Donald Trump has turned the Gish gallop into the Trump torrent, spewing out both lies and scandal at a rate that seems to make the national media incapable of maintaining a thought for long enough to have an impact. At the moment, there’s a lot of focus on Trump’s calling military veterans “losers” and “suckers,” on his denigration of John McCain, and on how he turned up his nose at having veterans march in his dictator-style military parade because “nobody wants to see” the wounded and amputees.
But this too shall pass. Jared Kushner may have once advised Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman to keep his head down until a little thing like a brutal international assassination of a journalist blows over, but Donald Trump has a different strategy—he’ll just find something worse to talk about. And if you think there can’t possibly be anything worse … you’ve clearly been asleep for the last four years.
So, before the current outrage is replaced by the newer, more disgusting outrage, here’s a quick reminder of what Trump has done, in order of most outrageous…
#10. Donald Trump attempted to extort lies from a foreign government to gain a political edge over Joe Biden.
Wait, you may be saying, wasn’t Donald Trump impeached over this? Yes. He absolutely was. Donald Trump was impeached, and always will be impeached. But even though his attempt to push the government of Ukraine into making up lies about Biden in order to give Trump a little election fuel, with military assistance needed to help that nation fight back a Russian invasion on the line, earned Trump thumbs down vote in the House—and a ridiculous free pass from Senate Republicans—it’s still at the least outrageous outrage on this list. That should tell you something.
#9 Trump refused to act after bin Salman kidnapped, tortured, dismembered, and murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Speaking of Trump’s Saudi pal Mohammed bin Salman, the incident that had Kushner telling the mega-billionaire despot to just chill for a while deserves a place on the list. In October 2018, U.S. resident Khashoggi was lured into the Saudi embassy in Turkey on the pretense of getting some paperwork down for his upcoming wedding. Instead, a Saudi assassination team took him prisoner, beat him for hours, and engaged in such frivolity as cutting off his fingers—while recording his sceams. Evidence suggests that the journalist’s body was then burned in an oven built just for that occasion. Through the whole investigation, Trump refused to take action against bin Salman, or to slow down in providing the Saudis with an enormous package of military hardware. The assassination came after Kushner provided a top secret list of “dissidents” to bin Salman that may have featured Khashoggi’s name. And then Kushner got a last minute billion dollar bailout of his failing real estate company … isn’t that nice?
#8 Trump dealt with accountability crisis by getting rid of inspector generals
This one may lack mentions of decapitation and murder … except in the sense of what it’s done to the government. In every instance where Trump has been caught out lying, cheating, and breaking regulations or laws to either slip some money to allies or cover-up his actions, he’s had one consistent response—sack the referee. Trump has always made it a practice to purge those he thinks might put the country’s interests ahead of his own, and to purge everyone with experience and insight on critical issues. But inspectors general have been at purge central because they’ve simply refused to sit down and shut up. Trump has fired or replaced at least 17 inspectors general, including taking out five in as many weeks. When Trump isn’t removing inspectors, he’s simply ignoring them no matter what the law says. Oh, and the same thing applies to U.S. attorneys, ambassadors, and military officers.
#7 Trump has handed out pardons for his pals, even when they’re clearly guilty
Trump’s disdain for justice isn’t just limited to proclaiming that he’s free from all legal constraints. He just … hates justice. To demonstrate this hate, Trump has repeatedly made a mockery of the whole concept of fairness and equal justice under the law by handing out pardons like candy to his friends. How do you earn a pardon for Trump? Being on his campaign staff certain helps. Ask Roger Stone. But you can also try writing a fawning book about Trump, or you can just be super, super racist. Of course, Trump also pardons people who are long dead … somehow that doesn’t make up for giving all his corrupt pals a holiday.
#6 Trump regularly encourages police and others to use violence
Whether it’s telling security guards at his rallies to “rough up” protesters, encouraging police to stop being “too nice” when making arrests, or offering to pay legal fees for an assault suspect, there’s nothing Trump likes so much as seeing people get beaten. Other people, of course. Trump has regularly encouraged not just violence of the batons and fists variety, he’s also directly responsible for encouraging people to go out and commit murder in his name. That’s been particularly true in Trump’s support of violence as a means of both distracting from his failure in the coronavirus crisis and his attempts to derail the Black Lives Matter movement.
#5 Trump is still overlooking Russia’s offer of bounties for the murder of U.S. troops
Trump isn’t just dishonoring fallen U.S. soldiers, he’s helping to see that more soldiers get killed by refusing to address the fact that Russia is paying bounties for the murder of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It’s clear that Trump was full aware of what was going on, it’s also clear that he just does not care. Just so long as any troops wounded by Russia don’t come back wounded and make his parades unsightly. After all, they knew what they signed up for.
#4 Trump’s wall still doesn’t exist … and that's the only thing good about this story.
Four years later, Trump’s wall along the southern border doesn’t exist, despite his declaring a national emergency to steal funding. Trump keeps on lying about the “hundreds of miles” that have been built, but the actual amount of new construction may not even make it into double digits—and not one foot of it was paid for by Mexico. It’s not just that Trump’s wall is a physical reminder of how much he lies about everything, it’s also an overt manifestation of what his campaign is all about: Racism and xenophobia. And, oh yeah, what has been built is useless. Even so, Trump is still using this wall to distract from his even bigger failure on coronavirus.
#3 Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has encouraged racism at every turn
This isn’t really a surprise. This is, after all, the guy who called for lynching Black teenagers even though he knew they were innocent. And that was before he moved into the White House. Trump ran for office as a racist in 2016, presenting himself as the last barrier between invading Latino hoards and white America. He’s running for office in 2020 as a racist claiming to protect suburbs from outraged Blacks. In between has come all the “very fine” Nazis and white nationalists that Trump has repeatedly defended and encouraged. Trump really has “united the right” behind an effort to trigger racial warfare while trying to pretend that Black Lives Matter is to blame. He’s a racist doing racist things. Including defending murders.
#2 Donald Trump put children in cages out of a desire to ramp up cruelty.
Every policy instituted by the border patrol and ICE since Trump took office seemed to be cruel, but it wasn’t until last year that it became clear that this was by design — Trump and racist adviser Stephen Miller deliberately designed these policies to generate suffering, out of the assumption that being sadistically harmful to children would reduce the flow of potential immigrants. And that was just one point in a policy that’s designed around the two pillars of Trumpism: hate and racism. How far did they go? They looked into the possibility of using a heat ray. They grabbed newborn babies from the arms of mothers. They took every opportunity to suspend immigration entirely while trying to revise the policy to make it much, much whiter.
#1 Donald Trump deliberately allowed COVID-19 testing to fail in order to conduct genocide
The order of other items is up for debate, but in the spring of 2020, Donald Trump made a deliberate decision to halt a national testing strategy because he believed it would kill more Americans in blue states. That decision is directly responsible for why America is leading the world in COVID-19 deaths. That’s not just “attempted genocide.” It’s genocide.
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