Donald trrump

For all that progressives hate Donald Trump’s policies, his tax cuts and his travel bans, nothing has been more outrageous to them than his personality: his boorishness; his bullying; his unshakeable satisfaction with his white, male, wealthy self. That’s why Democratic candidates have approached the next presidential election with the single-minded purpose of not being Donald Trump. Their policies are not like his, but more significantly they are not like him. If he is insulting they are civil. If he is obnoxious they are respectful. If he is reactionary they are progressive. If he is uncaring they are empathetic.The problem, though, as these candidates will learn, is that you cannot just be not-Trump. You must be something else.

Poor Donald Trump. Even Mar-a-Lago may not provide much of a refuge from his cares now that it has been exposed as a nest of Chinese spies. Trump, who campaigned against Hillary Clinton for jeopardizing national security with her private email server, makes her look like a piker when it comes to keep state secrets. Come one, come all. Mar-a-Lago is open to the highest bidder with access to the president as the highest prize. And to think that Americans were once scandalized that Bill Clinton was renting out the Lincoln bedroom for campaign contributions. Trump’s pocketing the proceeds personally. For him it’s always and only about the bottom line.

Harold Wilson was right that ‘a week is a long time in politics.’ But, hey, watching the president in Grand Rapids the other night, and taking a gander at some recent polls, I am willing to ascend pretty high up the old backyard oak, shimmy along a well placed branch and say, with confidence if not quite certainty, that Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election, and win handily. But, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chris Matthews, James Comey, John Brennan, Cher, CNN, those pathetic females on The View, college professors across the country, George Conway, Maxine Waters, Mad Max Boot, Twitter-addled Bill Kristol and writers for his novelty web site The Bulsomething all tell me that’s impossible. A formidable phalanx of contrary opinion.

I am a big critic of President Donald Trump. Really, a big one. I think Trump has done more to divide America than any president in my lifetime. His Twitter feed is a constant stream of invective against his enemies, real and imagined. He seems to find fissure points within our culture and seize upon them in order to polarize the country for political gain. His rhetoric against illegal Hispanic immigrants is toxic, if not sometimes outright racist. He has attempted to undermine our institutions, most clearly with his attacks on the press as the enemy of the people. He seems more happy rhetorically kicking our allies in Canada and Germany than our adversaries in North Korea and China. He is quite obviously a pathological liar.

The fight between George Conway and Donald Trump is getting nutty. ‘You. Are. Nuts.’, Conway tweeted this morning about the commander-in-chief who also happens to be the employer of his wife, Kellyanne, Trump’s unflinching defender. Earlier this morning, the president tweeted, ‘George Conway, often referred to as Mr Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!’ https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1108341534137692160 If anything, Conway should feel flattered.

Melania wore white today for St. Patrick’s Day services, but her husband was not in a peaceful mood. He came out swinging today against the shade of John McCain. Already peeved by a rerun of Saturday Night Live that portrayed him with disapprobation, Trump unloaded on his longtime nemesis in no uncertain terms. McCain may have died in August 2018, but to Trump his example apparently remains a living rebuke. So he had to disparage him. McCain’s marks at the Naval Academy were so lousy that he was ‘last in his class,’ according to Trump on — what else? — Twitter.

If the modern left has an original sin, it’s redefining language. Much of the craziness of the culture wars and the idiocy of identity politics can be boiled down to one critical problem: we have lost the ability to talk to one another because we have lost our shared language. When one group of people uses critical words like ‘violence,’ and ‘safety,’ in ways that do not represent the historic meaning of these words, conversation breaks down. This time, it’s not the left, but the right, that is guilty of redefining language and using that new fangled definition to shut down and destroy the fabric of our national debate.

Donald Trump really likes to brag about his brains. To listen to him, he has kind of a supercomputer whirring away there beneath the plume of iridescent hair. He can do anything better than anyone else, whether it’s spending a few hours learning about nuclear strategy or winning trade wars. Besides, his uncle taught at MIT, which means that the Trump gene pool couldn’t be more robust: ‘My two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.’ For good measure, Trump noted that his ability to win the presidency on his first attempt ‘would qualify as not smart, but genius... and a very stable genius at that!’ Well, well, well. Now it turns out that Trump went to great lengths to suppress his high school transcripts.

The Senate will pass a resolution to disapprove President Donald Trump’s declaration of an emergency on the border, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday. Fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul became the fourth Republican to join 47 Senate Democrats in support of a House-passed disapproval resolution, virtually ensuring that the measure will reach Trump’s desk. It is expected that when the measure reaches him, President Trump will exercise his veto for the first time. To override a presidential veto, the measure would need to secure two-thirds support in both bodies of Congress – an extremely high bar to reach. The House fell 40 votes short of two-thirds passage on the measure last week.

Remember the Cretan liar paradox? Epimenides the Cretan says ‘All Cretans are liars.’ But if it is true that all Cretans are liars, then his statement must be false. But if it is false, then Epimenides is telling the truth. So, Epimenides is both truthful and a liar. Ouch. There are solutions to this paradox—for example, to say that ‘all Cretans are liars’ does not entail that they all lie all the time — but what are we to make of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, emphasis on the word ‘former’? Cohen is being measured for his orange jumpsuit in preparation for his sojourn in the Big House as a guest of the government. His tort? Lying to Congress.

Is Donald Trump spacing out? Yesterday he signed Space Policy Directive-4, which orders the Pentagon to establish a Space Force within the US Air Force. Not quite the separate, sixth branch of the military that he touted back in June 2018, but whatever. Trump is riding high, so to speak. He may riding even higher if the Mueller inquiry turns out to be a bust, at least when it comes to proving that Trump was actively colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign. To be sure, there are no indications that Trump is feeling secure.

Ever the showman, Donald Trump did something during his press conference that was another presidential first. He broke into song in the middle of his soliloquy about the need for a border wall. In a refrain that was sure to send shivers down the spines of those who see him as an aspiring tyrant, Trump mocked the judicial system in a sing-song voice, declaring that while he might experience a few bumps in the rutted constitutional road, victory at the hands of the Supreme Court was a foregone conclusion. It would be the Muslim ban all over again. Not everyone was in harmony with Trump. Perhaps the most notable dissenter is Ann Coulter. Trump threw shade at her during his press conference. Rush Limbaugh is a tireless speaker. Tucker Carlson is a fine fellow. And Coulter?

It’s classic Trump. A president who knows the virtues of suspense is not going to render a final verdict on the congressional spending deal – which Fox News host Sean Hannity deemed ‘garbage’ – until the very last moment, trying to make it look as though he’s the Decider, when he really has little choice about whether to sign off on it. El Paso, where he ranted last night about the need to finish a wall he never even started, was his personal Alamo.After the 35-day government shutdown, which tanked his favorability ratings, Trump can hardly afford to create déjà vu all over again with a fresh one.