America Needed Donald Trump as President
OK I have to qualify the title of this piece. America’s economy did not need DJT, nor did its foreign relations. But America that’s made up of individual people needed this buffoon in office.
It hasn’t happened yet, but history will look upon Trump as the absolute worst president in history, bar none. I’m hoping that recognition comes with an added life-lesson bonus.
I grew up in an affluent suburb, with a kid who was an heir to a Fortune 500 company, started by a grand parent. His dad used his wife's fortune to become a rummy sailor and my classmate had been reared on the boastings of a drunken loser.
Some time around the 8th grade we began hanging around the same circle of friends. Like his father, he was prone to constant bragging, but it was always something that happened out on Nantucket; rarely anything that could be verified. It was the old Canadian girlfriend times ten.
His lies were almost believable. Clearly his family money had given him experiences. But anytime he made a promise for the future it was followed by a litany of excuses.
My “friends,” if you could really call them friends, were a particularly vicious and unforgiving lot. Normally they would have shredded someone who takes such liberties with the truth. But every once in a blue moon a bottle of Mount Gay would be successfully pilfered, just often enough to string the lot of us along for a while.
And so it went with this classmate who avoided repurcussions for his mendacity. I have thought back on him countless times since Trump’s election as the parallels are many.
In his insulated private school world, I’m sure Trump was also able to avoid the usual social razzing that accompanies the braggard bullshitter. Like my classmate, no one ever called him out. To this day, few do, and none do it to his face. They can’t since he stopped attending the annual press roast.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert writing staff put together a children’s book of quotes from President Trump while visiting hurricane ravaged zones. Whose Boat Is This Boat?: Comments That Don't Help in the Aftermath of a Hurricane.
This I believe is where the adults turn this into a teaching moment. If this book seems a bit vicious and unforgiving then good. If stripping the veneer away from the stark reality that the President is a malignant narcissist seems inappropriate to teach a child, think back to my classmate. It’s time to teach a new generation how to spot a bullshitter and the importance of calling one out.
What ever happened to my classmate, I wonder. His dad burned through the money, and their house was torn down and the lot subdivided. I believe he is estranged from his family. This I imagine for the future of one Donald J. Trump: The scene from The Jerk when Steve Martin storms off in disgust, and all he's going to take is this ashtray. And the remote control. And this chair...
Comments
Those spoiled rich kids are bullies
And they keep bullying until someone/something makes them stop. Unfortunately, they are rich enough to make our lives living hell...just for the sheer delight in their insulated little worlds. We all know/knew bullies and how much they are dis-liked and how we thrill when someone punches them in the face.
Well done is better than well said-Ben Franklin
Wrong wrong wrong!
I can name several worse presidents:
Jackson. (you can't get much worse than genocide, but he tried cruel genocide.
W, the usurper - who overthrew an elected government, started a war, and "tortured some folks".
Reagan, who institutionalized racism and corruption long after they were generally understood as evil.
And if you're serious about bad presidents you have to admit to Obama. His crimes are too recent to list, or even to have been fully revealed.
And we haven't learned from any of them!
On to Biden since 1973
@doh1304 Calling bullshit on
Calling bullshit on Jackson. Jackson fought the banks and won. His penalty? To erroneously be given the moniker of a genocidal President. The trail of tears was not of his doing. The banks made sure he was saddled with the blame, because hey, he was President at the time and they absolutely hated his ass for beating them. It took the banks another 70 to 80 years to get control of the government.
As for Trump, he still seems to have avoided war, although the neocons have been beating him like a drum. He keeps employing them and firing them. They don't seem to be working out as apprentices. Maybe by design. Who knows. With a bit of luck, he will have hired them all and fired them all and run them out of the executive branch of government. Maybe the electorate can run them out of Congress. He just called out Lindsey Graham again this week for his warmongering bullshit.
Strictly speaking, it was Martin Van Buren
who was responsible for the worst of it. Jackson was president 1829-1837; Cherokee removal began in May 1838.
Jackson doesn't get off scot-free, though: he set everything up to push the Native Americans westward willy-nilly, starting with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which he promoted - and signed. He certainly did preside over the forced eviction of the Choctaw (1831) and Creek (1834) tribes, and the attempt to dislodge the Seminoles (Second Seminole War, 1835-1842 - at best a partial success, as the Third , 1855-1858, would also be).
Van Buren could have stopped it. He sat on his hands and did nothing.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
@TheOtherMaven Sources?
Sources? And why would you believe them when the banks controlled the press? Jackson campaigned on "I killed the bank" for his second term. Meaning the central bank the bankers wanted to foist on the American people. And the bankers threatened a depression if he won a second time and they did it exactly that. They did everything possible to slander him and blame him for all kinds of things. And in spite of it all after having killed the bank in his first term, he was elected for a second term, even with the banks' promise of a depression if he won.
I pretty much came to the conclusion there was no good reason to believe the negative press he got once I discovered how much he was hated by the banks and how the banks controlled the press and historians. The people liked him enough to elect twice him anyway. Certainly they would have known of the Indian issues and discounted the press' bashing of him. And of course there was an assassination attempt on him which was unsuccessful when the pistols failed to fire and his assassin was linked to the banking industry.
To the people who know the banking history of America and who dislike the central banking system, he is considered the legend in American banking history.
"The people" WANTED the Indians gone
They hadn't - and haven't - outgrown their habit of being greedy land-grabbers, and they didn't want the competition. They DID want "More Land", even if it was land that had been put to productive use by people who were Not Them.
That's a truth you won't often hear, because it's been whitewashed for generations.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
@TheOtherMaven The field of
The field of archaeology has debunked the myth that North America was teeming with people when the English came in 1607 and later in 1620. In actuality, the diseases brought by the Spanish, and primarily the diseases borne by the European domesticated animals, for which the native Americans had no immunity, (the Native Americans had only domesticated the llama and it was not very domesticated) may have wiped out as much as 95% of the native Americans before the English even arrived. Had the native Americans been at full strength, the Americas would probably have had very little colonization by the Europeans. The natives would have been too strong for them.
Of course that is not to say that the English did not add to the misery of the native Americans. But the truth is that the native population was so decimated, much of North America was unpopulated.
Please don't move the goalposts
You were trying to defend Andrew Jackson's indefensible anti-Native American policies. Don't. And don't blather about "the English" vs. the Spanish (and their 100+ year lead on conquest and colonization) and yada yada yada.
By Jackson's time the Eastern tribes, and particularly the "Five Civilized Tribes", had had time to develop at least some immunity to European diseases, and to assimilate to European ways - that was precisely the problem, that they were too good at adapting. They had become competition that the Euro-descended did not like and did not want. And the easiest way to get rid of the competition was to get rid of the competitors. Ergo, policies to displace them west of the Mississippi - by force if necessary (and it was).
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Different flavors of awful
W. Wilson was a dreadful racist who took us into WWI after explicitly and repeatedly campaigning on not doing that.
Under Truman the A-bombs were dropped and at least a million people were incinerated.
Among Eisenhower's achievements was overthrowing Iran's elected gov't and ushering in the Shah.
Carter began supporting the forerunners of al Qaeda against a left-wing government in Afghanistan. There is a direct line from that to 9/11 and its aftermath.
Clinton gutted regulation of the banks, the media, slashed welfare, sanctioned Iraq, all setting the stage for the horrors of the Bush years.
How can you determine who was objectively the worst? All these people are just stewards of a system, and if they weren't there, others probably would have taken their place and engaged in mostly the same behavior.
As for Colbert, what a pitiful sellout. From confronting Bush to being the neocon lapdog smearing Tulsi Gabbard for allegedly not believing the U.S. military is a "force for good."
R'men
You can't quantify evil. Each president continued his predecessors' evil way for the advancement of global hegemony and every damn one of them should have been prosecuted for war crimes. Imagine if just one of them had been. How much different would our world be today? Or what if Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon? Obama Bush? Trump Hillary? Heh... but the point is that no president has ever been held accountable for their actions and that includes congress who let everything pass and continued funding it. Pelosi couldn't have impeached Bush for torture because she, DiFi, Reid, Schumer and others knew about it. Wiretapping every American? Nothing to see...
A small correction
that in my opinion makes Colbert's attitude worse.
It wasn't the US military that he was insisting is a force for good in the world. It was the United States of America itself. The good old exceptional American empire, god shed his grace on thee.
Colbert was appalled and horrified that anyone could ever think that *gasp* not everything the US does is right and good.
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
OK How about this
Not the worst president, but the worst person to ever become president.
“He may not have gotten the words out but the thoughts were great.”
Kavanaugh's face keep floating before my eyes as I read this.
"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin
As for kept us out of war,
this administration has tiptoed around wars and interventions. Venezuela, Yemen have seen every kind of intervention except deployment of official US soldiers. There have been plenty of unofficial agitators.
And, why are there still US soldiers in Afghanistan and Syria?
Mary Bennett