Trump's vision for American Greatness

My apologies. Every time I've gone into this goddamn blog post to fix a typo or add something, Blogger has completely fucked the formatting. I have TRIED REPEATEDLY TO FIX IT. I will try one more time, and if it doesn't work, I will consider switching to Wordpress.


How will Trump make America great again (whatever that means)?Apparently, according to all the hysterical, hyperventilating lefties I've talked to, that means pogroms, genocides, nuclear war with Russia, pushing disabled people into traffic for fun, "waterboarding the gay away", making grabbing women by the pussy not only legal but mandatory, and murdering undocumented immigrants from Mexico and thumbtacking their scalps onto a shiny, 80 foot high, gold-plated wall, emblazoned one end to the other with the single, repeated word "TRUMP", as a warning to any Mexican family who might consider setting foot in the US.

Oh, and he's going to officially rename the West Wing the Rape Wing. The East Wing will be henceforth known as the Sandwich Wing.

The Pentagon will be gutted and turned into a casino, and the Capitol Building will be demolished and replaced by a special prison for Native Americans who complain about contaminated water.

Mount Rushmore will be renamed Mount Trump, and the faces of the presidents will be refabricated into likenesses of His Greatness at various stages of his life. Lincoln will be replaced by Trump at age 14, and Roosevelt by Trump at age 30. He has yet to decide on the others.

Quotas will be introduced in police forces across the nation, dictating a minimum number of unarmed blacks shot per officer per year. Any officer who does not make quota will be investigated for racial bias.

All people describing themselves as journalists will be rounded up and summarily shot. This includes those who write for Breitbart--you gotta break some eggs when you're making an omelette, after all.

The Westboro Baptist Church will be declared the new official religion of the Theocratic States of America, and all school children will be required to recite the new Lord's Prayer at the start of every school day: "We love God, and god hates fags, and blacks, and women, and transfolk, and Muslims, and Mexicans, and Natives, and Asians, and Arabs, and anyone who does not glorify the cisheteronormative white supremacist capitalist patriarchy [repeat 5 times]."

After reciting the new Lord's Prayer, all school children will be required to sing the new national anthem, "In Trump We Trust".





When there's something wrong
in your great country
who you gonna call?
THE TRUMPSTER!

When it's time to end
your democracy
who you gonna call?
THE TRUMPSTER!

I ain't scared of no gays!
I ain't scared of no chicks! 

When the Mexicans
are just too darn brown
who you gonna call?
THE TRUMPSTER!

When gay wedding cakes
are getting straight folks down
who you gonna call?
THE TRUMPSTER!

When the womenfolk
are getting uppity
who you gonna call?
THE TRUMPSTER!

When they need to be
grabbed by the pussy
who you gonna call?
THE TRUMPSTER!

(sung to the tune of "Ghostbusters")


A mandatory program of corporal punishment will be applied to any child who might wish to abstain from this daily prayer and singing of the new anthem. And by "corporal punishment" we really mean Gitmo, complete with waterboarding.

Women who maintain a body mass index of 23 or higher will be subjected to a "fat tax" of 18%. Women who maintain a cup size of C or lower will be subjected to a "flat tax" of 10%.

And finally, in his second term, all restaurants will be conglomerated under the corporation known as "Taco Bell".This will finally make America great again.

Edit: Someone emailed me after reading this blog post to suggest that I'm lumping all "lefties" into the "hysterical, hyperventilating" category, and politely informed me of several good reasons to object to Trump. They'd been intending to leave that as a comment, but Google was acting up, so they expanded on it and sent it directly to me (if they give me permission, I'll post it here or in the comments, but since they expanded on their original "intended for public consumption" commentary, I don't know if they want it made public). Anyway, it was not my intention with this post to lump everyone on the left, or everyone who dislikes or has serious concerns about a Trump presidency into one big basket of hysterics. However, I have just subjected myself to several videos and articles where allegedly intelligent people (professors, journalists, pundits, etc) have used words like "ethnic cleansing" to describe Trump's proposed immigration policy, who have Tweeted that whites should be murdered because they're to blame for electing Trump, and a billion other hysterical reactions.

One quote from a Medium blog post: "If you would have just swallowed your pride and given Hillary half of the love you gave Obama, then we might not have woken up on November 9th worrying about families being torn apart, marriage licenses being taken way, guns getting into the wrong hands and women having to stay pregnant after getting raped."


Fact 1) Trump clarified very soon after being elected that the approximately 3 million illegal immigrants who are engaged in crime on American soil will be targeted. Once they're either deported or incarcerated, and the border is secure, then the Administration will decide what should be done about the remaining 8 million or so otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants. It's entirely possible that the first two stages of this policy will not even be complete until the end of his first term. The idea that innocent families will be ripped apart starting on the 20th of January, and that America will be "ethnically cleansed" is ridiculous. Fact 2) Trump also clarified that he's not touching the Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage (not that he could). According to him, that's done, it's been decided. And frankly, he can't touch it anyway. The only way to undo a SCOTUS decision is through a constitutional amendment (never gonna happen), or for SCOTUS to change their own minds. That means someone has to file a federal case, convince SCOTUS to revisit the issue, and then convince them to change the ruling. While it's possible for that to happen, it's neither a quick process, nor guaranteed, even with a majority of conservative judges on the bench. Generally the quality of argument required to convince SCOTUS to undo one of its own decisions is extremely high.Fact 3) Trump's position on guns is essentially to maintain the status quo. So guess what? As far as guns go, you woke up on November 9th in the exact same America that you went to bed in on November 8th. As far as guns go, Trump's America looks the same as Obama's America. The horror.Fact 4) Please take a civics class. As with same sex marriage, abortion rights are protected by a SCOTUS decision, only with abortion that decision now has 40 years of reinforcing precedent to back it up. The burden required to overturn it is EXTREMELY high, and deeply pro-life judges have, in the past, voted to uphold Roe v. Wade based on the existing mountain of precedent, and on the higher burden regarding SCOTUS overturning its own decisions. Roe v. Wade is almost certainly not going anywhere, and any restrictions and limitations individual states place on abortion will have to comply with Roe v. Wade up until the unlikely day it is overturned (at which point Trump has said, it will become a matter of states' rights). My point being that there is a LOT of hand-wringing going on for no good reason. I wrote this blog post after watching lots of this type of hand-wringing, which culminated in a video uploaded by a transperson who said she was going to leave the US because she felt her life was now in jeopardy because of Trump.Anyway. An old man was waiting outside the grocery store with me just before they opened this morning (Nov. 20). We got chatting, and he asked me how I feel about Trump. I told him I was cautiously optimistic. When he looked startled, I said I work in the larger realm of politics, and I've done a fair bit of research on him beyond what the mass media has reported. I told him about Trump moderating his policy on illegal immigrants and "the wall" since he was elected, and what that entailed, and that he's stated he's happy to leave the same sex marriage question alone. The guy had no idea about any of that. I told him Trump had been pretty hyperbolic and bombastic during his campaign, but the negative media spin regarding Trump was kind of unprecedented compared to any other candidate in history. And there's also the fact that not even a president, even with a majority in the House and Senate, isn't going to be able to just do whatever he wants. He thanked me. Told me he feels a little less afraid. As in, he seemed to have been genuinely pretty terrified the US had elected another Hitler, and he hadn't heard any of what I'd told him reported anywhere in Canadian media. So. Are there genuine reasons to be concerned about a Trump presidency? Sure. Just as there are with any president. But we should be concerned about real things, not "Trump-led 'genocides' of North Dakota native communities" that started while Obama was in office (see my previous blog post), not innocent, law abiding families being ripped apart starting on Jan. 20 when that's not what's going to happen, not the fact that gun laws tomorrow will be the same as they were yesterday. 


P. S. Blogger, fix your editing software, ffs. Holy fuck, what did you do to my blog post!!????

Here is the comment the person sent me by email, which I now have permission to publish:

"Apparently, according to all the hysterical, hyperventilating lefties I've talked to,..."That makes it awfully tempting to reply, "According to all the good-natured if incurious people I've talked to, you'd think the only response on the left to Trump's election is hysterical hyperventilation..."How about, instead, we acknowledge that Trump’s appointments and his cabinet nominations to date, are legitimate cause for concern? That turning to a white nationalist as his closest advisor is telling indeed, and suspect. That Trump’s foreign policy advisor, Michael Flynn, called Islam “a cancer,” and that possible, even likely nominee to the position of Secretary of State John Bolton was someone so dangerously hawkish that he stepped down as George W. Bush’s interim appointment as UN ambassador because the Bush administration knew Bolton would be rejected by the Senate once his interim appointment expired. Bolton, so you know, believes that the U.S. should be aiming for regime change in if not outright war with Iran. In addition, Trump’s CIA pick believes Edward Snowden deserves execution (after trial, of course, so there's that). Trump can nominate whom he likes to his cabinet, of course, and select the advisors he likes, but as President he will enter office with only about 12% of the electorate having voted *for* him rather than not voting, or having voted for his major party opponent, or having cast a vote for him but primarily for the very understandable reason that they did not want Clinton in office more than they did not want Trump in office.Trump was not even able to secure more votes than Clinton and is only ascending to the presidency thanks to the quirk that is the Electoral College.  In short, Trump was liked even less than the most corrupt candidate to ever run for the presidency, a warmonger and Wall Street shill, yet his political instincts are such that he is burning rather than building bridges.Trump also has a... let’s call it a fractious relationship with his own party, and if he wants to choose the most divisive figures he possibly can, that indeed he can do, or try to do. In theory, though, the American presidency was not intended as a spoils system where all the goodies get turned over to the winner, and screw the loser. I say that as someone who is not especially fond of bipartisanship. But Trump is treating the presidency as a winner take all proposition. That’s worth our concern and our consideration. This behavior of his is especially dangerous given Trump’s inarguable lack of experience with foreign policy. He knows quite literally nothing. A few months back he did not only not know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah, he did not know what they were beyond the familiar sound of those words. The problem with someone like Trump is, they don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. And that means they don’t know who to turn to for sensible counsel. That in turn means it’s never too soon to begin exercising what influence one has over politicians. In the case of lefties, the vast majority that are not hyperventilating and who can provide illuminated consideration of this new president, that influence will be over Trump primarily indirectly, through their Congressional representatives who vote on Trump’s cabinet and judiciary nominations. It is never error to stiffen the spine of a Democrat, here to at least resist any end to the ability to filibuster Supreme Court nominations. We’ve also seen the extraordinary damage done by Justice Antonin Scalia. Authentic progressives should be bombarding Obama’s office with demands that he seat Merrick Garland before leaving office. Garland is a corporatist and centrist, the perfect pick of a Wall Street, pro-choice Republican like Obama and not someone the left appreciates at all, but Garland is surely better than anyone Trump is going to select based on Trump’s campaign-induced list of his preferred Justices and the inflexible ideology Trump has paraded in the last ten days.  I must add that you’ve gotten lazy, my dear. I can recall that halycon time when you were a fierce inquirer into human affairs. Let me encourage you here to rediscover that vigor and rather than point to the small handful of noisiest, fatuous bloviators passing as left-wingers, to engage the left, the actual left, on the problem of Trump. And--I say this without hysteria--a problem Trump surely is. No one has come into the office of the presidency knowing less than Trump. This seems entirely inarguable. His few virtues include his hotelier’s distaste for physical destruction. He seems (at least until the nomination of execrable warmonger John Bolton, as bad as Clinton in this regard) averse to war. You can see the idea of it puzzles him. He’s a businessman. War breaks things into other things you cannot sell. Then there’s Trump’s inexplicable but useful infatuation with Vladimir Putin. In their third debate, Clinton all but promised war with Russia in Syria. Trump on the other hand has the neocons in D.C. abuzz and a-tizzy over his belief that Russia and Syria might prove valuable partners in the Middle East against ISIL. Lefties should be openly applauding Trump in this regard (Trump more than many is concerned with public opinion) and flooding John McCain’s office with angry letters telling him to stop attacking Trump on this issue. That a permanent war footing is not desirable. That a second Cold War is absurd and wasteful. The left should also be reaching out to those on other parts of the political spectrum who believe that the Project for a New American Century’s dream of a pax Americana is a blood-soaked path as we saw in Iraq then in Libya, and in Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and now Yemen. PNAC's imperial dreams compel us to ally with the house of Saud, to our enduring shame. We have allies on this on the right and in the center. There are even professional Republicans who have interest in ending Washington's preoccupation with global domination, and in ending its 800+ overseas military bases and dramatically cutting its 1.1 trillion dollar military budgetThe left caused Nixon to create OSHA and the EPA along with a dozen other important departments and initiatives. The left has called Nixon “our last liberal president” with good reason. We should be looking at Trump in this light, in how an authoritarian (I mean this as definitional, only) might be turned on occasion to pursue good purpose. In short, permit me to encourage you to engage the best of the left in all its varied colors and intellection, and not just as has become your custom take the hysterical few percent of ridiculous posturing feminists and SJWs for the multitude of intelligent, concerned lefties. I recall at least a couple of times in your videos that you referred to yourself as progressive. Surely you know, then, that the left is far more broad than its customary depiction in the lands of the men's human right movement. You’ll recall we’re the ones proposing a livable minimum wage, encouraging rapprochement with Russia and China, pushing for governmental transparency and an end to corporate welfare, and insisting that government promote worker cooperatives at least as much as it promotes car sales on behalf of ostensible private businesses.I suggest it serves no one well to routinely portray the left as all but synonymous with idiot feminists, nagging critical race theorists, and crybabies.   As for who you might engage, in the event you've fallen out of touch there are left-libertarians to whom American libertarianism is an odd, anachronistic figure of fun bolted together in far right think tanks. Then there is bulk of the European middle- and working-classes on the left (perhaps two hundred million of them) that are social democrats when they are not democratic socialists and simply socialists, and for whom a great many are capable of speaking ably. There are even small-government progressives like myself who understand the dangers of expansive government of the kind that Trump regularly proposes. I can offer a list of some hundred names of smart people on the left who do not identify as feminists and are not hysterical over Trump’s impending presidency, but rather treat it as a serious matter worth considered address and one that might be influenced in ways small and large. A veritable cornucopia of people and thought to choose from. Best Wishes,Blair Schirmer