Trump

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We need more Democrats fighting back

I may have some problems with Newsom’s policies, but I love the way he’s trolling Trump. He’s posting tweets that mimic Trump’s deranged ramblings along with fake AI pictures of the type Trump posts. And when Republicans say he’s not acting like a Governor should, he just laughs and wonders why they never say the same about Trump’s unhinged posts.

There’s a reason the support for Democrats is at its lowest in years, and it’s mainly because we’re tired of moderate Democrats who are too scared to fight back and who won’t push for the liberal policies the majority of Americans want. Chuck Schumer and his “strongly worded letters” may have been how politics was done in the days of political decorum, but that ended when Newt Gingrich came along, and Democrats have yet to learn that you won’t accomplish anything that way any more.

No more “When they go low, we go high.” Ignoring the neighborhood bully only makes him more powerful.

I mean, I am not really looking forward to Newsom running for President but duh, if he gets the nomination, I’m going to vote for him. I mean, come on, the worst Democrat is still better than the best Republican these days.

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Republicans don’t care about democracy

Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans disagree with Trump and his policies. His approval rating is terrible and people hate his “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

But Republicans don’t care. They control all three branches of government, and given what the Supreme Court allowed Trump to do last week, apparently plan on changing the rules as much as possible to make sure no Democrat ever gets elected again.

It’s kind of hard to call this kind of government a “democracy.”

cartoon by Bill Bramhall
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Dealing with “illegals”

“We can’t tolerate illegals! We have laws in this country!” — said by people who voted for a convicted felon

Calling immigrants “illegals” it’s an easy way for people to not say “I’m a racist.” (Hey, you notice that ICE never heads to Boston to round up all the illegal Irish immigrants that are there?) The “illegal” part is a misdemeanor at most (unlike President Felon) and we could change the law tomorrow and they’d be legal.

My ancestors on my father’s side came here legally in the early 1900s, because back then, there was no immigration law. You came here, you registered, and then you could apply for citizenship. There was no limit on how many could come here.

If you’re in America, your heritage is either native, immigrant, refugee, or slave — and it’s evilly ironic when you claim that “America is for Americans” when you’re standing on land stolen from natives. So unless you are a native American, you shouldn’t be screaming about how immigrants are going to ruin the country — chances are, someone said the same thing about your ancestors when they came here.

Besides, have you noticed that some of the people ICE rounds up are being caught at their immigration hearings — meaning the immigrants are DOING IT LEGALLY.

It’s pure racism, from an administration that yesterday refused to acknowledge or celebrate the national holiday Juneteenth.

In a related story, Trump now has a new policy to encourage women to have more babies, because we need to increase our population. Obviously, he means white babies (otherwise, if we want to increase our population, we should be bringing in more immigrants). It’s because these racists are really scared that white people will eventually be the minority in America and they’re convinced that once whites are the minority, that the non-white majority will treat whites as badly as whites are currently treating them.

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Donald Trump is still running… his mouth

A look back at the State of the Union disaster

by guest blogger Ian Randal Strock

Last night, Donald Trump bloviated for an hour and 39 minutes. It was a campaign speech, it was a complaint, it was a brilliant example of verbal masturbation, Donald Trump-style. It wasn’t terribly surprising, and it wasn’t at all unifying.

It took him only eight minutes to get around to telling us that Joe Biden was “the worst president in American history.”

He gave a long list of programs he called “fraud”—which in Trump English seems to be a synonym for “programs I don’t like or disagree with”—including money for a program “in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.” I’ve heard of it.

And he continued to threaten Panama and Greenland, saying “to enhance our national security, my administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal.” And that the canal was built for Americans, not others. He also encouraged Greenlanders to voluntarily associate with the United States, but then said “we need Greenland for international world security. And one way or another, we’re gonna get it.”

He rambled on about many other things, but frankly, there wasn’t enough new or interesting for me to bother reporting on it again.

One thought I did take away from the speech: whether he’s read the story or not, he seems to have completely embraced the idea in my story “The Necessary Enemy.” Specifically, that it takes a villain to make a hero, that we need an enemy in order to be the victor. Perhaps that’s why he’s always talking about enemies, and why he declared a variety of emergencies the day he was inaugurated. Perhaps that’s why he’s always struggling to “make America great again,” as if someone had somehow made America less. The only one making America less is Donald Trump, as he cedes our position of economic, political, and moral leadership on the world stage.

Ian Randal Strock is a political scientist and commentator (in addition to also being a science fiction author and publisher). Keep up with him at www.IanRandalStrock.com, or on Facebook, Bluesky, and Instagram.

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Fighting back against Trumpism

This didn’t just happen. This was a long term plan by a coalition of financial and Christian conservatives to subvert our democracy.

Part of this is the natural progression of society—those in power will do everything they can to keep the power, and no rights are ever given to others freely. We make progress and then there is a blowback and we fight back, and, given history, we do eventually win. But it’s never easy. 

In modern American history, this all started when Reagan was elected, and the conservatives suddenly realized that they could get away with a lot of shit. They sold arms to our enemies, and gave huge tax breaks to millionaires and made poor people pay takes on their Social Security. And the Overton Window got moved to the right.

When George Bush senior ran against Michael Dukakis, he called Dukakis a “liberal” as if it was an insult, and liberals stupidly rebranded themselves as “progressives” and ran away from the liberal label instead of embracing it. And we moved farther to the right, while the rest of the civilized world went left.

One of the ways conservatives get away with this is by filling the courts, which most people don’t pay attention to. So when Bush junior lost the election, he got the Supreme Court to ignore the voters and place him in power. And more conservative judges were put in.

And each time, the conservatives realized they could cheat and lie and get away with crap because they were playing hardball with politics while we liberals clutched our hankies and refused to get in the mud and fight back. And then Trump causes an insurrection, gets found liable for rape, gets convicted of numerous felonies, and gets away with it all. No wonder they think they can do whatever the fuck they want and no wonder Trump thinks he’s a king.

So let’s cut to the chase: What can we do now, with an idiot President who ignores the Constitution and a House, Senate and Supreme Court that cares little about “checks and balances” and allows all this to happen?

Obviously, the most important thing is (I know you hate to hear this) is to vote. They have spent decades doing everything they can to keep us from voting because they know when we all vote, they lose. And when you vote, only vote for Democrats. Some liberals are so “pure” they don’t understand that their protests votes for third party candidates or their refusal to vote at all is one of the reasons we are in this mess to being with. (Trump won in 2024 by less than 50%, mind you – if those third party people and those who refused to vote for stupid ideological reasons had voted for Harris, we wouldn’t be in this mess. You have my permission to blame these people in the same way you blame clueless Trump supporters.)

But what we really need to do is put pressure on our representatives. Call them constantly. Phone calls are more important than emails or letters. Don’t ignore those who support us—they need to be called too, to remind them that they need to do their job and to thank them when they fight back.

And here’s the thing some people miss: You need to call your state politicians as well. Your governor, state house members, even local city people. The fight can be at the state level. We need to encourage them to say no to the federal government. We need a non-violent civil war here, with civil disobedience, with local governments refusing to allow the feds to come in and cause their destruction. We need to throw monkey wrenches into every bit of the federal political machinery.

And of course you need to financially support groups like the ACLU and unions and other groups that are actively fighting in the judicial system for our rights.

There are more of us than there are of them. Every public survey shows that our vision of American is supported by the majority of the population. Trump lost the popular vote the first time he ran, never even reached a 50% approval rating the entire time he was president, lost the second popular vote by a bigger margin, and won this time with less than 50% of the vote (and he has an even lower approval rating in the polls than last time). He has never had the support of a majority of Americans, and we need to constantly remind our politicians of that. But none of that matters if we don’t get involved and especially if we don’t vote.

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If you were a Russian operative…

Let’s suppose you were a Russian operative who got himself elected to President with the instruction to destroy the country from within.

You’d fire a huge percentage of federal employees for no reason, fill the government with incompetent people whose only qualification is loyalty to you, ignore the rule of law and act as a dictator, raise tariffs and taxes to destroy the economy, do your best to pit Americans against other Americans, threaten to withdraw from NATO, and otherwise alienate the country from all its allies.

Yeah, like that would ever happenLet’s suppose you were a Russian operative who got himself elected to President with the instruction to destroy the country from within.

You’d fire a huge percentage of federal employees for no reason, fill the government with incompetent people whose only qualification is loyalty to you, ignore the rule of law and act as a dictator, raise tariffs and taxes to destroy the economy, do your best to pit Americans against other Americans, threaten to withdraw from NATO, and otherwise alienate the country from all its allies.

Yeah, like that would ever happen.

cartoon by Jeff Darcy
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No Honeymoon for Trump

When a President takes office, there is a “honeymoon period” where the polls are favorable and everyone is looking forward to the new person in the White House.

Donald Trump is only the second President to enter office with negative poll numbers. The first was (checks notes) Donald Trump.

Trump is the only President (since they started doing these polls) who never reached a 50% approval rating the entire time he was in office. His highest rating was still lower than Obama’s lowest rating.

He lost the popular vote the first time, lost it by even more the second time, and although he won this time, it was with less than 50% of the vote (thanks to third party candidates).

So when Trump people say he has the people’s support, that’s not true. He has never had a majority of Americans supporting him. Never.

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Convicted felon wants to get rid of the police

I see that the party of Law and Order — you know, the one that just elected a felon — is supporting the appointment of a new FBI director who has vowed to shut down the FBI.

There’s a line in Henry V: “The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers.” People joke about the line, but it was said by the character Dick the Butcher — a Bad Guy who wanted all the lawyers gone so he and his cronies could commit crimes and get away with it.

You think there may be a reason why the Felon-in-Chief wants to get rid of the people who will stop him and his cronies from committing more crimes?

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Thoughts about the election while under the effects of lack of sleep

The last century was the century of democracy, especially after World War II. More and more countries became democratic, and things looked good. This century has given us the opposite, as the rich and powerful take over control of countries and, often through democracy, turn them into autocracies (Russia, Turkey, Belarus, Venezuela…). Looks like the United States is on that same path. Thanks to Putin and the world’s billionaires, democracy is on the decline.

With Republican control of the Congress and the Justice Department, and with the support of a Supreme Court that allows Trump to get away with anything, it will be tremendously difficult to hold back the corruption and destruction of our civil rights.

The polls were wrong again, as they have been for every Trump election. They undercount him by about 3% each time. I will leave why that is to the experts.

Trump is the Mule of American politics.* He breaks all the rules that those of us who studied political science learned. Any other candidate doing even 5% of what Trump has done would crash and burn long before a primary. It says something about America though that we don’t have royalty but we have celebrities, and for some reason, they can get away with stuff that would destroy any other career. It is the defintion of a cult, really.

And ironically, people are not holding Trump responsible for the things he has done. Abortion was on the ballot in many states, and a majority in those states voted to keep it legal while at the same time electing the guy who was the reason they had to place those things on the ballot in the first place.

Trump proved that fear and hatred and anger generate more votes than optimism, and that is something we Democrats don’t always get. We want to bring everyone together and stop fighting, but there is a core group of Americans that believe in division: That this world is “us” verses “them.” This small-minded tribalism is not new to the world. The distrust of the “other” who is not part of your group has destroyed many cultures and has led to many wars. Republicans rely on this to get elected, warning of immigrants, gays, the transgendered, atheists, non-whites, the “woke” — whoever holds views counter to theirs is not someone who should be tolerated. They’re not someone who can be reasoned with. They’re the “enemy within.” If you disagree with them, you’re not the loyal opposition. You’re the cause of all their problems. And this is not new. Politicians have screamed this crap for years in elections … because it often works.

Trump constantly claimed that he was the subject of a witch hunt and that all the criminal charges against him were politically motivated, and we should have paid attention, because even the pollsters were telling us that his support grew the more charges that were brought against him. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have been brought, but we shouldn’t have thought that arguing that he was a criminal would help us gain support.

Harris ran a great campaign. Don’t blame her. She did everything right, including building a strong ground game, raising money, and beating Trump at their only debate.

My thought was that Trump’s support had not risen since he lost to Biden so I expected Harris to do at least as well as Biden did. However, Trump gained support largely from Black and Latino men. You’d think that wouldn’t happen, given the racist things he has said over and over again, but maybe the real reason is that these macho men can’t stand the idea of a woman being President. I mean, I’m sure that hurt Hillary Clinton as well (yes, she had other problems) but if 3% of the men will never vote for a woman President — well, there’s the margin you need in swing states.

I’ll probably add more to this as I wake up more.

*nerdy science fiction reference

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He doesn’t plan to win the popular vote

Trump doesn’t care. I mean, that’s obvious. But his plan to win back the Presidency isn’t based on “getting the most votes.” That’s why he can have nazi-type rallies where he and his followers insult the majority of Americans.

cartoon by Chris Riddell

No, his plan is simple (assuming the Electoral College doesn’t give it to him again): Claim victory no matter what. Plant seeds of doubt in advance, claiming the election is fraudulent, claiming without proof that illegal immigrants are voting, that voting machines are changing votes, that there is a huge, vast conspiracy to steal the election away from him despite the fact that the majority of Americans don’t want him. They’ll be at polling stations, threatening voters and trying to disrupt a free and fair election. They’ll threaten violence and will cause some as well.

The good news is that this time, the Democrats pretty much control all of the swing states, and in Georgia, their Governor has already shown that he won’t put up with Trump’s tricks when he tries to steal votes. I mean, come on, last time, Trump lost every single appeal he filed challenging the election.

Of course, this time, he’s stocked the Supreme Court with justices who have no problem with ignoring the Constitution and the law. Hey, it worked to get George W. Bush into the White House…

It’s not going to be easy when you’re dealing with fascists who care little for democracy. So we have to overwhelm them with such a blue wave that it is obvious they have no chance of success.