Trump cruelty called out by a Tennessee parent in an opinion letter

Echo opinion letter published in the Williamson Herald, a Tennessee newspaper: 

"The former president recently called Vice President Kamala Harris “retarded” while attempting to convince top Republican donors to pour more money into his campaign at his New York penthouse...😠😡😧❗..."

Donald Trump's latest tirade into IDIOCACY 😧💢was the straw that broke my camel’s back! 

Let me preface this by telling you that in the early 1970s, my wife and I were a part of a USO Tour throughout Southeast Asia. When we weren’t performing for the troops, we played music for orphans all over that part of the world. My wife was six, seven and eight months pregnant with our first child. The experience in the orphanages caused us to re-think our future family plans.

Two and a half years after the arrival of our son, we were all at the Nashville Airport greeting our first daughter (and sister), a biracial child from Viet Nam. Almost six years to the date of her arrival, a second daughter came to us via the Tennessee Department of Human Services. She was abandoned by her mother at 4 and spent another four years in foster care.

She was born with spina bifida, a birth defect of the neuro tube that caused her to be physically and mentally challenged, not to mention, never growing beyond 4’1” tall. She has successfully been living independently in her own apartment for over 20 years. She regularly books and takes the Franklin Trolley three days a week to where she volunteers at a local thrift store. She manages her own medications and cooks her own meals.

She is neither “Stupid” nor “Retarded”, although she was occasionally called that, along with “midget,” by some uninformed teenagers when she was in high school. 

Our daughter is a loving and caring human being who is wise and sensitive enough not to use derogatory language when talking about someone else! Her IQ is around 45-50.

The former president recently called Vice President Kamala Harris “retarded” while attempting to convince top Republican donors to pour more money into his campaign at his New York penthouse, according to The New York Times. Former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who was present, should have called him out for using such offensive language. She didn’t.💢😡 I personally took great offence at his use of the ugly word.

Mr. “former President,” our daughter will never own a New York City penthouse, and even if she did, she is smart enough to never think of running for president….and you should be too…but maybe you’re not as smart as she is! Please reconsider. We are so better than this!

From Gene Cotton in Franklin, Tennessee

Donald Trump's lies are extensions of his delusional ideation and disqualifies him for running in 2024! #DumpTrump

Growing Old Party needs a younger and saner candidate!

Maine Writer opinion- It's not too late to #DumpTrump❗ But who will pay all his legal bills if he is fired as the 2024 Republican presidential candidate?  Surely, no sane person wants to spend campaign money to pay off Trump's dozens of lawyers.  JD Vance was a Marine Corporal and has zero leadership experience.  Elon Musk was not born in the United States. So, what sane person could take Trump's place? GOP Help Wanted!  Looking for any sane person.

Echo opinion by Scot Lehigh published in the Boston Globe:

Donald Trump is either trying to dupe voters with lies or he is seriously delusional. Either way, Americans of all political stripes should be concerned.

To paraphrase the old saying, who are you going to believe when it comes to crowd size, Donald Trump’s lies or your own eyes 👀?

On Sunday, Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to create images of “fake crowds” at her events. Meanwhile, in a complaint-laden press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, the former president claimed that his speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, drew a larger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic 1963 speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

“She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Reality check. Harris’s crowds haven’t been conjured from AI whole cloth or artificially enhanced. As for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it drew about 250,000 listeners, while Trump’s I-have-a-scheme address topped out at an estimated 53,000.

We’ve become so accustomed to Trump’s harebrained assertions that they no longer draw the attention they once did. But with the newly reshaped presidential campaign in its last three months, they should. Here’s why. Trump's endless stream of false claims frame this choice: Trump is either too delusional to comprehend basic reality or he is purposefully and repeatedly lying to voters.

If Trump's false claims were just an occasional thing, one could dismiss them as a slip of the tongue or a mistaken understanding.

But the freshet of falsity that flows from Trump is so continuous that it can’t be explained that way. In his 64-minute rambling Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump made 162 assertions that a National Public Radio fact-check deemed “misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies.” The New York Times examined more than a dozen of them. (According to the tally by The Washington Post’s fact-checker, during his four years in office, Trump offered up 30,573 untruths.)

Trump's certainly sound and read like calculated efforts to deceive. Trump, for example, said that the strategic petroleum reserve is “virtually empty,” when it currently contains some 375 million barrels, more than half its all-time high of about 726.6 million barrels. Here, “virtually” is obviously intended to expand the latitude allowed to an off-base assertion before it is labeled a lie.

Trump also claimed that some Democratic states allow infanticide, saying that “Democrats are really the radical ones on [abortion] because they’re allowed to do abortion on the eighth and ninth month and even after birth.”

Actually, infanticide is illegal in every state. Trump’s distortion is an apparent reference to the small number of cases — about 11 a year — when a nonviable fetus or one suffering from severe abnormalities is born during an attempted abortion and doctors employ palliative care rather than intervening to extend the life of the stricken newborn.

There, it’s also illuminating to note that the vast majority of abortions in America, 81 percent, occur in the first nine weeks of a pregnancy, with 93 percent taking place during the first trimester. Only 1 percent came at 21 weeks or later, and then principally because of serious risk to the health of the mother or severe fetal abnormalities.

Without citing any credible evidence, Trump also maintained that a mysterious “they” are trying to sign up illegal immigrants to vote, saying, “Lately, I’ve seen where they’re trying to sign these people up to vote. … They cannot let illegal immigrants vote in this upcoming election.”

This seems to be a reference to a now widely debunked post that made the rounds on X in the spring. As fact-checkers have noted numerous times, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. 

Instances of that sort of attempted voting fraud are very rare. It is, however, a falsehood Trump has offered up before. After the 2016, election, he claimed that Hillary Clinton only won the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants voted. A commission Trump established to investigate the matter found no evidence to support his allegations of widespread voter fraud. Trump obviously knows that.

The prevalent assumption among commentators has long been that Trump lies to create a sense of shared resentment with his indifferently informed and lesser-educated white male base and keep them enthused about and contributing to his campaign. 

Others suggest he is laying the groundwork for denying another election loss, though after his claim of a stolen 2020, election was revealed as an utter lie, one would have to lean into duncehood to get fooled again on that score.

Now, certain conservative media outlets ignore Trump’s profusion of false statements, sparing Trump supporters without other sources of information the cognitive dissonance of dealing with his serial dishonestly.

No one, of course, wants to believe they are being played for a dupe by someone they view as their champion. But to avoid that conclusion, those who are aware of Trump’s serial dishonesty must confront the only other plausible alternative: He is so deeply delusional that he can’t distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and nonsense.

It hardly needs to be said that someone who suffers from that failing doesn’t belong anywhere near the Oval Office. 

IOW #PsychoTrump❗  #DumpTrump

News media irresponsibly prints and reports Donald Trump lies before providing the truth

Plea to #LameStreamMedia- As Maine Writer, I am appalled by the media coverage about the Donald Trump threat to democracy.....in fact, all these media people just requote whatever Trump said in his most recent incoherent rants. Then, that becomes the days news!  Hardly any objective analysis. I am sick of "man on the street" impromptu interviews with people who are obviously reticent to respond to a microphone stuck in their faces. 

Echo opinion letter published in the Boston Globe:

Please, news media, do not fall for his schtick

I am shocked by how little journalists have learned after nine years of covering Donald Trump. Since the human mind is more likely to remember information presented to it first, journalists have been repeatedly urged not to print Trump’s lies before presenting the truth that contradicts his lies. Yet on the front page of the Globe on Aug. 1 over a New York Times news service story, the headline read, “Trump attacks Harris over racial identity” and the subhead read, “Tells Black journalists she was Indian, ‘made a turn.’ ”

The article citing Trump’s remarks about Vice President Kamala Harris, his likely presidential opponent, continued on the back page of the front section with the headline “Trump attacks Harris over racial identity, says she became Black.” But in the article’s third paragraph the reader was told, “Headlines from her earliest political victories dating back to the early 2000s highlighted both identities.”

The way the mainstream media covered Donald Trump during the 2016, presidential campaign made many believe they were complicit in getting him elected. I fear that they might help him get elected again in 2024.

From Michael Biales in Acton Massachusetts

Florida is not a destination conference center while "dah" Santis wrongly revises American history

Black fraternity joins list of Orlando convention cancellations.

Echo opinion by Skyler Swisher published in the Orlando Sentinel, a Florida newspaper.

Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest historically Black fraternity, is joining a growing list of groups canceling their Orlando conventions over political concerns.

The fraternity is pulling its 2025, convention out of Florida because of a “hostile” political environment created by Gov. Ron DeSantis, General President Willis L. Lonzer III said in a prepared statement.

“In this environment of manufactured division and attacks on the Black community, Alpha Phi Alpha refuses to direct a projected $4.6 million convention economic impact to a place hostile to the communities we serve,” he said.

The event was planned for the Rosen Shingle Creek hotel and was expected to draw about 4,000 to 6,000 fraternity members in addition to family members and guests, said Eric Webb, an Alpha Phi Alpha spokesman.

Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida to criticize the standards, while DeSantis and his (wrong minded) supporters defended them and said a national Advanced Placement course includes similar language.

The College Board, the organization that runs the AP program, took issue with that characterization, issuing a statement that it disagrees “with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans.”

Jeremy Redfern, a DeSantis spokesman, dismissed Alpha Phi Alpha’s cancellation when asked for comment.

“This a stunt,” he said in an email.

Founded in 1906, Alpha Phi Alpha’s members have included civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, among other notable alumni.

A search is underway for a new location for the 2025 conference, Webb said.

At least four events planned for the Orange County Convention Center have been canceled over political concerns, spokeswoman Nicolette Sewell said.

The National Society of Black Engineers moved its 2024 convention out of Orlando, an event that organizers say attracts up to 15,000 people. The American Education Research Association and AnitaB.org, an organization of female and nonbinary tech workers, also nixed events planned for 2024.

The Association of perioperative Registered Nurses cited political concerns in canceling a conference and surgical expo planned for 2027, according to the convention center.

And organizers of Con of Thrones canceled an event planned for the Hyatt Regency Orlando they say draws 3,000 to 4,000 fans of the “Game of Thrones” books and television shows.

Several groups issued travel warnings for Florida, including the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group.

Groups canceling their events have cited laws that banned most abortions after six weeks, allowed Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a permit, cracked down on illegal immigration and targeted transgender and LGBTQ+ issues.

DeSantis, though, has said Florida’s overall tourism numbers are rebounding from the pandemic. More than 74 million visitors came to the Orlando area in 2022, up 25% from the previous year and just shy of pre-pandemic levels, tourism officials said in May.

But as of late, Orange County’s tourism tax collections have dipped, posting back-to-back monthly declines in May, which officials attributed to pent-up demand normalizing after the pandemic.

President Biden is essential to "Finish the Job"- IOW to defeat DJT former guy

Joe Biden can beat Trump.  But Democrats should worry that no one else can.

Washington D.C. - opinion essay published in The Washington Post by Ramesh Ponnuru.

President Biden says he is running for reelection to “finish the job.” What job, exactly?

There’s an answer to that question that makes sense. But he’s not saying it directly, and it’s one that should worry Biden’s fellow Democrats.

His announcement video presents Biden as defending freedom, democracy, Social Security, voting rights and abortion from “MAGA extremists.” It is not plausible that threats to any of these things, or what Democrats perceive as threats to them, would be vanquished in a second Biden term. 

Republicans and Democrats are going to continue to disagree about abortion and about how to protect voting rights long after 2028. Biden didn’t get his voting-rights bill into law when Democrats had the House and the Senate, and its prospects are not getting any better.

Keeping Trump out of the White House is a job that Biden could finish. There is, of course, no guarantee that he will accomplish it. He could lose to Trump in November 2024, or beat him only for Trump to run again and win in 2028. But Biden has a good shot at shutting Trump out.

Biden’s real mission, the one that needs completion, is the one he set for himself in his 2020 campaign: keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. That was the theme that summoned the most passion from him throughout that year. 

In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination, he mentioned policy issues. But his focus was on being the kind of president children could look up to, and not the kind who would bash our foreign allies or equivocate about white supremacists.

Biden may well think that he has a better shot at it than anyone else the Democrats might nominate — because he does. Yes, he is old and unpopular. But have you seen the alternatives?

If Biden were not running, Vice President Kamala Harris would be the most likely Democratic nominee. But she is just as unpopular and has become a reliable source of loopy sound bites. 

Democratic insiders cannot stop telling reporters how little she impresses them.

The other also-rans from the 2020, primaries have their own disadvantages. Bernie Sanders combines Biden’s advanced age with a political identity much further from the median voter. In the primaries last time, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren showed very little appeal to Black voters, without whom nobody can win the Democratic nomination.

There are political analysts who concede some of these points but still insist that the Democrats have a strong bench. It is remarkable, though, how often they mention Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who may be rising stars but have held office only since January. Let’s check back with them in 2028.

That’s not to say that Democrats would be doomed if Biden bowed out. It is certainly possible that a Democratic governor — particularly Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, or Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — would be able to defeat Harris for the nomination and then Trump for the presidency. 

But you can see why “Saturday Night Live” played the party’s options as a horror show last fall.

The implausibility of most of Biden’s potential replacements is a function of two facts about the Democratic coalition: It’s unwieldy, and it’s in flux. Democrats have been bleeding support from White voters without college degrees and making up for it among Whites with degrees. 

They have been losing ground in presidential elections in Wisconsin, where most voters are Whites without degrees, and gaining it in Georgia, where they’re only a third of the electorate.

Biden has presented himself as a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders. He is also a bridge between the Democrats’ past coalition and its future one. He won in November 2020, by holding down losses among Whites without degrees while benefiting from the pro-Democratic trend among Whites with degrees.

Trump’s unpopularity aided Biden. But that advantage would almost surely not have been enough for Sanders or Warren, who got the next-largest number of votes in the primaries, to stitch together the precarious electoral majority that Biden did.

A recent poll found that most Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. They’re lucky he’s not following their wishes. But it should make them uneasy that they need him to finish the job of stopping Trump.

Maine Writer post script:  In other words, quite honestly, President Joe Biden is the only candidate who can finish the job, to keep the former guy #DTJ out of the White House, forever❗

Some voters in politically red states are relieved to see Trump finally indicted

"Donald John Trump indicted: First ex-president charged, surrendered to New York authorities in Manhattan.'' 

Echo published in Yahoo.com and The Repository newspaper in Ohio: 

Dear Editor,  As a Ohioan, I am very grateful that the former President Donald John Trump was finally indicted and might finally be held responsible for some of the things he's done and could potentially face real jail time.

While some conservative Republicans are feigning indignation at the charges, they should be relieved to know that no one is above the law. After all, if you support the law, and law enforcement, then you must support the Capitol Police who bravely defended America's Capitol on January 6, 2021, from a dangerous insurrectionist mob, where some members of the cult testified that they incited an insurrection against America, because the former president request it.

In my opinion, I think it would be best to give this former president less attention and focus on supporting people and candidates who advocate for civil rights for all, from the LGBTQ+ community and Drag Queen story hours, to immigrant and minority rights, to reproductive rights for pregnant people, and to save lives, pass an assault weapons ban.

In the meantime, I am very proud to support our current Democratic President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who won the 2020, election and have policies and plans in place to help all Americans regardless of party.

From Nancy Dollard in Lake Township, Ohio

John Eastman is a fake news expert!

Echo report published in The New York Times by Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman.

The former guy Trump is "able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine", The Independent

John Eastman’s path from little-known academic to one of the most influential voices in Donald J. Trump’s ear in the final days of his presidency began in mid-2019, on Mr. Trump’s favorite platform: television.

Mr. Trump, who had never met Mr. Eastman, saw him on the Fox News talk show of the far-right commentator Mark Levin railing against the Russia investigation. Within two months, Mr. Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hourlong meeting.

Soon, Mr. Eastman was meeting face to face at Mr. Trump’s urging with the attorney general, William P. Barr, and telling him how Mr. Trump could unilaterally impose limits on birthright citizenship.

Then, after the November election, Mr. Eastman wrote the memo for which he is now best known, laying out steps that Vice President Mike Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power — measures Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.

Mr. Eastman’s memo is among the most alarming of the continuing revelations about the last stages of Mr. Trump’s time in the White House, when he was prompting the Justice Department to find ways to reverse his loss in the election and his top general was worried about the nuclear chain of command.

Mr. Eastman’s rise within Mr. Trump’s inner circle in the chaotic final weeks of his administration also underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump not only relied on, but encouraged, a crew of players from the fringes of politics. They became key participants in his efforts to remain in power as many of his longtime aides and lawyers refused to help him.

John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, said in an interview that it was troubling that at such a critical juncture, Mr. Trump had pushed aside the Justice Department and White House counsel.

Instead, he said, Mr. Trump was listening to an outsider “without the institutional learning that has gone on for a couple of hundred years that undergirds the advice that is normally given to presidents that keep them in sane channels.”

Mr. Eastman’s appeal to Mr. Trump, fleshed out in interviews with Mr. Eastman and others who dealt with him during this period, rested in large part on his expansive views of presidential power — and his willingness to tell Mr. Trump what he wanted to hear.

When it came to immigration policy, a favorite topic of both men, Mr. Eastman argued that Mr. Trump could use his executive authority to impose limits on birthright citizenship — the foundational concept that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen — by saying it should not be applied to people born in the United States to noncitizens.

But Mr. Barr, who was increasingly finding himself having to fend off the advice of outside lawyers, television commentators and Mar-a-Lago hangers-on, dismissed the idea, saying Mr. Eastman’s argument was a stretch and ultimately impractical.

Mr. Eastman admitted Mr. Barr was right.

“Well, tell that to the president,” Mr. Barr told him.

Still, by early January 2021, amid his wide-ranging effort to overturn the election results, Mr. Trump had become so enamored of Mr. Eastman’s advice that the two teamed up in an Oval Office meeting to pressure Mr. Pence to intervene to help Mr. Trump remain in power by delaying the Jan. 6 certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

In a two-page memo written by Mr. Eastman that had been circulated to the White House in the days before the certification — revealed in the new book “Peril”, by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa — Mr. Eastman said that Mr. Pence as vice president was “the ultimate arbiter” of the election, essentially saying he had the power to determine who won, and that “we should take all of our actions with that in mind.”

As Mr. Trump hints at another run in 2024, Mr. Eastman remains a bridge between the former president and the continuing efforts by some of his supporters to promote specious allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 and to undercut faith in the electoral system.

In a series of interviews, Mr. Eastman said he was continuing to investigate reports of election fraud and was writing a book on the subject. He also said he would still like to represent Mr. Trump, who faces a range of legal battles.

He declined to say whether he had advised any state legislatures — which have become hubs for Republican efforts to push claims of election fraud — on voting issues. And he insisted that his two-page memo, which he said he hastily wrote while on Christmas vacation with his family in Texas, had been taken out of context, but defended his view that Mr. Pence could have done far more to help Mr. Trump.

“I won’t be cowed by public opposition to it,” Mr. Eastman said.

He added: “There are lots of allegations out there that didn’t get their day in court and lots of people that believe them and wish they got their day in court. and I am working very diligently with several teams — statistical teams, election specialists teams, all sorts of teams — to try and identify the various claims and determine whether they have merit or there is reasonable explanation for them.”

Like many of the lawyers who worked in Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Eastman had strong conservative legal credentials, initially giving him a patina of respect in Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

Mr. Eastman attended law school at the University of Chicago and clerked for both Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge who President George W. Bush considered for the Supreme Court. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and a former dean of the law school at Chapman University in Orange County, Calif. For two decades, he ran his own small law firm that focused on representing conservatives on issues like free speech, religious liberty, abortion and immigration.

After Election Day, Mr. Eastman served as a behind-the-scenes legal quarterback of sorts for Mr. Trump, alarming some of Mr. Trump’s aides, who feared he had found someone to enable his worst instincts at one of the most dangerous moments of his presidency. And it surprised many of Mr. Eastman’s longtime friends and others, who questioned whether his access to power had skewed his vision of reality.

“You’re always at risk when every fail-safe mechanism breaks down,” Mr. Bolton said.

Mr. Eastman’s role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power began the weekend after the election in Philadelphia, where Mr. Eastman had traveled for an academic conference. At a nearby hotel, Mr. Trump’s closest aides, including Corey Lewandowski, were putting together a legal brief to challenge the results in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Eastman had put himself on the radar of Mr. Trump’s political aides during the election when Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, had shared on Twitter an article Mr. Eastman had written. 

In fact, the article, in an echo of racist questions stoked by Mr. Trump about where President Barack Obama had been born, questioned whether Kamala Harris*, Mr. Biden’s running mate, could legally become president because her parents had not been born in the United States. (OMG!)

*Vice President Kamala Harris- Early life, family and education (1964–1990) Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964!