What election? This is a civil war to stop Trump
In what amounted to a casual aside at his rally in Colorado Springs on Thursday night, Donald Trump drew the battle lines in this election as clearly as I've heard them drawn yet. Facing another of his virtually all-white audience in the city that is headquarters to multiple fundamentalist sects...
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In what amounted to a casual aside at his rally in Colorado Springs on Thursday night, Donald Trump drew the battle lines in this election as clearly as I’ve heard them drawn yet. Facing another of his virtually all-white audience in the city that is headquarters to multiple fundamentalist sects and several Christian megachurches, Trump waved his arms and asked, “By the way, how bad were the Academy Awards this year?” The crowd jeered loudly. “Did you see it? And the winner is … a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about?” he went on with undisguised disgust. “We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of that, they give them best movie of the year? Was it good? I don’t know. Let’s get ‘Gone With the Wind’! Can we get ‘Gone With the Wind’ back, please?”
This article first appeared in Salon.
Trump may as well have waved a Confederate battle flag. The crowd knew exactly what he meant. “Make America Great Again” now had a point of origin, and the greatness they yearned for had not been expressed by the Oscar win of “Parasite” director Bong Joon-ho or, God forbid, the election of Barack Obama, but by Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.
Trump is letting us know that he and his base don’t think of this as an election. It’s a civil war. They want to turn the clock back to the time that Negroes knew their place and women were happy making biscuits in the kitchen and employers could pay their workers anything they wanted and the question of who got to vote was decided by a few white men in a smoke-filled room.
Look around you. With William Barr at the Justice Department and Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and Senate Republicans voting in lockstep with Mitch McConnell, living in Donald Trump’s America feels like the South won the Civil War. If we don’t get our shit together and drive him from office at the ballot box in November, we’ll lose this one, too.
Trump made use of an enemy foreign power, Russia, to win election in 2016, and if what the intelligence community told the Congress this week is correct, he’s in the process of doing it again. There won’t be any investigation of foreign interference this time. What did the Mueller investigation accomplish? Sure, there were a few months when it looked like it would go somewhere. I mean, Trump’s people had been running all over the place meeting with Russians in cigar bars, and Roger Stone was on the phone to WikiLeaks, and there was a department of the FSB (Russia’s equivalent to the CIA) devoted to hacking the Democrats and a whole goddamned building in St. Petersburg posting on Twitter and running Russkie bots through Facebook. And then Trump fired Jim Comey and had Sergey Kislyak and Sergey Lavrov into the Oval Office, where he told the two Russians the “pressure is off.”
And then Trump’s hand-picked shithammer, William Barr, dug a hole right under his office window in Washington and threw Mueller’s 400 pages in, shoveled in some dirt, and it was like the whole thing had never happened.
The stunning thing is, Trump keeps getting caught and nothing happens. His entire administration leaks like a collapsed dam. Every time he does something cruel or stupid or even illegal, somebody calls a reporter or blows a whistle. Look at the Ukraine scandal. Everything from Trump’s phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Rudy Giuliani’s latest bowel movement was exposed, and yet the effort to impeach him was doomed from the start.
Even the House testimony by 10 people from Trump’s own administration had no effect, like the appearance by my old friend Bill Taylor. I kept waiting for him, or one of them anyway, to get up there and metaphorically grab the members of the committee by the lapels and yell, “Don’t you see what the fucker did? He bribed a foreign government using our tax dollars to help him get elected!”
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