In a World Filled with More Liars than Ever, Donald J. Trumps Them All!
Hillary was a liar and a crook. By all appearances her campaign paid for and instigated the Great Lie against Donald J. Trump. Her campaign's fabricated documents cast an intentional shadow over his entire term, pegging him falsely as someone who collaborated with "the Russians." We don't know how much she knew about the document her campaign paid for, but certainly the evidence points to her knowing it all. Her lie damaged the American Republic because it created years of chaos and distrust, exactly as it was intended to do according to the head of the CIA.
As for the guilt Team Clinton hung on Trump, Special Counsel Robert Miller spent tens of millions of dollars investigating the matter and employed the best intelligence-gathering organizations at his full disposal (motivated toward protecting themselves from Trump's constant claims against them); yet, Mueller couldn't find a shred of evidence to implicate Trump or his team on the issue of working with Russians for the Trump campaign. All Mueller could prove was that some of Trump's team lied to the investigators because they knew the whole investigation was a witch hunt, so Mueller was able to put those perjurers in jail or prison. He also said Trump might be guilty of obstruction of justice for how he directed others not to cooperate with the investigation and how he fired people like Comey.
FBI Chief James Comey was a smug, self-righteous liar and a leaker. He knowingly approved use of the Hillary case files (a.k.a the aforementioned Steele Dossier) against Donald J. Trump in order to get a warrant to eavesdrop on the presidential candidate and on everyone associated with Trump's campaign.
Comey betrayed the president's trust by disclosing confidential conversations and caused the public and Democrats in congress to distrust the president on the issue of colluding with Russia and to impeach the president and try him on the matter of collusion, even though Mueller couldn't find a shred of evidence on the original claim of cooperating with Russia.
If Trump was obstructing, it was more like obstruction of witch hunts, not obstruction of justice, because the whole thing was an unjust smear. The matter of deepest concern that set all of this into motion was a total lie created by Pillary and made to look like a matter of real concern by the upright-in-stature-but-not-in-truth Comey.
CIA Chief John Brennan brazenly lied to America over and over to save his own skin and sell the public on the notion that Hillary's deceitful document was not the basis of the FISA warrant wrongfully used to spy on presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. We now have his hand-written notes as solid evidence that he knew Hillary was cooking a crooked case against Donald J. Trump, yet he still approved using her concocted document against Trump.
Newly declassified handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan show that the U.S. intelligence community knew in 2016 that Russian intelligence was actively monitoring, and potentially injecting disinformation into, Clinton’s anti-Trump collusion narrative. The intelligence concerning Russia’s knowledge of Clinton’s campaign plans was so concerning to Brennan and other national security officials that they personally informed Obama of the matter in the Oval Office in the summer of 2016....
According to the declassified notes, Brennan and the U.S. intelligence community knew months prior to the 2016 election that the collusion smear was the result of a campaign operation hatched by the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton....
[In Brennan's hand:] “Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton–on 26 July–of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to villify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.â€
Of course, we also just gained information that there is more to the story than The Federalist or the mainstream press lets on. Evidence suggests "the Russians" who were working with the Clinton campaign to create the fabricated Steele Dossier were rogue agents no longer under the Russian government's employ. They were quite possibly trying to make it look like the Russian government helped create the falsified documents the Clinton campaign now appears to have paid for.
It looks like the so-called Russian spies (at least one of them, if not both) were disgruntled cast-offs of the Russian government, possibly out to kill two birds with one stone -- mess with US elections and lay a trail of blame that would bypass themselves and go straight to Russia while making money off Hillary & Co.. I wouldn't go out on a limb with that, but ...
Regardless, Brennan knew Hillary was cooking up a corruption scandal to upset the Donald's campaign or disable his administration if he should win with an "insurance" document that would create an endless tirade of charges about Russian collusion. Brennan supported use of this utterly bankrupt information to help obtain a warrant for the very purpose of spying on Donald Trump, exactly has he claimed Hillary hoped for, because he thought that Hillary and Co. did not know Russians were involved.
Bottom line: Brennan is a liar.
CNN leaked all over itself -- as in peed itself -- when it shared the fake story about Trump's golden showers in Russia, which claimed he hired prostitutes to pee on a mattress used by the Obamas. (Exlussive content of the fake Steele Dossier Hillary's campaign paid for.) CNN made self complicit in spreading a story it believed was fake.
Originally CNN chose not to run this fake story because it din't think the story reached journalistic standards; but, as soon as BuzzFeed carried the story, CNN did all it could to make news about BuzzFeed running the story, giving the story huge popularity while tacitly running the story as part of its report on BuzzFeed.
CNN thought they could spare themselves the claim of being fake news because they could say, "Our news was not that Trump did this outrageous thing, but just that BuzzFeed was making a story out of it." The cop-out didn't work. I laid out here how it backfired on CNN as Jake Tapper of MSNBC and others turned on them: "Fake News: The Fake-Stream Media Devours Itself."
CNN and many other mainstream media organizations lied when they claimed Donald Trump's inauguration was not massive. They used real photos to create a false impression. They featured two undoctored photos of the Washington mall taken by the same camera at the same time on each man's Inauguration Day to prove Trump's crowd was pathetic.
On the face of it, that would seem like a fair comparison. I dug deeper and found that Trump's crowd was merely half an hour later in arriving and that was because they had over a hundred BLM, Antifa, and Occupy organizations doing their best to make sure crowds could not get to the inauguration at all.
The determined crowds still arrived, and the Donald's turnout was hyuge ... albeit a little later in arriving. I documented the mainstream media deception here: "More Fake News: Media Contrived Photos to Diminish Trump’s Inauguration Crowd."
The New York Times lied when it claimed Donald J. Trump's taxes proved corruption. They claimed the documents they had proved Trump was practically broke and proved he was profiting immensely off the presidency at the same time. I laid out the internal inconsistencies and flaws of their argument here: "NEW YORK TIMES PROVES IT IS FAKE NEWS: Shreds Years of Its Own Reporting on Trump Tax Fraud and Russiagate."
Antifa lies all the time in claiming it cares about Black lives. Antifa is as fascist in its violent techniques as the fascism it falsely claims to oppose. Its real cause is chaos, nothing more. It pretends to care about Black lives in order to co-opt the BLM movement and uses protests as opportunities to turn anger to chaos.
However, even the Black female chief of police in Seattle pointed out that the only people killing Black kids in Seattle's conscripted CHAZ neighborhood were Antifa people. I wrote about the hypocrisy she pointed out here as well as about media bias in not covering the truth about Antifa's violence: "How CHAZ Got CHOPped: Seattle Made Itself a Petri Dish of Polluted Liberal Ideas."
The bottom line in all of this seems to be that the lies these days are extraordinary in scale and everywhere you look, and they are biggest in organizations that like to pretend they are most concerned about truth. All the politicians and operatives named here are liars extraordinaire, and the mainstream media are complicit in all the lies above, while concocting many of their own against the president.
That said, all that lying against the president does not justify his own. So, I want to add the biggest liar of all to my list -- the liar-in-chief, and I'm only going to call out a few of his many massive lies -- the ones he has adroitly sold to his supporters to such a degree they constantly repeat them just has he has claimed them over and over.
That is the "big lie" often attributed to Hitler in which you tell a really big lie often until it becomes "the accepted truth." I believe a handful of Trump's big lies are so extraordinary, yet so widely and fervently believed by his supporters, that they are all the evidence needed to justify a claim that Donald J. trumps all of the liars listed above.
I mentioned my articles about the above lies to make it clear that I don't try to take down Trump. I try to take down liars. While I don't like his personality, I do my best take take down falsehood wherever I find it and to lay out what I believe is true, even when it supports Trump, as all of those stories did.
I think we have become a nation saturated with lies everywhere. The one cause I aim for and pledge to my readers is the pursuit of truth, regardless of whom it serves and whom it takes down, including if it takes down me as writer because Democrats hate all I wrote above in all those articles, and Republicans will hate what I will say below.
Here are my own biases
Let me start off by saying I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016, but I didn't vote for Hillary either.
I noticed during the Obama administration that everyplace Hillary went in the Middle East became a slime trail of fire six months after she travelled there. She lit Libya on fire. She lit Syria on fire. (Or, at least, got the US government deeply involved in those oxygenating those fires.) And she supported the Arab Spring that lit Egypt on fire. She detonated relations with Russia. Hillary never saw a war she didn't vote for.
That was my suspicion from what I observed, and then Wikileaks got me there with documented proof, which I presented here: "HILLARY’S WARS (Pt. 1): Clinton Reset Button with Russia Goes Nuclear" ... and here: "HILLARY’S WARS (Pt. 2): Wikileaks Proves Syria about Iran & Israel."
Just as I was certain Hillary was complicit in all those wars, so I could not vote for her, I was certain the Donald was a pathological liar because pathological lying is essential to supporting pathological narcissism, so I could not vote for him either. While I won't pretend to be a psychologist, more than one psychologist has stated Trump abundantly exhibits all the traits.
All I need for myself was the observation that Trump had for years exhibited the most extraordinary narcissism I've ever seen. He bragged about himself more than any human being I've ever seen. Way more! He put his name on everything more than any person I've ever seen. Way more! He always boasted about how big and rich and successful everything that had his name on it was. He never took responsibility for any of his failures, though some of those were quite spectacular. Whenever anything went bad, he always blamed someone else.
I know that narcissists serve only themselves and whatever maintains their inflated opinions of themselves. So, I couldn't vote for him. (Trump will serve his base so long as their adulation continues to maintain his inflated opinion of himself.)
Even though I liked a good deal of what Trump was promising, I was certain he wouldn't carry most of it out, and I was sure he'd blame everyone but himself for his manifold failures. Since there was nothing about Shrillary Clinton that I liked, I voted for no one for president.
I also did not vote for Donald Trump this year, and I did vote for Joseph Biden. I know I will always regret the fact that I voted for Biden, as he is increasingly looking like a liar in the breaking China scandal and older Ukraine scandal; but I don't think I will regret it as much as I would regret allowing the world's greatest liar and most intentionally divisive president in US history have another four years for the following simple reason:
After four years of the man who would "make America great again," I can honestly say America has never looked worse to me than it does now. Its liberal leanings look worse ... everywhere. It's conservative failures look worse. The level of lies everywhere exceeds anything I've ever seen in my 60+ years on this earth. The economy has never looked worse, and violence only once looked this bad to me, which was back when I was a child in the 60's. I think America is more at risk of flying apart than at anytime in my life. So, when I evaluate how Trump did at his primary overarching goal, I say no one has ever done a worse job of making America great again.
Trump is the most intentionally divisive president we've ever had. He loves to watch a dog fight or a cock fight. Many who have worked for him have spoken of how he likes to see people go at each other in the White House. He thrives on negative energy because it gives him an adrenaline surge. You can see it at ever rally where he works up the crowds animosity as negative energy that drives him.
He intentionally says everything in the most provocative way he can because it garners media attention, regardless of how it polarizes America. He knows how to play the media. He lives by the old adage that "all press is good press" because, even if they are saying terrible things about you, at least you are the center of their attention. The media can be just as fully blamed for allowing itself to be played because the media knows a good fight sells, too. The media loves the controversy as much as Trump loves to play it.
So, America's situation today is by no means all Donald Trump's fault, but I have truly never seen America look worse, and Trump has played a deliberate and major role in intensifying animosity and hatred by the provocative way he says things just to stay in the news cycle. He says things in the way he knows will enrage people the most. He could make his controversial points more adroitly and build an argument and support for his causes, but that is hard brain work. That's Lincolnesque.
Trump prefers the pugnacious approach.
So, I'm voting him down by voting for Creepy, Sleepy Uncle Joe, whom I have never liked, because I think Trump is the biggest abject failure at his own campaign promises I've ever witnessed, and I'll lay my evidence for that out below. America has never looked worse in nearly every respect. There is not a single thing about it now that looks better than when Trump took office nearly four years ago, and Trump has been a wedge in all of its divisions.
I would have liked for Trump to accomplishment many of the main things he promised in my abbreviated list; but the facts clearly show he has not accomplished ANY of them. He has just used those issue to divide the nation; and, as Lincoln said, quoting Jesus, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
Trump can blame everyone else if he always does, and his supporters can support his denial as they usually do; but I agree with Truman -- the buck stops with the president when it comes to the failures of his own promises and especially the failures of the people HE chooses to put on his team.
Full disclosure: I can't stand either of the major parties nor any of the lesser parties. I think the two big parties, while a little more centrist than the rest are big liars who serve the rich, while most of the small parties are lunatics. If I am sympathetic to any, it would be the Libertarians, but many are too anti-government for me. I'm for clean, streamlined government, not next-to-no government.
I'm not anti-government. I'm anti-lies and anti-corruption wherever I find it. It just happens corruption focuses where lies the center of power, no matter which party is in charge. I am, exactly as I've sold myself at the top of my website, an equal-opportunity critic. If your a strict party man or woman who cannot handle that, I am the wrong person for you to be reading.
As a diehard independent, I've also voted Republican more often than I have voted Democrat. However, I am not at all surprised that Republicans have proven what I believed once and for all -- they will approve any size deficit so long as most of it is spent on the things they want. Once they had the power of government (both houses), they approved even larger deficits BEFORE COVID than the Democrats ever had. (More on that below.)
You basically have a choice between the Welfare Party or the Warfare party. Reagan approved tax cuts and then doubled the deficit with military spending. The Donald did the same thing, but at an exponentially higher level of deficits. With both men, their party joined them wholeheartedly in the largesse to their favorite military causes, and nowhere is government waste greater than in the military. Each party blames the other one for all the overspending, and their supporters lap all of that up.
I'm willing to make myself the enemy of all the people on both sides if that is the cost of simply standing up for truth. So, I've hit the Democrats with critical truth above. It's all fact. Now it comes time for TheRump and his Republicats to get theirs.
"Crooked Hillary. Shall we lock her up?"
Trump didn't lie about Hillary being crooked, as the Steele Dossier proved, but he sure lied like the Head of Hades about locking her up. He may not have often stated he would lock her up, but he ALWAYS enticed his supporters into chanting "Lock her up" and always led them to believe he'd gladly do as they asked. He baited the chants at nearly every rally and egged them to rise in pitch, clearly leading his base to believe he would carry out their wishes.
Yet, the Donald's first order of business after his inauguration was to let her off the hook completely. The Clintons, he said, were "good people." Crooks are good people? How do you square that circle?
From that day forward, Trump did nothing to lock Hillary up until late this year. Now he trots out the same mantra all over again and finally has Barr looking into Hillary, but he had four years to do something and made no effort. Of course, now the chief of blaming everyone else blames Barr for dragging his feet. That's a total lie -- the usual blaming someone else that he appointed. Trump told us within a day of being inaugurated Hillary was not going to be locked up as I wrote back then:
No, Hillary is not ever going to be locked up. She never was going to be! That was just more big mouth to wind up the crowd. What Trump really delivered for her was an immediate gold star as “good people†and a public sympathy card, signed by Trump, himself, who said she had suffered enough, and he didn’t want to hurt her. As a prize he appointment an AG who shows no signs of going after her — probably part of the deal before Trump appointed him. She’s effectively been pardoned.
Trump strongly indicated in an interview on 60 Minutes as soon as he was elected that he is not inclined to lock Hillary up because he feels she needs time to heal from her loss....
Lesley Stahl: You called her “crooked Hillary,†said you wanted to get her in jail, your people in your audiences kept saying, “Lock em’ up.†…
Donald Trump: I don’t want to hurt them.... They’re, they’re good people. I don’t want to hurt them…
Why did Trump spend so much energy railing against a good person? Is he willing to rip good people to shreds just to get ahead?... If Trump had called Hillary “crooked†just once, you might say, “OK, he got a little carried away back then ...†but Trump continually did everything he could ... to work his supporters up with the hope that crooked people like the Clintons ... would go to jail. Less than a week after he was elected, he washed his hands of it and rendered his judgment that Hillary and William are good people.
That's how fake he is. What a fraud. He spent months working the mob into a frenzy, then just washes his hands of it! However, we are now back to where Trump needs the energy of that chant, so he's trumping it back up again ... and his followers are falling for it all over again as if it ever really going to happen. It's pure circus. If it were actually going to happen, he would have made sure he had the people in place in the DoJ to get her locked up the entire time he was being tried for collusion with Russia.
I didn't believe Trump would "lock her up" the first time, as you can tell from the quote above, and now I know he won't lock her up; so, I am certainly not going to vote for him now that I know he will not do the things I believed he wouldn't do when I didn't vote for him the first time!
"I'll drain the swamp"
The Donald drained the swampiest creatures straight into the White House, and Washington has never looked or felt like more of a swamp of lies than it does to today because the Liar-in-Chief now has everyone lying -- both about him and for him.
Even before Trump took office, I pointed out how swampy the team he was forming was starting to look and asked if he was just a Trojan horse for the establishment:
Lesley Stahl: Your own transition team, it’s filled with lobbyists.
Donald Trump: That’s the only people you have down there.
Lesley Stahl: You have lobbyists from Verizon, you have lobbyists from the oil gas industry, you have the food lobby.
Donald Trump: Sure. Everybody’s a lobbyist down there–
Lesley Stahl: Well, wait….
Donald Trump: That’s what they are. They’re lobbyists or special interests—
Lesley Stahl: On your own transition team.
That was the status of his team before he was even inaugurated, and it never got any better. He put the top brass from the military industrial complex in charge of all intelligence gathering and everything military, and he put Goldman Sachs' executives and big banksters like Wilbur Ross in charge of all things financial, along with know-nothing Larry Kudlow, who was never once able to see a recession coming, even when he was standing in the middle of one.
Whenever Team Trump failed, he blamed the stupidity of the people he had appointed as though a leader's job one is not assembling a great team and, as though, the greater idiot is not the person who keeps knowingly putting foxes in charge of the hen house or hiring people he later calls failures.
With more turnover than any White House has ever seen, there is not one single time it has been Trump's fault ... according to him. It's always the fault of the person he hires, whom he frequently ridicules as stupid on their way out the door.
Heck, I pointed out what an obviously horrible choice many of his people, whom he later fired, would be. How can you hire John Bolton and then be surprised to find out he's a warmonger as Trump was? Why couldn't Trump see the obvious? Yet, it's ALWAYS someone else's fault that Trump hires "stupid morons" or "hawks" who would "start wars everywhere" if it were not for Trump restraining them.
I don't vote for people who always blame others for their mistakes. Own it, Man!
Before he was even inaugurated, I concluded,
Trump’s process looks a lot less like draining the swamp and more like putting the alligators in charge of protecting the flamingos.
I have never had cause to adjust that opinion as Trump continues to fire people whom he considers failures. So much for his supporters' counter that he was playing 4-D chess by holding his enemies close. You may hold them close, but you don't put them in charge of the very things they seek to abuse! That's like putting known pedophiles in charge of schools just so you can keep an eye on them. Plain dumb!
The oldest game in the swampy Wall-Street play book is to get your own executives in charge of all the government’s regulatory agencies,
That is exactly how the Trump administration's played out through its first four years. Why would I want four more years of the swampiest White House I've ever seen. It's been a White House filled with Creatures from the Black Lagoon, whom Trump constantly has to fire, or they leave because they can't stand him.
Trump repeatedly assured his supporters that being a billionaire did not mean he was committed to serving the desires of the 1%. It meant he would not be beholden to big corporate money because he had enough of his own money to fund his campaign. After Trump secured the Republican nomination, however, he quickly started raising money through big corporate lobbyists, who have now gained seats on his transition team.... Is it still unreasonable that I wonder if Trump is a Trojan horse for the establishment that he was born into and has lived in and had as customers all of his life?
"I will repeal and replace Obamacare, and it will be easy. So easy."
Oh, and "It will be replaced with something much better. Just wait and see. It will be replaced with something much better. It will be a great plan."
Here we are four years later, still waiting to hear the actual great plan; yet, we are only hearing, "We are putting together a great plan. It's a really great plan. The best plan."
If you keep falling for the same lie, that makes you the greater fool. It became clear in the first year of his presidency that neither Trump nor the Republicans had the plan they had long claimed they had over all those years when they railed against Obamacare. They had nothing!
Trump’s really big supporters openly grieved that the explosion of his emphatically promised Obamacare replacement bodes poorly for all of Trump’s plans. Fox’s Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs harangued the Republican party for failing to take the reins and lead now that the party finally has the chance to prove it can do what it has promised. Hannity stated that numerous high authorities told him failure of this partial repeal marks the end of any Obamacare repeal for 2017....
Even Paul Ryan, who drafted the plan that Trump endorsed, admitted the enormity of the failure quite honestly.... Ryan picked up the argument leveled against Republicans by Democrats when they were running congress, which said that it is easy to be an opposition party and simply stand against everything, but quite a different matter to be creative and actually govern.... Ryan failed embarrassingly, and I question whether his leadership will survive this failure
Ryan didn't survive. "Put up or shut up," said the Fox News people to their own Republican Party, dismayed at the scale of failure with Obamacare, and that failure didn't just end hope of any Obamacare repeal for 2017, as Hannity had said. It killed the subject completely for the rest of Trump's term!
Trump failed bigly, too, because the truth is that he swore over and over to his supporters that he would get a “great†replacement through congress as one of his first orders of business.... It is, however, now questionable that he will ever get a replacement through, much less a great one. He has three more years to try again, but a total failure within your own party to get your first order of business done, especially when it is something the entire Republican party has said it will do over and over for years and when you are in your honeymoon period, is no small failure.
As I suggested back then, he never got it through and never again tried. Since Republicans had nothing they could agree on back then, if they are really going to campaign against Obamacare all over again, they owe America a fully detailed plan during the campaign, not a worn-out promise. To expect us to just trust them after their first spectacular failure in 2017 is completely absurd. We have a right to KNOW what we will be getting for our vote since we got nothing last time around -- even by the measures of their own party elite -- yet, all we have is the vain assurance that Trump has a plan.
Where's the beef? If his plan is so great, why has he not spent all of the last four years using every opportunity he could to put the plan out in public for the American people to salivate over in order to build grassroots support for his "great plan" so that congress will be pressed to capitulate? He has nothing! It's a bald-faced lie. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice with the exact same campaign lie, SHAME ON ME!
So, that's one more reason I am, again, not voting for Trump. I believed he was lying the first time. Now I know he was lying, and I have NO reason to believe he is going to do anything this time.
"It will be easy. So easy. Just you wait and see." Still waiting. May those be his famous last words.
"I'm going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it."
He didn't build a wall. His supporters built what little wall has been built. They paid for it with donations over and above their taxes. Mexico hasn't paid one dime for it.
Moreover, what little wall has been built has mostly replaced sections of wall, barriers and fence line that already existed and were failing for lack of maintenance or not doing the job due to poor design.
Darn little wall has been built.
Trump also lied by saying it would be "the best wall -- a Great Wall." We don't need the Great Wall of the United States. China already has one of those. If you really want to stop illegal immigration; just start imprisoning the American employers who knowingly break US labor and immigration laws by hiring illegal aliens, and stop all funding of welfare for illegal aliens. Dry up all economic opportunity, and they'll take themselves home. You won't even have to round them up.
Both parties lie all the time about wanting to do anything against illegal aliens. Both parties want the cheap labor for their financial backers. What makes a better pool of peasants than making someone's presence illegal while turning a blind eye to their being here? If you make them illegal, they have to accept whatever working conditions they get or go back home because they have no voice (or shouldn't, though some Dumocrats are trying to change that by giving people who are here illegally the right to vote).
Making them illegal then turning a blind eye is just a formula for creating a true peasant working class in America. The peasants don't dare speak out for better conditions because they'll be deported if they complain. "Off with their heads."
Trump had said he would send ALL illegal aliens back home, but before he was even inaugurated, the president-elect changed his tune to saying he would only send home those illegal aliens who committed crimes. In the four years since, Trump has not done more than that.
According the Customs and Border Patrol, Trump did not deport more illegal aliens crossing the southern border than Obama until last year. Even his 2019 high was lower than almost any year before Obama going back to 1983. So, same ol' same ol'.
To be sure, he has been thwarted by courts and all kinds adversaries to his plans, so his failure to get it done may not have been a lie, but his promise of getting a great wall built that Mexico would pay for certainly was, and he hasn't succeeded at his plan of stopping illegal immigration so far.
One reason I didn't vote for Trump the first time was that I knew a wall was a stupid answer to something with a much easier and less ugly solution. Just enforce the laws we already have by giving painful fines to Americans that don't properly document their workers. (Fine them on the first set of offenses. Jail them for a month the second time they're caught and fine them even more. Then, if they are ever caught again without proper documentation on file for their workers, imprison them for a year. They'll start abiding by the law, and everyone else will step in tow as soon as they see how serious you are. There will actually be almost no need to imprison anyone after the first case goes public because photographic proof of proper documentation is easy. I know. I've done it as a manager. It's no big deal! Keep the documentation files in your own office, and lock the drawer.)
What really bothers me on this one is not so much Trump's failure to get the job done, but the excuses made by supporters on his behalf regarding the wall that barely happened: "Mexico is paying for the wall through the tariffs Trump is charging them." Trump's supporters are parroting a lie they got from Trump, so it's Trump's big lie.
My rebuttal:
The tariffs are gone because Mexico signed Trump's new trade agreement, and the wall still is not built. So, the tariffs clearly did not pay for a wall that actually got built. Trump didn't say he would raise money for the wall. He said he'd build it, and Mexico would pay. If someone wants to stay with that lame argument, then prove to me where the pile of cash from those Mexican tariffs is banked for use on a wall? Why did Trump not even TRY to get congress to use all of the supposedly collected tariffs to fund his wall or earmark the funds for a wall? Fact is the short-lived tariffs did not raise enough money to cover the wall. That's just a fact.
Neither Mexico nor Mexicans pay for the Trump Tariffs on Mexican imports anyway. So, Mexico paid nothing on tariffs to US, but I'll cover how that works in the next section. Likewise, all tariffs charged on US exports going into Mexico during the trade war were Mexican import tariffs paid by Mexican people and Mexican companies to the Mexican government. Now, under the new trade agreement, there are essentially no tariffs by either side.
"China is paying for the tariffs"
Have you ever travelled internationally and then been asked to pay duty on something you brought into the US or been concerned you'd be asked to pay duty on it? Who pays the duty? If you are coming back from Canada, does Canada pay the duty on Canadian goods you are effectively importing for yourself? Of course not. You do!
Duties are tariffs. The difference between a duty and tariff is that a duty is paid directly by the end consumer to the US government. A tariff is paid by an importer who adds the cost of that tariff to his shipping costs to come up with his own "cost of goods sold" and then marks up that cost to determine his price as he resells those items from his warehouse to a retail store. The retail store then marks up its cost of goods sold to get the retail price at which it sells the goods to you the consumer. (The warehouse middleman may or may not be in the equation.)
So, who pays? You do! The consumer always pays for taxes on US businesses. In the process, the tariff may actually get marked up twice -- by a wholesaler and then a retailer -- before you (the consumer) pay for all of it. Passing along the cost of tariffs to the end consumer is precisely the reason tariffs are employed. The whole purpose of tariffs is to jack up the price of foreign products so Americans buy American.
So, who pays? China? Mexico? That would defeat the purpose! The consumer pays. Yes, in some cases some US importers were able to talk Chinese manufacturers to lower their prices and absorb SOME of the tariff with that kind of compensation to the importer; but that is not usually the case. Nevertheless, Trump kept boasting he loved the revenue from these tariffs because China was paying for it. Bull!
Thus, Mexico did not pay for the wall either because Mexico didn't pay the US for any US tariffs. You paid the tariffs. That is the whole point of leveling tariffs.
That said, Trump did manage to use the tariffs to get Mexico to police the border more, so he has had some success on immigration control. He, at least made it cost Mexico something to avoid the wall. (However, none of that is going into US coffers to eventually pay for a wall. The money Mexico has added to border enforcement all goes to Mexican border patrol.)
It's a lie! A big lie.
"The Trump Tax Cuts will pay for themselves"
I said that before the 2016 election the Trump Tax Cuts would never pay for themselves. As it became clearer what the tax cuts would be, I wrote repeatedly that the tax savings would almost entirely be spent on stock buybacks, and that is what happened.
To mask over this, the Trump Administration encouraged companies to give out bogus bonuses to sell the cuts after the fact.
The bulk of Trump’s tax benefits that is now running straight into the buyback pit (as I predicted it would) is already causing a backlash among politicians who are just now learning what nonsense the talk was of using that money to develop businesses, build new plants, develop new products and … the biggest lie of all, boost wages. Some of us pay attention to history — and learn from it — so knew from the beginning that those promises were completely bogus.... The dollars spent on buybacks amount to ... 6,300% more than the bonuses and wage boosts that have been announced.
"The Dumb Money is Helping the Smart Money Exit the Stock Market"
During the passage of the tax revision and in the immediate aftermath, some argued that firms would use these funds to pay worker bonuses.... Subsequently, a number of firms announced bonuses, which in some cases they attributed to the tax cut. One organization that tracks these bonuses has reported a total of $4.4 billion. With US employment of 157 million, this amount is $28 per worker….
Much of these funds, the data indicate, has been used for a record-breaking amount of stock buybacks, with $1 trillion announced by the end of 2018.
"It’s Been a Great Recession for a Few; Let’s Do it All Again!"
I called them "bogus bonuses" from the outset because a Republican non-profit was encouraging and reporting this trickle of bonuses to the press just to sell the tax cuts Republicans had just put in place. You know there is something deeply wrong with tax cus when you have to sell them to the public after you already got them approved by congress! $1,000-2,000 peanuts. One time. Didn't happen again the next year, except maybe in rare instances. Certainly will not happen this year. That's why they were done as bonuses and not wage increases.
Republican-approved deficits that were due to the Trump Tax Cuts and spending increases matched the worst two Obama years coming out of the Great Recession. Republicans approved these high deficits even though Trump was already claiming the economy was doing splendidly because of the Trump Rally in stocks. They approved those deficits, not for one or two emergency years as Democrats had, but for as far out as the eye could see! Break the nation for the next generation; it doesn't matter so long as you make me rich now!
When COVID hit, they approved vastly greater deficits. They are not the party of fiscal restraint -- another big lie. They merely pretended to be frugal when they were acting as an obstructionist faction during the Obama years. It was easy to stand against expenses Obama wanted, but they have been truly "deplorable" at standing against expenses their own Trump has demanded.
I didn't vote for Trump originally because I knew his tax cuts would not trickle down to me. As I wrote about his proposed plan before he was even inaugurated,
We know from experience that money retained in a corporation due to the elimination (or reduction) of corporate income tax will likely just go into more rounds of stock buybacks or into buying up other businesses. Buybacks mostly just make the rich richer by creating phony demand for their shares while reducing the supply of shares available on the market. They add nothing to the national economy and do little for the common person as most people do not own a lot of stocks.... If we’re going to make a change this massive, let’s make sure it helps all of society, not just the empire builders.
I pointed out that, if Trump really wanted to help the economy and the common man, he would only allow the corporate tax breaks to companies that did not do buybacks, buybacks having long been illegal for good reason for decades. Then those corporations could decide -- more money from tax savings to invest in building the company or buybacks to build up vacuous stock prices and make us rich now?
Unfortunately, Trump’s corporate tax cut is dangerous because his plan presents no curbs against rampant empire-building, colossal conglomeration. I don’t see anything in Trump’s plan that assures me his corporate tax reductions will go into developing markets, developing new products, improving plants and building new plants and not directly into the pockets of overstuffed CEOs and shareholders.
Why? Because the plan was designed by Goldman Sachs and friends for Goldman Sachs and their friends. It all went just as I thought it would:
Even David Stockman, Reagan’s chief budget advisor, has admitted that tax cuts do not pay for themselves! I, for one, do not believe promises that are made again and again that prove false every time.
Every single time we've tried trickle-down tax cuts, we've had an immediate explosion of greater national debt. There is nothing in my 2016 article that didn't go as I thought it would -- ending up in greater deficits:
Stockman’s team originally called their notion that tax cuts would pay for themselves by stimulating the economy the “rosy scenario.†Rosy scenarios are not the way to plan a personal budget, much less the budget of an entire nation!... If you’re a die-hard Republican loyalist, you can blame a Democratic congress for the huge deficit expansion that happened under both Reagan and GBII; but face it: neither Reagan nor Bush ever proposed a budget themselves that didn’t include massive deficits. So, neither of them can legitimately cop that defense....
Reality is that you always have to play ball with the other team. The fact is, neocon Republicans never saw a warfare deficit they wouldn’t approve any more than Democrats ever saw a welfare deficit they wouldn’t approve. Trump, just like Reagan, is even promising to greatly increase military spending; so, here we go again. If you REALLY want to live in a nation that is broke, this is the way to accelerate into that curve.
Now that Trump has delivered (even before COVID) the biggest deficits in history, why would I vote for him when he is promising even more tax cuts that will no more pay for themselves than the last ones did? I don't approve tax cuts for myself at the expense of breaking my nation. Give me the spending cuts first, then I will believe you can pay for the tax cuts. End the fakery of cutting taxes first and pretending you will figure out how to harangue the other party into cutting spending later. I've heard that lie too many times to ever believe it again. Too many lies, too many times.
It is a fact (if we are capable of learning anything from thirty-five years of experience with supply-side economics) that Trump’s corporate tax cut will not raise wages much or create jobs unless stops are built in place to prevent the money from simply inflating stock values. The rich would far rather make their money the easy way with stock manipulation than the hard way by building things and selling them.
The nation just keeps voting or lies that feed irresponsible fantasies the electorate wants to believe, in spite of repeated proofs they never play out as promised. Now Trump is promising us round four of tax cuts that will only make the deficit bigger again. Lies and more lies.
"We have the best employment, best job numbers ever."
The truth is that unemployment continued to follow exactly the same curve of diminishing returns after the Trump Tax Cuts as we had seen develop throughout the Obama administration:
The graph says it all. Unemployment followed the same glide path to a flat landing that had been set in as a course throughout the Obama years. Trump's boasting that he had delivered the "best jobs" situation was baloney. Sure it was the best numbers, but not because of him!
You can see nothing improved in the rate of change. Unemployment's decline actually flattened out, but that also was not because of him. It's simply what you would expect as inevitable when we get that close to what the government calls "full employment." Clearly, the tax cuts did nothing to improve the new jobs situation that was already fully in play.
What about wages, did they shoot up and give the common man a cut of those tax cuts?
Nope. If there is any visible difference, it was part of an ever-so-slight curve already set in during the Obama years. Wages did leap up during COVID, however, but that is only because most of the COVID layoffs hit the lowest-wage earners, leaving the remaining workforce skewed toward those who were better off, which is why I just left that sudden skew off the graph. The sudden upward skew in wages had nothing to do with Trump unless you want to blame him for the sudden COVID unemployment that caused that sudden skew.
In case you are thinking it might look better if I include salaried people, since they are a little higher echelon:
Nope. The recession turned around gradually in Obama's first term, and wages began a path throughout his second term that actually took a sharp dip in Trump's term, though the dip eventually caught back up to the trend.
"We have the best economy -- the greatest economy ever"
Oh, but surely the government's typical measurement of how the economy is growing improved because of the Trump Tax Cuts? Right? Best economy ever would mean best growth. Right?
Nope GDP kept rising at the same rate it had been rising for years. Not a bit of change. The drop near the end, of course, is do the line dropping from the Q4 2019 to Q1 2020 when COVID hit (one month and little more of Q1 2020 being under the evil spell of COVID).
What about if we look at actual quarterly GDP growth rates?
Nope. The Trump Tax Cuts gave a quick but minor bump, but then settled right back to the meager post-Great-Recession growth rates that typified Obama's last term. In fact, sales and revenue in manufacturing went into recession in the summer of 2019, and services started moving into recession in the fall.
So, there you have it -- another big lie: best economy, best jobs, best wages ever!
Not! Looks more like a pile of stagnant, slowly decaying goo to me!
"The coronavirus is a small thing. It's going away soon. We're turning the corner now."
Trump's treatment of the coronavirus has been a long parade of lies since he first started to downplay the pandemic when it arrived on American shores. We now have his own word on a recording stating that he intentionally "downplayed it in order to avoid starting a panic."
If he downplayed it because he believed the truth would "start a panic," then we know the truth must have been quite bad in his own opinion.
I've had people challenge me on this, claiming I'm a fool to believe anything "liberal lying Bob Woodward" would say. I'm not taking Bob's word for it. I don't have to believe anything Woodward says on this. I've heard Donald J. Trump saying it, so what Woodward says is irrelevant.
"Oh, but those are Woodward's recordings." So? The Nixonian Donald doesn't deny it is his voice on the recordings any more than tricky Dick did. Trump just doubled down on what the recording says by saying, essentially, "Of course, I didn't want to start a panic. Why would I want to start a panic?"
For me this recalls all the old movies of alien invasions or asteroids impacts or viral outbreaks or other such grand calamities that I used to watch as a kid where the government would always refuse to level with the public what was really happened. And, therein, the trouble always became a worse panic.
It always galled me because I knew the real government probably would do the same thing, and I thought it was completely unjustified. I'd say to my television set, "Just tell them! Tell them in a way that helps them handle it by letting them know what to do about it."
So, I have no patience with Donald J. Trump for telling the public one of his biggest lies just to "avoid a panic." He actually created distrust because many of us could tell that what he was saying did not square with the Chinese' choice to destroy their economy because of the disease. It didn't square with what other nations were telling their people. It didn't square with our nation's choice to close down the economy.
Trump's lack of candor, which could have been coupled by a steady hand at the tiller, created distrust that turned America into one of the worst COVID nations of all. Trump has lied consistently about that, too, in order to maintain his charade, saying that our total number of cases is only up because we are doing more testing.
The give away to that lie is that we are doing, for example, 2.5 times more testing than Germany (as a percentage of our population), but we have 10 times more cases (as a percentage of our population). The extra testing falls far short of accounting for the extra cases. If we had 2.5 times more cases, you'd say Trump's argument adds up. It doesn't. Not even close. Just another Big Lie. Tell it often enough, and people will believe it.
Trump said he had been schooled by getting COVID. He was worried when he got out of the hospital, and you could see him struggling a bit to breathe when he went out on the White House balcony. We learned the president had been put on supplemental oxygen twice because his oxygen saturation level was falling too low.
Trump got the best drugs available in the universe right now at the highest doses -- some of which are not available to others -- and so a disease that may well have killed him at his age and weight without such extensive treatment, went away. Trump said literally he had been "taken to school" by the virus, "the real school," and for a few days he started wearing a mask.
However, the treatments continued to work their rapid magic as administered at the White House; so, within a few days of getting back, the president was fine. His story changed from boasting of the great drugs delivered by the Trump Administration to he could have done it all without the drugs he had just called "a cure" a few days before based on his own experience. "Others don't like to use this word; but I'm calling it a 'cure.'"
Back to his usual behavior once his immediate danger cleared. He went back to making fun of masks, and then he told us all another whopper -- that the nation was turning a corner. Well, the COVID corner we just actually turned looks like this:
It looks like we're turning this corner for the third time. In fact, the last couple of days have turned in a new record of 100,000 new cases per day. We've jumped up an average of about 5,000 cases a day since Trump started saying "we've turned the corner." If we turned it, we turned it so hard, we rolled our car right off the cliff.
I don't know how bad COVID really is. I don't know how many of the roughly quarter-million deaths in the US attributed to COVID really are due primarily or exclusively to COVID. I have no idea what the real number are, but I am certain COVID was killing the president,. Because he was so utterly impressed with the drugs that quickly turned around his situation, he must have felt it was dire. Why else would he call them a miracle "cure?"
Get real here: No one calls a cure for a minor flu a "miracle cure." I doubt things would have gone so well without those massive doses of experimental medicine, which clearly caused Trump to feel a rapid difference; and I doubt Trump would have agreed to take the meds, instead of his preferred hydroxychloroquine and zinc had he not feared where the disease was taking him.
I also think he single-handedly poisoned the well for all of America about wearing masks. I know masks don't do a lot, and they don't filter out individual viruses. No one has ever claimed they do; but they do filter out water particles from human breath and coughs that carry thousands of viruses. They reduce how much of that escapes by about 50%. I've seen it proven, and a 50% reduction of viruses floating through the air improves everyone's odds. So, it's a small inconvenience, and I am someone who always hates wearing dust masks and respirators.
We also know that doctors and nurses and surgery techs have worn mask for decades to protect their patients and themselves because they DO help. This is not some new discovery that needs to be proven in order to be justified. Hospitals have not required masks and paid for millions of them for decades just for kicks.
If Trump had not lied about a virus where he said the truth was bad enough he felt he had to downplay it to avoid causing a panic; and, if he had encouraged his many followers to wear masks when around a lot of other people, I believe most of them would have followed what their leader modeled.
Instead, he has gone right back to scoffing at them (now that he has immunity due to having had the disease and then having been "cured," according to Trump, himself, by modern miracle drugs:
Donald Trump has claimed that contracting the coronavirus was a "blessing from God...." In the clip shared on Twitter Wednesday evening, the president described how he "felt good immediately" after taking the emergency antibody cocktail, which he praised as a "miracle."
"It was, like, unbelievable! I felt good immediately! I view these -- they call them therapeutic -- but to me it wasn't just therapeutic. It just made me better. OK? I call that a cure.... It's a cure.... It was incredible the way it worked. Incredible."
The Sun (including from the embedded video)
I believe that -- if Trump hadn't politicized mask wearing into a Red thing, versus a Blue thing, and if masks were not forced on people by overreaching Blues -- then even Trump supporters would have gone along with giving them a voluntary chance. Who knows how many lives have been lost because Trump chose not "to cause a panic" and had just leveled with the public?
So, that's the final reason I voted already for Joe Biden -- not because he wears a mask. (I only wear one myself in establishments that require it or when around a lot of strangers, but I don't fight the establishment about it. Their establishment, their rules.) No, I voted for him because my sister and her husband have always voted solid Republican; they voted for Trump; this year, however, they experienced the loss of her husband's sister to COVID in the big Texas outbreak, and the sister was a nurse. They also had two other family members get sick with COVID, one of whom remains permanently damaged but living.
My sister wrote to family members and friends and said for the first time they are not voting Republican, and they implored their family and friends to please vote for Joe Biden because they are so disappointed in Trump's poor leadership on the COVIDcrisis. Your perspective changes when some of your own die from the illness.
Given all the other Trump-sized lies above, I chose solidarity with those I care about.
Conclusion
Everything listed above has gone exactly as I said it would in the articles I wrote near the start of Trump's first term, asking if Trump was a Trojan horse. So, why would I vote for someone who fulfilled all of my worst suspicions when I was absolutely certain before he even assumed the office none of what he promised would go as he said, and none of it did?
Do I think things will go better under Joe? No, but Trump has been such a terrible liar that I have to do what I can to get him out. I have truly never seen America look less great than it does today or more filled with civil strife and violence or darker or more likely to slide into civil war. I cannot see a single way in which America is actually greater after four years of Trump in office. Not any way that matters much to me anyway.
I can't call that success. Trump can't be blamed for all the evil and hatred in the hearts of others. I don't hold him responsible for the evil that is Antifa, but he has certainly done everything he can to antagonize it. That's not what I want in a president. I don't see the value in poking rabid dogs.
Battle them and arrest them for sure, and Democrats have been a massive failure on that front by defunding police; but I think Biden and Kamala are a tougher on law enforcement that their party's fringe. Biden has spoken sharply against defining police, and one of the biggest claims made against Kamala was that she was too severe and relentless as a DA in locking up Black people for drug crimes. Good on her for locking up anyone involved in a crime and not caring what color they were!
Kamala has wrongfully praised some riots as peaceful, so I'm not without concerns; but I think she won't be all that soft on crime, given her longer track record. Kamala has been blamed for letting the Catholic church get away with terrible pedophile crimes, but a report I saw a couple of years ago laid the blame at the feet of someone who was one of her subordinates. That video gave no evidence Kamala even knew what the subordinate was sitting on. Maybe she did, but her record on fighting crime is still pretty intense.
I'm not saying I am confident in either Kamala or Joe. I just know beyond a doubt that four more years of Trump is four more years of Big Lies, more economics that never trickle down (or where the trickle is very tiny and temporary), more mismanagement of a health crisis he admits he greatly downplayed, and more constantly divisive behavior in a hornets' nest that is already riled up; so I'm not voting for Joe and Kamala; I'm voting to get this bloated, self-serving constant liar out of office because America has never been less great than it is today.
I am not richer because of Trump. I have experienced little benefit from the tax cuts that are breaking the nation. I am not happier (though I am not unhappy). I do not have better relationships with family members or coworkers (but I try to avoid the strains I see others in). I have not experienced greater opportunity in any way, nor have I known anyone who's opportunities improved because of Trump. I have seen very few people have any better opportunity at all or wind up any richer than they were when I knew them four years ago. I have no trust in our president or the medical establishment regarding out health crisis because the president admitted he downplayed the whole thing, and I always believed he was downplaying it. That, to me, encompassed the whole crisis in a fog. I am not living in a more peaceful nation. I do not feel I have seen a single crook put in prison by the Trump Administration in four years, so I have no sense of improved justice. I do not feel the CIA and FBI are any less corrupt than they were. I still feel bankers are ruling the world and profiting immensely more than I from blatant greed, and I don't feel the few punishments doled out match up to the money made on the crimes. I still feel the economy is mirage built over an ever-expanding chasm of debt. I feel the nation is more deeply broke than it was when John Boehner first said, "We're broke," and feel we are further away from any hope of turning that around than we ever were. I feel the stock market is just as much of a casino as it was in Obama's time and am as certain it will all come crashing down with the whole economy as I ever was. I feel like Trump and his tier of people are all richer than they were before Trump entered office while I have been left behind ... again. I'm tired of the boasting and the talk that goes nowhere, and I don't need the endless television entertainment Trump provides. I don't even have better health insurance -- his first objective -- nor does it cost me (or my employer actually) one penny less. It actually costs me more than twice as much in copays now. That is truthfully what four years of MAGA has brought me. Nothing I didn't already have.
You have my assurance I will just as vigorously attack Biden's lies as they become more evident if he wins. I'm sure they will, but simply not voting is not enough this time. I'll deal with Biden's evils as they emerge. Right now I have Trump's manifold lies and abject failures to deal with and a divided America that has beyond all doubt never looked worse to me.
If you want to remove your support due to my criticism of Trump or stop publishing my articles if you are one of the many websites that carry them, I'm OK with that. I really am because I'd truly rather not write at all than do less than what I've promised from the start, which is to be an equal-opportunity critic of falsehood WHEREVER I find it, regardless of what I want to believe and regardless of what it costs me because of what others believe.