with a few quotes, one from a book review about how Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by old-guard politicians who assumed they could let him ride popular anger into office but then control him for their ends, and one by Mitch McConnell, who represents Republicans who think the same thing about Trump. The thrust of the TPM article is that the old guard’s main pledge is that sure, Trump might be an authoritarian monster, but once he’s in office we’ll be able to control him.

This isn’t to say that Trump is Hitler. This isn’t Germany in 1933. It’s the United States in 2016, a country that isn’t sure of itself, feels like its best days are behind, and is sliding along a weird trail of economic dislocation and historical amnesia. That’s bad enough, and it can get much worse. That we have even gotten to this point shows how much worse it can get. Not understanding how we got here, and ignoring everything except tomorrow’s news, creates the possibility to slip past the point of no return.

06.06.16
by

Trump’s “My African-American”: The Problem Isn’t The Possessive; It’s The Singular

waldo81

Pictured somewhere: Trump’s black support. Can you find him???? Image from whereswaldoemotionally.blogspot.com

So, the weekend was dominated, as it should be, by Donald Trump’s not-bizarre insistence that the judge in his fraud case is biased against him because he’s not just Mexican, but really super Mexican. To say this line of thinking should be disqualifying is self-evident, but the real disqualifications are, once again, just how dumb and ill-informed Trump sounds dumb and ill-informed Trump sounds (and is!) when talking about anything other than his business acumen.

These comments caused some fainting in green rooms across the country, as the media tries to reconcile their belief that any bad thing a politician says is a gaffe with the reality that Trump is running a white nationalist campaign based on ignorance and petty grievances. To their credit, they actually seem to be coming around to it. Perhaps the best line of the weekend was offered up by Newt Gingrich, who has always managed to find the perfect combination of obsequiousness when he wants power with self-serving self-righteousness. He called Trump’s comments inexcusable, which allows him to maintain independence, but then said that Trump’s comments were the “biggest mistake of the campaign” so far, as if this was a stumble, and not the point of the whole project. But Gingrich gets to seem like a wise Washington hand, as he angles for the Vice Presidency.

Still, that wasn’t the only racial flap. Trump began the weekend by pointing out a black person in the crowd and saying “my African-American.” The man, who wasn’t a Trump supporter, also wasn’t offended, which is fine. He shouldn’t have been. The outcry was over the use of the possessive, which strikes me as silly. Every politician refers to their supporters like that. The real problem is that, when trying to say you have a racially-inclusive campaign, you probably shouldn’t be able to highlight the single minority in your audience. Having a diverse following isn’t Where’s Waldo.

To me, though, the real highlight was when Trump retweeted a picture of black supporters, which turned out to be fake, just a photo pulled off the internet somewhere.   That’s normal, except, dig this: the account he retweeted.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

“@Don_Vito_08: Thank You Mr. Trump for Standing up for Our Country! JOIN ME ON THE 🚂http://twitter.com/Don_Vito_08/status/739075864793653248/photo/1pic.twitter.com/zgopGvSEen “

7:49 AM – 4 Jun 2016
Eagle-eyed readers will remember that “Don Vito 08” was the same account from which Trump retweeted the famous Melania Trump/Heidi Cruz picture. At the time, I described him thusly: “The attack comes in the form of a reweet from someone who has named himself “Don Vito 08”, which is perfect image of a Trump supporter- sad and lost but with delusions of greatness underscored by violence.”
At this point, we can just count Don Vito 08 as a top campaign advisor.
06.03.16
by

Skin Too Thin To Fail: What’ll Sink Trump

gettyimages-524732160_wide-1951934875efc83bfeb5db5285f91a29052bffbb-s1100-c15

Mr. Perfect!

I mentioned earlier today that Trump responded to Hillary Clinton saying he had thin skin by immediately huffing that he had the opposite of thin skin, which is of course what someone who is totally secure and unflappable would do. In an interview with Jake Tapper today, notable mostly for continuing his assumption that any Mexican can’t be an unbiased judge because of the wall, he doubled down on that claim.

“Well, I don’t have thin skin,” Trump protested. “I have very strong and thick skin. If you do a report and it’s not necessarily positive but, you’re right, I never complain. I do complain when it’s a lie or when it’s wrong.”

(Which of course, it always is)

Trump then went on to explain how his thick skin and “good temperament” made him have “one of the best-selling books of all-time” and a successful television show.

This is what, I think, will sink him with all but those who feel a tribal connection to him, either through whiteness or general Republicanness (not unrelated!). But anyone who is sort of on the fence about him, emotion-wise. It’s the idea that no matter what anyone says, he has to come back with the most absurd statement, because he can’t possibly have a moment of self-doubt. That’s not a political tactic, although it works politically. It’s who he is.

You saw it with the Trump Steaks nonsense. After Mitt Romney made fun of him for having a steak line that failed, Trump brought out steaks to prove they still existed, on election night! A night he won real legitmate primaries. As Chait pointed out: “His campaign displayed store-bought steaks for the media, not even bothering to fully remove the labels of the store at which they purchased them.”

That’s the thing: anyone with an ounce of security would have said, “You know what- I’m a businessman. In business, you take chances. You win some, and you lose some. I win a lot more, but no one’s perfect. I’m still a billionaire.” He could have then lit a pile of $100 bills on fire on threw the flaming pile at a lackey who would have thanked him for it. That’s how you be an asshole, but one slightly tethered to the real world.

There are a lot of people who love Trump because he says racist things, and that own’t change. But for those who don’t, they’ll see a small, vainglorious toad, who overreacts in bizarre ways to the slightest hints that he is fallible. It’s deeply unattractive, and there is a serious limit to its appeal.

06.03.16
by

Trump’s Security Briefings: The First Real Sign Of the Sweaty Terror

dr-strangelove-still-580

“On my first day in office…” -Donald Trump

Until now, the fears of a hypothetical Trump presidency- and even just typing that makes me a little woozy– were just that: hypothetical. We’ve all been able to imagine just how scary it would be, given his combination of rampant insecurity, raw egotism, paranoia, and general inability to keep two coherent thoughts in his head at any one time. But now, as the possibility becomes decidedly more real (although demographically unlikely), the actual outlines of just how fearful his win would be begin to take shape.

Hillary Clinton’s excellent attack on him  yesterday, in which she mockingly demonstrated his unfitness to serve (and demonstrating that she knows how to needle him), was just the beginning.  He further elaborated upon his attacks on the judge in his civil case, claiming that merely being of Mexican descent was a conflict of interest with Trump, a truly frightening line of thinking. And today, the Times has a piece by legal experts worried about his contempt for the First Amendment, separation of powers, and more.

But again, those are all still in the realm of “wouldn’t it be bad if he became President?” As he gets closer to the nomination, though, various norms start to take hold, and we see just how grotesque his victory really is. Reuters had the far more interesting story, about how security officials are worried about giving Trump the daily briefings that are traditionally accorded a nominee.

Eight senior security officials told Reuters they had concerns over briefing Trump, whose brash, unpredictable campaign style has been a feature of his rise as an insurgent candidate. Despite their worries, the officials said the “Top Secret” briefing to each candidate would not deviate from the usual format to avoid any appearance of bias.

Now, to be fair, one says that the briefings are more of an overview, and won’t tell him much that he won’t get from reading the paper. And it’s not like he has the intellectual wherewithal to actually explain anything. The briefings can be politically advantageous, because they give a patina of respectability to his rantings (“I’m getting security briefings because they know I’m the smartest. And let me tell you, people, ISIS is bad, ok. And the people doing the briefings are saying, ‘Mr. Trump, you have to save us, crooked Hillary can’t do, you’re the only one who can stop this’, ok?”).

However, it isn’t the politics of it. It’s the fact that people are beginning to really realize how different this is from anything we’ve ever seen, how large a mutation. We have someone who is not just intellectually unfit, or even morally, but tempramentally and emotionally. We have someone who is truly dangerous, and the people tasked with keeping this country safe are genuinely terrified. This needs to be made a much bigger deal. We’re seeing what the actual election of Donald Trump as President means- a complete breakdown of every national apparatus. The media needs to hammer this, to make sure he loses in such a way that completely discredits the terrifying politics of personal resentment.

(Of course, in the story, Rueters also quotes a sneering RNC official who makes an flagrantly dishonest snark about the email scandal, I guess for “balance”. This allows places like The Hill to have headlines reading “US Intelligence Officials Concerned About Briefing Trump, Clinton”. Goddammit, Reuters, and The Hill. This isn’t balance. Both sides aren’t doing it. This only normalizes the most abnormal and scary campaign we’ve ever had.)

 

06.01.16
by

Trump The Flim-Flam Man and the Judge: The Only Thing Hillary Needs To Talk About

conanmonorail

Pictured: Donald Trump campaigning for the support of the FOP.

There’s a lot of talk that the Hillary Clinton camp hasn’t yet settled on a narrative about how best to handle the unpredictable ravings of the idiot madman against whom she’ll most likely find herself running. If I may be so bold, I think over the last few days he’s provided the clearest opening, and it comes from a combination of his phony real-estate “schools” and the racism that underpins his campaign.

From The Guardian:

A federal judge has given the world an unprecedented glimpse into the ruthless business practices Donald Trump used to build his business empire.

US district court judge Gonzalo Curiel on Tuesday made public more than 400 pages of Trump University “playbooks” describing how Trump staff should target prospective students’ weaknesses to encourage them to sign up for a $34,995 Gold Elite three-day package.

First off, this is an obvious swindle, and there was some evidence in the GOP primary that this was the best hit on Trump, because it got to the heart of his self-image as a great, world-bestriding businessman. It shows him to be a cheap grifter, hitting the flats for their life savings and skipping town. His string of bankruptcies, and the fact that most of his business now is just licensing his name, deflates the basis of his campaign, showing him to be a cheapjack Lyle Lanley, always just one step ahead of the mob.

It’s also when he lashes out the most, and he did so, in a series of tweets and rants against the judge. This is when people say they are “disappointed” with the decision. Not so our Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔‎@realDonaldTrump

I have a judge in the Trump University civil case, Gonzalo Curiel (San Diego), who is very unfair. An Obama pick. Totally biased-hates Trump

4:45 PM – 30 May 2016

Donald J. Trump

✔‎@realDonaldTrump

I should have easily won the Trump University case on summary judgement but have a judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who is totally biased against me.

4:55 PM – 30 May 2016

You’ll notice of course that these came within 10 minutes of each other. Not really a temperate person. The Times already noted how disturbing it is to see a Presidential candidate attack in such a personal manner the judicial branch, but for the real horrorshow, let’s go to this part of a speech.

Trump hit back calling Curiel a “hater”, a “total disgrace” and “biased”. “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump. A hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a rally near the courthouse in San Diego. “His name is Gonzalo Curiel. And he is not doing the right thing … [He] happens to be, we believe, Mexican.”

See, it’s the last part that really sets this on a whole new level. There is no way to interpret that except to say that Mexicans are bad, and are aligned against Trump, and are therefore aligned against America. It is absolute naked racism. This case in no way involves, say, a border wall, in which case maybe you could make a (still racist!) case that a Mexican judge would be biased. But not in this one.

Curiel, by the way, was born in Indiana.

This is all Hillary needs to do. His attacks on judges show his thin-skin nd wild intemperance. His quote on “happens to be, we believe, Mexican” should be run over and over in every Hispanic market to make sure his numbers never climb. And his obvious swindle, the details of which are now perfectly clear, should be hammered every day. This is a man who sees Americans as a way to feed his ego and his wallet, and sees everyone else as an obstacle to be removed. Between his venality, his absurdity, and his racism, there’s really nothing more to say.

06.01.16
by

Donald Trump as Tinpot Strongman

Perfection, of a kind, he was after
And the poetry he wrote was easy to understand;

-Auden, “Epitath on a Tyrant”

prague-tour-clementis-balcony

The man is gone, but the hat remains. Image from nakedtourguideprague.com

It’s doubtful that Donald Trump would know who Emomali Rahmon was. To be fair, very few Americans do. I was only vaguely aware of him. He’s the President of Tajikistan, a landlocked country in Central Asia that doesn’t come up very much. It’s not considered one of the world’s happiest places. With borders that touch Afghanistan and the rebellious Xinjiang region of China, not to mention its abutting of Jammu and Kashmir, it is in a fairly rough place in the world, and has never enjoyed much stability in the post-Soviet era. That’s about to change, albeit in a way that makes most people uncomfortable.

Rahmon, the President, successfully passed a ballot referendum that scrapped term limits, as well as lowered the age one could stand for President to 30, which by a great coincidence gives his son the ability to run. It’s instituting a President-for-Life plan, and it worked. A low-information campaign (which mostly talked about vague “changes to the constitution”), coupled with a population weary about politics, helped make the referendum a landslide. With 94.4% of the votes, Rustam, the fresh-faced whelping, now has a clear path to 40 years of power. It’s hard to say democracy died in Tajikistan, as it was never fully born. But it’s easy to see that this is how authoritarians act. They tell you not to worry you weary hearts. They tell you it’ll all be better if you just let them take care of it. They tell you that all you have to do is give them power, and things will be fine.

Donald Trump may never have heard of Emomali Rahmon, but both he and his gruesome campaign head, Paul Manafort, know that playbook by heart. They’ve taken the lessons of him and every other tinpot tyrant that has stumpled across history, and brought them to America.

Continue reading →

05.27.16
by

Never Forget: Donald Trump Is A Giant Goddamn Dummy About Climate Change

Canada Wildfire

Tar sands extractions are a good idea with no downsides.

This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice. Jan 1st, 2014

Not a dime’s worth of difference between Hillary and Donald, right?

Never forget that Donald Trump is a man who is stupid enough to believe that if it is cold out, global warming isn’t real.

Never forget that Donald Trump is so galactically goddamn dumb that he thinks extreme and unprecedented weather events, happening with terrifying regularity, are a sign that everything is fine.

Never forget that Donald Trump is such a peabrained dipshit that he literally believes China invented the idea of global warming in order to bankrupt the US.

It’s not that Donald Trump doesn’t believe in anything. It’s that what he believes in is so gigantically moronic that his environmental plans include pulling out of the Paris climate accords, which he wrongly thinks allows foreigners to dictate our climate policy, and to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which he wrongly thinks will have a positive impact on energy independence. He also thinks he can bring back coal, absent market forces. This proves again that he doesn’t understand how things work, whether it is the fungible nature of the energy market, coal, pipelines in general, the Paris accords, or, of course, anything at all.

Kudos, by the way, to the New York Times for not hedging when covering his idiotic “energy speech”, which he used to show his wholly non-existent bonafides. They actually used terms like “repeatedly denied the established science” and “However, the next president will not have the legal authority to unilaterally rescind the climate rules” and “In fact, at the heart of the Paris Agreement are voluntary pledges put forward by the governments of over 190 nations” to contradict him when he said things that were in opposition to reality. This is a good way to cover his truthless campaign.

But really, I don’t think he’s lying, in this case. I think he is genuinely dumb about everything that can’t make him money, and even that prowess is questionable. He’s a rich moron who believes that being born rich means he has everything figured out, as long as he can filter a newspaper through his brain, and doesn’t have anyone around him who says “Donald, you’re a giant goddamn dummy for thinking that snow in New York in January disproves science. The Northwest Passage is now a real thing, you enormous featherweight pinhead.”  He lies about nearly everything, but on other things, he’s just a genuine tiny-brained mouth-breather who couldn’t shoot himself in the ass with a shotgun in a phone booth.

But, you know, not a dime’s worth of difference.