By Meg Langford
There may not be much in this letter that smacks of originality. Mr. Trump, you simply do not inspire novel thoughts. Your words do not help people to dream, imagine, or otherwise fantasize about some different, better world—unless it is to return to a kingdom in American’s distant past, where white people reign supreme, and people of more swarthy complexions clean your house, scrub your toilet, cook your meals, iron your shirts, and pick the crops in your field. But no—other than imagining a time that is happily gone with the wind, you do not inspire your political opponents with fresh, new ideas. Rather, you frighten us with old dreads, buried fears, and the kind of hate that we keep thinking we had left behind in our dream to climb to the mountaintop.
Yet I write this letter, nonetheless. Full disclosure: I am no bleeding heart liberal. I am not a registered Democrat. I am not a person who lines up with the blue states and checks all the progressive squares on the ballot box. I have sometimes voted Republican. Coming from an Air Force family that has recognized both the need for a strong national defense, and the personal pride that comes from pulling one’s self up by one’s boot straps, I am prepared to vote for a Republican candidate, from time to time, under certain conditions. When I lived in Los Angeles, for example, and the local Democratic congressional incumbent lived happily, cozily in the pockets of rich music executives (remember when they wanted to install a virus that would blow up your computer if you so much as downloaded “Muskrat Love” or Rocky IV?), I worked pro-bono for an upstart Republican congressional candidate. He and his wife spent more time volunteering for civic causes and fighting for the underdog than any two people I have ever met, and in a strange passage of months where every day felt like backwards day, Republican David Hernandez sure acted like a hippie (his wedding march music was “Light My Fire”), and the incumbent liberal Congressman in the music moguls’ pockets acted mighty Republican.
So there it is. Full disclosure. Mr. Trump, I get you. I understand you. And I believe that I understand your supporters. Having lived in the heart of Mexifornia, where illegal aliens run amok, I get your folks’ concerns about the border. About Mexicans. And as I watch the hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Middle-Eastern men flooding into Europe, many complaining about the free food and shelter they are getting while shrieking “Allahu Akbar”, I understand your concern about letting mobs of un-vetted refugees in from places that seem oh so alien to us. I get a lot of your policies, Mr. Trump. And I get why they are so damnably attractive to those rabid followers who show up at your rallies and come eerily close to giving you, en masse, the Nazi salute.
But, Mr. Trump, there is an old adage which applies to you. And no, it has nothing to do with oranges or tangerines or your hair or your bizarre fake tan. The adage is, “You can’t have Falstaff, and have him thin.” Although this pearl of wisdom first appears in the extraordinary movie “Tucker”, it feels much older. Falstaff was a zaftig, fun-loving knight in three of Shakespeare’s plays; he lived life to the fullest and indulged himself in all creature pleasures. He was marvelous company for the likes of King Hal, and this was probably because of his carefree decadence. In other words: You aren’t going to go out and telling drinking stories and sing pub songs all night with Tony Robbins. And if you want a gym buddy to go to the fitness center with you at 7:00 a.m., Mick Jagger is probably not your man.
I bring all this up in relation to Trump because it aptly describes the essence of his campaign. Yes, oh Trump followers, I get your concerns about the Mexicans and Middle Easterners, about the border and the trade deals and the jobs crisis and the crime rate. The problem is this: if Trump even begins to give you the solutions to these problems (which, in and of itself is highly doubtful—more on that some other time), I can guarantee you that along with the solutions will come a host of nightmares, and a legion of devils, the likes of which you can barely imagine. Because that, folks, is how Trump does business. That, folks, is the true history of Trump.
You can’t have someone who is going to do the things Trump has promised to do, without unleashing, along with his (final) solutions, a wave of hatred, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, and just good old fashioned outright contempt for any “Losers” who haven’t managed to become rich, powerful, and able to buy themselves a troika of hot supermodel wives.
And once that tsunami of contempt is unleashed … watch out, world. It cannot be contained. If I may bring in another metaphor, it is like the brooms with sloshing buckets in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Except that Mickey was cute. And he had a twelfth hour Gandalfian savior. We have nothing to stop the flood, once Trump gets started.
The bottom line is this: Trump has openly—OPENLY—displayed overt contempt for so many kinds of people and groups of people that he has no business being in any kind of public office. Much less—oh my God, I cannot believe I am writing this—much less, the most powerful political office on the planet. (And even the planet is trembling in mortal fear. The finest minds on Earth tell us that we may be reaching the point of no return, when it comes to the catastrophic effects of Climate Change—and Trump thinks it is a Chinese plot. Already, he is boasting of his plans to trash the Paris Climate Treaty. A President is supposed to represent all the people, protect all the people, champion all the people.
But Donald Trump? Donald Trump hates (almost) all of the people. And the truth is in the math.
So there it is. Full disclosure. Mr. Trump, I get you. I understand you. And I believe that I understand your supporters. Having lived in the heart of Mexifornia, where illegal aliens run amok, I get your folks’ concerns about the border. About Mexicans. And as I watch the hundreds of thousands of able-bodied Middle-Eastern men flooding into Europe, many complaining about the free food and shelter they are getting while shrieking “Allahu Akbar”, I understand your concern about letting mobs of un-vetted refugees in from places that seem oh so alien to us. I get a lot of your policies, Mr. Trump. And I get why they are so damnably attractive to those rabid followers who show up at your rallies and come eerily close to giving you, en masse, the Nazi salute.
But, Mr. Trump, there is an old adage which applies to you. And no, it has nothing to do with oranges or tangerines or your hair or your bizarre fake tan. The adage is, “You can’t have Falstaff, and have him thin.” Although this pearl of wisdom first appears in the extraordinary movie “Tucker”, it feels much older. Falstaff was a zaftig, fun-loving knight in three of Shakespeare’s plays; he lived life to the fullest and indulged himself in all creature pleasures. He was marvelous company for the likes of King Hal, and this was probably because of his carefree decadence. In other words: You aren’t going to go out and telling drinking stories and sing pub songs all night with Tony Robbins. And if you want a gym buddy to go to the fitness center with you at 7:00 a.m., Mick Jagger is probably not your man.
I bring all this up in relation to Trump because it aptly describes the essence of his campaign. Yes, oh Trump followers, I get your concerns about the Mexicans and Middle Easterners, about the border and the trade deals and the jobs crisis and the crime rate. The problem is this: if Trump even begins to give you the solutions to these problems (which, in and of itself is highly doubtful—more on that some other time), I can guarantee you that along with the solutions will come a host of nightmares, and a legion of devils, the likes of which you can barely imagine. Because that, folks, is how Trump does business. That, folks, is the true history of Trump.
You can’t have someone who is going to do the things Trump has promised to do, without unleashing, along with his (final) solutions, a wave of hatred, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, and just good old fashioned outright contempt for any “Losers” who haven’t managed to become rich, powerful, and able to buy themselves a troika of hot supermodel wives.
And once that tsunami of contempt is unleashed … watch out, world. It cannot be contained. If I may bring in another metaphor, it is like the brooms with sloshing buckets in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Except that Mickey was cute. And he had a twelfth hour Gandalfian savior. We have nothing to stop the flood, once Trump gets started.
The bottom line is this: Trump has openly—OPENLY—displayed overt contempt for so many kinds of people and groups of people that he has no business being in any kind of public office. Much less—oh my God, I cannot believe I am writing this—much less, the most powerful political office on the planet. (And even the planet is trembling in mortal fear. The finest minds on Earth tell us that we may be reaching the point of no return, when it comes to the catastrophic effects of Climate Change—and Trump thinks it is a Chinese plot. Already, he is boasting of his plans to trash the Paris Climate Treaty. A President is supposed to represent all the people, protect all the people, champion all the people.
But Donald Trump? Donald Trump hates (almost) all of the people. And the truth is in the math.
TRUMP: HATE BY THE NUMBERS
Hatred—and the tragically deformed litter of offspring it has whelped: disdain, contempt, condescension, ridicule, shunning, mockery, bullying, violence—is hard to quantify.
Or so they say.
I am not so sure I agree, Mr. Trump. I think when it comes to you—perhaps because you never, ever shut up—it is in fact quite possible to quantify. Where to start? Where to start?
There was the putrid panache with which you began your campaign: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people.” Well, Mr. Trump. Roughly 18 percent of the country is now Latino. That’s nearly one out of five people living in this country who, I think it is fairly clear, you simply DESPISE. (Or, dear reader, pick appropriate name from the litter listed above, also known as Hate’s Offspring. (read basket of abhorribles) above. Donald, one in five of us, standing here in America, you hate.
And then there is the abundant evidence that you hate blacks. One out of every eight Americans is an Afro-American. And you clearly don’t think much of them. You didn’t like them in the early beginnings of your career, when you were sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against blacks and keeping them from accessing your apartment buildings. And then, the Justice Department sued you again for the same thing, three years later. And the racism charges and lawsuits just kept on coming. In 1992, you were fined by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission because when high rollers requested that you remove black card dealers from the floor, you complied with their racist requests. It cost you $200,000, but that’s chump change to you. One black employee testified that it was standard operating procedure for casino managers to remove all black employees from the floor, before you and Ivana entered the casino. According to former president of Trump Plaza Hotel John O’Donnell, in his biography of you, you frequently called black employees “lazy”. And then there was this toad that jumped out of your mouth, also according to O’Donnell: “And isn’t it funny. I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it … the only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” And it gets worse: “I think the guy is lazy … And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.”
 |
In 1989, your infamy grew when you attempted to thwart the judicial process, following the rape of a Central Park jogger. Rather than waiting for the investigation to play out, you bought full page ads in four newspapers, calling for the return of the death penalty. You spared no eloquence: “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes … I want to hate these murderers and I always will.” You basically called for a lynch mob: public hysteria ran high, five teenagers of color were convicted, and their lives were ruined. In 2002, DNA exonerated them all, and the true rapist confessed, DNA further confirming his guilt. But you had wreaked your havoc and destruction. Not only did the men lose over a decade of their young lives languishing in jail, but their families were constantly threatened. And Donald--you have recently stated that you still think the men are guilty. You know more than the DNA does, apparently. When you publicly railed on about it so many decades ago, you made a chillingly prescient comment: "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done.” Perhaps we should have listened more closely.
We could go on and on, but this list and litany of racist horror stories is everywhere. Even on the campaign trail, Donald, you were racism personified. You retweeted a message from @WhiteGenocideTM that contained phony crime statistics. And Donald, you and your White Supremacist cohorts didn’t just get it wrong. You got it BIGLY wrong. The following comes direct from the FBI. (Whom we know, from events just pre-election, is hardly anti-Trump.) You said the percentage of White people killed by other Whites was a mere 16 percent. That’s a lie. Whites kill each other at a rate of 82.4 percent. You got it wrong by 66.4 percent, in a pathetic attempt to mask the truth about how many white thugs there are out there in the world—many of whom no doubt voted for you. And, keeping the Nazi drumbeat going, you Tweeted that Blacks kill Whites at a rate of 81 percent. Lie, lie, lie. Blacks kill Whites at a rate of a mere 14.8 percent. Again, a HYUGE error, off by 66.2 percent—made on purpose no doubt, in an attempt to make Blacks look like violent thugs en masse. There is no such evidence of that, anywhere. At all.
You condoned the beating of a black protestor at one of your rallies. "Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” is what you said. We understand if your henchmen want to escort him from your rally. But your suggestion of employing physical brutality is typical of you—hatred and violence are your stock in trade.
And when you finally did “reach out” at another rally, in some bizarre attempt at inclusion, it was with a condescension that makes a decent person’s skin crawl. At a stop in California, you pointed to a black man and said, "Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him," Trump said. "Are you the greatest?" What Donald, just the one? It is hard to hear that without flashing back to Paula Deen, pulling one of her Negro employees from backstage, claiming him as a dear friend, and pointing out “he’s as black as this board!”
And you clearly hate people from the Middle East. In your eyes, they are all terrorists. With folks from the Middle East comprising between 3 and 4 percent of the population, that means that in an average crowd of Americans, you automatically hate one out of thirty people just because they don’t look Scottish, like your mom. (Who was an immigrant by the way, Donald. A poor immigrant. Dare I say it—a loser? It seems too weird to call her a rapist or a drug dealer.) Or maybe you hate people from the Middle East because they don’t worship the same God you do. Although, for what it is worth, I sure as hell hope that my God is not the same as your God, for they seem to be saying very, very, very different things.
You clearly are not a fan of the Jewish people. There was your famous Tweet of Hillary Clinton on a Star of David atop a pile of cash. Blatantly anti-Semitic, Donald. And when your campaign decided to delete the Tweet, you objected. More anti-Semitism? You thought it was cool to quote the anti-Semite Benito Mussolini. You had your typical lame justification—you said it was “a good quote.” Over two thousand years of wisdom pumped into the universe by the best and the brightest, and your Bartlett’s Quotations fell open to Il Duce. Il Duce, who was the driving force behind ‘Leggi Razziali’ (aka, “The Race Laws”, “A Manifesto of Race”), which is basically a fan letter to the author of Mein Kempf, and the beginning of the end for Jews in Italy. Your camp later Tweeted a bunch of Nazi soldiers superimposed over an American flag next to your big orange face. And when the KKK endorsed you, you took your sweet time in distancing yourself from them. As with all the groups you hate, I could go on and on with examples.
And what about poor people? Donald, you made your opinion of poor people very clear, in a New York Times story by Maureen Dowd. “My entire life, I’ve watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn’t the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office. How smart can they be? They’re morons.” Well, Donald, according to everybody from the U.S. Census Bureau to the Pew research center, about 29 percent of Americans are either poor or low-income. I am going out on a limb here, believing that someone doesn’t actually have to be living below the poverty line for you to feel contempt for them—how did you so eloquently put it—for them to be “morons”. So that means that you think that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of the United States are “morons”. Thanks, Donald. You know, since the great crash of 2009, when I lost every penny of equity in my home, I basically fit into that group. Yes, I have worked very hard since that time, and yes, I have a plan that is on course. But I am in that class of people. A lower income loser. I got my B.A. at George Mason (awarded “Outstanding Senior of the Year”, my Masters at the American University, and did my doctoral work at the University of Maryland, but to you I am “a moron.” Thanks, Donald.
Oh, and while we are on the subject of “morons”, I think it is worth comparing the average teacher’s salary with the magic number that makes somebody “low income”. If a teacher and spouse dare to have two children—imagine that, someone who devotes their life to teaching wanting to have two children of their own—then yes, statistically, their salary puts them smack in the lower income level—a number in the mid-40’s. Roughly 45,000. That’s what we pay them. And they are morons for making such a moronic life choice, Donald? Or perhaps we are the morons, because that’s all we can see they are worth.
And then, of course, there is the now famous incident of Trump mocking and imitating a reporter with a disability. Serge Kovaleski, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, suffers from arthrogryposis. This is terrifying, not just because it is an assault upon anybody and everybody with a sense of human decency, but because it gives an eerie glimpse into how Trump views people with disabilities. It must be their fault. It must be a weakness. They must be “Losers”. And the bald fact is according to all the institutions who track that sort of thing—the Census Bureau, CDC, etcetera—one in five Americans lives with a disability. So on the basis of that alone, Trump thinks another 20 percent of the country are “Losers”. And suitable to be mocked. But here is the thing, Donald: those people have opinions, many of them very wise and informed opinions. If a blind person dared to criticize you, would you do a hilarious impression of a that person tapping his cane around, searching for the next safe step? Would that get a rise from your crowd? What about a person with muscular dystrophy? Let’s watch you imitate their walk. That’s the kind of cruel stunt that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap and my butt smacked when I was a kid. In fact, I don’t know any decent kid on the playground past the age of ten who would try something so offensive. Anybody who did something like that, back in the day, we all just knew was going to grow up to be an a**hole.
Lastly, of course, there is Trump’s ubiquitous and never ending misogyny. We don’t care if you don’t like some of us ladies, Donald, but for Chrissake, take on our opinions, our thoughts, our plans, our platforms. To judge us by our appearance is—well, I don’t really know if it can be described in words, just how utterly offensive that is to us. I would really, truly love to get inside the brains of the women who voted for you, and find out what they were thinking … how they could elect as President a man who clearly has contempt for half of the citizenry of this great nation. I cannot believe I am saying this, but I hope—I truly hope, women-for-Trump, that your daughters confront you relentlessly and ruthlessly when they are old enough to understand what you did. I hope they give you a damnably hard time, and rebel against you. And this is not because I wish to see acrimony and divisiveness within a family, but because that appalled confrontation from the next generation of young women is the only way I know there can be any hope for this country. And right now, I place the future of this country above the well-being of your family—at least in terms of peace around your dinner table.
Let’s take a moment to look at Donald’s stance on pro-choice. Trump has actually stated that women who have abortions should be punished. He makes no distinction (as persons such as myself do), that an abortion within the first couple of months of pregnancy is a mighty different proposition than late term abortion. He doesn’t care if it is your daughter who is pregnant. No, just, they should be punished. That’s Trump’s view. This viewpoint is rendered particularly repulsive, given his self-admitted history of pushing himself on women sexually. Apparently, he doesn’t mind impregnating them. Just giving them the right to do something about it.
Once more, for old times, here it is: You have called women Fat. Slob. Pig. Disgusting animal. You said that nobody would vote for Carly Fiorina because of her face. Are you serious, Donald? Are you serious? Do you really think American voters are that superficial? And Donald, have you looked in the mirror? You have a mouth too small for your face, lips that look like they were dropped in by CGI effect. You have raccoon eyes because nobody in your circle, even your wife, will tell you how to get a decent fake tan. And I am not even going to start with the Tangerine jokes or hair mockery.
But back to what you think about women. When The New York Times columnist Gail Collins dared to criticize you, you mailed her article back to her with “FACE OF A DOG” scrawled across her picture.
And there was the comment you made in a 1991 Esquire Magazine interview: "You know, it doesn't really matter what [they] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass."
And then there was the 1992 New York Magazine interview when you said, you actually said about women, “You have to treat them like shit.”
And your disrespect is not reserved just for your enemies or strangers: You said of Ivana: “I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?” And then there’s the creep factor you just had to inject: you joked that you would date your daughter, if you could. Beyond disgusting. And then, there was the comment that made our collective pieholes drop open in shocked disbelief: When Robin Leach asked you and Marla what parts of you and your wife you could see in your precious newborn baby, you had to reference your baby’s breasts. And their growth potential…
And of course there was the time you kept a picture of your secretary in your desk drawer; you thought she looked chubby in the photo. You would look at it when you got annoyed with her. You liked how that act served to humiliate her. She claims the story is true, you denied it. You know what, Donald? I am going with her word. Just as I am going with the testimonies of all the women who claim you sexually assaulted them. This is because I, like millions of other horrified citizens, heard you not only admit to it, but brag about it. Just as you brag about walking through the dressing room of your teenage beauty pageant and ogling the girls as they change clothes and stand around semi-naked.
In the words of Detroit Free Press journalist Brian Dickerson, “If your sons bragged about their sexual prowess or intellectual superiority the way Trump does, you’d tell them to put a sock in it. If any man spoke about your wives or daughters the way Trump speaks about my female colleagues in the press, you’d punch his lights out.” In my words: Mr. Trump, you have a very barely contained disdain—perhaps hatred, even—for half of the population of this country. Yes. I believe that. Do you need to hear it again? Mr. Trump, you have a very barely contained disdain—perhaps hatred, even—for half of the population of this country. Because half of us are women, and, to paraphrase the premise of an old Seinfeld episode, most of us are not “10”s. Most of us are not even “8”s. We are just hard working mothers and career women and professionals and volunteers who realized long, long ago that an excessive obsession with one’s personal appearance represents a kind of narcissism that is both unnecessary and offensive. We put on clean clothes, a dab of lipstick, a squirt of imposter perfume, and hope that our smile will make us attractive to a world that we are desperately doing our part to save. Shame on you, Mr. Trump, for the way you treat the gender that has given birth to every single one of your twisted supporters. What the hell would your own mother think of you, I wonder? I mean, if you could really, really hear what she thought of what you have been saying and doing for the last year.
And stop letting your teenage daughter sit provocatively on your lap when you pose for pictures atop a statue of two parrots fornicating, as she lovingly cradles her face in your hand. I say this because, since Melania has aged out (if past statistics are any indicator), you may well have a new hot young wife, and then, soon to follow, a hot young teenage daughter. Please, Donald, do your best to keep your hands off of her, too.
And what if someone is successful enough to own their own business? Do you respect them then, Donald? Nope. Here are some examples of just how deeply you hold in contempt the very hard-working businessman. (Sources not cited here, since these incidents are ubiquitous on the web, and corroborated by court records.)
Michael Diehl of Freehold Music Center recalls that he sold you eight Yamaha grand pianos for 100,000 dollars. You wouldn’t pay, and forced Diehl to settle for 70 cents on the dollar. Sign maker Eric Silverstein remembers working on the Trump Plaza signage, and asking you, The Donald, to pay the agreed upon 800,000 dollars. You kept refusing, then forced Silverstein to settle for one third of what you had promised. (“Promise”: look up this important word in the dictionary, Donald. If you don’t have a dictionary, now would be a good time to buy one. It is connected, in principle, to the idea of taking an “Oath of Office”.) A sucker who owned a store called the Paint Spot never got paid his 34,000; but you blew that one. The Donald was so blatant in his rip-off tactics that you ended up owing Paint Spot owner 300,000 in legal fees. Ha ha. Curiously, that was the same amount—34,000--that you stiffed the owner of Classic Chandeliers. Trump, you bought three huge, probably gaudy chandeliers, a bunch of bulbs, and then didn’t pay the amount agreed.
The fiberglass company that made the faux minarets and domes for the Taj Mahal was owed 3 million dollars. From you, Donald. The fiberglass factory crew had been run ragged, trying to finish the pieces while dealing with your constantly changing demands. They worked in three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You kept refusing to pay, then settled for 33 cents on the dollar.
Back in 1990, sixty struggling union men had to be benched from working on the Taj Mahal because you kept refusing to pay them, even after the Taj Mahal was open and thriving. Oh, and thanks to you, Donald, they all lost their medical insurance and their pensions. At the time they were laid off, just after the Taj opened, you owed 253 contractors who were employing thousands of people a whopping 70 million dollars. They ended up getting 50 cents on the dollar.
Atlantic City’s Mayor is no fan of yours. He has stated publicly, “The fact is, there were a lot of small contractors and vendors who got hurt, who went out of business because Trump did not pay contracts on time.”
Patricia Paone’s memory was long, and Donald, when you first started your campaign, she saw your face on TV and could only think of the nightmare that you caused her family when you refused to pay her late husband the 1.2 million dollars you owed for Taj Mahal paving stones. She died shortly after seeing The Donald on TV.
And if someone doesn’t own their own business, and is stoopid enough to be hired by you, then they deserve to be stiffed, right? You didn’t pay 300 employees at your Los Angeles golf club; you eventually settled the class action lawsuit for 475,000. Who knows what you really owed them, before settling. A dishwasher sued you because you made him work time and a half, but didn’t write it in your books. You settled for 7,500. Given your propensity for settling for pennies on the dollar, and the fact that the guy cannot have had much of a legal team to fight you, one wonders what you really owed him. Maybe 20,000 grand? How was the guy supposed to live? And at the Trump Miami resort, 48 servers had to sue to get paid when you made them work shifts as long as 20 hours during Passover. Really, Donald? You don’t even pay waiters their paltry little pay?
And Donald. Some of your cheap-skatedness is just plain hilarious. There was the detective you hired to follow the detective that your wife Ivana hired to get proof of the affair you were having with Marla Maples. He got you the proof. He just never got paid for it. Sheesh.
Before we leave this subtopic regarding all the businesses and struggling workers that Donald Trump has ripped off, it is worth noting a bit of karma. Before I go into this story, I am reminded of a story out of ancient Rome. And I am not the only one seeing the similarities. San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, at the end of a passionate and insightful rant, said, of Trump’s election …“We are Rome”. Chilling words, rendered even more frightening because of their prescient ring of truth.
Here is my Roman story. It is the true tale of a famous torture device, conceived of and created by a one Perillos of Athens, for Phalaris, the Tyrant of Akragas, Sicily. This gorgeous torture device, known as The Brazen Bull, was a large hollow golden bull in which a victim was placed, via hinged door, then slowly burned alive, while a fire beneath the bull slow cooked the poor prisoner. The “art” of the bull was the demonic way in which the screams of the tortured soul worked their way through a series of tubes in the bull’s head, and then the human screams came out through the bull’s mouth in such a way that it really did sound like a bull bellowing. But here is the funny part. First, it was used to torture the unfortunates who had offended the tyrant Phalaris. Then, the inventor of the bull found himself thrown in the bull and roasted. Then, when the tyrant ruler was overthrown, he ended up in the bull, being roasted alive. For some reason, that is the story I flashed on when I read about the last group of people that Trump ripped off, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decades; HIS OWN LAWYERS. Ha!
(And yes, you could say that my Roman analogy is a bit of hyperbole, comparing ripping off your lawyers to burning a human being alive in the infamous Brazen Bull.
Trump, after all, does not own a solid gold life sized bull in which to roast his enemies slowly to death.
Not yet.
*************
So there you have it. A long, scary, depressing list of just some of the groups which Donald Trump clearly holds in contempt. The list is not complete though; I think we all understand that.
Of course, you would have to be an Uber Statistician (most of whom, oddly enough, are hiding out in caves, after the Hyuuge miscalculation of Election Night), to figure out statistically exactly how many Americans Trump hates, because the above categories obviously cross over. There are women who are black. There are people from the Middle East who are poor. Hey, here is an example: Donald Trump called Charles Krauthammer a LOSER. Does Donald Trump hate fellow party member Charles Krauthammer because he had the audacity to criticize Mr. Trump? Or because he is a Jew? Or, maybe, maybe it is because Charles Krauthammer is a big enough loser to have gotten himself in a wheelchair for life? In fact, now that I think about it, Chuckie boy is a triple threat loser. Criticized Trump. Jew. Crippled. Loooser.
Mr. Trump, a man who disparages people from other races, other cultures, people with disabilities, virtually all women, and apparently anyone else who is not as successful as he is, has no business leading this nation. He has no business being President. My Lord, the Founding Fathers must all be spinning in their graves. And yes, I know that the early days of the Founding Fathers were just as acrimonious today’s headlines. But they were fighting over desperately important matters like federalism versus states’ rights—adult talk, for the grown-up table. We were not talking in the public forum about whether we should elect to the highest office of the land a man who talks about his penis size at a presidential debate, and who encourages his followers to pummel those who disagree with him. And if any of you Troglodytic Trump supporters are talking back to this letter as you read it, muttering “You could say things every bit as bad about Hillary”, then I encourage you, sit down and pen that epistle. Go for it. Get it all out of your system. That would require, of course, that you can in fact write a cogent sentence.
That’s about it.
And so—as I promised--there is not a great deal in this open letter to Donald Trump that is original.
No revelations or bombshells.
But I don’t care about that. Sometimes it is important not to say something different.
Sometimes it is important to echo the crowd, to corroborate your colleagues, and to generally be part of a groundswell of protest that relentlessly lists the sins and failings and evil agendas of a man who dares to aspire to lead this great country. The Hallelujah Chorus is not rendered great because all of the singers are crooning a different tune, and when the distinct individuals gathered at a funeral put aside their personalities to collectively lose themselves in a recitation of the 23rd Psalm, it is that very act of unification that gives Psalm 23 its power, and, by proxy, the grieving souls new strength. And in the hours following the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, when members of Congress—from both sides of the aisle, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—joined hands in signing” God Bless America”, it was poignantly reassuring that all those bickering brokers of labyrinthine laws and devious deals were, for one shining moment, putting aside their differences and lifting their voices in affirmation of this one, profoundly crucial unifying belief. It is the land that we love. It is our home sweet home. We put aside our bickering to pray.
And that, my friends, gives me an idea. Many articles have been written listing their litanies of grievances against The Donald, and the horrific lapses in decency committed by The Drumph, but this is perhaps once of the first penned since he has been given the dubious title of President-Erect. Sorry. Elect.
So maybe this is the one thing that we can all agree on … all Democrats, all Independents, and any Republicans who have a shred of the old guard in them—Republicans like George Will and Peggy Noonan—perhaps we can all gather one of these days on the Capitol steps, and sing a new kind of anthem. One about patriotism, and loyalty, and learning from the mistakes of our collective past. America has survived many wars, and will survive many more.
The question now is, how do we survive this second Civil War?
************
To be sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
My eyes have watched in horror as the man announced his run
And it seemed for just a moment that the clouds blocked out the sun
As he hurled insults at Mexicans, I knew he’d just begun…
It seemed all hope was gone
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, his lies have just begun…..
As the months flew by each day would bring a new and sickening twist
There were riots, punches, mocking, threats as Donald grew more pissed
And the candidates who challenged him dropped slowly off the list
While Trump was pure Teflon..…
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah the joke’s no longer fun…..
We all watched the grand convention with a hope for some relief
But the count was killed and votes were stolen as though by a thief
But the worst was yet to come when Trump would mock a parent’s grief
God Bless You, Captain Khan…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, he mocked the Khan’s dead son
Then Hilary and Donald were both vying for the prize
But his followers seemed not to care about his endless lies
Donald taught them how to hit and hate and thoroughly despise
All decency was gone…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, It’s time to turn and run….
The women came, they all edged forward, timid and afraid
But the Donald just denied and mocked the charges that they made
In the end it was Melania who suffered and who paid
For the Tangerine Don Juan…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, I pity Donald’s son.
On the night of the election we were all glued to the news
Then the shock set in and every soul was thoroughly confused.
Now he’ll be the country’s president, and we must sing the blues--
Or write a different song…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Why’d you let the Trumpman fool ya?
Holy Crap and Hallelujah, the Tangerine Man won
Republicans and Democrats, both parties finally see
Trump is wrong for our great country, now we finally agree
As they reach across the aisle, there is hope for you and me,
While God is Marching On…
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Our God is Marching on.
We could go on and on, but this list and litany of racist horror stories is everywhere. Even on the campaign trail, Donald, you were racism personified. You retweeted a message from @WhiteGenocideTM that contained phony crime statistics. And Donald, you and your White Supremacist cohorts didn’t just get it wrong. You got it BIGLY wrong. The following comes direct from the FBI. (Whom we know, from events just pre-election, is hardly anti-Trump.) You said the percentage of White people killed by other Whites was a mere 16 percent. That’s a lie. Whites kill each other at a rate of 82.4 percent. You got it wrong by 66.4 percent, in a pathetic attempt to mask the truth about how many white thugs there are out there in the world—many of whom no doubt voted for you. And, keeping the Nazi drumbeat going, you Tweeted that Blacks kill Whites at a rate of 81 percent. Lie, lie, lie. Blacks kill Whites at a rate of a mere 14.8 percent. Again, a HYUGE error, off by 66.2 percent—made on purpose no doubt, in an attempt to make Blacks look like violent thugs en masse. There is no such evidence of that, anywhere. At all.
You condoned the beating of a black protestor at one of your rallies. "Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” is what you said. We understand if your henchmen want to escort him from your rally. But your suggestion of employing physical brutality is typical of you—hatred and violence are your stock in trade.
And when you finally did “reach out” at another rally, in some bizarre attempt at inclusion, it was with a condescension that makes a decent person’s skin crawl. At a stop in California, you pointed to a black man and said, "Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him," Trump said. "Are you the greatest?" What Donald, just the one? It is hard to hear that without flashing back to Paula Deen, pulling one of her Negro employees from backstage, claiming him as a dear friend, and pointing out “he’s as black as this board!”
And you clearly hate people from the Middle East. In your eyes, they are all terrorists. With folks from the Middle East comprising between 3 and 4 percent of the population, that means that in an average crowd of Americans, you automatically hate one out of thirty people just because they don’t look Scottish, like your mom. (Who was an immigrant by the way, Donald. A poor immigrant. Dare I say it—a loser? It seems too weird to call her a rapist or a drug dealer.) Or maybe you hate people from the Middle East because they don’t worship the same God you do. Although, for what it is worth, I sure as hell hope that my God is not the same as your God, for they seem to be saying very, very, very different things.
You clearly are not a fan of the Jewish people. There was your famous Tweet of Hillary Clinton on a Star of David atop a pile of cash. Blatantly anti-Semitic, Donald. And when your campaign decided to delete the Tweet, you objected. More anti-Semitism? You thought it was cool to quote the anti-Semite Benito Mussolini. You had your typical lame justification—you said it was “a good quote.” Over two thousand years of wisdom pumped into the universe by the best and the brightest, and your Bartlett’s Quotations fell open to Il Duce. Il Duce, who was the driving force behind ‘Leggi Razziali’ (aka, “The Race Laws”, “A Manifesto of Race”), which is basically a fan letter to the author of Mein Kempf, and the beginning of the end for Jews in Italy. Your camp later Tweeted a bunch of Nazi soldiers superimposed over an American flag next to your big orange face. And when the KKK endorsed you, you took your sweet time in distancing yourself from them. As with all the groups you hate, I could go on and on with examples.
And what about poor people? Donald, you made your opinion of poor people very clear, in a New York Times story by Maureen Dowd. “My entire life, I’ve watched politicians bragging about how poor they are, how they came from nothing, how poor their parents and grandparents were. And I said to myself, if they can stay so poor for so many generations, maybe this isn’t the kind of person we want to be electing to higher office. How smart can they be? They’re morons.” Well, Donald, according to everybody from the U.S. Census Bureau to the Pew research center, about 29 percent of Americans are either poor or low-income. I am going out on a limb here, believing that someone doesn’t actually have to be living below the poverty line for you to feel contempt for them—how did you so eloquently put it—for them to be “morons”. So that means that you think that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the population of the United States are “morons”. Thanks, Donald. You know, since the great crash of 2009, when I lost every penny of equity in my home, I basically fit into that group. Yes, I have worked very hard since that time, and yes, I have a plan that is on course. But I am in that class of people. A lower income loser. I got my B.A. at George Mason (awarded “Outstanding Senior of the Year”, my Masters at the American University, and did my doctoral work at the University of Maryland, but to you I am “a moron.” Thanks, Donald.
Oh, and while we are on the subject of “morons”, I think it is worth comparing the average teacher’s salary with the magic number that makes somebody “low income”. If a teacher and spouse dare to have two children—imagine that, someone who devotes their life to teaching wanting to have two children of their own—then yes, statistically, their salary puts them smack in the lower income level—a number in the mid-40’s. Roughly 45,000. That’s what we pay them. And they are morons for making such a moronic life choice, Donald? Or perhaps we are the morons, because that’s all we can see they are worth.
And then, of course, there is the now famous incident of Trump mocking and imitating a reporter with a disability. Serge Kovaleski, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, suffers from arthrogryposis. This is terrifying, not just because it is an assault upon anybody and everybody with a sense of human decency, but because it gives an eerie glimpse into how Trump views people with disabilities. It must be their fault. It must be a weakness. They must be “Losers”. And the bald fact is according to all the institutions who track that sort of thing—the Census Bureau, CDC, etcetera—one in five Americans lives with a disability. So on the basis of that alone, Trump thinks another 20 percent of the country are “Losers”. And suitable to be mocked. But here is the thing, Donald: those people have opinions, many of them very wise and informed opinions. If a blind person dared to criticize you, would you do a hilarious impression of a that person tapping his cane around, searching for the next safe step? Would that get a rise from your crowd? What about a person with muscular dystrophy? Let’s watch you imitate their walk. That’s the kind of cruel stunt that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap and my butt smacked when I was a kid. In fact, I don’t know any decent kid on the playground past the age of ten who would try something so offensive. Anybody who did something like that, back in the day, we all just knew was going to grow up to be an a**hole.
Lastly, of course, there is Trump’s ubiquitous and never ending misogyny. We don’t care if you don’t like some of us ladies, Donald, but for Chrissake, take on our opinions, our thoughts, our plans, our platforms. To judge us by our appearance is—well, I don’t really know if it can be described in words, just how utterly offensive that is to us. I would really, truly love to get inside the brains of the women who voted for you, and find out what they were thinking … how they could elect as President a man who clearly has contempt for half of the citizenry of this great nation. I cannot believe I am saying this, but I hope—I truly hope, women-for-Trump, that your daughters confront you relentlessly and ruthlessly when they are old enough to understand what you did. I hope they give you a damnably hard time, and rebel against you. And this is not because I wish to see acrimony and divisiveness within a family, but because that appalled confrontation from the next generation of young women is the only way I know there can be any hope for this country. And right now, I place the future of this country above the well-being of your family—at least in terms of peace around your dinner table.
Let’s take a moment to look at Donald’s stance on pro-choice. Trump has actually stated that women who have abortions should be punished. He makes no distinction (as persons such as myself do), that an abortion within the first couple of months of pregnancy is a mighty different proposition than late term abortion. He doesn’t care if it is your daughter who is pregnant. No, just, they should be punished. That’s Trump’s view. This viewpoint is rendered particularly repulsive, given his self-admitted history of pushing himself on women sexually. Apparently, he doesn’t mind impregnating them. Just giving them the right to do something about it.
Once more, for old times, here it is: You have called women Fat. Slob. Pig. Disgusting animal. You said that nobody would vote for Carly Fiorina because of her face. Are you serious, Donald? Are you serious? Do you really think American voters are that superficial? And Donald, have you looked in the mirror? You have a mouth too small for your face, lips that look like they were dropped in by CGI effect. You have raccoon eyes because nobody in your circle, even your wife, will tell you how to get a decent fake tan. And I am not even going to start with the Tangerine jokes or hair mockery.
But back to what you think about women. When The New York Times columnist Gail Collins dared to criticize you, you mailed her article back to her with “FACE OF A DOG” scrawled across her picture.
And there was the comment you made in a 1991 Esquire Magazine interview: "You know, it doesn't really matter what [they] write as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass."
And then there was the 1992 New York Magazine interview when you said, you actually said about women, “You have to treat them like shit.”
And your disrespect is not reserved just for your enemies or strangers: You said of Ivana: “I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?” And then there’s the creep factor you just had to inject: you joked that you would date your daughter, if you could. Beyond disgusting. And then, there was the comment that made our collective pieholes drop open in shocked disbelief: When Robin Leach asked you and Marla what parts of you and your wife you could see in your precious newborn baby, you had to reference your baby’s breasts. And their growth potential…
And of course there was the time you kept a picture of your secretary in your desk drawer; you thought she looked chubby in the photo. You would look at it when you got annoyed with her. You liked how that act served to humiliate her. She claims the story is true, you denied it. You know what, Donald? I am going with her word. Just as I am going with the testimonies of all the women who claim you sexually assaulted them. This is because I, like millions of other horrified citizens, heard you not only admit to it, but brag about it. Just as you brag about walking through the dressing room of your teenage beauty pageant and ogling the girls as they change clothes and stand around semi-naked.
In the words of Detroit Free Press journalist Brian Dickerson, “If your sons bragged about their sexual prowess or intellectual superiority the way Trump does, you’d tell them to put a sock in it. If any man spoke about your wives or daughters the way Trump speaks about my female colleagues in the press, you’d punch his lights out.” In my words: Mr. Trump, you have a very barely contained disdain—perhaps hatred, even—for half of the population of this country. Yes. I believe that. Do you need to hear it again? Mr. Trump, you have a very barely contained disdain—perhaps hatred, even—for half of the population of this country. Because half of us are women, and, to paraphrase the premise of an old Seinfeld episode, most of us are not “10”s. Most of us are not even “8”s. We are just hard working mothers and career women and professionals and volunteers who realized long, long ago that an excessive obsession with one’s personal appearance represents a kind of narcissism that is both unnecessary and offensive. We put on clean clothes, a dab of lipstick, a squirt of imposter perfume, and hope that our smile will make us attractive to a world that we are desperately doing our part to save. Shame on you, Mr. Trump, for the way you treat the gender that has given birth to every single one of your twisted supporters. What the hell would your own mother think of you, I wonder? I mean, if you could really, really hear what she thought of what you have been saying and doing for the last year.
And stop letting your teenage daughter sit provocatively on your lap when you pose for pictures atop a statue of two parrots fornicating, as she lovingly cradles her face in your hand. I say this because, since Melania has aged out (if past statistics are any indicator), you may well have a new hot young wife, and then, soon to follow, a hot young teenage daughter. Please, Donald, do your best to keep your hands off of her, too.
And what if someone is successful enough to own their own business? Do you respect them then, Donald? Nope. Here are some examples of just how deeply you hold in contempt the very hard-working businessman. (Sources not cited here, since these incidents are ubiquitous on the web, and corroborated by court records.)
Michael Diehl of Freehold Music Center recalls that he sold you eight Yamaha grand pianos for 100,000 dollars. You wouldn’t pay, and forced Diehl to settle for 70 cents on the dollar. Sign maker Eric Silverstein remembers working on the Trump Plaza signage, and asking you, The Donald, to pay the agreed upon 800,000 dollars. You kept refusing, then forced Silverstein to settle for one third of what you had promised. (“Promise”: look up this important word in the dictionary, Donald. If you don’t have a dictionary, now would be a good time to buy one. It is connected, in principle, to the idea of taking an “Oath of Office”.) A sucker who owned a store called the Paint Spot never got paid his 34,000; but you blew that one. The Donald was so blatant in his rip-off tactics that you ended up owing Paint Spot owner 300,000 in legal fees. Ha ha. Curiously, that was the same amount—34,000--that you stiffed the owner of Classic Chandeliers. Trump, you bought three huge, probably gaudy chandeliers, a bunch of bulbs, and then didn’t pay the amount agreed.
The fiberglass company that made the faux minarets and domes for the Taj Mahal was owed 3 million dollars. From you, Donald. The fiberglass factory crew had been run ragged, trying to finish the pieces while dealing with your constantly changing demands. They worked in three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You kept refusing to pay, then settled for 33 cents on the dollar.
Back in 1990, sixty struggling union men had to be benched from working on the Taj Mahal because you kept refusing to pay them, even after the Taj Mahal was open and thriving. Oh, and thanks to you, Donald, they all lost their medical insurance and their pensions. At the time they were laid off, just after the Taj opened, you owed 253 contractors who were employing thousands of people a whopping 70 million dollars. They ended up getting 50 cents on the dollar.
Atlantic City’s Mayor is no fan of yours. He has stated publicly, “The fact is, there were a lot of small contractors and vendors who got hurt, who went out of business because Trump did not pay contracts on time.”
Patricia Paone’s memory was long, and Donald, when you first started your campaign, she saw your face on TV and could only think of the nightmare that you caused her family when you refused to pay her late husband the 1.2 million dollars you owed for Taj Mahal paving stones. She died shortly after seeing The Donald on TV.
And if someone doesn’t own their own business, and is stoopid enough to be hired by you, then they deserve to be stiffed, right? You didn’t pay 300 employees at your Los Angeles golf club; you eventually settled the class action lawsuit for 475,000. Who knows what you really owed them, before settling. A dishwasher sued you because you made him work time and a half, but didn’t write it in your books. You settled for 7,500. Given your propensity for settling for pennies on the dollar, and the fact that the guy cannot have had much of a legal team to fight you, one wonders what you really owed him. Maybe 20,000 grand? How was the guy supposed to live? And at the Trump Miami resort, 48 servers had to sue to get paid when you made them work shifts as long as 20 hours during Passover. Really, Donald? You don’t even pay waiters their paltry little pay?
And Donald. Some of your cheap-skatedness is just plain hilarious. There was the detective you hired to follow the detective that your wife Ivana hired to get proof of the affair you were having with Marla Maples. He got you the proof. He just never got paid for it. Sheesh.
Before we leave this subtopic regarding all the businesses and struggling workers that Donald Trump has ripped off, it is worth noting a bit of karma. Before I go into this story, I am reminded of a story out of ancient Rome. And I am not the only one seeing the similarities. San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, at the end of a passionate and insightful rant, said, of Trump’s election …“We are Rome”. Chilling words, rendered even more frightening because of their prescient ring of truth.
Here is my Roman story. It is the true tale of a famous torture device, conceived of and created by a one Perillos of Athens, for Phalaris, the Tyrant of Akragas, Sicily. This gorgeous torture device, known as The Brazen Bull, was a large hollow golden bull in which a victim was placed, via hinged door, then slowly burned alive, while a fire beneath the bull slow cooked the poor prisoner. The “art” of the bull was the demonic way in which the screams of the tortured soul worked their way through a series of tubes in the bull’s head, and then the human screams came out through the bull’s mouth in such a way that it really did sound like a bull bellowing. But here is the funny part. First, it was used to torture the unfortunates who had offended the tyrant Phalaris. Then, the inventor of the bull found himself thrown in the bull and roasted. Then, when the tyrant ruler was overthrown, he ended up in the bull, being roasted alive. For some reason, that is the story I flashed on when I read about the last group of people that Trump ripped off, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the decades; HIS OWN LAWYERS. Ha!
(And yes, you could say that my Roman analogy is a bit of hyperbole, comparing ripping off your lawyers to burning a human being alive in the infamous Brazen Bull.
Trump, after all, does not own a solid gold life sized bull in which to roast his enemies slowly to death.
Not yet.
*************
So there you have it. A long, scary, depressing list of just some of the groups which Donald Trump clearly holds in contempt. The list is not complete though; I think we all understand that.
Of course, you would have to be an Uber Statistician (most of whom, oddly enough, are hiding out in caves, after the Hyuuge miscalculation of Election Night), to figure out statistically exactly how many Americans Trump hates, because the above categories obviously cross over. There are women who are black. There are people from the Middle East who are poor. Hey, here is an example: Donald Trump called Charles Krauthammer a LOSER. Does Donald Trump hate fellow party member Charles Krauthammer because he had the audacity to criticize Mr. Trump? Or because he is a Jew? Or, maybe, maybe it is because Charles Krauthammer is a big enough loser to have gotten himself in a wheelchair for life? In fact, now that I think about it, Chuckie boy is a triple threat loser. Criticized Trump. Jew. Crippled. Loooser.
Mr. Trump, a man who disparages people from other races, other cultures, people with disabilities, virtually all women, and apparently anyone else who is not as successful as he is, has no business leading this nation. He has no business being President. My Lord, the Founding Fathers must all be spinning in their graves. And yes, I know that the early days of the Founding Fathers were just as acrimonious today’s headlines. But they were fighting over desperately important matters like federalism versus states’ rights—adult talk, for the grown-up table. We were not talking in the public forum about whether we should elect to the highest office of the land a man who talks about his penis size at a presidential debate, and who encourages his followers to pummel those who disagree with him. And if any of you Troglodytic Trump supporters are talking back to this letter as you read it, muttering “You could say things every bit as bad about Hillary”, then I encourage you, sit down and pen that epistle. Go for it. Get it all out of your system. That would require, of course, that you can in fact write a cogent sentence.
That’s about it.
And so—as I promised--there is not a great deal in this open letter to Donald Trump that is original.
No revelations or bombshells.
But I don’t care about that. Sometimes it is important not to say something different.
Sometimes it is important to echo the crowd, to corroborate your colleagues, and to generally be part of a groundswell of protest that relentlessly lists the sins and failings and evil agendas of a man who dares to aspire to lead this great country. The Hallelujah Chorus is not rendered great because all of the singers are crooning a different tune, and when the distinct individuals gathered at a funeral put aside their personalities to collectively lose themselves in a recitation of the 23rd Psalm, it is that very act of unification that gives Psalm 23 its power, and, by proxy, the grieving souls new strength. And in the hours following the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, when members of Congress—from both sides of the aisle, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—joined hands in signing” God Bless America”, it was poignantly reassuring that all those bickering brokers of labyrinthine laws and devious deals were, for one shining moment, putting aside their differences and lifting their voices in affirmation of this one, profoundly crucial unifying belief. It is the land that we love. It is our home sweet home. We put aside our bickering to pray.
And that, my friends, gives me an idea. Many articles have been written listing their litanies of grievances against The Donald, and the horrific lapses in decency committed by The Drumph, but this is perhaps once of the first penned since he has been given the dubious title of President-Erect. Sorry. Elect.
So maybe this is the one thing that we can all agree on … all Democrats, all Independents, and any Republicans who have a shred of the old guard in them—Republicans like George Will and Peggy Noonan—perhaps we can all gather one of these days on the Capitol steps, and sing a new kind of anthem. One about patriotism, and loyalty, and learning from the mistakes of our collective past. America has survived many wars, and will survive many more.
The question now is, how do we survive this second Civil War?
************
To be sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
My eyes have watched in horror as the man announced his run
And it seemed for just a moment that the clouds blocked out the sun
As he hurled insults at Mexicans, I knew he’d just begun…
It seemed all hope was gone
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, his lies have just begun…..
As the months flew by each day would bring a new and sickening twist
There were riots, punches, mocking, threats as Donald grew more pissed
And the candidates who challenged him dropped slowly off the list
While Trump was pure Teflon..…
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah the joke’s no longer fun…..
We all watched the grand convention with a hope for some relief
But the count was killed and votes were stolen as though by a thief
But the worst was yet to come when Trump would mock a parent’s grief
God Bless You, Captain Khan…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, he mocked the Khan’s dead son
Then Hilary and Donald were both vying for the prize
But his followers seemed not to care about his endless lies
Donald taught them how to hit and hate and thoroughly despise
All decency was gone…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, It’s time to turn and run….
The women came, they all edged forward, timid and afraid
But the Donald just denied and mocked the charges that they made
In the end it was Melania who suffered and who paid
For the Tangerine Don Juan…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Don’t you let the Trumpman fool ya
Glory Glory Hallelujah, I pity Donald’s son.
On the night of the election we were all glued to the news
Then the shock set in and every soul was thoroughly confused.
Now he’ll be the country’s president, and we must sing the blues--
Or write a different song…..
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Why’d you let the Trumpman fool ya?
Holy Crap and Hallelujah, the Tangerine Man won
Republicans and Democrats, both parties finally see
Trump is wrong for our great country, now we finally agree
As they reach across the aisle, there is hope for you and me,
While God is Marching On…
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Glory Glory Hallelujah
Our God is Marching on.
RSS Feed