The Carpentariat

The Trump presidency's thousand-word description in one photo

Photo from a commenter just now.

My fellow Americans, please feel free to visit today's Lincoln Memorial, a marble tribute to perhaps the greatest American ever, and Trump's unspeakable desecration of it.

ANTIFA, the ACORN of 2020

From the malarial, Borglike gutter of "Trump/Pence 2020, Make Nazi Germany Great Again" comes this hilarious screed:

PM,

Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting - it’s absolute madness.

President Trump has made it clear he will not tolerate their disgusting acts of violence against innocent citizens, which is why the United States will be formally designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.

It’s important that EVERY American comes together at a time like this to send a united message that we will not stand for their radical actions any longer…. We’re sending a list of EVERY AMERICAN who signs their name to President Trump first thing TOMORROW morning and we want him to see YOUR NAME. Don’t let him down.

They forgot one thing. Trump can't read.

Otherwise, the campaign team's hysterical rabble-rousing is like Joe Biden basing his 2020 campaign on keenly heightened American awareness of some demented, 13-man Michigan militia playing "Army" somewhere in the Wolverine state's woodlands.

Quote of the Seventh Day

He did not pray. He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years. We need a president who can unify and heal. He has done the opposite of that, and we are left to pick up the pieces.

— Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, speaking of Trump's militaristic diatribe last night

                                                      Erin Schaff/The New York Times

A truly presidential speech, for a change

This morning — the morning after Trump's tear-gassed, flash-bombed photo-op in the name of a religion he knows nothing of — Joe Biden delivered a speech in Philadelphia — a speech of lament but also inspiration.

Metaphorically he translated George Floyd's voice of "I can't breathe" as collective "voices of protest" — of "I can't breathe — in America" voices, African-American as well as Hispanic and Native American voices, as heard and seen daily across the nation since largely peaceful protests emerged and incidental violence erupted.

In his speech, Biden entreats us to hear not the Trumpian voice of "selfishness and fear" — but of FDR, Rosa Parks and Neil Armstrong's. This is the strength of Biden's speech, and I would encourage you to set aside 22 quiet minutes to watch it.

"Conservatives for Natural Selection"

The content of Stein's tweet is too disheartening — and in general familiar — to bother plunging into the rest of the poll's pseudoconservative ghoulishness:

ABC/wapo: "45 percent of strong conservatives, four in 10 Republicans and nearly as many evangelical Christians say they’d be unlikely to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, even for free"

— Sam Stein (@samstein) June 2, 2020

I'm a bit fuzzy on the difference betwixt "strong conservatives" and "Republicans," nevertheless what's clear is that nearly half of both — the same for evangelical Christians (who are strong, "conservative" Republicans) — are willing to die for a sociopathic confidence man and presidential impostor.

They've had "hoax" and "no worse than the flu" drilled so many times into their already leaking heads by a tireless scoundrel, philanderer and golf-cheater, they would roll the dice on a lethal pandemic.

Even more bizarre is that, in their siphoned minds, it is "far-leftist" citizens protesting the systemic murder of young black Americans who are the tribal fanatics.

Finally, a man Will Rogers would have despised

​​​​​The kitschiest, hokiest, funkiest, all-time most awesome, most quintessential, most epic, most Tartuffian photo of religious hypocrisy ever taken.

Trump should be embattled like Nicholas II

We can always count on Trump to make precisely the wrong decision. So it is, with no surprises, that he has ordered a militaristic crackdown on masses of peaceful protesters.

No doubt he made this decision with full knowledge that the violence would increase. He is deploying federal police and the US military knowing that this is a provocative, inflammatory act on his part. Hence the violence will become bloodier. And in Trump's mind, his reelection prospects will improve.

Divide. Divide America. Divide blacks and whites and surely the whites will retaliate at the ballot box. Trump is no better than the vilest, most racist Southern demagogue of the Jim Crow era — and I suspect that most whites and every conscientious white in America now know that.

So even the wrong decision which he believes is the right political decision is typically Trumpian: ignorant, stupid, and conspicuously self-centered.

In the long run, he'll be kicked from the White House like the rabid dog he is. In the short, run, however, I'd love to see the masses invade his summer palace and trap him in the basement like a Romanov swine. 

He is the most despicable, unAmerican president we have ever suffered. And he deserves the worst in return.  

Relief could be on the way

Reveals a National Research poll ("A/B"):

• 54% of Americans support Twitter's decision to add fact-checking labels to Trump's tweets.
• Of the remainder, 26% thought Twitter was wrong, while 20% neither support nor oppose Twitter's move.
• Only one-third of Americans support President Trump's decision to sign an executive order that aims to limit the power of social media companies to moderate content. Nearly half (48%) opposed it.

We could slash the unemployment rate overnight. Fact-checking every one of Trump's prodigiously mendacious tweets would require the labor of roughly half of America's jobless, currently around 40 million.

The downside? They'd all lose their job in about five months, and then Joe Biden would be blamed for having created Trump's unemployment crisis. 

Please don't think outside the box

About every day I read it or hear it somewhere in the news: "Think outside the box." Thus did some NYT editor apply it to Maureen Dowd's latest column: "Think Outside the Box, Jack," referring to Jack Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Twitter.

The four-word abomination is kin to another awful cliché (which advocates thinking inside the box) — "Get with the program" — though this one seems to have faded. What's so nauseatingly ironic about Think outside the box, though, is that the tedious minds that encourage its use are also the minds least capable of thinking outside the box.

Live-tweeting a do-nothing White House

The president spent the day "cloistered inside [the White House], periodically sending out Twitter messages like 'LAW & ORDER!'"; saying he "will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization," even though no other domestic group — e.g., a far-right militia — is designated as such; and being told by aides, "repeatedly," that "the protests were not only about him."

They are, however, the sole responsibility of governors and mayors, as Trump once again rejects even the notion of presidential leadership in times of national crisis:

Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors. These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020

What out-of-office Joe Biden has to do with it I'm not sure — but if this is not what America wants, shouldn't the American president be in charge of resolving it?

Even D.C. hoodlums have more journalistic values than Trump's god-fearing followers

They may be hooligans, but they're discriminating hooligans, who know a purveyor of genuine "fake news" when they see it. 

I don't condone the intimidation and physical harassment of reporters — these days, largely because Donald Trump does (see: rallies) — but Fox News lost its right to the designation of "professional journalism" roughly two minutes after Matt Drudge discovered, to his delicate horror, the presence of presidential jizz on Monica's blue dress.

This led to countless hours of broadcast yellow journalism, which amplified the scourge of Gingrichian politics and culminated in the asinine impeachment of an otherwise responsible POTUS. Then came the network's shilling for a Boy King who became responsible — for the needless deaths of thousands of uniformed Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents.

Then came endless, counterfeit controversies stirred by Fox for fatheads about a president who now ranks in the top 10 of all presidents — and then its baseless, inexcusable defenses of the incontrovertibly worst president in American history.

Now this, thanks in large part to the network's unforgivable, propagandistic defenses of this godawful chief executive: cities burning, more than one-hundred-thousand citizens dying, and a historic nation collapsing.

So do I feel sorry for this embattled schmuck who knowingly lowered himself to "report" for Fox News? Fuck no. Perhaps his mother does, assuming Trump hasn't yet killed her off with America's presidentially unchecked plague.

      

Unjustifiable justice

Fighting for harmony is like fucking for virginity.

These people should read Thoreau. 

PROOF that Donald Trump knows me by name

This just in via email, from Brad Parscale, Trump's reelection campaign manager:

***

PM, I recently stepped out of a meeting with President Trump to update him on our May fundraising numbers. We went over the most recent list of May Deadline Donors, and when he asked me why YOUR NAME was MISSING, I didn’t have an answer for him.

The President requested that I reach out to you because you’ve always been one of his most loyal supporters and he was surprised to see you hadn’t contributed yet.

***

This email is also proof that Trump knows his target market is populated by absolute morons. 

For Trump, the two different worlds of Lansing and Minneapolis

When Trump wanted laundry mats, massage parlors, churches and liquor stores reopened in the Wolverine State, and assault-rifle-armed protestors ominously gathered in Lansing to emphasize his opinion, the president gently tweeted that "the Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again."

But when "THUGS" gathered in Minneapolis, Minnesota to protest the wanton police murder of George Floyd, Trump harshly tweeted that "either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right." He famously added that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" — later explaining, in his usual disingenuous way, that he only meant that looting often turns even more violent.

Plainly, the two protests cannot be compared in attitude or purpose. But Trump's early reactions can. White Michiganders lethally armed against "that woman" were "good people"; black, mostly unarmed Minnesotans protesting tear-gassing police and one homicidal cop were "thugs" to be shot. In addition, what happened in Lansing was vividly "lawless anarchy and chaos," yet Trump applied the phrase only to the situation in Minneapolis.

Trump wanted to "LIBERATE" Michigan from the tyranny of closed floristries; in Minnesota, the tyranny of racial killings demanded a city's suppression. Adding to the surreal polarizations of Trumpworld was reelection campaign manager Brad Parscale, who blamed Twitter's fact-checking of the president for "fueling the misinformation" causing such anarchy.

Of course, neither Parscale nor Trump is really angry about the underclass chaos and Twitter-induced anarchy, since both are working out as intended. No one would have believed any Trumpian attempt at empathy for the actually oppressed, and everyone's attention is now off the 100,000 dead.

Come again?

I submit this Twitter advisory is more than a trifle baffling.