Six Random Trumpisms

Truth, and Making Democracy Vulnerable in the US

I know, I know. Most don’t like the incessant Trump regurgitation, as it always results in a feeling of despair, of wondering if we are really seeing this unfolding in front of us. But we can’t duck it, as the outcome for the free world, for democracy of the continued presence of Donald Trump and his lies will be seriously negative. So I have chosen some random “Trumpisms” or scenarios from many possibilities as a written collage for you to munch on, and to support my theme of democracy’s vulnerability. It’s ironic that I have posted this on the 80th anniversary of one the greatest moments of the free democratic world, D-Day, when the allies pushed Hitler’s armies off the beaches of France leading to the overthrow of the Nazi regime the following spring.

1. His outburst at a rally in March, which seems desperate: 

“If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath…for the country.” This is actually what Trump said March 17 at a rally outside the Daytona International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio. He also warned that if he didn’t win, ”I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” In the rest of his speech he repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which have been utterly discredited. 

He praised the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol – calling them “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots,” commending their spirit, and promising to help them if elected in November. He cast migrants as threats to American citizens – claiming without evidence that other countries were emptying their prisons of “young people” and sending them across the border. ”I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases,’ he said. “They’re not people, in my opinion.” He later referred to them as “animals.” Even Trump’s own former VP, Mike Pence, had enough integrity to refuse to endorse Trump. If other current and former Republican officials had an ounce of integrity, they would do the same. 

2. His reorganized Republican National Committee: 

Agreeing to Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen has become a kind of litmus test for employment, just as it’s become a litmus test for almost every Republican running for public office. A political party that baselessly denies the outcome of an election has no legitimate claim to be “represented” in the media. I believe the entire MAGA Republican Party is now in a place no one with a shred of integrity should want to be. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, by the way is the RNCs co-chair.

3. His trials; the first of six has come to a close and it indicates how he will behave in the future: 

First of all, a New York jury found Trump guilty of all 34 counts related to falsifying business records in the hush-money trial against him. The news makes him the first former US president convicted of a crime. Trump is now a felon. His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his National Security Adviser, his Trade Advisor, his Foreign Policy Adviser, his campaign fixer, and his company CFO. They’re all felons. 

Diane Francis in her June 3 column in the Financial Post did have one positive outcome. She said that his conviction last week proves that their legal system remains intact. The fact that a rich, influential former president and powerful billionaire was held to account by a jury of his peers, shows that the rule of law is alive (and well?) in the United States.

She said “New Yorkers either celebrated the verdict or rolled their eyes. There were no giant crowds of MAGA hats outside the courthouse sitting vigil. This is because the city has witnessed decades of Trump’s grandstanding, scandals, bankruptcies and promotions for his overpriced, gaudy real estate developments. Trump has been described as a ‘conman’ by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, billionaire George Soros and Sen. Mitt Romney. In New York, Trump is a punchline.”

It said a lot that his wife was not at the trial supporting him. As the entertainment columnist for the Toronto Star wrote May 28, Melania “wanted the Hermès bags, not the emotional baggage that comes with being the plus-one for the worst president in American history. It’s why she has now pulled a Waldo, both in court and on the campaign trail. She could be defending her husband and amplifying his ‘witch hunt’ and ‘human scum’ insanity. Instead, she is hundreds of miles away.”

During the trial, Judge Juan Merchan found Trump in contempt of court for attacking witnesses and jurors so he fined Trump $1,000 per offence, required him to take down the nine social media posts at the heart of the decision, and warned him that future violations could bring jail time. Trump’s team deleted the social media posts. For the first time in history, a former U.S. president has been found in contempt of court.

Trump was under a gag order and couldn’t attack people involved in the case the way he wants to, so his workaround was to summon his army of puppets to do his bidding. As American comedian Seth Myers said the problem is character witnesses should be people of high character, not people of whom you would say ‘He’s a real character.’” “If you’re on trial for a criminal charge where character is central to the case, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert aren’t exactly the role models you want with you in the room. That’s like if O.J.’s buddies at his trial were Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter.”

George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week took a broad view, “Until now, no American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse.”

Could this prosecution help Trump’s chances of winning back the White House? As the insurrection of January 6th 2021 ought to have made clear, that is a greater hazard to the rule of law than any fraudulent book-keeping. He was waning as a political force before Mr Bragg charged him in April 2023. The indictment did put Trump back in the spotlight, and even his Republican critics, including his opponents for the nomination, fell into line, supporting his claims of victimization. It’s a terrible time for morality in the US.

4. His app is a reflection of the man – detached from fundamentals: 

This is on top of the public offering of the Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind the Truth Social app, sending the stock upward 16%. That surge would value the company at more than $7 billion, although in the first nine months of last year it had only about $3 million in sales and lost nearly $50 million. It seems that the $7 billion valuation is completely detached from any sort of fundamentals. 

As has been observed, buying stock in the company is more of a political movement or just a speculative stock driven by social media. (BTW, Trump owns 65% of the shares in the company.) I predict the volatility will continue in the short term (prices have fluctuated greatly; it has swung from a high of $79.38 per share to its lowest close of $22.84 – March 26 to April 16) before the stock eventually collapses in the long term. For what it’s worth, I also believe in a similar ignoble ending for its owner.

5. His Bible, for Christ’s sake! 

He came up with a dandy in March: hawking Bibles for $59.99, plus shipping and handling, with a video message saying “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe we need to bring  them back…. That’s why our country’s going haywire—we’ve lost religion in our country.”  He’s calling it the “God Bless the USA Bible” and it includes the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights (both of which are already in the public domain). As comedian Jimmy Fallon said, “It’s like if Mike Pence was selling copies of ‘50 Shades of Grey.’” He’s also been hawking gold (chocolate) bars, wines, superhero NFTs, and “Never Surrender” sneakers, for $399 a pair. None of these cons will do any better than Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Plaza, Trump Marina, or the Trump Taj Mahal.

6. His role in the federal debt (this is for those die-hards who think his economic credentials are sound): 

The major reason for the huge US federal debt is Trump’s (and George W. Bush’s) tax cuts, which together added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment. That’s more than the entire defence budget. (The US will spend about $870 billion, or 3.1% of GDP on interest payments on the debt.) They’re responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the national debt to the economy since 2001. Excluding the one-time costs of responding to Covid-19 and the Great Recession, the Bush and Trump tax cuts account for more than 90% of the increase in the debt ratio. (Most of the benefits of those tax cuts, not incidentally, have gone to the rich. 65% of the benefits of the Trump tax cuts have gone to the richest fifth of Americans, 22% to the top 1%.) 

Since the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts, though, wealthy Americans have financed the federal government mainly by lending it money and collecting interest payments on those loans – profiting when the rest of the citizens pay them back. So the next time you hear Republicans complain about the federal debt and the swelling interest payments on it, remember that: (1) the debt has grown mainly because of Republican tax cuts, (2) those cuts have mostly benefited the rich, (3) the rich are now the major recipients of interest payments on that debt, (4) and those interest payments are crowding out spending on childcare, elder care, affordable housing, better schools, paid family leave, and everything Americans need. 

And for those who think Biden is bad for the market, yesterday the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, closed at a new record high of 5,354. The Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, also closed at a record high of 17,187. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was also up, but not to a new record. It closed at 38,807. With regard to the economy last year US inflation dropped significantly, unemployment was at a low 3.7%, and the economy grew at an astonishing 4.9% in the last quarter.

Wrap-up: Trump is the “opioid of all opioids”:

I’ll wrap up with observations from three diverse observers. The first, Robert Reich, is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton:

• “The people who inhabit the Trump world live in a more extreme place – where there are no norms, no standards of decency, no common good. There are only opportunities to make money off others and potential dangers of being ripped off by others. It’s a place where there are no relationships, only transactions.” 
• “I sometimes worry that the daily dismal drone of Trump world – the continuous lies and vindictiveness that issue from Trump and his campaign, the dismissive and derogatory ways he deals with and talks about others, the people who testify at his criminal trial about what they have done for or to him and what he has done for or to them – have a subtly corrosive effect on our own world.”
• Trump’s sense of the state of the country is “quite apocalyptic. That’s where Trump’s heart is. That’s where his obsession is.”

The second person is celebrated filmmaker and chronicler of American history Ken Burns who said recently at a university graduation ceremony:

• “Do not be seduced by easy equalization,” he said. “There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives.” He bluntly warned that “the presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids,” a drug meant to alleviate pain whereby “you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, a bigger delusion.” 
• The choice this election, he explained, boils down to this: “There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment, or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.” If we choose former president Donald Trump, then we will see what happens when “the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” There is no third choice.

And finally, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt state in their recent book, How Democracies Die, “American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices.” All Trump tactics.

Bottom line re Trump – lies vs truth and a vulnerable democracy:

A poll released last month highlighted the biggest domestic concern about Trump going forward. Two-thirds of Americans believe violence is a real possibility if he loses the next election. Trump himself does not rule out the possibility of political violence around the election. “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” he says. He claimed on Truth Social that a stolen election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”“He’s in full war mode,” says his former adviser and occasional confidant Stephen Bannon.

Some bright person has said that without facts you can’t have truth, without truth you can’t have trust, and without trust you can’t have democracy. The “Trump factor” is as serious as that – Trump endangers democracy for the United States as well as the free world.

For a link to past blogs I have written on the US and Trump see:

Trump and the United States: Observations From North of the Border (May 12, 2020). See: https://powellponderings.com/trump-and-the-united-states-observations-from-north- of-the-border/

The US Presidential Election: Two Questions from Canada: Main Blog (Oct 30, 2020). https://powellponderings.com/the-us-presidential-election-two-questions-from-canada/ 

Trumpism as a Cult: Post Script to Trump and the U.S. Election (Nov 11, 2020). See: https://powellponderings.com/trumpism-as-a-cult-post-script-to-trump-and-the-u-s- election/

Trump as a “floater” (Nov 23, 2020). See: https://powellponderings.com/trump-as-a- floater/