Trying to wrap his arms
about the enormity of tRUMP and tRUMPism, former Labor Secretary
Robert Reich posted this synopsis today on Facebook:
“One
week ago, Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha,
Wisconsin, police department, fired at least seven shots at the back
of a Black man named Jacob Blake as he opened his car door, leaving
the 29-year-old father of five probably paralyzed from the waist
down.
After
protests erupted, self-appointed armed militia or vigilante-type
individuals rushed to Kenosha, including Kyle Rittenhouse, a white
17-year-old who traveled there and then, appearing on the streets
with an AR-15 assault rifle, killed two people and wounded a third.
This
is pure gold for a president without a plan, a party without a
platform, and a cult without a purpose other than the abject worship
of Donald Trump.
To
be re-elected Trump knows he has to distract the nation from the
coronavirus pandemic that he has flagrantly failed to control –
leaving more than 180,000 Americans dead, tens of millions jobless
and at least 30 million reportedly hungry.
So
he’s counting on the reliable Republican dog-whistle. “Your
vote,” Trump said in his speech closing the Republican convention
Thursday night, “will decide whether we protect law-abiding
Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists,
agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.”
“We
will have law and order on the streets of this country,” Vice
President Mike Pence declared the previous evening, warning “you
won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
Neither
Trump nor Pence mentioned the real threats to law and order in
America today, such as gun-toting agitators like Rittenhouse, who,
perhaps not coincidentally, occupied a front-row seat at a Trump
rally in Des Moines in January.
Pence
lamented the death of federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood, “shot
and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” earlier this
year, implying he was killed by protesters. In fact, Underwood was
shot and killed by an adherent of the boogaloo boys, an online
extremist movement that’s trying to ignite a race war.
Such
groups have found encouragement in a president who sees “very fine
people” supporting white supremacy.
The
threat also comes from conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor
Greene, the recently nominated Republican candidate for Georgia’s
14th congressional district and promoter of QAnon, whose adherents
believe Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who
worship Satan and traffic children for sex. Trump has praised Greene
as a “future Republican star” and claimed that QAnon followers
“love our country.”
And
from people like Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of Trump’s campaign
advisory board, who was scheduled to speak at the Republican
convention until she retweeted an antisemitic rant about a supposed
Jewish plan to enslave the world’s peoples and steal their land.
Clearly
the threat also comes from hotheaded, often racist police officers
who fire bullets into the backs of Black men and women or kneel on
their necks so they can’t breathe. Needless to say, there was
little mention at the Republican convention of Jacob Blake, and none
of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor.
And
the threat comes from Trump’s own lackeys who have brazenly broken
laws to help him attain and keep power. Since Trump promised he would
only hire “the best people,” 14 Trump aides, donors and advisers
have been indicted or imprisoned.
Trump’s
personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani – who ranted at the Republican
convention about rioting and looting in cities with Democratic mayors
– has repeatedly met with the pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian
Andriy Derkach, whom American intelligence has determined is
“spreading claims about corruption … to undermine former Vice
President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”\
In
addition, federal prosecutors are investigating Giuliani’s business
dealings in Ukraine with two men arrested in an alleged campaign
finance scheme.
Trump’s
new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who had been a major Trump
campaign donor before taking over the post office, is being sued by
six states and the District of Columbia for allegedly seeking to
“undermine” the postal service as millions of Americans plan to
vote by mail during the pandemic.\
Not
to forget the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who spoke to the
Republican convention while on an official trip to the Middle East,
in apparent violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits officials of
the executive branch other than the president and vice-president from
engaging in partisan politics.
You
want the real threat to American law and order? It’s found in these
Trump enablers and bottom-dwellers. They are the inevitable
excrescence of Trump’s above-the-law, race-baiting, me-first
presidency. It is from the likes of them that the rest of America is
in serious need of protection.
What
do you think?”
I
think we are in deep shit. We are witnessing the destruction of the
republic from a front-row seat.
Flush
this turd, November 3rd.
___________
1.
https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts
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