Even More Lies the President Told me: The RNC Speech

The Truth vs Trump’s RNC Claims

        Listen to what his older sister, herself a former federal judge, says; “He has no principles.”, “All he wants to do his appeal to his base,” “He doesn’t read.” “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.” And she’s a blood relative! 

    No President is an expert on everything, but this is the first in my memory who refuses to listen and cannot even write a literate English sentence. His older sister, the federal judge, actually also said he cheated to get into college, which echoes what several former professors have said. The only one who has EVER said Trump is a "genius" is Trump himself. He has lied about his college grades and had Cohen, (the former lawyer, now felon), threaten Penn with a lawsuit if they ever released any of his grades.

       The only mystery to me, and I have never had anyone willing to enter into a civil conversation on this point, is exactly what about Donald Trump is admirable? It certainly isn't his personality. He has kept essentially none of his campaign promises, He says he has, and people go "oh yeah, he said it, so it must be true." He has turned the big lie into an art form

        The "great Trade Deals" he refers to are costing every household in the US about $850 annually because of the tariffs every responsible economist warned him not to enact. The farmers he was going to "help" with tariffs on China have lost billions. "Usual" farm subsidies average about $25 billion annually. Add $32 billion to that because of the Chinese not buying US soybeans. Moreover, the trade “deals” he brags about are very thinly veiled, almost precise, copies of the ones they replaced. Yes, criticize Obama for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) which a Republican controlled Senate ratified, and then roll out one essentially just like it and brag about it, as if you either wrote it or understood it.  

        John Bolton, Trump's hand-picked National Security advisor who also served in the Bush 43 administration, writes that where the President is supposed to listen during the daily security briefs, Trump talks, usually bitching about things he doesn't understand. He refuses to read briefing papers but obsessively watches the gospel from Hannity and Carlson.  In fact, the reasons and psychological flaws which led to things Bolton describes in his book, written after he resigned in disgust, are explained by Trump's  niece (the PhD Psychologist) in her book. It is interesting that now, recently, even the older sister has weighed in with confirmation.

       The general theme of both is that his claims to religious faith are the biggest lie of all because he is amoral and has no room for any God except himself. It saddens me that many who overlook all these things still cling to the manufactured myth that Trump is a man of God. 

       This goes back to Roe V Wade. Being a history teacher, I looked back at when, and how, the religious evangelicals hijacked the Republican party. It happened shortly after Roe V Wade. The original Southern Baptist Convention's response to Roe V Wade was printed in their in-house newspaper. It called the decision a "triumph for personal liberty!”  Read that again. However, several political operatives led by Lee Atwater and several very conservative businessmen saw the chance to make "choice" a divisive issue. 

      

        Note that I said "choice" because no one is "pro-abortion" - that's another far right lie,  but I digress; they politically "weaponized" religion by claiming that abortion was "Biblically”  a sin.

       Of course, the only actual mention of abortion in the Bible in ten separate instances has God killing the unborn, or in one case\, the priests will give the pregnant woman the "herbs" to cause her to abort. In fact, as late as Augustine, 400 years AD, the unborn were not considered to have life or souls, yet the same who say "but now science shows they are alive”, deny many of the other things science also shows us (you know evolution, global warming..real stuff?) The entire abortion issue has been manufactured to get those religious persons who might actually evaluate all political issues, to focus on only one and determined their votes on that one made up issue. The real reason Trump magically became pro-life (after urging his first trophy wife to abort Tiffany (yes, she said he did; I believe her) was to get votes.

        It's the same reason Trump caters to working class folks with racism and xenophobia. We know he has no actual respect for them. Ask any of the multitude of workers he has stiffed. Ask the caterer he engaged for a wedding, then when the bill came, he refused to pay, saying that "just doing my wedding" was payment enough! (yes, really!) 

       In fact, it may well have been that the "genius” couldn't pay because, by that time, US banks were sharply curtailing his credit. This would have been about the time daddy, Fred Sr, was clandestinely sending employees to Atlantic City to buy chips at Donnie’s casino, which was struggling. They would spend hundreds of thousands and never use the chips, instead bringing them back to NYC. Sound like money laundering? It was, in essence. Even with dad’s help the casino eventually became just another bankruptcy. Jump ahead to 2017, 18 and 19. All years during which Trump bragged incessantly that he had created the very, very greatest, best economy in history.

  

      So, what’s wrong with that? First the GDP growth increase began in the Obama recovery from the housing bubble collapse. Oddly, although Trump brags (a redundancy, because he always brags) about the “amazing growth” only he could have caused, the GDP growth percentage, the true measure of how robust (or not) an economy truly is, tells us a contrasting reality: Comparing the growth of US GDP for 2014 and 2015, under Obama  actually yields a slightly higher growth rate than the growth rate in 2017 and 2018, under Trump!! Of course, Obama just didn’t brag about it and claim the credit.  

        Stranger still, all the Trump budget deficits (2017-19) are higher than the last three Obama years (2014-16). More to the point, and even worse, the deficit as a percentage of GDP is also significantly greater, all in this “wonderful, very, very, great economy!”. His one truthful answer, when questioned on the huge deficits (even before 2020’s CoVid nightmare)  was, "Oh well we won't be here."

        Trump has bragged on defense spending, claiming that the military was weak under Obama. This was a lie, and senior officials know it, but he tells the deplorables and they buy it.  In fact, as a percentage of GDP, defense spending has been essentially flat from 2010 to the projected 2020 figure.  

        Perhaps the most unpleasant part of all this for me, having traveled much of western Europe in recent years has been the precipitous decline in the esteem in which our nation is now held by our allies. Oh, the Saudis and Russians like us but many of our former allies are simply dumbfounded and troubled by what we have become.  

        And finally, since I have ranted on CoVid in depth in several other pieces: You might remember that I previously pointed out that the Obama administration, contrary to Mitch McConnell’s blatant lie, did leave a “play book” aimed at handling a pandemic. I further pointed out that the Obama administration also ran a scenario using that play book with members of the Trump transition team, including then Energy sec. Rick Perry and Transportation sec.(and Moscow Mitch’s spouse) Elaine Chao. 

       What I haven’t previously discussed was that the Trump administration also ran a scenario called Crimson Contagion, which has been a fairly well-kept secret. I’ll tell you why in a moment.  Crimson Contagion was a joint exercise conducted from January to August 2019, (yes a whole year before CoVid!!) in which numerous national, state and local, private and public organizations in the US participated, in order to test the capacity of the federal government and twelve states to respond to a severe pandemic of influenza originating in China.

                The simulation, conducted months prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, involved a scenario in which tourists returning from China spread a respiratory virus in the United States.  In less than two months the (simulated) virus had infected 110 million Americans, killing more than half a million. The report issued at the conclusion of the exercise outlined the government's limited capacity to respond to a pandemic, with federal agencies lacking the funds, coordination, and resources to facilitate an effective response to the virus. Rather than summarize all the conclusions of the study, let’s just say that nothing we have seen in 2020 was not obvious long before. What action did the Trump administration take? Do nothing and blame Obama, who’d been gone for several years!  

        I could go on, but it’s lunch time. Register, Vote.