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USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Tracy Riddle - 10-11-2016
I've never been more proud to be a Californian -
Joint Statement from California Legislative Leaders on Result of Presidential Election
Wednesday, November 09, 2016
SACRAMENTO California Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) and California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) released the following statement on the results of the President election:
Today, we woke up feeling like strangers in a foreign land, because yesterday Americans expressed their views on a pluralistic and democratic society that are clearly inconsistent with the values of the people of California.
We have never been more proud to be Californians.
By a margin in the millions, Californians overwhelmingly rejected politics fueled by resentment, bigotry, and misogyny.
The largest state of the union and the strongest driver of our nation's economy has shown it has its surest conscience as well.
California is and must always be a refuge of justice and opportunity for people of all walks, talks, ages and aspirations regardless of how you look, where you live, what language you speak, or who you love.
California has long set an example for other states to follow. And California will defend its people and our progress. We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress at the height of our historic diversity, scientific advancement, economic output, and sense of global responsibility.
We will be reaching out to federal, state and local officials to evaluate how a Trump Presidency will potentially impact federal funding of ongoing state programs, job-creating investments reliant on foreign trade, and federal enforcement of laws affecting the rights of people living in our state. We will maximize the time during the presidential transition to defend our accomplishments using every tool at our disposal.
While Donald Trump may have won the presidency, he hasn't changed our values. America is greater than any one man or party. We will not be dragged back into the past. We will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution.
California was not a part of this nation when its history began, but we are clearly now the keeper of its future.
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Magda Hassan - 11-11-2016
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Emperor Commodus in the gladiator arena
This needs an outing.
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Magda Hassan - 11-11-2016
Cliff Varnell Wrote:A so-called President who not only doesn't believe in climate change but wants to triple down on the technologies which create climate change.
Hope all you default Trump-rooters don't sunburn much.
Yeah, Trump will slow burn us all. Hillary would have incinerated us instant;y in a nuclear war.
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Lauren Johnson - 11-11-2016
Rumor: Trump considering notorious neocon John Bolton for Sect of State. I tend to discount this one. But Trump is a well trusted friend of Israel.
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 11-11-2016
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American liberals unleashed the Trump monster
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From Jonathan Cook Blog
The earth has been shifting under our feet for a while, but all liberals want to do is desperately cling to the status quo like a life-raft. Middle-class Britons are still hyperventilating about Brexit, and now middle-class America is trembling at the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House.
![[Image: trumpster-248x300.jpg]](http://abananapeeled.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/trumpster-248x300.jpg)
And, of course, middle-class Americans are blaming everyone but themselves. Typifying this blinkered self-righteousness was a column yesterday, written before news of Trump's success, from Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, Britain's unofficial stenographer to power and Washington fanboy. He blamed everyone but Hillary Clinton for her difficult path to what he then assumed was the White House.
Well, here is some news for Freedland and American liberals. The reason Trump is heading to the Oval Office is because the Democratic party rigged the primaries to ensure that a candidate who could have beaten Trump, Bernie Sanders, did not get on the ticket. You want to blame someone, blame Clinton and the rotten-to-the-core Democratic party leadership.
But no, liberals won't be listening because they are too busy blaming Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing the truth about the Democratic leadership set out in the Clinton campaign emails -- and Russia for supposedly stealing them.
Blame lies squarely too with Barack Obama, the great black hope who spent eight years proving how wedded he was to neoliberal orthodoxy at home and a neoconservative agenda abroad.
While liberals praised him to the heavens, he poured the last US treasure into propping up a failed banking system, bankrupting the country to fill the pockets of a tiny, already fabulously wealthy elite. The plutocrats then recycled vast sums to lobbyists and representatives in Congress to buy control there and make sure the voice of ordinary Americans counted for even less than it did before.
Obama also continued the futile "war on terror," turning the world into one giant battlefield that made every day a payday for the arms industry. The US has been dropping bombs on jihadists and civilians alike, while supplying the very same jihadists with arms to kill yet more civilians.
And all the while, have liberals been campaigning against the military-industrial complex that stole their political system? No, of course not. They have been worrying about the mass migrations of refugees -- those fleeing the very resource wars their leaders stoked.
Then there is the liberal media that served as a loyal chorus to Clinton, trying to persuade us that she would make a model president, and to ignore what was in plain sight: that Clinton is even more in the pocket of the bankers and arms dealers than Obama (if that were possible) and would wage more, not less war.
Do I sound a little like Trump as I rant against liberals? Yes, I do. And while you are busy dismissing me as a closet Trump supporter, you can continue your furious refusal to examine the reasons why a truly progressive position appears so similar to a far-right one like Trump's.
Because real progressives are as frustrated and angry about the status quo as are the poor, vulnerable and disillusioned who turned to Trump. And they had no choice but to vote for Trump because there was no one aside from him in the presidential race articulating anything that approximated the truth.
Sanders was ousted by Clinton and her corrupt coterie. Jill Stein of the Greens was made invisible by a corrupt electoral system. It was either vote for Clinton and the putrid status quo, or vote for Trump and a possibility for change.
Yes, Trump is very bad. He is as much a product of the plutocracy that is now America as Clinton. He, like Clinton, will do nothing to fix the most important issue facing humankind: runaway climate change. He is a climate denier, she is a climate evader.
But unlike Clinton, Trump understood the rising popular anger at the "system," and he was articulate enough to express it -- all it took was a howl of pain.
Trump isn't the antithesis of liberal America. You liberals created him. You unleashed this monster. It is you in the mirror. You stayed silent, you took no stand while your country was stolen from you. In fact, you did worse: you enthusiastically voted time after time for those who did the stealing.
Now the path is clear and the route fast. The precipice is ahead, and American liberals are firmly in the driving seat.
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 11-11-2016
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There Must Be a Waterfall of Pardons on the Way
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The U.S. has just seen a surprise presidential electionvictory by a candidate who banked his campaign on vilifying Muslims andundocumented immigrants and on promising to maintain the devalued legal statusof Black lives. Now that Democratic Party and media figures have been quick tomake cynical speeches about uniting the country and moving on, the nation'sprogressive movements should be ever more compelled not to lose sight of theConstitutional power that is still afforded to President Obama, the same manreturned to office by progressive votes four years ago.
![[Image: 3942978612_9d69a19bca.jpg]](https://farm3.static.flickr.com/2636/3942978612_9d69a19bca.jpg)
I'm talking about the power of the pardon, the final executivebranch check on the legislative and judicial branches, which over the yearshave passed laws and interpreted them through a white-supremacist,capital-supremacist lens. According to Article 2 Section 2, it is constitutionallypossible for Obama to issue "reprieves and pardons" to all people, whether injail or not, facing charges or not, who up to this point in time may havecommitted a federal offense.
At the very least, Obama owes his electorate an immediateblanket pardon to all people accused or convicted of nonviolent federal drugoffenses, and--- to borrow an idea of Peter L. Markowitz published in the New York Times last July--- to allpeople who entered the United States other than through an official port ofentry. Over the next two months or so of his term, he ought to be spending thegreater chunk of every remaining day of his term on the task of reexamining thecases of all still remaining federal prisoners, probationers, and parolees whomight have had trials tainted by racial, religious, or other bias. (And let'snot forget those already released from federal supervision only to facechallenges getting jobs, housing, voting access.)
The President may need to appoint a commission to siftthrough more than a quarter of a million cases, but the final decision on anypardon has to come from Obama himself. Upon examination of each case he shoulddecide whether to issue a pardon in the interest of true justice. Many wouldargue that these would be very subjective judgment calls; nevertheless, theyare calls he was democratically elected to exercise.
Despite eight or more years of trying to figure out whatObama's personal opinions really are, we still don't know for sure that hisheart is in such an undertaking. The same man who for good reason is nicknamed the"Deporter-in-Chief" has also used executive power to shield immigrants, albeitonly narrow categories of immigrants and only temporarily. It will take anational movement of pressure to bear upon Obama; either to give him thecourage to act, or to politically force these steps on a legacy standpoint.
He will have no more excuses for not acting. With his timeon the clock running out, Congress can hardly punish him with impeachment atthis point. Likewise, there will be no incoming Democratic President or houseof Congress to receive political fallout from conservatives. There is noSupreme Court review. There is no Constitutional power for President Trump toannul a former president's pardons. He and the dual Republican Congress cannotpass a "Bill of Attainder" to re-arrest or arrest for the first time any of thepeople protected under pardon, and Trump and his supporters will only be ableto legally exact their vengeance on people who allegedly breach a federal law after the date of the pardon.
Can Obama and the Democratic Party get away with maintainingthe status quo when they literally have this particular power in their handsand absolutely nothing to lose? Unfortunately the answer is yes--- but only ifprogressives remain silent, say "well, we had a good run," and do nothing to advocatethis possible course of action that would improve, even save, the lives ofmillions.
Anyone infuriated that a candidate who panders a fascisticworldview was elected president should be pushing for an executive action whichvigorously repudiates the xenophobic philosophy that narrowly swept him in.Each person reading and agreeing with this idea should do their best to spread itfar and wide, via the media and sustained public actions. All politiciansconcerned about reelection or legacy must follow the will of the most organizedand loudest constituency on which they are or were dependent. Demand that Obamabegin issuing these pardons now.
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Peter Lemkin - 11-11-2016
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[TD="width: 84%"]Demise of the Major Parties, and the Need for a New Progressive Movement
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ByDave Lindorff
Let's look on the bright side.
![[Image: s_700_opednews_com_0_presidenttrump-jpg_...09-682.gif]](http://www.opednews.com/populum/cachedimages/s_700_opednews_com_0_presidenttrump-jpg_63_20161109-682.gif)
Donald J. Trump is the next president of theUnited States. His stunning victory over Hillary Clinton came after he hadfirst crushed the Republican Party establishment, steamrollering all thecandidates it put forward and defeating party leaders' concerted efforts todeny him the nomination as he rolled up victory after victory in that party'sprimaries.
But Trump did more than that. He also, alongwith Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, smashed the Democratic Party establishmenttoo.
Trump's win in traditionally Democraticstrongholds like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and his near win inMinnesota, not to mention his victories and near wins in states like Florida,Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia, all a result of the DemocraticParty's failure to energize it's critical base in black and Latino communities,have exposed the total bankruptcy of a party whose leadership long agoabandoned the poor, the working class, African Americans, Latinos and organizedlabor, working on a now thoroughly discredited assumption that it wouldautomatically win those votes anyhow because those "little people" would haveno place to turn but to the Democrats.
The Democratic Party establishment this electioncycle threw any shred of principle to the wind in orchestrating the nominationof Hillary Clinton, surely the most disliked candidate to run on a major partyticket in history. The party did this knowing that it was promoting a candidatewho had a tin ear for the issues of ordinary people, who was demonstrablycorrupt and dismissive of laws and ethical standards, and who was actuallyunder investigation by the FBI the whole time she was running in the primaries.
We know, thanks to principled Democratic Partyleaders who quit like Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the vice chair of theDemocratic National Committee, and to emails leaked by Wikileaks, that the DNCworked assiduously throughout the primary season to undermine Bernie Sanders'insurgent primary campaign. The DNC and the Clinton campaign -- actually facetsof the same malignant organization -- did this by scheduling early debates at times, like during theSuperbowl, when few people would be paying attention, by working with corruptmainstream journalists to plant hit pieces on Sanders, resorting to cheapred-baiting, lying about his history of civil rights activism, and questioninghis mental abilities, and even resorting to voter suppression -- usually atactic favored more by Republican Party operatives.
When this DNC bias and manipulation of theprimary campaign was exposed, forcing the resignation of DNC chair DebbieWasserman-Schultz, Clinton immediately made that disgraced Floridacongresswoman the titular head of her own campaign, demonstrating her uttercontempt for ethics and for the Democratic base.
Nor was Clinton's stolen party nomination theonly corrupt act of the DNC. It also successfully defeated primary efforts by anumber of aggressive popular, progressive Senate candidates who could havehelped the party retake the Senate by running well-funded corporatist partyhacks like Evan Bayh in Indiana and Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania, againstthose progressive candidates. In each case, these hacks went on to lose theirraces, leaving the Senate in Republican hands.
Hopefully, this highly visible corruption at thetop of the Democratic Party will lead to a real effort to chuck this scleroticand wholly corrupted organization and replace it with a genuine party ofworking people, the poor and minorities on the left. That long-overdue projectneeds to begin immediately.
But back to other silver linings of the Trumppresidential win.
Most importantly, it seems likely that we willno longer have to worry about the US going to war with Russia. While Hillary Clinton, with her stated desireto establish a "no-fly zone" in Syria that even leading generals said wouldmean "war with Russia," Donald Trump throughout the campaign made it clear thathe did not want the US confronting Russia. He said, to the consternation ofmost establishment Republicans, that he thought the two countries "should beworking together." That view, if he isserious, bodes well for Syrians, and for Ukrainians as well. Trump has alsocondemned NATO, which since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been convertedinto a military adjunct to aggressive US efforts around the globe to sow chaos,mayhem and regime change -- something Trump has opposed. With luck Trump, whorecognizes that Americans do not want endless war, may act to neuter NATO,hopefully by withdrawing US funding for the organization and allowing it tofade away -- something that should have happened in 1990 when the Berlin Wallcame down.
Rampingdown US imperial over-reach, which has caused the deaths of millions ofinnocents over the last decade and a half alone, angered nations and peoplearound the world against the US, and cost Americans over $4.5 trillion since2001, would be reason enough to cheer Trump's victory. But revoking theso-called Affordable Care Act and leaving Americans to their own devices in anunregulated private insurance market would be another plus. The ACA, which isalready becoming, to quote Trump, a "disaster," with rates soaring 25% thisyear for many low income people, and with plans offering ever higherdeductibles and worse coverage, was an insurance-industry boon that threatenedto make a shift to a nationalized health plan impossible to achieve. By undoingit, as he and a Republican Congress have vowed to do, we can expect demands fora Canadian-style system to soar in no time, perhaps handing a key campaignissue to any new progressive party.
Onthe economic front, Trump has made it clear that he will oppose the pendingTrans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and that he wants to undo or renegotiateearlier job-killing trade agreements, most notably the North American FreeTrade Agreement (NAFTA). If he is serious about this anti-globalism policy, andacts on it, it will be a huge victory for working class Americans of all races,and a huge blow to the Democratic Party, which since the Clinton presidency hasembraced the idea favored by corporate America that shipping productionoverseas to cheap labor countries was sound economic policy. Trump also spokeduring the campaign of the need to raise the minimum wage, and in years pasteven supported a tax on wealth. If he does either or both of those things hewill be a working class hero. But then, there's no telling whether he was justcampaigning, and will forget these ideas once in power.
Ofcourse, there is no denying that Americans have elected a racist, misogynist,xenophobic narcissist, and that his successful campaign has made at least overtracism and anti-immigrant bigotry, if not overt sexism, socially acceptable. Itwill be critical for progressives and for the impacted groups themselves toorganize a mass movement to resist these trends, as well as policies, like theoverturning of women's right to control their own bodies, and the right ofpeople of color to quality schools and to be safe from aggressive, militarizedpolicing. These are important concerns but they also expose the rot of thepolitical system, which was allowed these trends to develop and fester foryears.
There's no denying either, that Trump is a climate-change denier, and that with a Republican Congress -- thanks to the corporatist machinations of the Democratic Party and it's selection of loser Congressional candidates -- he could gut environmental protections and even eliminate the EPA. On the other hand, though, Hillary Clinton, the uber-corporatist, was never going to do much about stopping climate change. She wouldn't even raise the issue in the debates or on her compaign. Truth is Obama did next to nothing about it over two terms. His main contribution to reducing carbon emissions was failing to boost the economy, which kept emissions low. Since Trump is likely to bring us a new economic crash, via his plans for bank deregulation, etc., he may end up inadvertently reducing carbon emissions too.
Onbalance though, I would nonetheless argue that Trump's victory and his drubbing of aDemocratic Party that has been fleeing from its New Deal and Great Society pastfor decades, is what is needed if we are to have any hope of restoring any kindof popular sovereignty in a US that was sleep-walking into a kind ofcorporatist oligarchy. Trump, along with the Sanders movement during theDemocratic primaries, effectively tossed a molotov cocktail into that wholesystem.
BernieSanders has said that the real "political revolution" he was calling for duringhis primary campaign would begin after the election. Of course, he wasenvisioning it being to put pressure on a President Hillary Clinton to live upto her campaign promises and the Democratic Party's platform, not to oppose aTrump Presidency's policies. Because he made the horrendous mistake ofbetraying his 12 million ardent supporters by surrendering his campaign beforethe Democratic Convention and by then converting himself into an activesupporter of the very woman who had corruptly undermined his campaign and liedabout him personally, ignoring his earlier spot-on indictment of her as acorrupt tool of the big banks and big corporations, though, he has lost much ofhis political appeal at this point. Nonetheless, his call for a politicalrevolution remains correct.
Wewho had hoped Sanders could win the Democratic nomination, can look back anddecry his gutless and politically disastrous decision not to accept Green Partyleader Jill Stein's offer to him to accept her party's presidential nominationand run against Trump and Clinton in the general election, which he might wellhave won in such a three or four-person race. But that's all history now. Atthis point, it's on all of us on the left, and in the rest of the Democraticbase -- the working class, union rank-and-file, people of color, immigrants, feminists, environmental activistsand peace activists, to pick up the pieces and to build a movement ofresistance anda new political party of the left to keep socialism on the political agenda inAmerica and to fight for real progressive change and real democracy.
DAVELINDORFF
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - David Guyatt - 11-11-2016
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From Jonathan Cook Blog
The earth has been shifting under our feet for a while, but all liberals want to do is desperately cling to the status quo like a life-raft. Middle-class Britons are still hyperventilating about Brexit, and now middle-class America is trembling at the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House.
And, of course, middle-class Americans are blaming everyone but themselves. Typifying this blinkered self-righteousness was a column yesterday, written before news of Trump's success, from Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, Britain's unofficial stenographer to power and Washington fanboy. He blamed everyone but Hillary Clinton for her difficult path to what he then assumed was the White House.
Well, here is some news for Freedland and American liberals. The reason Trump is heading to the Oval Office is because the Democratic party rigged the primaries to ensure that a candidate who could have beaten Trump, Bernie Sanders, did not get on the ticket. You want to blame someone, blame Clinton and the rotten-to-the-core Democratic party leadership.
But no, liberals won't be listening because they are too busy blaming Julian Assange and Wikileaks for exposing the truth about the Democratic leadership set out in the Clinton campaign emails -- and Russia for supposedly stealing them.
Blame lies squarely too with Barack Obama, the great black hope who spent eight years proving how wedded he was to neoliberal orthodoxy at home and a neoconservative agenda abroad.
While liberals praised him to the heavens, he poured the last US treasure into propping up a failed banking system, bankrupting the country to fill the pockets of a tiny, already fabulously wealthy elite. The plutocrats then recycled vast sums to lobbyists and representatives in Congress to buy control there and make sure the voice of ordinary Americans counted for even less than it did before.
Obama also continued the futile "war on terror," turning the world into one giant battlefield that made every day a payday for the arms industry. The US has been dropping bombs on jihadists and civilians alike, while supplying the very same jihadists with arms to kill yet more civilians.
And all the while, have liberals been campaigning against the military-industrial complex that stole their political system? No, of course not. They have been worrying about the mass migrations of refugees -- those fleeing the very resource wars their leaders stoked.
Then there is the liberal media that served as a loyal chorus to Clinton, trying to persuade us that she would make a model president, and to ignore what was in plain sight: that Clinton is even more in the pocket of the bankers and arms dealers than Obama (if that were possible) and would wage more, not less war.
Do I sound a little like Trump as I rant against liberals? Yes, I do. And while you are busy dismissing me as a closet Trump supporter, you can continue your furious refusal to examine the reasons why a truly progressive position appears so similar to a far-right one like Trump's.
Because real progressives are as frustrated and angry about the status quo as are the poor, vulnerable and disillusioned who turned to Trump. And they had no choice but to vote for Trump because there was no one aside from him in the presidential race articulating anything that approximated the truth.
Sanders was ousted by Clinton and her corrupt coterie. Jill Stein of the Greens was made invisible by a corrupt electoral system. It was either vote for Clinton and the putrid status quo, or vote for Trump and a possibility for change.
Yes, Trump is very bad. He is as much a product of the plutocracy that is now America as Clinton. He, like Clinton, will do nothing to fix the most important issue facing humankind: runaway climate change. He is a climate denier, she is a climate evader.
But unlike Clinton, Trump understood the rising popular anger at the "system," and he was articulate enough to express it -- all it took was a howl of pain.
Trump isn't the antithesis of liberal America. You liberals created him. You unleashed this monster. It is you in the mirror. You stayed silent, you took no stand while your country was stolen from you. In fact, you did worse: you enthusiastically voted time after time for those who did the stealing.
Now the path is clear and the route fast. The precipice is ahead, and American liberals are firmly in the driving seat.
I think that sums it up pretty well actually. The self-satisfied, selfish smugness of the liberals who ignored the decades of poverty and joblessness wrought on many parts of the country - and the world through exported warfare - while they continued to enjoy their bottle of chianti with their dinner out in a posh Italian restaurant, lost to reality in their privileged world
What is hard about understanding that this would, sooner or later, result in a massive backlash?
It takes a special kind of arrogance and blindness.
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - Tracy Riddle - 11-11-2016
Yes, neo-liberalism has been a failure for working people, just like neo-conservatism. But that's not what either philosophy is about, anyway. We know the globalists (whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives) have a different agenda in mind.
But citizens/voters also have a responsibility to try to rise above the propaganda and stop believing in TV images, whether images of Bush landing on a carrier, or Obama the Savior, or Trump the Successful Businessman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/books/review-megyn-kelly-tells-tales-out-of-fox-news-in-her-memoir-settle-for-more.html?mtrref=t.co&_r=1
Ms. Kelly writes that her problems started in August, the Monday before the first Republican presidential primary debate. She had just done a segment on her show, "The Kelly File," that infuriated Mr. Trump. He refused to make his own scheduled appearance on her show unless she phoned him personally.
"I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you," she says he told her, "and I still may."
Then, the day before the first presidential debate, Mr. Trump was in a lather again, Ms. Kelly writes. He called Fox executives, saying he'd heard that her first question "was a very pointed question directed at him." This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.
She doesn't speculate where the leak came from. (She reports. You decide.) But that's another unambiguous takeaway from this book: Parts of Fox or at the very least, Roger Ailes, the network's chairman until July, when he was given the boot after several allegations of sexual harassment were made against him seemed to be nakedly colluding with the Republican presidential nominee.
"Folks were starting to worry about Trump his level of agitation did not match the circumstances," Ms. Kelly writes. "Yes, it was his first debate. But this was bizarre behavior, especially for a man who wanted the nuclear codes."
Her story becomes more byzantine. On the day of the debate, Ms. Kelly writes, she woke up feeling great. Then an overzealous, suspiciously enthusiastic driver picked her up to take her to the convention center. He insisted on getting her coffee, though she'd repeatedly declined his offer. Once it was in her hand, she drank it. And within 15 minutes, she was violently ill, vomiting so uncontrollably that it was unclear if she'd be able to go on and help moderate that evening. It was so bad that she kept a trash pail beneath her desk throughout the debate, just in case.
Ms. Kelly never says outright that someone tried to poison her. (A stomach bug was going around, she notes.) But the episode spooked her enough that she shared it later with Roger Ailes and a lawyer friend of his. Foul play? Again: She reports. You decide.
As we all know, Mr. Trump did unleash his beautiful Twitter account on Ms. Kelly after that debate, and it threatened to upend her life. He called her "overrated," "angry," "crazy" and "a bimbo"; he went on CNN with Don Lemon opposite her show's time slot and said there was blood coming out of Ms. Kelly's eyes, "blood coming out of her … whatever." (My favorite response to this: Katie Couric wrote Ms. Kelly a note asking: "Are you okay? Do you need some Tampax?")
The hectoring went on for weeks. "Every time Trump acted up," Ms. Kelly writes, "it was like he flipped a switch, instantly causing a flood of intense nastiness." Kelly's voice mail box filled with invective and obscenities. People phoned in with death threats. Ms. Kelly's young daughter asked her what a bimbo was; a suspicious man showed up in the lobby of her apartment building; her family took an armed guard to Disney World.
It didn't help that Mr. Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen retweeted this message from a Trump supporter: "#boycottmegynkelly @realDonaldTrump we can gut her."
Part of Mr. Trump's response seemed like that of a man betrayed: Months before announcing his candidacy, he had tried hard to curry Ms. Kelly's favor. He sent her notes, including an attagirl scrawled across her picture in The New York Times Magazine. (When Vanity Fair reported this, Mr. Trump denied it; Ms. Kelly includes proof, a picture.) Ms. Kelly and her husband declined an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump's fabled estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Then Mr. Trump tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to persuade her to let him pick up the tab for the weekend she spent with two girlfriends at the Trump SoHo hotel.
"This is actually one of the untold stories of the 2016 campaign," Ms. Kelly writes. "I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous from hotel rooms to rides on his 757."
USA under presidency of a know-nothing, neo-fascist, racist, sexist, mobbed-up narcissist!! - LR Trotter - 11-11-2016
Tracy Riddle Wrote:Cliff Varnell Wrote:Peter Lemkin Wrote:As I pointed out before the vote, Trump is very likely to be impeachable...but that leaves a bigger problem...his VEEP!
The USA has made its foul bed and now must sleep in it....it is going to be a wild and I believe horrible four years.
Mike Pence, arch bible thumper, homophobe.
Pence will become the real power in this Administration as it dawns on Trump that he has zero skill set for what a POTUS does day-to-day.
Possibly, but that sure isn't what Trump's supporters voted for.
Bush was the power behind Reagan, and Reagan was a friggin' genius by comparison (he actually read books, was a two-term governor).
Edit/delete.