American Politics – Page 8 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Donald Trump is no Dick Nixon.

June 13, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Before events where so rudely interrupted last week, we were thinking of letting the Toronto Star’s Tony Burman know that no matter how he tries, president Trump could never be as politically smart as former president Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick, as Nixon was known, could make a ‘Law and Order’ campaign platform work. With expert advice, with all the right cue cards and with desperation, Trump could never run as a tough guy.

While you have to agree with Burman that Trump appears out of options for this fall and that polls show where he is losing support, you would be most unwise to consider the bastard done with.

We know that Trump is no politician. He is not a person who cares about democracy. He is not a person who cares about the truth. He has a highly inflated opinion of his own importance and competence.

When Tricky Dick was finally forced to resign, it was a dark and dreary three-act play in the White House. In 2021, when Americans finally rescue that failed icon of democracy from Donald Trump, there will be nail marks across the carpets of the oval office—when Trump and his clacque, kicking and screaming, are dragged out to the curb for the next garbage collection. It will not be proud moment.

Americans need to worry more about the detritus Trump leaves behind. They need to worry about the believers across America who, in their ignorance and self-indulgence believed that Trump would restore the legendary greatness of the America that took place under Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Trump was not even working with the right party. Unlike the republican’s fabled Dwight Eisenhower, Trump cannot even play an honest game of golf.

If Trump wants to emulate Richard Nixon this fall, he should be made aware that his hero not only lost the Vietnam War but he also lost the White House.

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Pestilence rides the pale horse.

June 5, 2020 by Peter Lowry

The cull continues. The deaths mount. Do the continuing failures of those who govern America take precedence over the battle with covid-19? Does pestilence allow a time-out for protest? And what of the other three horsemen? Is famine reserved for other parts of our world? Is the war with the police but a minor skirmish of the war to come?

My Bible reading as a child never got as far as the Book of Revelation. I do not know if this is the Apocalypse?

Mr. Trump continues to fortify the white house. The choppers are on alert and make their presence known overhead. The army stays in readiness. They are making the white house the final battleground.

And in the meantime, pestilence rampages unstopped, across an uncoordinated, defiant America.

The only positive we have noted lately is the speech presumptive presidential candidate Joe Biden gave the other day in Philadelphia.

It was a message of hope. It was a presidential speech. It was inclusive, not divisive. While he named Mr. Trump as the problem, he did not over do it. He asked “Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be?

We can only hope that a lot of Americans give those words the thought they deserve.

Biden has a difficult task ahead. He has to use the anger of America as a positive force. He has to get it focussed on the November election.

What America has now seen is that Donald trump is not an instrument of change. He actually imperils America’s future. His promises ill-considered and hollow.

He is a hypocrite and a sociopath, a misogynist and a liar. He endangers world peace. He blames others for his errors. He insults America’s friends and cozies to its enemies. Maybe it is Trump who rides the pale horse.

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Trump’s Terror.

June 3, 2020 by Peter Lowry

We were spell-bound Monday evening watching the television coverage of events around the American white house. We had heard recordings of what he had said to many of the U.S. state governors earlier in the day and dreaded how it might play out through the evening. This was the belligerent and threatening Donald Trump that we were watching.

We were rapidly coming to the conclusion that the man is intent in launching another American civil war. Though, he brought no honour to it. He is no Abraham Lincoln. He had military and massed police forces at the ready around the white house.

The police practiced their cotillion moves to the surprise of the few spectators come to see the events of the evening. The big surprise was the Secret Service and their back-up of city and park police using flash-bangs and tear gas to clear the most peaceful protest of the week in Lafayette Square.

It was not until Trump and his Men in Suits sallied from the white house through Lafayette Park and across to the boarded-up St. John’s Episcopal Church, that had been cleared of protesters. The ‘Hypocrite-in-Chief’ wanted a photo op of himself, in front of the church, holding an old Bible, he must have found in the white house. He is always thinking of the looming election these days. He needs that picture to impress the religious conservatives across the U.S. They like to think their Mr. Trump is at that church on Sundays instead of usually playing golf at one of his East Coast resorts.

But it was the anti-Christ in him that lead him to demand that the governors come down hard on the protestors. He wanted them to deploy the National Guard to ‘dominate’ street demonstrators. He told them, he would send in the army to do the job, if they did not.

For Canadians, the most telling scene of the following day was the question to prime minister Justin Trudeau outside the cuckoo clock at Rideau cottage. The media wanted to hear his reaction to the American president’s actions. He made them wait. You could easily imagine the range of thoughts as the PM considered possible answers. His answer was to never say the name of the problem.

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Trump will not go gentle into that good night.

May 31, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was talking about older people and death in that often-quoted poem. It is much to far ahead of the election to make a confident prediction but I can cheerfully suggest what might happen when Joe Biden beats Trump in November. When all avenues for dispute are closed, the man child best be carried down the White House driveway and thrown bodily into the street.

There was an excerpt from David Frum’s new book about Trump in the Toronto Star yesterday. I must admit, from the first words I read, I disagreed with the premise of the book. Frum claims that Trump is challenging the very tenets of democracy in America, “perhaps irrevocably.” I would suggest to you that Trump has never bothered with what passes for democracy in the United States. He ignores it.

It is like Mr. Trump’s understanding of truth. It does not seem to exist in his vocabulary. It is for others.

Frum seems to see the on-going corruption of American politics as a class war. It is unlikely that David Frum is a member of the one per cent, but he appears to identify with them. He does not accuse Trump of creating the conditions he exploited to gain power. Trump is a user. He is no politician. He is not even a nice person.

But I was watching the TV news from the United States on that November evening four years ago. You saw the Trump family and it was hard to tell who was the most surprised. Trump has never been a good enough actor to feign that surprise.

In the Frum excerpt, he explains the legal means at Trump’s disposal with which he could have carried out some of his objectives. The fact that nobody seemed to be telling Trump, or if they were, he was not listening, must have thwarted many of Trump’s plans.

A friend called while I was writing this and when I told him what I was writing, he offered to buy me a copy of the book. I was pleased with the offer but explained to him that I always waited for the remaindering of political books. I have never read one that cost me more than $7. That is a good average of what they are worth.

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Mr. Trump’s Stupid Wars.

May 29, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It is hard to say what the Americans have done wrong to deserve this. They have the best equipped standing army in the world and they elect a guy like Donald Trump as commander-in-chief. It’s enough to make you cry. That jerk could not understand the strategy for a snowball fight against seven-year old girls. What he is doing loose in the free world is the wonder.

The scary problem is who told him to launch a trade war against the Chinese? It is a dumb idea. It is bad foreign relations. It is a war that neither side can win and neither side can afford to lose. The only thing worse would be to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.

You get the impression from this that if the Chinese leadership had a better sense of humour, all could easily be resolved. The problem is that through the 19^th century and into the 20th, the Chinese knowledge of Europeans was taken mainly from the British. They saw the Brits as stuffy, humourless and dull. And the Brits accused them of being inscrutable, so they worked on it.

And just try to convince them of the benefits of democracy when the Americans elect an incompetent like Trump. Well, nobody says that democracy is perfect but Trump is certainly pushing the envelope.

The hardest part of this is that the Chinese cannot understand an aberration such as Trump.

But neither do we. Our major problem is that Trump is not a politician. If he was a politician, we would have some idea as to what he might do next. Nobody knows what a spoiled child will do next.

I think we should take the advice of the child psychologists. Distract him. Let him go to war against Twitter. Who cares? Maybe Facebook can get in a few good licks. Let him build a moat around the white house to try to keep out the democratic party interlopers. And you only wish that Trump would go stick beans up his nose.

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Who’s voting for stupid?

May 19, 2020 by Peter Lowry

The ignorant and the gullible are on the march in America. They are coming to his rallies and buying his snake oil. Donald Trump has his eye on the prize: the November election. That is quite a prize for a serial killer who has already helped the pandemic take the life of more than 90,000 Americans—and this year is not even half over.

Is this not the guy who belittled the declaration of the pandemic and cut off the U.S. funding of the World Health Organization? Do you know that his followers think America is lucky to have him? They can watch people close to them dying and they think Trump is a gift from some funny farm Heaven.

These people are mixing and drinking their own Kool-Aid. Trump says he is taking an anti-malaria pill. Maybe he will also drink bleach.

He is promising his followers a vaccine by the end of the year. He sees the race for a vaccine as an economic contest to make money for Americans, instead of something that will be distributed freely around the world. In addition to this miracle of medical science he is also promising his supporters a miracle economic recovery in the next year.

Trump supporters tell us that we are lucky to have a businessman like Trump running things. They think that, as a businessman, he can help the economy to recover. He is certainly no businessman. People who really understand Trump know he is just a gambler who typically uses other people’s money. As a developer, he is used to promising much and delivering little.

If Trump had been more of a scholar, he would understand why the lack of organization in his country during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918/1919 killed so many. It is disgraceful that his ignorance, disinterest and partisan approach make it impossible to create a co-ordinated approach in 2020.

But maybe the real villains in this event are Trump’s supporters. Theirs is hardly a statement of political allegiance. Trump is not political. He is too selfish and self-centered to be part of any party. And yet, it is likely die-hard republicans that are giving Trump a narrow edge—while helping him do irreparable damage to their party.

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And the show goes on.

May 7, 2020 by Peter Lowry

Just when you have lost all interest in America’s president Trump, he finds something more ugly, more tawdry with which to entertain you. There seem to be none of the deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger or sloth that do not entice and enthrall him.

Is this man’s pride so great that he can abuse the memory of Abraham Lincoln? How dare he use the Lincoln Memorial as a set for his virtual rally? In the time of the novel coronavirus, he invited the disgusting Fox News organization into the place wherein sits the figure of a great man—a man who has inspired generations of Americans.

Not that Fox News and Donald trump are not of the same ilk. Fox News glorifies Trump. Trump is Fox News—bad news. They hit bottom together as sleaze interviews sleaze. Even the magnificence of the setting could not help.

It was an open invitation for Trump to brag. He wants to tell his followers of his triumphs, his triumphs over imaginary foes—in the Congress and the news media. He wants to spread his paranoia and his braggadocio and his lies.

It was not so many years ago that the wife and I drove to Washington in late May to enjoy the city as though we were tourists. I remember getting off the tour bus to stand at the bottom of the steps up to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a quiet moment to honour Lincoln.

In all the times I had been in the District of Columbia on business or a speaking engagement, I had never seen any of its monuments close up. Washington is a city of monuments to the great and not so great of American politics. Yet, whether major or minor players on the political scene, each, in their way, leaves their legacy. I seriously wonder how future historians will explain Donald Trump.

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Making a stand, in Dixie.

April 27, 2020 by Peter Lowry

It is only appropriate. If any music is right for the coronavirus in the United States, it is Dixie. In the American Civil War, Dixie was the song of defiance and it took many from the American South to a needless and untimely death.

This came to mind the other day while trying to decipher one of those complex graphs in The Economist that was being used to try to explain the pattern of occurrences and rates of death from covid-19 across the United States of America. (This was in the North American edition of the British journal.)

Giving up on the confused graph, the real shock of the story, for me, was the comment in the last paragraph of the article that the states of Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee were relaxing their lock-down restrictions. Those rednecks in the heart of Dixie have probably had enough of governments telling them what to do and have decided to take things into their own hands.

The point of the Economist article was that the mortality rate for covid-19 was much higher in areas of higher heart disease and diabetes and with fewer hospitals equipped with intensive care units. That is a good description of that part of Appalachia.

The article also noted that the disease is also more prevalent in places where people are crowded together, such as in New York City. The difference is that in New York, there are good hospitals and a willing population that supports a governor who took the reins and knows what he is doing. Those factors can contribute to a lower death rate.

But we have been seeing on the news how the citizens of many of the southern states have been becoming more and more dissatisfied with restrictions forced on the population because of covid-19.

It is really a shame that the United States lacks effective national leadership in this time of crisis.

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“Are we there yet?”

April 19, 2020 by Peter Lowry

That man-child in the American White House reminds me of taking the kids on a road trip. How soon they would tire of their prison in the back seat of the family sedan. And, no matter how many games you had lined up for them, you eventually hear what every parent does not want to hear, the whine, “Are we there yet?”

Donald Trump’s impatience with a pandemic, that has inconvenienced him, should come as no surprise. He has been telling us when it will end practically from before it became too serious for him to ignore. And the fact he belittled the coronavirus from those early stages was just the usual childish reaction to things Trump cannot control.

Lately he has decided to blame the World Health Organization (WHO) for the pandemic. It is hard to tell if he is complaining about them telling him or not telling him what was coming down the turnpike. In a typical Trump reaction, he has cut off the U.S. funding for that very critical body. “That’ll teach ‘em!”

It certainly helps to prove what a lackey vice president Mike Pence can be when he is still at Donald Trump’s beck and call. For him to head up that Gong Show gang running the federal pandemic circus is not only frightening but is liable to extend the pandemic effects in the U.S. for another two years.

One thing is for sure, Mr. Trump is still supposed to be driving the bus in the U.S. until January of 2021. The only thing that he might have in mind is how to stay in office beyond that date.

Of course, many Americans have assured me that Mr. Trump is going to have a very difficult time getting re-elected in November. I am impressed with their confidence, but it seems to me, we heard something similar four years ago. I remember how disappointed we were back then.

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The impatience of Donald Trump.

April 16, 2020 by Peter Lowry

While Canadians have mostly been enjoying the unusual unanimity of their federal and provincial leaders in this time of the pandemic, the situation in the U.S. is reversed. In a frightening replay of the Spanish flu of 100 years ago, the states and their federal government are fighting their own battles. Last time, about 675,000 Americans died. With today’s modern medicine, only 20,000 Americans have died from covid-19, so far. President Trump is impatient for it to be over and wants to declare the pandemic has been beaten.

With the patchwork solutions—or lack of solutions—by the various states, there is no way to reasonably predict any resolution of the pandemic in the country. President Trump will have to keep moving his end dates. He blithely missed his first prediction of Easter. Undaunted, the blowhard-in-chief has now predicted the end of the pandemic is the end of April. He will be likely to keep moving his dates and his followers will believe his excuses.

What he really should be thinking about is the need for the states to agree to mail-in ballots for the November election. The reality is that the Americans are likely to want to vote in unprecedented numbers in November. And if the recent Wisconsin primary experience is any indication, the election officials will be loath to help people mark their ballots. Long line-ups with angry, frustrated voters are not a good idea.

If Trump continues to move his forecast to end of the pandemic, month by month, it could even shake the confidence of some of his followers. If someone lies to you for eight months in a row, would you not be taking his opinion for what it is worth—nothing.

What is really concerning in all of this is that Donald Trump has available to him some of the best medical science laboratories in the world and some of the finest minds in the medical sciences. If he would just listen to these experts for a change, think of the good he could do.

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