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Fact Checker: President Trump has made 3,251 false or misleading claims in 497 days


Washington Post
Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, Kelly Meg
8 hrs ago

© Provided by WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post
In the 497 days since he took the oath of office, President Trump has made 3,251 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.
That’s an average of more than 6.5 claims a day.
When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing as the president nears the 500-day mark of his presidency.
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In the month of May, the president made about eight claims a day — including an astonishing 35 claims in his rally in Nashville on May 29.
Among the claims at the rally: He more than tripled the projected savings from repealing Obamacare, and said the individual mandate was unconstitutional even though the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., said it passed constitutional muster. He once again falsely said he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history, when it’s only in eighth place. He inflated the trade deficit with Mexico. And he offered a long list of false statements about immigration, ranging from mischaracterizing the visa lottery to whether his long-promised wall is being built. (It’s not.) He also twisted the words of Democrats, casting words of sympathy for undocumented immigrants as support for MS-13 gang members.
But perhaps the president’s most astonishing claim in May came on the last day of the month, in the form of a tweet.
Initially, the White House had said FBI director James B. Comey was fired May 9, 2017, because of his handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation, on the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
But here’s what Trump himself said to NBC’s Lester Holt just two days after the firing: “I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”
Moreover, the New York Times reported that Trump, in a meeting with Russian officials the day after the firing, said: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Those quotes appeared in a White House document summarizing the meeting.
Our interactive graphic, created with the help of Leslie Shapiro and Kaeti Hinck of The Washington Post’s graphics department, displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. We also catalogued the president’s many flip-flops, since those earn Upside-Down Pinocchios if a politician shifts position on an issue without acknowledging that he or she did so.
Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted at least 122 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency.
Almost one third of Trump’s claims — 931 — relate to economic issues, trade deals or jobs. He frequently takes credit for jobs created before he became president or company decisions with which he had no role. He cites his “incredible success” in terms of job growth, even though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the last five years of Barack Obama’s term. He also loves to cite unemployment figures, even though he repeatedly said during his campaign that the unemployment rate was phony and could not be trusted.
Not surprisingly, immigration is another source of Trump’s misleading claims, now totaling 379. Nineteen times just in the past three months, for instance, the president has falsely claimed his long-promised border wall with Mexico is being built, even though Congress has denied funding for it.
Misleading claims about taxes — now at 299 — are also a common feature of Trump’s speeches. Seventy-five times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history.
But moving up the list quickly are claims about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether people in the Trump campaign were in any way connected to it. The president has made 265 statements about the Russia probe, using hyperbolic claims of “worse than Watergate,” “McCarthyism” and, of course, “witch hunt.” He often asserts that the Democrats colluded with the Russians, even though the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign were victims of Russian activities, as emails were hacked and then released via WikiLeaks.

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Matthew 23


23 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

This is not the  “2 Corinthians” but sums up the Trump Presidency to date. The past 2 years of this administration has the capacity to show us the value of really paying attention to who we elected and have elected to serve all of the American people (this means all of the people who currently reside, work and live in the United States and it’s territories). The current leadership is Congress have been taken hostage by extreme right factions who much in the mindset of the 1600’s era “witch hunters” and religious zealots. it is well to consider how “Religious” are people who purport to believe in God yet deny the religious rights of others using subterfuge and misstatements to justify what “they interpret” as right or wrong. The big push in this administration is to install as many “Conservative” judges as possible in lifetime positions that will push us all into the right of center spiral which would be just as inappropriate as left of center. Our position should be an equalizing mix of center right, center left and center in order to have the best governance. As a Nation we will never all agree on everything but we do need to agree on somethings and be able to have a discussion or at least have representatives who can present our views for discussion. If the elected entity is not representing all of their voting base in as equitable fashion as possible then their time in office should be short. Religion should never be a factor in politics as politics is a part of governing and governing is a state function aka “separation of church and state”.

The Reason For Trump


The reason for Trump is dissatisfaction with Government but the focus needs to be directed at the people we elect on the Congressional level. The myriad of political views which are excited by the election and ongoing tweet governance of DJT (TOTUS, #45 or your preferred description) have proven to be more of a distraction than attraction. The assorted Named groups from Conservative to progressive and the subsets that exist all appear to  have a similar agenda and that is get their way without considering how their way affects everyone else. There is and never will be a perfect solution to governing or lawmaking. The best we can hope for is electing people who are as middle of the road as possible. Our current political campaigns are fueled by huge amounts of money since the Citizens United ruling (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), is a landmark U.S. constitutional law, campaign finance, and corporate law case dealing with regulation of political campaign spending by organizations. The United States Supreme Court held (5–4) on January 21, 2010 that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for communications by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.)  Along with this ruling came the darker side of politics, the name calling, the barely true and unlikely true statements. Essentially the idea became a Goebbels-Hitler method of politics. This method follows any National unrest or upheaval, ours was the early 2000’s financial collapse brought on the greed in the Real Estate debacle of sub prime mortgage lending and the shock to some citizens of Having a person of color being elected President. The long string of anti anything or person of color was proudly pushed by this administration with no regard for the long range effects. All of the showy signing of rollback executive orders with no regard or understanding of the harm that will ensue should give ALL of us a reason to vote for people who will (we hope) fight back on these types of roll backs. The multitude of “buzzwords, sound bites and outright lies” should not be the convincing information to vote for anyone. As voters it is our DUTY to get All of the facts even if we don’t like them. With facts one can make a reasonable choice of who represents us. It is well to remember that Washington has the power to corrupt and once we understand that, we must keep backing the most honest of our lawmakers no matter which party they serve under. It is well to remember that this administration conflate lie with the truth as a matter of course along with the extreme conservatives who interfere with the work and funding of Women’s and low income citizens nutritional health. 

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Former CIA Chief John Brennan: Trump’s ‘Madness Is A Danger To Our National Security’


By John Bowden – 05/08/18 08:17 PM EDT

The Hill

Former CIA Chief John Brennan: Trump’s ‘Madness Is A Danger To Our National Security’
Trump has “undermined global confidence in U.S. commitments” and “alienated our closest allies,” Brennan said.

Former CIA Director John Brennan ripped President Donald Trump over his decision on Tuesday to pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear treaty.
Brennan wrote on Twitter:

Brennan, now an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, made similar comments on the air.
“This is not just foolish, this is dangerous,” he said. “And Mr. Trump has repeatedly misrepresented the facts of the nuclear deal with Iran. He’s basically lied to the American people and lied to the world about what that deal entails.”
Brennan was not alone in criticizing the move. The leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Germany issued a joint statement expressing “regret and concern.” In Iran, one lawmaker said “Trump does not have the mental capacity to deal with issues,” and members of parliament burned a paper version of an American flag and a symbolic copy of the Iran deal.
Brennan has been a constant critic of the president since leaving office on Trump’s 2017 inauguration. In March, he slammed Trump for hailing the Justice Department’s decision to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe just two days before retirement.
“You may scapegoat Andy McCabe,” Brennan wrote at the time. “But you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

Earlier this year, Brennan described himself as “nonpartisan” and told NPR he had respect for both Democratic and Republican presidents he has served. Trump, however, was different.
“I think he is dishonest. He lacks integrity. He has very questionable ethics and morality. And he views the world through a prism of how it’s going to help Donald Trump,” Brennan said. “And I just think that he has not fulfilled the responsibilities of the president of the United States office.”

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Donald Trump is no ‘idiot.’ He’s something worse


By Paul Begala
Updated 11:41 PM ET, Tue May 1, 2018
Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 and was counselor to Clinton in the White House. He was a consultant to Priorities USA Action, the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN)Add the name of White House chief of staff John Kelly to the astonishingly long list of close Trump aides who have reportedly disparaged the President’s intellect, in his case referring to the leader of the free world as “an idiot.” Kelly called the report “total B.S.”
But, like the dog that didn’t bark, Kelly’s statement reveals more by what it does not say. It does not say the President is bright. It does not say he is engaged. It does not say he digs into the impossibly difficult issues that come into the Oval Office each day. And Kelly’s silence on those matters is telling.
Of course, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called President Trump “a [expletive deleted] moron” then heroically refused to participate in the ritualistic dishonest denial. Tillerson told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “I’m not going to get into that kind of petty stuff.”
National security adviser H.R. McMaster, according to a report in BuzzFeed, has called President Trump an “idiot,” a “dope” and a man with the brain of a “kindergartner.”
In Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury” (which ought to be taken with an entire salt lick), the former chief of staff Reince Priebus and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin refer to the President as an “idiot.” Then-chief economic adviser Gary Cohn says Trump is “dumb as [poop],” and is “an idiot surrounded by clowns.” (Note that this was at the time that Cohn himself was one of the people surrounding the President. Does that make him Clarabell?). And billionaire media baron Rupert Murdoch reportedly called President Trump “a [effing] idiot” after a phone call on immigration.

The tumultuous relationship between Trump, Kelly 02:32. I’m beginning to see a pattern here. Those closest to the President think, well, it’s pretty clear what they think.
But I dissent.
I think Donald J. Trump is plenty bright. Not in the intellectual, Mensa-meeting sense, but he has, I think, an undeniable intelligence. He is street smart, savvy, clever. No one can be that conniving and be an idiot.
So why the disconnect? Why do I as an outside analyst see an intelligence that those closest to the President do not? Because there are different kinds of intelligence that are useful for different purposes. The kind of intelligence I believe Trump has is enormously useful if you want to, say, be a politician — even better if you want to be a demagogue.
He has a cynical, innate intelligence for what his base wants to hear. It’s like a divining rod for division, prejudice and stereotyping. His relentless rhetorical repetition (“No collusion, no collusion, no collusion”) is brilliantly designed to tell folks who are predisposed to like him what they want to hear. Forget the objective reality that his campaign chairman, his son and his son-in-law all met with Russians who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government, helping make the case for why Robert Mueller should be investigating potential collusion.
He has an unerring sense for how to command media attention, whether it was assuming a pseudonym and leaking the “Best Sex I Ever Had” myth to the New York tabloids, or dominating water coolers across the country by attacking NFL players who kneel during the National Anthem. It’s like he knows what every bar stool blowhard is about to say before he or she even says it.
His penchant for third-grade nicknames undoubtedly demeans the discourse, and yet otherwise sophisticated people repeat them: “Lyin’ Ted,” “Little Marco,” “Crooked Hillary.” So who’s really the idiot?
The problem is, Trump’s idiosyncratic intelligence, while enough to propel him to the White House, does not serve him well for the job of President. He lacks, by most accounts, the broad curiosity, the policy depth, the healthy skepticism of his own positions, the attention span, the appreciation of nuance, and most of all, the intellectual humility that successful presidents must have.
Serving President Clinton in the West Wing was the highlight of my professional life. He is the smartest person I have ever known — and he never, ever acted like (or felt like) the smartest person in the room. He paired his astonishing intellect with an immeasurable empathy, and the combination brought out the best in everyone around him.
He didn’t merely want to know; he wanted to understand. Then he would integrate, cross-pollinating new information about farm prices with the latest briefing on the French military budget, and seeing the world in subtle hues. It is impossible to imagine any of his top aides speaking as contemptuously of him as President Trump’s do of him. Finally, a word of caution for the Democrats: Don’t attack Donald Trump’s intelligence. Liberals already suffer from the conceit that they are more intelligent, and it can make them insufferable. Plus, in a weird way, calling President Trump stupid excuses his intentional acts of malice. So, don’t call him “moron” or “idiot;” call him what he is: a conniving, corrupt con man, a dangerous, divisive demagogue — and, most sobering of all, the man who carried 30 states in the last election, and may well do it again if Democrats don’t focus their fire more effectively.

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TOTUS- words to live by?


This Old Trump Tweet Is Coming Back to Haunt Him — Because, Well, Just Read It
May 2, 2018 by Victoria Messina
First Published: March 14, 2018
It’s no secret that President Donald Trump isn’t the best at keeping officials in his administration around for very long. Though it feels like he’s been in the Oval Office for centuries, it’s only been a little more than a year — and in that time more than 30 of his staff members have either resigned or been fired from their posts. Notable departures include Sean Spicer, former White House Press Secretary, James Comey, former FBI Director, and Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist — just to jog your memory, since these departures seem to happen so often that they all blend together.
Trump’s most recent staff switch up came when he announced on March 13 that he had fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. As soon he shared the news — on Twitter, naturally — many were quick to call out his alarmingly high turnover rate, and some even resurrected an old tweet from the president in which he slammed Barack Obama for the amount of staff change-ups he made during his time in office. Way back in January 2012, just one day after Obama announced that his second Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, would be stepping down, Trump tweeted, “3 Chief of Staffs in less than 3 years of being President: Part of the reason why @BarackObama can’t manage to pass his agenda.”
Little did he know that six years later he’d wind up in the White House, already on his second Chief of Staff before even reaching his two-year mark, with his third COS, John Kelly, possibly on his way out soon.
We’ve said it before and we’ll likely say it again: for almost all of Trump’s controversial statements or decisions, there’s always a corresponding tweet from his past that totally contradicts it. And everyone on social media isn’t about to let him off the hook for it . . .

Failure


“What we got here is a failure to communicate”. This one of the most remembered lines from “Cool Hand Luke”, we currently have a massive miscommunication or under communication issue across the country. The widely accessible media information is now divided into so called “fake News” and real news. It seem that the majority of  “fake news” comes from on air personalities who are not journalists but more provocateurs who comment on current events under the guise of relaying true events. It is unfortunate that our TOTUS et al have used these outlets as purveyors of facts rather than the generators of biased and single sided information based on alternate facts. These semi news organizations have and probably will continue to garner support from folks who want to believe salacious and biased information rather that what is true. The failure is not so much in the communication but more the skewing of the information to present a particular sense of the real information that is available elsewhere. It is unfortunate that our CIC has not grown into the job and probably will not given the past two years of this administration. There is a fine line between Governing and ruling, since this is not a Monarchy, there should be no line to navigate just a willingness to have factual and realistic  conversations about administering a culturally diverse country. There is no one size fits all in this and apparently TOTUS does not understand that.

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The Mainstream Faces of Hate


Eliza Newlin Carney
August 24, 2017
It’s easy to reject racism when it waves a torch or a Nazi banner. But what about when it wears a suit and tie?
When it comes to hatred and discrimination, white supremacists and neo-Nazis stand in a class by themselves. But the public condemnation heaped on far-right nationalists, and on President Donald Trump for pandering to them, should not be reserved just for the nation’s most blatant racists.
For most Americans, it’s instinctual to reject those who wave Ku Klux Klan–style torches or banners bearing swastikas. But what about the racists who boast law degrees and sparkling resumes, and sport suits and ties? These haters, too, have flourished in the Trump administration. And their policies of bigotry, safely cloaked behind mainstream-sounding think tanks and federal commissions, can do as much or more damage as the thugs on the street.
The poll taxes and literacy tests of that period may be gone, but they’ve been replaced by GOP-authored voting restrictions, such as voter-ID laws and barriers to registration, that disenfranchise African American and Latino voters.
This is particularly true in the arena of voting rights, which lies at the heart of recent clashes over Confederate monuments that were, for the most part, built at the height of the Jim Crow era. The poll taxes and literacy tests of that period may be gone, but they’ve been replaced by GOP-authored voting restrictions, such as voter-ID laws and barriers to registration, that disenfranchise African American and Latino voters.
President Trump isn’t the first Republican to bandy about unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, or to use racial code words to rally white voters. But Trump’s call before the election for his supporters to monitor the polls in “certain areas,” and his baseless claims following Election Day that three million to five million noncitizens had voted illegally, took the GOP campaign to intimidate and challenge nonwhite voters to a new level.
Most importantly, Trump’s “election integrity” commission, established in May and dominated by conservatives who have built their careers on promoting voter-fraud myths and ballot restrictions, may set the stage for sweeping new national restrictions on registration and voting. The commission’s de facto head, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has pushed to require voters in his state to show proof of citizenship just to register.
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Another commission member, J. Christian Adams, is the president of a group that has repeatedly threatened legal action against local election officials, typically in jurisdictions dominated by African American or Latino voters, if they don’t purge their voter rolls. That group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, is just one of several conservative organizations devoted to imposing new restrictions on voters in the name of battling supposed voter fraud—which numerous credible studies have concluded is virtually nonexistent.
The best-funded of these groups (with a budget of $4.6 million in fiscal 2015) is the so-called American Civil Rights Union, which also uses lawsuits as a means to force voter-roll purges in minority-dominated voting jurisdictions. There’s also True the Vote, which announced plans in 2011 to recruit one million citizens to serve as poll watchers in 2012, and which was investigated by the Justice Department following allegations of voter intimidation.
The newest such group on the scene, run by former Trump campaign aides and dubbed Look Ahead America, has announced plans to block “fraudulent” votes by deploying poll watchers carrying video cameras. (The group’s main purpose, its organizers say, is to register new conservative voters.)
They are not on the streets swinging clubs alongside neo-Nazis and white nationalists, and they use legal briefs and positions papers, not violence, to achieve their aims.
The conservatives leading the charge against supposed voter fraud cast themselves as patriots protecting the integrity of the vote. They are not on the streets swinging clubs alongside neo-Nazis and white nationalists, and they use legal briefs and positions papers, not violence, to achieve their aims. But a string of court rulings have found their voter restrictions in Texas, North Carolina, and elsewhere are both unconstitutional and explicitly discriminatory.
Last year, a federal appeals court rejected a package of North Carolina voting laws, enacted in 2013, on the grounds that many of its restrictions targeted African American voters “with almost surgical precision,” a finding upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The year the omnibus bill was enacted, conservative activist and GOP precinct chairman Don Yelton told The Daily Show that it was “going to kick the Democrats in the butt,” and that if it “hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
Conservatives who champion voting restrictions may not have the same motives as white nationalists, but the outcome of their actions, from the perspective of targeted groups, is the same, says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“The aims of vote suppression, in fact, reinforce the aims of the white supremacist groups,” says Weiser. “And if folks claim to oppose the white supremacist groups, they should also oppose the agenda of those groups and efforts to undermine African American and minority political power.”
After all, the Klan first arose during Reconstruction to stop blacks from participating in politics—in particular, from voting. Sound familiar?

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Short Explanation Of Trickle-down Economics


This is an excerpt of an extensive article  posted in the American Prospect

Justin Miller August 24, 2017

Tax Cuts for the rich. Deregulation for the powerful. Wage suppression for everyone else. These are the tenets of trickle-down economics, the conservatives’ age-old strategy for advantaging the interests of the rich and powerful over those of the middle class and poor. The articles in Trickle-Downers are devoted, first, to exposing and refuting these lies, but equally, to reminding Americans that these claims aren’t made because they are true. Rather, they are made because they are the most effective way elites have found to bully, confuse and intimidate middle- and working-class voters. Trickle-down claims are not real economics. They are negotiating strategies. Here at the Prospect, we hope to help you win that negotiation.

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Time’s up for KKKommander-in-Chief


Opinion piece from Colorado sums up the Trump Presidency(?) MA

Opinion: Dyer Times

By Joel Dyer – August 17, 2017

Before I say anything else, I want to thank Heather Heyer for being strong enough, brave enough and committed enough to attend the counter demonstration against the racists in Charlottesville who gathered under the guise of protesting the removal of a Confederate statue last weekend. All of us here at Boulder Weekly are so sorry she was murdered by and because of these people. I’d also like to thank and send our condolences to Susan Bro, Heather’s mother. We can not imagine your loss and pain. Your ability to raise an extraordinary daughter, forgive her killer and even manage to thank the president for his eventual short-lived condemnation of the various racist hate groups responsible for Heather’s death is a powerful lesson for all of us. I for one fear I would not have your strength of heart if I found myself in your current circumstance.
Mostly, I just feel angry and confused. I do not understand how we got here.
Oh I get the frustrated electorate, the disenfranchised workers whose jobs went overseas, the white backlash to the Democratic Party’s disingenuous and divisive use of identity politics, the generally accepted political position that rural America doesn’t matter and the electoral college. I understand how Trump got elected, but I don’t understand how we got here, in the midst of a full-fledged race war with a white nationalist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist sympathizer as the leader of the free world. Make that the leader of the United States because the rest of the free world has nothing but disgust for Donald Trump and does not see him as the leader of anything except the radical racist fringe of American society.
On Tuesday, Aug. 15, I believe we moved past the point of no return. I really do. Trump’s third, and most honest, response to the violence in Charlottesville left no path forward to heal a nation and avoid future violence so long as he remains in office.
Sure it was already going pretty badly: Trump/Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, mass deportations, a White House infested with racist pseudo intellectuals whose defense for everything is “fake news.” But even with that backdrop, the events of the last week crossed a new and irreversible line.
For nearly eight months we have waited for our political system to self-correct. We have waited for establishment Democrats to understand that the protesting crowds in the streets are as angry at them as they are the Republicans. For eight months we have waited for Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Lindsey Graham or any other supposed leader in the Republican Party to acknowledge that Donald Trump is a nearly illiterate, narcissistic, racist, money launderer clearly being influenced by the foreign mobsters and oligarchs who have been propping up his flailing businesses for decades. And for eight months these Republican “leaders” have left him in power in hopes that his pen would eventually sign Republican legislation that would give still more tax breaks to the rich at the expense of the poor before the inevitable impeachment comes.
Sure, some of them have been mildly critical of Trump, but mostly he has been treated as nothing more than a controversial, outside-the-mainstream political figure.
Well that’s not good enough. Not now. Not after he finally showed his true colors. Make that color. White is all that matters to this man. Like his Klan-marching father before him, Donald Trump is a white supremacist and we now know with certainty what he means when he says “make America great again.”
I am a lesser person than Heather Heyer’s mom. I do not accept Donald Trump’s belated, half-hearted condemnation of the racists groups who participated at Charlottesville. He has been encouraging and pushing these same racists towards violence and hatred for many years. Think about it.
As far back as 1973, Trump was sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination for refusing to rent apartments in one of his developments to African Americans. And then there was his self-funded ad campaign calling for the death of the Central Park five — five young black men who were eventually exonerated of a notorious 1989 rape of a white woman. Even after being found innocent thanks to DNA testing, Trump was still insisting that they were guilty as late as 2016 while running for president, a wink to the racist right in this country that also refused to accept the DNA results. Then there was the “birther” movement. Trump became the most ardent supporter of this conspiracy theory put forward by the racist right, which sought to delegitimize the first black president of our country. In the past two years he has refused to denounce or strategically delayed denouncing the support he has been publically given by figures associated with the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists and the alt-right.
When he does denounce their support due to political pressure, he always makes sure they understand his criticism is not real.
Consider his ever-shifting positions on Charlottesville. His initial response to the violence was to blame both the alt-right rally attendees and the counter protestors, without mentioning Heather Heyer’s name or her death, or calling out the KKK and neo-Nazis by name. And when he did finally acknowledge Heyer’s death, he refused to call it an act of terrorism. Then two days later, under extreme pressure from his own party and advisers, Trump finally criticized the KKK and Neo-Nazis as bad people who did a terrible thing. As a result, he was immediately criticized by the likes of Klan leader David Duke who reminded the president via Twitter he was elected by white America. So the very next day, to the astonishment of many in his own administration, Trump reverted to blaming the “alt-left” for the violence in Charlottesville and again claimed that both sides played a role in the tragedy that ensued. His flip-flop obviously worked with his racist base, as evidenced by the immediate praise heaped upon him for his brave honesty by Duke and infamous white supremacist Richard Spencer.
In addition, within hours of his Monday wink-wink criticism of the KKK and neo-Nazis, Trump was busy retweeting the words of a right-wing conspiracy theorist whose crazed theories help fuel the violence and hatred of the radical right. The very same guy who caused an idiot to show up with a semiautomatic rifle to a pizza parlor in 2016 because he thought Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the restaurant.
And then… then the president of the United States — a man completely embroiled in controversy over his sick lack of compassion and wrong-headed handling of the death of a young, innocent woman who was mowed down by a car driven by a neo-Nazi — retweeted a cartoon of a train with his name on it mowing down and killing a person labeled “CNN.”
This doesn’t anger me because I’m overly sensitive to journalists getting picked on by the president. Nor am I so naive as to believe that the president was just being funny with a mistimed joke — although he has shown himself capable of such stupidity.
I am angry and frustrated because the president of our country is a sick, deranged, racist who must, and I believe will, be removed from office. And if it doesn’t happen really soon, the streets of our country will be filled with far more blood than that of Heather Heyer. Charlottesville is spreading like a cancer and next time the victims are likely to be on both sides… in no small way thanks to the ignorant hate-filled rhetoric of the president. Did I mention he equates Confederate leaders Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee — who tried to destroy the United States in order to preserve slavery — to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington?
There are a lot of people who have to share the blame for the existence of a President Trump. Two-out-of-three white men voted for Trump as did the majority of all white women. Evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Trump, presumably more for his impact on the makeup of the Supreme Court than his sexual assaults on women, support of racism and claim that he has never asked for forgiveness because he has never done anything wrong. And establishment Democrats put forward the only candidate so flawed and unpopular that she could actually lose to Donald Trump, and they had to rig the DNC against her rival just to get her onto the final ballot. There is plenty of blame to go around, but pointing fingers doesn’t help anyone at this point.
Voting for Trump can be forgiven. Washington needed a wake up call, and by golly it was sent. But if you still support Donald Trump after Tuesday, you may need to look in the mirror and consider the hard fact that you may be a racist by way of enabling racism. I don’t like using such a broad brush, but it seems unavoidable when speaking to those who are still supporting this clearly racist president.
This is no time for pride and insecurity. A lot of good people voted for Trump for a variety of reasons that seemed justified at the time. But now it’s time for those who voted for Donald Trump to stop supporting and enabling him.
We do not have a year or two to wait for Special Council Robert Mueller’s investigation to conclude. At this point, such a lengthy timetable is simply irresponsible governing by Republicans. They must be made to understand that their belief that they still have a small window of time to exploit Trump as their useful idiot before he’s removed from office is simply no longer true. The longer they wait, the more blood that will be on their hands.
This is not a political game. Our nation isn’t heading for a cliff that we can suddenly steer away from at the last minute. We have gone over the cliff and are in freefall, and the only parachute that can prevent our deadly impact is the swift removal of Trump from office.
The revolution is underway and it is being televised. With the exception of those who rely solely on Fox News for information, we are all seeing it everyday. From the protests at Standing Rock to the Women’s March to the shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria to the deadly riots in Charlottesville, the one thing that is crystal clear is this: Time is up on the Trump presidency and things are getting more violent by the day.
Congress has every right to impeach Trump tomorrow based on his obvious incompetence and clear inability to fulfill the duties of the office, which though not specifically written down anywhere, include not dividing the nation by race and starting a civil war by giving support to neo-Nazis, the KKK and alt-right, including the racists he has actually given jobs to in his administration.
Leaving Trump in power — a twisted, self-centered man, willing to do anything to stay in office for even a few more months — will result in more blood in the streets; maybe a nuclear war; the further destruction of our democratic processes byway of the interference from his mobster, oligarch pals from the former Soviet Block; the further and possibly irreversible degradation of the planet via global warming; and possibly a full-scale revolution, including a race war like we have not seen since the 1960s.
All of this can be avoided if just a few hundred elected officials in Washington D.C. can be persuaded to find their spine and think about our country as opposed to their own political fortunes and those of their corporate donors. I have no doubt they will be persuaded sooner rather than later. It’s just a matter of how many more people have to die before they are scared enough to do the right thing. And as for those wealthy corporate donors, in case our elected friends in Washington haven’t noticed, they are already running from this president as if he were the plague because they understand that being associated with him could be the end for their businesses. There is a lesson there for Congress: It’s time to start running.
Remove this president before it’s too late.

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