It Couldn’t Be Clearer Now: It Was Always ‘Trump First,’ not ‘America First’

  Since this is Thanksgiving week, I have to say two things — first, that I am thankful that Joe Biden is our President-Elect; and second, that “Talking Turkey” is not related to the Butterball Turkey hotline. You’re on your own, friends!

On a personal note, I am thankful for those readers who pushed my GoFundMe campaign to $11,931. That is less than the $17,000+ I paid to print this column in the Denver Post each week starting in March, but I would have gladly spent the entire amount myself if I had to, and I’m happy if this column somehow contributed to Joe Biden’s landslide win in Colorado and gave some comfort to my fellow progressives that they were not outnumbered by members of Cult 45.

Now, as Joe Biden said in his Thanksgiving address, we need to turn our attention to healing the partisan divide. But how do we do that when the president himself is sowing disbelief in our American electoral system? How will his supporters, egged on as they are by Trump, the Fox News opinionistas, OAN, Newsmax and QAnon, ever accept President Biden and Vice President Harris as legitimately elected leaders?

   In 2009, the Republican leadership in Congress committed themselves to being the “Party of No” and making President Obama a one-term president. With only 2 years of Democratic control in both the House and Senate, it’s impressive that the 44th President accomplished as much as he did.

I have donated to the Democratic Senatorial campaigns in Georgia in hopes that Joe Biden will have the same advantage for at least his first two years as president.

As Chris Christie put it on Sunday, Trump’s fight to overturn the election, led so appropriately by Rudy Giuliani, is a “national embarrassment,” but more to the point, it demonstrates even to his supporters who claim to love America and the constitution, that Donald Trump has never put our country first. As John Bolton expressed in his best-selling book, every decision and every action that this president took was predicated on what was best for Donald Trump, not for the country. Click here to read psychiatrist Vincent Greenwood’s treatise demonstrating how Donald Trump exceeds the criteria of a narcissist and meets the criteria of a psychopath. Read it and weep — but weep tears of joy that he will be put out of pasture in January, ready to face $400 million in debts and countless criminal charges, especially in the Southern District of New York.

As I predicted in the past, once the man reaches the end of his “I won” rope, I believe that he will resign for two reasons. First, he can then be pardoned by Pres. Mike Pence, protecting him from federal prosecution, and, second, his fragile ego will not permit him to attend the inauguration of President Biden. He’s such an insecure child — but we already knew that, didn’t we?

From the picture of Donald Trump painted by Mary Trump, John Bolton, Anonymous and so many others, it’s so in character for Donald Trump to be acting the way he is. His supporters haven’t grasped that picture yet, but maybe this current behavior, once it has run its course, will enlighten even them.

At a closed door meeting  on April 16, 2016, Trump told Republican leaders, in effect, that the “act” he was putting on during his campaign would change once he became president. The same day, at a Pennsylvania rally, he told the crowd, “I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored.”

“Promises made, promises kept”? Not that one! And the reason is simple. Immediately after his inauguration, he announced his re-election campaign and continued his “act” at rallies throughout his time in office.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

unpresidential term. .

 

Like Jimmy Kimmel, It’s Hard for Me to Understand Trump’s Larger Following

  Last Friday, Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show on ABC was a re-run of his Nov. 4th show, providing his first monologue after election day, and it resonated with me for the following section, which I had to transcribe for you (emphasis added):

I’m shocked that it was this close… It is unimaginable to me that close to half of American voters saw what this man has done to this country over the last four years, how he kowtowed to Vladimir Putin, he cozied up to Kim Jung Un, he alienated us from our allies, he put children in cages, he villainized the free press, he hid his tax returns, he tear gassed peaceful protestors, he pardoned all his criminal buddies, he extorted Ukraine, he misled us about Covid, he dismantled the pandemic response team, he dismantled health care, he called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” he hired a never-ending parade of imbeciles, he lied, he lied, he lied, and then he lied some more. He’s a liar and a cheat who wants them to stop counting thousands of legitimate votes – and almost half of us are apparently okay with that.  Half of us want to keep it going for four more years. Which, listen, I don’t care what you think of Joe Biden. If Joe Biden stopped by my house every morning to key my car and pee in my pool, still there’d be no question which one of them I would vote for. None! I mean, what more would Donald Trump have to do to show us he’s insane and not fit to lead this country?  I feel like I overestimated the American people, and I underestimated the village people…

   Here’s the bottom line: Donald Trump is going to serve another term.  We just don’t know whether it will be in Washington or in prison yet.

Yes, ten million more people voted for Donald Trump in 2020 than did in 2016.  Joe Biden only won because of a historic voter turnout by right-thinking Americans, but it’s still amazing that so many other Americans like this man.

As I’ve written in previous columns, many or even most of his supporters agree the man is a poor excuse for a human, but they like his policies — some because they are wealthy and it has made them wealthier, but others because he speaks to the nascent racism in them which they can’t always express outwardly, but which they can silently express with their votes. As many Trump supporters have said, “He speaks what I’m thinking.” 

I have to admit that I have lived a sheltered life. I was raised in New England by parents who instilled in me that lying and cheating is not acceptable behavior. This was reinforced by the private schools I attended (on scholarship, since we were poor) for 7th grade through 12th grade, where lying or cheating could get you expelled. That is still true, I’m sure.

Having been an employer rather than an employee all my adult life, I have encountered lying and cheating, and every time it was a firing offense.

You probably have the same mentality about it. Namely, if someone lies to you once or twice, or cheats you even once, that is not forgivable. It’s a red flag reflective likely of future behavior which is simply unacceptable.

Willful lying is so offensive, even in political life, that it took a year or longer for the media to use the word. They used softer phrases like “misstated” or “was not truthful,” but hesitated to say, “the president lied.”  That’s how big a deal it was to use the word, yet now it is easily stated multiple times per day by every news organization that isn’t partisan by its charter. And even the supporters of the president must recognize some of his lies, such as when he said in October that we are “rounding the corner on the pandemic,” and that “they won’t talk about it after the election.” Here’s the corner that we were rounding as he spoke:

Joe Biden Is Wrong: Trump’s Refusal to Concede Befits His Legacy

   We all remember 2016, when Donald Trump said he would only accept the election results if he won. So it is no surprise that he won’t accept the election results now that he has lost.

Never mind that it defies the constitution and threatens national security. Trump has provided adequate evidence that he doesn’t care about either.  He only cares about himself and his fragile ego.

My July 2nd “Talking Turkey” reported on Dr. Vincent Greenwood’s psychiatric analysis of the president as meeting most of the 20 criteria of a psychopath. Refusal to accept loss is not one of them, but it is certainly consistent with them. Reviewing those 20 criteria now makes them ring truer than ever. Only two or three don’t apply:

1. Glibness/superficial charm

2. Egocentricity/grandiose sense of self-worth

3. Proneness to boredom/low frustration tolerance

4. Pathological lying and deception/gaslighting

5. Conning/lack of sincerity

6. Lack of remorse or guilt

7. Shallow affect

8. Callous/lack of empathy

9. Parasitic lifestyle

10. Poor behavioral controls

11. Promiscuous sexual behavior

12. Early behavioral problems

13. Lack of realistic long-term goals

14. Impulsivity

15. Irresponsibility

16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

17. Many short-term marital relationships

18. Juvenile delinquency

19. Revocation of conditional release

20. Criminal versatility

News Flash: Trump’s a Loser

Yes, Donald Trump is now a loser, whether he accepts it or not. He is even on record saying that he’s a bad loser.

A Nov. 7 Fast Company column by Joe Berkowitz has the simple headline, “Donald Trump is a Loser,” In it, he wrote that Trump has in fact been a loser in many ways (e.g. getting Mexico to pay for his wall) and lists 14 things we will lose with his departure:

1)  The “fascist cruelty of Stephen Miller.”

2)  Acceptance of white supremacy, “making racists feel happy, comfortable and validated.”

3)  Loss of international esteem.

4)  Denial of climate change.

5)  Conversations about building “the wall.”

6)  The “top-down politicization of the pandemic.”

7)  A Trump-dominated news cycle.

8)  Distrust of White House announcements, which typically focus on Trump’s inherent greatness.

9)  Spite “as the prevalent motivating force,” aimed at “making liberals cry again.”

10)  Loyalty to the president as the primary employment qualification.

11)  The concept of “alternative facts”

12)  The idea that the media is the opposition party and “enemy of the people.”

13)  The president as a negative role model for children.

14)  The president’s sense of infallibility, that he can do no wrong.

But this is such a limited list, isn’t it? I can think of several more things I look forward to losing.

1)  “Shooting from the hip” without thinking and without consultation with advisors. Example: Middle-of-the-night tweeting in general, but specifically announcing troop withdrawal from Syria, abandoning our Kurdish allies.

2)  The president thinking he knows it all — more than the generals, more than epidemiologists, more than climate scientists or scientists in general.

3)  The president making policy decisions based solely on the desire to reverse the policy of his predecessor, regardless of whether the policy was a good one.

4)  A president who is a psychopath, unable to express compassion, such as upon the death of Sen. John McCain, calling him a “loser.”

 

I Can’t Get Over the Fact that Many People Voted for Trump Based on Lies

   As I watched the Florida returns on Tuesday evening, I was struck by the statement that the majority of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade voted for Trump because they had been convinced that Biden was a stalking horse for communism, from which they had fled in Cuba.

That is such a blatant lie, which Trump has been happy to promote in his rallies, and those Cuban-Americans actually believed him.  It they and other Floridians had known they were being duped, it’s possible the state would have gone to Biden, and the election would have been over more quickly.

And that’s just one of the innumerable lies which were utilized by the Trump campaign to draw voters away from the Biden/Harris ticket. How many voters, for example, believed the QAnon line that Democratic leaders like Clinton and Pelosi were part of a Satan-worshipping cult that engaged in pedophilia and drank babies’ blood?

In such a close election, any one lie that is believed by lots of people can make a difference, and the Trump campaign convinced millions of followers of so many lies that one wonders how poorly the president would have done without engaging in any of those lies and if the Russians and other hackers hadn’t spread multiple lies in 2016 as well as this year.

It’s time to realize that our country was suckered in by one of the greatest con men of all times. If you haven’t watched Frontline’s program, “The Choice 2020: Trump vs. Biden,” you can view it free online.  His niece, Mary Trump, describes him as a con artist on that program and in her best selling book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

For that matter, the same picture of Trump was painted by Frontline in their program four years ago, “The Choice 2016: Trump vs. Clinton” (also available to view free online), but it wasn’t enough to counter the big con that won Trump the presidency.

The biggest con, of course, still being played by Trump, is that he’s a successful businessman and great deal maker. It’s simply not true. His business life it littered with failures, including multiple bankruptcies. Mark Burnett can be credited (or blamed) with creating the false mystique about Donald Trump, who was, in fact, rescued from failure by “The Apprentice.”

Now that the campaign is over, it’s useful and appropriate, I believe, to take stock of what we have all witnessed ever since Donald Trump and Melania came down that gold escalator in June 2015. (Did you know that those people in the Trump Tower atrium were in fact extras paid $50 each to be there and cheer him on?)

There are plenty of books written by persons in a position to know which can educate Americans about the big con. The “bible” would have to be the book published earlier this year by the Fact Checker staff of The Washington Post: Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies.

Speaking of The Washington Post, I’d like to acknowledge how all the mainstream media have stayed true to their professional standards throughout these years of being ridiculed and called “the enemy of the people.”

One book which really portrays that experience is Jonathan Karl’s best seller, Front Row at the Trump Show.  Karl has known and covered Trump longer than any other White House correspondent, including back when he was a rising real estate developer in New York City. As a journalist myself, I enjoyed his perspective, including his criticism of some other correspondents who strayed, but rarely, from journalistic standards and ethics. If you are intrigued by the role of journalists, I heartily recommend Karl’s book.

Another writer who I recommend is Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, who writes a nightly newsletter called “Letters from an American.” Visit https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

 

It’s Time to Sum Up the Dumpster Fire We Know as the Trump Presidency

   I have done exactly what Donald Trump has asked of every American since he came down that gold escalator in June 2015 — to think only about him day and night.

The books I read before going to bed each night? They are all about Trump. The email newsletters I read between my real estate newsletters? All about Trump. The news programs and specials I watch every evening and on Sunday? Mostly about Trump.

This is how he likes it, and it has been exhausting for me and I suspect also for you. I look forward to ignoring him starting in 2021.  It will drive him nuts.

As I sit down to write this 28th and final “Talking Turkey,” it’s a challenge to do more than breathe a hopeful sigh of relief that our long national nightmare is coming to an end — and peacefully so. Here are my closing thoughts.

First, it’s apparent to me that Donald Trump’s two “winning arguments” are that he is against abortion and that Joe Biden is a Trojan horse for a radical left “Democrat party” that will destroy America through socialism and communism/Marxism. A third argument, that he inherited a bad economy from Obama and made it great, is hardly worth discussing. His shameful tax cuts for the wealthy, which gave crumbs to the middle class, merely supercharged the already healthy economy he inherited and massively ballooned our national debt, benefiting only Wall Street.

The argument about socialism also deserves dismissal. The programs that are identified as “radical left” and “socialistic” — Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — are essentially ones that have been in place for years or even decades in Canada, the United Kingdom and most European countries. We are laggards in adopting them.

Regarding abortion, I have pointed out that being pro-life is something Trump only adopted to court evangelicals and is not a core belief.  He was a pro-choice Democrat in New York.

I have gotten the impression that people cite opposition to abortion as their reason for supporting Trump, using it as a cover for their unspoken support of white supremacy and anti-black and brown immigration. This is particularly true for the evangelicals, because there are so many non-Christian aspects of the man they are required to overlook.

After all, why would someone opposed to abortion support a President who separated babies from their mothers as a method of discouraging refugees and immigrants, encouraged rally-goers to beat up anti-Trump demonstrators, and said that the white supremacists included "many fine people," not to mention supports the killing of adults (i.e., the death penalty)?

As we all know by now, there are countless lies and conspiracy theories, many of them by QAnon, charging various Democrats (especially Trump’s guilty pleasure, Hillary Clinton) with crimes. Here’s the question I keep asking those who believe the charges of crimes by Democrats: If these stories were true, it is totally within the power of the Republican-controlled Senate to hold hearings on them. Why don’t they hold those hearings? Obviously it’s because public testimony would prove them to be false. It’s more useful politically for McConnell and Trump's other enablers to keep those lies circulating on social media instead of providing an opportunity to disprove them.

    Most Trump supporters agree he’s a terrible human being, but there are some who think he’s “a good man,” citing an urban legend about him paying off the mortgage of a black man who changed a flat tire on his limo. It was totally disproved on snopes.com in 1998, but when I informed a Trumper of this, his response was predictable: “Snopes is owned by George Soros” (another urban legend). Trump supporters simply can’t handle the truth.

Assuming (again, hopefully) that Donald Trump is defeated next week and his sycophantic majority in the Senate evaporates, Trump will cease to hold the sway that he has held over Republicans, and “the truth will out.” It may take time for his hard core alt-right white supremacists to withdraw into the shadows where they resided before Trump emboldened them to “unite the right” as they did in Charlottesville. The majority of Trump supporters will, I believe, follow the path of Germans after Hitler’s downfall and come to realize how badly they were duped and misled by the worst president in American history. It will take a while, but it will happen. America is too strong to fall. We will recover.

From HuffingtonPost.com - "Data Disappeared" - Trump hides data that doesn't match his rhetoric

Four years ago, Donald Trump won the presidency while relentlessly fearmongering about refugees. So it came as no surprise when, in March 2017, his White House ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to study the long-term costs of refugee resettlement. A few months later, HHS returned with their results: Far from being a drain on resources, refugees had, in fact, contributed $63 billion more in government revenue than they had received in benefits between 2005 and 2014. The numbers were not to the White House’s liking—and so senior adviser Stephen Miller simply buried them. “The president believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the president,” he reportedly told agency staff.

That’s just one example out of a myriad of instances during the last four years where the Trump administration has purposefully destroyed, manipulated, subverted and sidelined data—the lifeblood of a functioning government. Are honey bee colonies on the verge of collapse? How toxic is mercury? Are people of color paid less for the same work? How economically devastating has the COVID-19 pandemic been? The Trump administration’s war on data has made each of those questions, and many more, harder to answer—and thus harder to do anything about. As writer Samanth Subramanian puts it in the introduction to Data Disappeared, “by attacking numeracy, it is attacking democracy.” In 2021, for example, the United States will accept no more than 15,000 refugees, down from an annual average of 76,000 during the Obama administration.

Over the past year, a team of reporters at HuffPost has tracked and vetted these data distortions, using published accounts, NGO reports and government documents. What we present to you today is by no means an exhaustive list. Instead, it’s a chilling collection of the Trump administration’s most consequential and well-documented assaults on science—and reality itself.

Thanks for reading and take care,

‌Richard Kim

Enterprise Director, HuffPost

Click here to read the full story

We Can Make America Great Again -- by Defeating Trump & His Enablers

In a previous column I asked what Trump and his supporters have in mind when they speak of “making America great again.” Are they harking back to the Jim Crow era; to when only men could vote and black voting was suppressed with poll taxes and literacy tests; to before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts; or to when people with pre-existing conditions were unable to get health insurance at all and certainly not at the same price as others?

It seems that "MAGA" is devoid of meaning except to Trump’s white supremacist followers, but it means more and more to me every day. Yes, I want to return to the days before Trump was elected — back to a time when:

>  We had a president who was not a pathological liar and did not embolden white supremacists and other “deplorables” with thinly veiled dog whistles.

>  The United States of America was respected around the world for our values, and foreign governments could depend on us for stable and sensible foreign policies.

>  People with pre-existing conditions were guaranteed health insurance at the same rate as people without health challenges.

>  Health insurance for women cost the same as for men.

>  The president put the country first instead of his own personal interests and did not violate the constitution by profiteering from government business, accepting money (and loans) from foreign powers.

>  The Secretary of Labor did not try to gut protections for laborers.

>  The Secretary of Energy, like the president himself, knew that an economy based on fossil fuels was itself a dinosaur and that we need to transition to clean and renewable energy.

>  The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency was to protect the environment, not eliminate protections.

>  The president was not in the pocket of our number one enemy, Russia.

>  The Republican Party believed in free trade, not supporting trade wars and tariffs that only hurt American farmers and consumers.

>  We expected better than average morals, ethics and integrity from our politicians and punished those who fell short.

>  Our president didn’t promote violence against his opponents.

>  The president didn’t hide his tax returns and his foreign entanglements.

>  The president (and his supporters) saw value in marital fidelity.

>  We joined the rest of the world in committing to address the existential threat of climate change.

>  Our president supported our allies instead of ridiculing their leaders.

>  Scientists were respected by the president and both political parties, not ridiculed and insulted.

>  Voter suppression was not the stated policy of the president and his political party.

>  The president didn’t fall for and promote conspiracy theories, unable to censor his own public utterances.

>  The president (like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) would admit their errors and apologize instead of doubling down. He practiced humility.

>  It was not considered presidential to engage in name calling and insults at every opportunity.

>  The president concentrated on running the country instead of being glued to his TVs and engaging in an absurd amount of spontaneous tweeting.

>  Loyalty to the country was more important than loyalty to the president.

>  Members of the president’s party were willing to speak out when they knew the president was wrong.

>  The media were respected instead of attacked for telling the truth and was not called “the enemy of the people.”

>  The president upheld the conservative principle of the rule of law.

Voters who don't want to make America great again as described above should ask themselves why. What kind of America do they want?

Here's a recommendation - Heather Cox Richardson's daily newsletter

Here are the first paragraphs of today's edition.  You can subscribe at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe 

"The theme of the day was the palpable sense of rats leaving a sinking ship as Republicans, administration officials, and administration-adjacent people distanced themselves from the president.

"There was a foreshadowing of that exodus on Wednesday, when Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) let loose about the president in a telephone call with constituents. Sasse was an early critic of Trump but toned down his opposition significantly in the early part of the administration. On Wednesday, he reverted to his earlier position, saying he had “never been on the Trump train.” He complained about the way Trump “kisses dictators’ butts,” and went on: "The United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership, the way he treats women, spends like a drunken sailor…. [He] mocks evangelicals behind closed doors...has treated the presidency like a business opportunity" and has "flirted with white supremacists." He said: “What the heck were any of us thinking, that selling a TV-obsessed, narcissistic individual to the American people was a good idea?"

Each newsletter includes links supporting every citation.  Not surprising, since she's a professor of history at Boston College. She previously taught at MIT and the University of Massachusetts.  Here are the footnotes from today's edition of her newsletter:

Notes:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2020-10-14/william-barr-department-of-justice-doj

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/politics/donald-trump-bill-barr-attorney-general/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/us/politics/regulatory-rush-federal-agencies-trump.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2020/10/16/biden-trump-townhall-ratings/

43 Alumni for Biden @43Biden

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October 16th 2020

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/16/trump-rejects-california-disaster-wildfires/

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/politics/donald-trump-criticism-from-former-administration-officials/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/16/us/trump-biden-town-halls#if-he-loses-the-election-trump-mused-friday-maybe-ill-have-to-leave-the-country

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gop-sen-sasse-unleashes-scathing-attack-trump-tv-obsessed-narcissist-n1243701

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/us/politics/justice-department-barr-prosecutors.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/politics/rudy-giuliani-daughter-caroline-joe-biden-2020/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/us/politics/republican-senators-trump.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2020/10/16/republicans-should-have-stopped-trump-2016-ex-state-gop-chair-column/3665008001/

Trump’s Hostility to Obamacare Is Emblematic of His Psychopathy

   From everything I’ve read and seen, Donald Trump is a profoundly insecure person, and it’s most evident in his antipathy to everything identified with his predecessor, Barack Obama.

We all saw it on day one, when he couldn’t abide the fact that Obama’s inauguration had drawn a bigger crowd than his own. That was when Kellyanne Conway introduced us to the concept of “alternative facts.”

Since that day he has been focusing single-mindedly on reversing or voiding everything with Obama’s stamp on it, and the Affordable Care Act, because of its more common identification as Obamacare, is at the top of his hit list.

What proves my point is the claim that he wants to repeal and replace it with the same provisions, notably protection against pre-existing conditions. He can’t be satisfied with amending the law, which would be far more practical than kicking millions of people off of Obamacare with only a vague promise of replacing it at some future date with a law that has the same provision.

It has been demonstrated in multiple ways by multiple former insiders that Donald Trump is only interested in himself. He’d be a pro-choice Democrat (as he was before) if that provided a path to power, but the path which opened for him was to be a pro-life Republican. He doesn’t actually care about this or any issue.

He thought he should get the Nobel Peace Prize because of his meeting with Kim Jung Un. Clearly it bothers him that Obama won that prize during his first term.

Trump had to replace NAFTA because Obama created it. Again, he couldn’t amend it, he had to replace it with the USMCA, which is only a minor tweaking of NAFTA.

He had to withdraw from the Paris Accord on Climate Change because it was Obama’s, despite the fact that virtually every other country in the world joined it, thanks to Obama's diplomacy on the topic. It goes deeper than that, however. He is a climate change denier only because Obama accepted climate change and was working to address it.  Again, he doesn't actually care about the issue.

Indeed, the failure of this president to marshal the federal government in addressing climate change will be one of his many terrible legacies which a Biden administration will need to deal with. With all the evidence of having passed the “tipping point” on climate change, it’s going to be hard. It could well be impossible after four more years of Donald Trump as president ignoring the issue.

Trump had to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal because it was Obama’s deal. One of the biggest lies that he and his sycophants like to repeat is that Obama sent a plane-load of money to Iran to secure the deal, even though it was Iran’s own assets that had been seized and were now being released to them as part of the deal. Yes, it was dollars and was in cash, but it was Iran’s dollars.

The lies and deception put forth by Donald Trump and echoed by his supporters are astounding, but thankfully they don’t appear to be working, since Biden’s lead in the polls keeps widening. As the election approaches, the lies and distortions will probably get worse and Biden’s lead will hopefully increase as a result.

Can Americans really be fooled into thinking that Obama’s former vice president is going to foment a communist takeover of America? And forget about white supremacists — Trump won’t even disavow Qanon, with its theory that the leaders of the Democratic Party and Hollywood celebrities are a Satan-worshipping cabal engaged in child sex trafficking and drinking the blood of babies. No wonder the president is finally losing credibility except among his base who so love his racist attitudes and policies that they will accept things in him that they wouldn’t ever accept in any other human being.

Trump’s desperation, I believe, is rooted in his fear of prosecution once he is out of office.  I predict that once he finally accepts that he has lost re-election and his 2nd Amendment followers haven't created a coup, he will resign so President Pence can pre-emptively pardon him, although that would only protect him from federal, not state, prosecution. He knows that New York, among other jurisdictions, is waiting to indict him. 

Will Trump’s Biggest Legacy Be Ending the Peaceful Transition of Power?

   I fear for the future of our country, regardless of who wins the presidential election next month. I agree with the president's longest-serving National Security Advisor, John Bolton that we can survive four years of Donald Trump but not a second term.

But I also fear the future if Joe Biden wins the election, even if by such a margin as to overcome phony charges of the election being “stolen.” In this regard, our decentralized election system will serve us well, because Trump will have to allege cheating in enough individual states and counties to add up to a change in the electoral college totals. At least in Colorado, the statewide vote is the sum of the vote counts in 64 individual counties, many of them run by Republicans. It would be a steep climb to say the totals reported at the state level were wrong by a statistically useful amount.

However, I’m talking about something deeper and more intractable than public confidence in the electoral process. I’m talking about the willingness of Trump’s base, not Trump himself, to accept defeat.

If one is to believe what his base believes — that a Biden victory will lead to a communist takeover — wouldn’t a true patriot with an arsenal of military grade weapons and ammo take up arms against the new regime? Trump has invoked their support in the past and would not hesitate, I suspect, to do so again. Trump knows that there is no danger for him — the Secret Service will keep him safe as Americans spill each other’s blood in his name. It might even warm his narcissistic heart to know that supporters are willing to die in defiance to his defeat at the polls.

What I find so disheartening is, to quote a Forbes.com headline on Sept. 2, 2020, that a “Majority of Republicans Believe The QAnon Conspiracy Theory Is Partly Or Mostly True.”  The breakdown is that 33% of Republicans believe QAnon’s theory is “mostly true” and 23% say it is “partly true.” On the other hand, only 4% of Democrats think QAnon’s conspiracy theories are even partly true, and 72% of Dems say they’re “not true at all.”  I’m proud to be a Democrat. Unfortunately, QAnon supporters are proud to be Republicans and Trump supporters.

To quote the article by Forbes staff writer Tommy Beer, “QAnon supporters claim President Trump is defending the planet from a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles (consisting mostly of Hollywood celebrities, liberal politicians and 'deep-state' government officials) who are running a secret child sex-trafficking ring.”

If fear of a communist takeover doesn’t scare you into taking up arms, would believing that bullshit do the trick for you?

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bi-partisan resolution condemning QAnon by a 371-18 vote. That may have no effect, since Donald Trump won’t disavow QAnon. “I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” he said during a White House news conference. “So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”

The enthusiasm of Trump supporters will certainly get them to the polls. The question I have is whether it will also get them to the barricades when and if Joe Biden takes office. With the current President of the United States emboldening them to do just that, we have a serious problem on our hands.

The headline of my May 14 column was, “Dems Need to Realize That People in Trump’s Base Are Simply Unreachable.” That statement has been reinforced for me by the emails I receive each week from Trump supporters who, God bless them, keep reading this column. I engaged in email conversations with several of them, but recently have started blocking their email addresses and cell/text numbers because they are so totally lost in their adoration of Trumpism, and not worth the distraction.

So sad, so true, and now so scary as the president lays the emotional basis for his supporters to take up arms if the election is “stolen” from their man. Even if bullets don’t fly, as I fear they might, they will never accept defeat.