“An Unacceptable President”

Andrew Johnson was the first President of the United States to face impeachment proceedings against him, which started on March 5, 1868. In part, Johnson’s charges consisted of breaking the Tenure of Office Act with the forcing out of one Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, and seeking to replace him with Ulysses S. Grant, who was more in line with Johnson’s own ideologies against Reconstruction.

Three articles of impeachment over the Watergate scandal awaited Richard M. Nixon in July of 1974: for obstruction of justice, lying, and misuse of the IRS. Had Nixon not resigned in disgrace, he would have faced impeachment trials in both the House and Senate, and most likely would have done serious time in a federal prison.

William Jefferson Clinton was the last of the three Presidents to face impeachment in 1998; one charge of perjury, and another charge of obstruction of justice. What started as an investigation into the 1992 Whitewater land deal mushroomed into revelations of mass firings, multiple instances of sexual harassment, and ultimately, the “blue dress” scandal involving Monica Lewinsky.

The idea of impeachment is, for the most part, a political process, thrown around the circles of whoever the opposition party might be at the time. Perhaps there is an aversion to the removal of a President that transcends time; when President Johnson was acquitted, Sen. James Grimes (R-Iowa) declared, “I cannot agree to destroy the harmonious working of the Constitution, for the sake of getting rid of an Unacceptable President.” The process of impeachment, however odious, is absolutely a part of that “harmonious working” the Constitution was meant to be. The trading in of the ease of partisan politics for the dirty work of putting our Nation first must be the duty of every elected member of the Legislative Branch.

And that must begin with the removal of perhaps the most villainous President to take the Oath, Donald John Trump.

♠                 ♠                ♠

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that President Trump is now the subject of an investigation into whether he obstructed justice in asking former FBI Director James B. Comey for loyalty to himself, and into “letting go” of the investigation of fired national security adviser Michael Flynn. The Post reads,

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.

The move by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.

Most Americans of moderate temperament, including some on the Right, knew this man was and is an international embarrassment. Because of blatant Russian interference into our electoral process, the suspicion of Trump being a Manchurian-esque head of state fully beholden to the Russian government will not go away. But now that there has been a shift of focus from said Russian co-opting of Trump’s campaign to possible obstruction of justice after Comey’s sacking, Trump’s actions have made him appear to be a guilty man on the run.

Donald John Trump is a pathological liar, and represents the worst elements of our country. His was a campaign that fanned flames of racism, misogyny, violence and unfettered hatred of a changing world. He has shamed the office of the President with frequent rants against the Judicial Branch over his precious Muslim travel ban, which has been struck down in the courts multiple times; his tweets are those of an intemperate, petulant child, assuming the role of the oft-assailed conservative convinced of his own rightness. He has abdicated his responsibility to be the leader of the free world when dealing with the most important issue facing our planet: climate change. He has no regard or respect for the rule of law in this country. He has referred to the media as “the enemy of the people”, and his sons regard Democrats as “not even people.” He is a defrauder of sick children. His White House is one that, instead of checking him on his own foolish impulses, would rather sit around a table giving honor and glory to his name as if he were an all-powerful deity.

And if Trump is found to be one who obstructs justice in his quest to cover his ties to Russia, he and his entire operation must be made to answer for their crimes, from his Vice President on down. Trump must be brought to justice for his continued flouting of the Emoluments Clause, as he and his family have no problem lining their own pockets by way of the prestige of the presidency.

The preservation of our democracy, and the integrity of the Constitution he tramples on with each passing day depend on it.

 

Party of the Desperate Strongman

 

Greg Gianforte should be in jail right now.

Less than twenty-four hours before a special election for a seat in Congress, Gianforte attacked journalist for The Guardian Ben Jacobs, grabbing him by the throat and “body-slamming” him to the ground, according to confirming reports by Fox News (of all places) and BuzzFeed. Instead of cooling his heels in a Montana jail cell, Gianforte, a man with ties to Russian companies that Jacobs reported on last month,  was rewarded with an extra $100,000 in campaign contributions, and a victory over Democrat Rob Quist.

At first, Gianforte’s camp tried to place the blame on Jacobs, saying that the incident was “aggressive behavior by a liberal journalist,” essentially providing the childish “He started it!” defense. Had this assault not been corroborated by Fox News, Gianforte probably would have gotten away with it, given the sheriff who cited him donated $250 to his campaign.

Gianforte’s actions were a disgusting display of his lack of temperament, and a clear indication of where we are as a nation under the Trump regime. By calling the Fourth Estate “the enemy of the people”, and slandering reporting that holds him responsible for actions within his administration as “fake news”, Donald Trump has indeed created an environment where those so immersed in his culture now feel empowered to be the bullies they’ve always felt liberals to be. Snooping “liberal” journalist out to get your favorite Right-wing candidate by asking too many questions? Just beat the crap out of him/her and keep it moving.

As The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler points out, Gianforte’s actions should scare the hell out of anyone with an ounce of patriotism:

All the more because of Gianforte’s victory, conservative candidates across the country know they can abuse reporters, lie about it, use political violence to raise money, and find safe harbor in the Republican cloakrooms of the United States Capitol. Yet taking all of this in, the NBC News political cheat sheet First Read lamented that the “body slam of [a] reporter is another sign of America’s broken politics.” That conclusion isn’t wrong, much as the broken wing of an airplane might send the whole vessel into a spiral dive, and, in surveying the wreckage, one could accurately exclaim that “the plane broke.”

The New York Times’ Jacey Fortin reported on the rash of physical assaults on press freedoms in the Trump era:

Last week, John M. Donnelly, a journalist for CQ Roll Call, said he was pinned against a wall by security workers in Washington as he tried to ask a question of Michael P. O’Rielly, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission.

Two plainclothes security workers used their backs to keep him against the wall and away from Mr. O’Rielly, Mr. Donnelly said.

“There was absolutely nothing in my countenance that could be perceived as a threat,” Mr. Donnelly said. “I think they interpreted that I was going to ask a question, and they were determined to stop it.” Mr. O’Rielly later apologized on social media.

The Columbia Journalism Review is also keeping a running tab on assaults on the press, be they actual assault, the locking out of American journalists from certain briefings, or Trump telling then-FBI director James Comey to lock up journalists who report and publish leaked information, according to a New York Times report.

Assaulting journalists and banning the press from certain briefings are the actions of a party fully on board with becoming the enablers of strongmen. The alleged Leader of the Free World rewards dictators like Recep Tayyip Erdogan by inviting him into the White House, and allowing his goons to attack peaceful protestors outside the Turkish embassy; he calls murderous thugs like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and calls him great, and he fondles an orb with the king of Saudi Arabia, a country that violates human rights with impunity, so why should a congressional candidate’s assaulting a journalist surprise anyone?

Because the Right is so afraid of losing the power they’ve been rightly deprived of for the better part of a decade, they won’t stop this immature, vile madness. Instead of demanding a suspension of his campaign, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan weakly said Greg Gianforte should apologize for his actions yesterday.

And so it goes.

Lies, Damned Lies, and “Other People’s Babies”

What, exactly, is the value of the truth?

If a lie is told often enough to the right ear, it is nearly always believed as fact, especially if it serves to perpetuate the support of who told the lie, and confirms the bias against the subject of the lie. And as has been proven countless times in the last fifty-plus days, this administration has proven that all it needs is to simply air whatever it wants–especially if it’s untrue–and people will believe it as fact.

We are currently living in the beginning stages of an era in which facts and logic are being rendered moot. Where easily refutable lies are fervently believed as an “alternative” version of the truth by those still elated to have a President Trump in the Oval Office, eager to believe and trust whatever they believe the “truth” to be. Where conservative plagiarism–the stealing of another’s writings and claiming it as their own–is excused and derided as a “hit job” by the “mainstream media.”

With baseless accusations of his predecessor wiretapping Trump Tower, and in attempting to rush through a soul-crushing replacement for the Affordable Care Act past the Congressional Budget Office, the Right has proven that only their “truth” matters, and they will pursue its realization to the detriment of the American people.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent outlines several points of the Trump administration’s strategy against the CBO today:

The CBO was created a half-century ago as a neutral, objective agency to assist Congress in empirically-based, independent governing, by giving it data and technical advice that is not tainted by executive branch political considerations. The point is not that the CBO’s word is gospel. It can and does get things wrong. But as Jonathan Cohn explains, while its projections about the Affordable Care Act were hardly perfect, it got much of the big story right, and its forecasts are as good as or better than anybody else’s. White House aides are not exercising merely healthy skepticism about the CBO’s findings. Rather, they are saying they won’t accept those findings as legitimate, if they are politically inconvenient — and they are signaling this in advance. There is every reason to believe that many Republicans in Congress will take their cues from this and echo them.

By itself, this might not be all that outlandish — there is a long history of such stuff — but it needs to be placed in the larger context. There is Conway’s off-the-wall depiction above of the purpose of congressional investigations. Meanwhile, when Trump got called out for the lie that he won the popular vote but for millions who voted illegally, the White House threatened an investigation to prove it true, using the vow of probes as a tool to obfuscate efforts to hold him accountable. On Friday, Sean Spicer greeted the good February jobs report by claiming that the numbers “may have been phony in the past” — when they reflected job growth during the Obama presidency that Trump derided as fictional — but now they’re “very real.” Government data is real only when Trump says it is. Everyone had a good laugh over this, but at the risk of being very earnest, government data is supposed to inform policymaking.

 

This is a clear affront against governance in good faith, as well as an institution that would protect the country from bad governance. The Right knows their version of healthcare reform is a massive giveaway to the insurance companies, as well as yet another expensive concentration of wealth to the rich.

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Here’s a nice reminder why Kellyanne Conway got banned from MSNBC. From The Washington Post:

Kellyanne Conway was doing okay. She’d effectively neutralized the bubbling outcry over comments she made to the Bergen Record, in which she defended President Trump’s evidence-free claims of wiretapping by noting that various household devices could be used to surveil a target. “You can surveil people through their phones, through their — certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways. And microwaves that turn into cameras, et cetera,” she’d said, comments that were more about Team Trump’s long-standing use of isolated anecdotes to rebut broad trends than they were about Conway auditioning for a role in a James Bond film.

So when Chris Cuomo brought the whole thing up on CNN’s “New Day,” she effectively repeated the dismissal she had given to ABC News earlier: She was talking generally about how spying could take place, not making specific allegations.

On CNN, though, her phrasing was a bit more fraught. “I’m not Inspector Gadget,” she said. “I don’t believe people are using the microwave to spy on the Trump campaign.”

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Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) is a horrible, horrible man.

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017

Rep. Steve King stood by his explicitly white nationalist comments on CNN today https://t.co/wTYdsGOP7z—
SPLC (@splcenter) March 13, 2017

This is an especially sickening statement, given that this is the man who said undocumented immigrants had “calves the size of cantaloupes” from hauling marijuana on their backs. King is quite possibly the most overt racist in the Legislative Branch, but in this period of time, where a man could run on a clear platform of hatred and fear of anything not white, male or Christian, King just can’t help to feel emboldened to be exactly who he is.

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I hope everyone in the NYC area is getting prepared for a serious snow tonight. According to most reports, we are to expect anywhere from 12-18 inches of snow. Perhaps even more, depending on what this incoming nor’easter does. If you haven’t gotten your supplies for this late winter blizzard, you might want to pick up a few things tonight.

Just a quick public service announcement.

Sessions of Corruption

For one brief moment, it seemed like Donald Trump had finally mastered the art of being a president in the House Chamber Tuesday night. As he stood on the dais and repeated the promises and slogans made throughout his campaign, Trump’s appearance that night — especially his admittedly moving tribute to the widow of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens — was hailed by Chris Cilizza and even Van Jones as the moment where Trump “became the President of the United States”, even going so far as to say that if he continued to do what he did that night, Trump “would be there for eight years.”

But as Trump tried to create a perception that people of good sense should never believe as fact, the reality of the possible compromise of this Nation’s chief law enforcement officer looms large today. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, well-known for his racist policies, recused himself today from all investigations into Russian ties to the Trump campaign.

From the New York Times:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, facing a chorus of criticism over his contacts with the Russian ambassador, recused himself Thursday from any current or future investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. His conversations with the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, came amid suspected Russian hacking directed at Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Mr. Sessions said he made the decision after meeting with senior career officials at the Justice Department. He said he would not take part in any investigations “related in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.”

He also strongly denied that any of his conversations with Russian officials were related to the presidential campaign. And he said he did not intend to deceive the Senate when he said he had no such meetings with Russian officials.

On the surface, this would seem to be the right thing to do, had this not happened. From the same Times report:

At the confirmation hearing for attorney general in January, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, asked Mr. Sessions about a CNN report that intelligence briefers had told Barack Obama, then the president, and Mr. Trump, then the president-elect, that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising information about Mr. Trump.

Mr. Franken also noted that the report indicated that surrogates for Mr. Trump and intermediaries for the Russian government continued to exchange information during the campaign. He asked Mr. Sessions what he would do if that report proved true.

Mr. Sessions replied that he was “not aware of any of those activities.” He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I didn’t have — did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.”

But the Justice Department acknowledged on Wednesday that Mr. Sessions had twice communicated with the Russian ambassador last year. The first time was in July, at the Republican National Convention, after he gave a speech at an event for ambassadors sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. The second time was a visit to his office by Mr. Kislyak in September. The Washington Post earlier reported both encounters.

Sessions has, quite simply, perjured himself. Simply backing away from an active investigation is not nearly enough to answer for the fact that he lied under oath, and has left the Department of Justice wide open to compromise to the Russians, no matter how many “clarifications” of his testimony he gives.

This story is far from over, as more reports are coming in that Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, has had contact with far more people within the Trump administration than previously believed. At this rate, an argument could be made that the entire administration could be compromised.

More to come.

You’ll Get No Chance From Me

For eight years, I watched as the Right savaged Barack Obama, and used the Legislative Branch to deny him anything regarding his own agenda. I watched as Senator Mitch McConnell defiantly declared their ultimate goal of making him a one-term president by any means necessary, from incessant stonewalling in Congress and attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, to playing politics with raising our debt ceiling, shutting the federal government down twice, and bringing this Nation to the brink of defaulting on our debts.

I watched as the Right’s base–angry, aggrieved whites from the South and “America’s Heartland”–believed any and all conspiracies they were fed about Obama. They called him everything from a Muslim socialist to a “racist nigger.”They demanded his birth certificate, claiming he was an “illegitimate” out of the falsehood that he was born in Kenya. I watched as actual deplorables stormed the White House in so-called protest, waving the Rebel flag of the long-dead Confederacy in front of Obama’s place of residence, then daring to say they really only differed with the man in terms of policy.

Barack Obama served this country with distinction and honor, never once forgetting that he was a servant of the people. Under his watch, unemployment fell to lows not seen in years. He was loved in his own country, and revered around the world for his diplomacy.

And instead of securing Obama’s legacy of success, by 77,000 votes this nation was handed to a man whose first priority was not how to heal the country after his divisive, racist, and sexist campaign, but on the size of the crowds–or lack thereof–at his inauguration. In a moment of Napoleonic hubris, this man declared his inauguration a national holiday, by way of executive order. Under guidance by his right hand, the avowed Leninist Steven Bannon, a constitutional crisis was nearly created by unilaterally locking out of this country thousands of Muslims–many of whom were American citizens with green cards and proper documentation–purely because of their religion, then daring to say it was a similar “ban” Obama had carried out in 2011.

Spoiler alert: it was not.

This man, by way of his administration, has demanded fealty by the press. Bannon declared the nation’s press outlets should be silent. Kellyanne Conway said the media should be a place where, instead of facing tough questions from a constitutionally protected free press, they can “promote their agenda.” In other words, become outlets for our propaganda or, like CNN, be marked as a purveyor of “fake news.”

This country has seen more than it can handle from this administration, and it hasn’t even been two weeks. The now-45th President of the United States has already shamed this nation tenfold. Millions have turned out in protest of an administration hell-bent on making this country “great again” by embodying the final, most desperate (and most dangerous) form of conservatism: a type of malignant populism that seeks to turn this nation into a place where only white, “Christian” males hold sway.

And what’s worse, they could care less about what dissenting Americans may think, as Ed Kilgore writes:

It’s all so familiar that Trump’s critics should resist the temptation to underestimate these people yet again. They do not give a damn about respectable opinion; they live to defy it. They will not be shaken by judicial thunder; they view judges as pawns in larger battles involving more powerful political and economic forces. They don’t fear GOP elected officials; they’ve watched Republicans turn tail, roll over, and beg for tax-cut treats and other policy concessions; just the day before Trump started this latest conflagration the entire congressional party assembled in Philadelphia to beg its new master for direction.

And most of all, Trump and his closest associates do not fear blue-state protests of the sort that swept the nation this weekend. More likely than not, they exult in them, and have planned all along to exploit them to show Trump loyalists they are fighting disorderly and essentially unpatriotic people who value civil liberties more than national security, diversity more than national identity, and America’s enemies more than America.

“Give him a chance,” his supporters say. “He’s your President now; get over it”, they say. But how? How can freedom-loving, remotely decent people be in support of–or even be willing to “give a chance” to–an administration with no fear or regard of the people it serves? How can we be asked to give total loyalty and trust to an administration that seeks to crush all dissent, be it external or internal? How can support be given to a federal government that, under the guise of “Keeping America Safe”, made excuses for the incarceration of a FIVE-YEAR-OLD?

No, family, I will not be giving “a chance” to this administration; one that has stripped itself of decency for the illusion of safety. I will not be giving a chance to people who are prepared to use “shock events” to further divide and radicalize the politics of this nation. As Matthew 12:25 says so poignantly, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.”

This is the aim of the Trump administration.

And, for my part, I shall resist.

 

The Failed Northern Strategy

NEW YORK–Imagine, if you will, being painted with a broad brush; marginalized, ridiculed and made fun of for years for being a bunch of backwards-thinking, gun-fellating, Bible-thumping trailer trash, who hate all minorities and religions other than those “Judeo-Christian” values they hold so dear, by granola-crunching, kombucha-drinking hypocrites, with our “safe spaces”, “trigger warnings”, and privileged ability to look for and find racism via “microaggressions”, residing in densely populated, mostly liberal cities never, once having to look at or care about these people, or the things which they’ve lost.

From my own coastal liberal perch in New York City, it’s been difficult as a man of the left to maintain some resolve in the wake of last week’s general election. In an instant, every poll showing Hillary Clinton was upended; all of the “conventional wisdom” espoused by many–myself included–came undone. And the millions of people who cast their votes to elect the first woman president in our nation’s history had their hopes dashed to pieces in the worst possible way, never dreaming the following words would never be uttered: President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Liberalism was defeated not because of the Electoral College being predisposed to racism and giving former slave states a voice in presidential elections, and it damn sure wasn’t just because of the email scandal that many people, including Secretary Clinton herself, believe. Liberalism was defeated due to its arrogance; this “silent majority” was such only because we chose to ignore them and their needs. We wished them good luck, and left them to their own devices; to do otherwise was labeled as being racist, or giving in to the nonsense of “white privilege.” Hillary Clinton–and I say this as one who voted for her–was seen by many to be the worst example of the elitism and exclusionary mindset, now rewarded by a President Trump.

From a publication called The Daily Yonder:

Hillary Clinton stood before a giant gleaming John Deere tractor in Iowa as she rolled out her Future of America’s Rural Economy plan on August 26, 2015. The white paper (pretty much a carbon copy of her 2008 rural plan) garnered some positive press and the Rural for Hillary Twitter feed picked up a few more followers. Then Madame Secretary wiped her hands and walked away from rural America. Most of the effort to woo rural voters was left to surrogates at a couple of debates and forums with Trump representatives on the other side of the stage and a handful of upstate New Yorkers who testified that Clinton paid attention to them as senator and helped push some initiatives that benefitted Empire State agriculture. The candidate herself told people to go to her website to read her position papers. For millions of rural residents without access to high-speed broadband, that is hard to do. On November 8, the Rural for Hillary Twitter page had a total of 783 followers. 783 Twitter peeps? As they say on Monday Night Football, “C’mon man!”

Last year, In These Times, a website devoted to covering rural American life, answered its own question when asking why the Left was ignoring them:

American disinterest in the poverty of its own pastoral lands can be traced across the Atlantic Ocean and back several hundred years to the origins of social sciences in academia. The rise of these disciplines coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the mass migration of peasants from the country into cities. As an effect of these circumstances, the leading theorists of the era—Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber—were primarily concerned with living conditions in cities and industrializing societies, setting the foundation for the metro-centrism that continues to characterize the social sciences.

“In academia, there’s an urban bias throughout all research, not just poverty research. It starts with where these disciplines origins—they came out of the 1800’s—[when] theorists were preoccupied with the movement from a rural sort of feudal society to a modern, industrial society,” Linda Loabo, a professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University, tells Rural America In These Times. “The old was rural and the feudal and the agricultural and the new was the industry and the city.”

And, as always, arrogance is rewarded by defeat. From the Huffington Post:

Several theories have been proffered to explain just what went wrong for the Clinton campaign in an election that virtually everyone expected the Democratic nominee to win. But lost in the discussion is a simple explanation, one that was re-emphasized to HuffPost in interviews with several high-ranking officials and state-based organizers: The Clinton campaign was harmed by its own neglect.

In Michigan alone, a senior battleground state operative told HuffPost that the state party and local officials were running at roughly one-tenth the paid canvasser capacity that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had when he ran for president in 2004. Desperate for more human capital, the state party and local officials ended up raising $300,000 themselves to pay 500 people to help canvass in the election’s closing weeks. By that point, however, they were operating in the dark. One organizer said that in a precinct in Flint, they were sent to a burned down trailer park. No one had taken it off the list of places to visit because no one had been there until the final weekend. Clinton lost the state by 12,000 votes.

We ignored those “deplorables” at our own peril, and now a man with absolutely no record of public service is now the President-elect of the United States.

And if we keep up like this, we’re going to lose every time.

It’s going to be an interesting four years.

The Reality of a Deadbeat

Permit, if you will, a moment of personal reflection.

I have been a man in a state of rebuilding for the last year and four months. During that time, and even before my separation from my now ex-wife, my writing has suffered. My writing and tweeting have dwindled down to nothing more than a few posts, here and there. The crash-and-burn of what many (myself obviously included) once considered to be a “power couple” produced many scars in need of healing and repair.

Losing the woman I once called my One Great Love–and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder–shook me down to my core. Even still, the pain remains, and will probably never go away totally. Moving to another state and hitting the reset button on my life have caused me to question my very ability to write. Perhaps, I thought, this gift I was blessed with was nothing more than a symptom of my illness.

But on October 1st, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump, a nightmare candidate that only neo-confederates, old white racists, charlatan preachers, and his cadre of surrogates so unbelievably incompetent (or in Katrina Pierson’s case, unbelievably evil) they rival “Saturday Night Live” parodies stand with, took full advantage of a tax system tailor-made for cheats such as he. In losing nearly $916 million after the bottom fell out of his casino empire, Trump was able to avoid paying taxes for eighteen years.

I had to pick the pen up again, because at thirty-four years of age, that is over half my own life.

The Times report continues:

The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,” or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.

As Donald Trump’s antics continue to pile up in public view, a manure pile made larger and larger on a near-daily basis, including having his foundation shut down by the New York Attorney General’s office for not having the necessary certification to solicit money from the public, it stands to wonder: How was this man even remotely allowed to pursue the office of the President of the United States? With so much evidence of his destructive business practices, his racist and misogynistic rants, and the glaring proof that he, as the late George Carlin coined, is a business criminal of the highest order, how can any one person ever consider this man to run a lemonade stand, much less our Nation?

The answer is simple.

Because America loves a good dumpster fire story.

As we sit and watch this train wreck of a campaign continue to alienate itself from decent, even-minded people everywhere (yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s former prosecutor and well-known conservative Michael Chertoff announced he was crossing party lines to vote for her), it goes without saying that we as a nation cannot look away from what inspires us to ask, “What’s next?”

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote this, which perfectly captures the danger Trump truly is, and why he’s just that:

Trump benefits from the expectation of phoniness. Pop-culture critic Jen Chaney wrote in The Post that “having a reality-TV celebrity running for commander in chief may subconsciously signal our brains to participate in this election the same way we’ve grown accustomed to consuming reality shows . . . believing that none of it is genuine, that none of it has any actual consequences.” It doesn’t matter, therefore, if two out of three claims Trump makes are false, or if he proposes dangerous ideas: It’s only entertainment.

Whatever reasons one might have to distrust or outright hate the former Secretary of State cannot overshadow the fact that Donald J. Trump is not just unqualified for the position he seeks; he is the very antithesis of what a President should be. I, for one, do not want a man who will reach for his phone to hatefully bluster at someone who he feels wronged him, or complains about a “biased media” who rightfully calls out his many indiscretions. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton is soberly aware of the gravity and seriousness of the position she seeks to attain.

Deal in reality this November, folks.