"They Are Dying...And It Is What It Is" -- Donald Trump's Memorable Quotation on the #TrumpVirus

'The Buck Stops Here'

'Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You'

'I Am Not A Crook'

'Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself'

And now we've found the quotation Trump's presidency will be remembered for:

'They Are Dying, That's True, And It Is What It Is.'
https://t.co/Da0lhcQj6Z

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) August 4, 2020

For those of you, like me, who don't subscribe to HBO, Axios has posted the entire interview that Jonathan Swan conducted with Donald Trump on YouTube as a public service:

This Swan/Trump interview may not be remembered as long as Frost/Nixon, but it certainly should be studied by every other interviewer who sits down with the Prevaricator-in-Chief to see how follow-up questions should be deployed when Trump tries to lie or (more frequently) change the subject.

A Twitter Poll for Mike Pence's 60th Birthday

In the parallels between Watergate and the current #StupidWatergate, what role do you believe that Vice President Mike Pence is playing?

Here's a POLL for Mike Pence's 60th birthday.

In this #StupidWatergate we're living through now, is @VP Pence playing the role of Sprio Agnew (the even more unattractive insurance policy against Trump's impeachment) or Gerry Ford (hired for his future promise to pardon Trump).

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) June 7, 2019

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. [...Trump for Nixon, Pence for Agnew and/or Ford...]" 

--Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" (1852) 

The Finest White Whine: The Mission Statement of Donald J. Trump

"I am the most fabulous whiner. I do whine because I want to win, and I'm not happy about not winning, and I am a whiner, and I'm a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win." -- Donald J. Trump on CNN, August 11, 2015 

And just in case you think that this quote is just "Fake News" from CNN, there is video of this ultimate #FineWhiteWhine from the current resident of the White House:



This video also shows how the supremely-unqualified Trump was coddled and given free airtime by CNN and the rest of the news-hungry media in the summer of 2015.

Two Gettysburg Addresses

Today is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address, but we shouldn't let that overshadow our current White House resident's Gettysburg Address on October 22, 2016. Only a candidate at the time, Donald Trump promised a major address about his first hundred days as president at the site of Lincoln's immortal speech. The speech quickly devolved into a typical airing of grievances about the media, lies about the Clinton campaign, and gloating about his crowd sizes, but included one key specific threat that he never followed up on (and never will). With news of his history of sexual assaults and the Access Hollywood tape (below) dominating the news, candidate Trump made this promise:

"Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign. Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over."

Even Donald Trump must remember what happened when Bill Clinton was forced to lie under oath about his sexual past; Donald Trump will never want to face any of his many accusers in a court room.

Today's Fine White Whine comes from Bill O'Reilly's lawyer.

It's amazing how the people who would have been supporters rather than targets of Tailgunner Joe in the 1950s are becoming fond of throwing around charges of McCARTHYISM! now whenever they find themselves under attack. The current right-wing occupant of the White House famously misused that label against the former occupant of the White House last month over fake wiretapping charges, and now the lawyer for another infamous right-wing sexual harasser, Bill O'Reilly, is pulling out the charge again in this legal whine:

"Bill O'Reilly has been subjected to a brutal campaign of character assassination that is unprecedented in post-McCarthyist America. This law firm has uncovered evidence that the smear campaign is being orchestrated by far-left organizations bent on destroying O’Reilly for political and financial reasons.

“That evidence will be put forth shortly and it is irrefutable."

Wah. Wah. Wah.

In addition to playing the victim, it's also amazing how people on the right are always looking for financial motivations among those on the left. The current White House occupant is always asking about who is paying the millions who are demonstrating against him; I think it's actually hard for him to believe that so many people would act without monetary compensation, just as it might be hard for Bill O'Reilly to believe that many feel it's simply a public service to speak out against primetime television hosts who bully guests, sexually harass and demean women, and spread untruths that have played a role in lifting an unqualified kleptocrat into the White House.

Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his most important speech exactly fifty years ago.

In my last post I pointed toward the dramatic end of Dr. King's life, which took place 49 years ago today. Exactly one year earlier, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in Manhattan, he gave what very well may be the best and most important speech in his brilliant career.

The speech is commonly referred to as "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." In 1967 it was a brave move to come out so strongly against the war, advocating (among other things) conscientious objection among draft-age men, an end to U.S. bombing and a unilateral cease-fire, but the speech was so much more. It would be just as radical, and just as timely, if delivered today, 50 years later, when we have a billionaire president looking to increase a bloated military by another 54 billion dollars while cutting programs for the poor and middle class to exacerbate atrocious economic inequality.

Please read Martin Luther King's whole text, but here's a taste from that historic speech...

... When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. 

   A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

    A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. 

   A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. 

   America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. ...

Please read the whole thing here at Stanford's King Encyclopedia website.
Here's a story about the speech that was on NPR's All Things Considered tonight.
Here's The New York Times' "When Martin Luther King Came Out Against Vietnam."

The Quotation of the Day comes from our previous president.

It's so easy to get tied up in knots by the daily flow of crimes and misdemeanors coming from the inarticulate TV-watcher-in-chief currently occupying the White House; I needed to cleanse my mind this afternoon by reading this full interview of novelist Marilynne Robinson by President Barack Obama that appeared in two issues of The New York Review of Books in November 2015.

"...When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you..." -Barack Obama, 2015

Even though it hurts to know that he's not the president now, it helps to know that Barack Obama is a fellow citizen. I'll say it again (and again and again): The 2016 election was a contest of readers versus brain-dead boob-tube addicts (not to be too judgmental about it), and the TV watchers are currently (but, I hope, temporarily) in control.

You can read the full text of Part One of this conversation in the November 5, 2015 issue of  NYRB and Part Two in the November 19th issue (the quote is pulled from the beginning of the second part).
The full audio version of conversation is available for free from iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/soundings-from-new-york-review/id284527588?mt=2

I was steered toward today's quotation, and inspired to find the full conversation, by the January 12, 2017 episode of Kurt Andersen's Studio 360, "POTUS as Tastemaker." Thanks Kurt.

The Quotation of the Day -- and Slang Vocabulary Enrichment -- comes from John Waters

Maybe you knew before today, but until I read this in The Guardian, I had no idea what a 'Hair-Hopper' was.

When John Waters says that he has never watched a reality television show, Rebecca Nicholson asks him if he has really never seen The Apprentice, the show that brought Donald Trump to national prominence among America's couch-potato demographic.

 He answers:

“Never. No! I hated him before. I hate a hopper. A hair-hopper is someone who pretends they’re rich, who really wasn’t brought up very wealthy but now tries to brag that they’re rich, and they spend too much time on their hair.”

The Tweet Of The Day for December 30, 2016

I don't need to wait until later tonight to pick a winner. The TrueBlueLiberal.org tweet of the day -- the tweet that needs to be preserved and highlighted before it disappears under the relentless surge of Twitter's flood -- came from @SummerBrennan drawing attention to these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister murdered by the Nazis in 1945, on stupidity and the rise of fascist power pic.twitter.com/4vQmMkJjc7

— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) December 30, 2016

Though this sounds like Bonhoeffer to me, I always like to confirm any quotation I'm given in a tweet or Facebook or blog post. It was easy to find the exact source of this on page 43 of his Letters and Papers from Prison, in case you want to read it in context.

"What is Honour? A word. What is that word Honour? Air."

The combination of Donald Trump's most recent tweet today, "If the press would cover me accurately & honorably, I would have far less reason to 'tweet.' Sadly, I don't know if that will ever happen!", and reading Philip Roth's Our Gang about Dick Nixon, who was pathologically wed to the concepts of "peace with honor" and "an honorable end to the war" (even if that insistence cost tens of thousands of  American lives in Vietnam during his time in office) got me thinking about Republican presidents and their obsession with that hollow abstract noun.

Is this a concept that is more important to Republicans? It seems that way to me. My feelings about the concept are more in line with Sir John Falstaff's in English literature's most famous consideration of honor at the end of Act V, Scene 1 of Henry IV, Part One when Prince Hal speaks to Sir John immediately before the battle at Shrewsbury.

From Bodleian First Folio:
http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/text/392

FALSTAFF
I would it were bed time, Hal, and all well.
PRINCE HENRY
Why, thou owest Heaven a death.
Exit PRINCE HENRY

FALSTAFF
'Tis not due yet; I would be loath to pay him before
his day. What need I be so forward with him that
calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks
me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No: or
an arm? No: Or take away the grief of a wound? No.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is
honour? A word.  What is that word honour? Air.
A trim reckoning! Who hath it?
He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No.
Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible, then. Yea,
to the dead. But will it not live with the living?
No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore
I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon, and so
ends my catechism.
Exit

Quotes of the day (and possibly the year) from Jonathan Swift and George Orwell via Philip Roth

The first of many Philip Roth novels I have read was 1971's Our Gang (Starring  Tricky and His Friends), which appeared when I was in high school in the Nixon years.

In advance of the text of his 200-page satire about Trick E. Dixon, Roth chose these two epigraphs to appear:

"...And I remember in frequent Discourses with my Master concerning the Nature of Manhood, in other Parts of the World; having Occasion to talk of Lying, and false Representation, it was with much Difficulty that he comprehended what I meant; although he had otherwise a most acute Judgment. For he argued thus; That the Use of Speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive Information of Facts; now if anyone said the Thing which was not, these Ends were defeated; because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving Information, that he leaves me worse than in Ignorance, for I am led to believe a Thing Black when it is White, and Short when it is Long. And these were all the Notions he had concerning that Faculty of Lying, so perfectly well understood, and so perfectly practised, among human Creatures." -- Jonathan Swift, A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, 1726

"...one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end … Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."  -- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Lying and the degradation of political language weren't new in 2016, or when Roth wrote about them in 1971, or when Orwell wrote about them in the 1940s, or to Swift in the the 18th Century, but that doesn't mean we should stop trying to fight against them by pointing out examples whenever and wherever they appear.

"The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!"

This remark of Bernie Sanders' about Hillary Clinton's emails from last October will probably go down as the quotation of the 2016 election, and it's even more true today than it was a year ago as the cable media continue to give wall-to-wall coverage to the "email controversy" to give her contest with Donald Trump the appearance of closeness in these last two weeks.

Michelle Obama has given the two best speeches of 2016

The first was, of course, her "When they go low, we go high" speech at the Democratic National Convention.

The second was at noon today in Manchester, New Hampshire:

The fact is that in this election, we have a candidate for president of the United States who, over the course of his lifetime and the course of this campaign has said things about women that are so shocking, so demeaning, I simply will not repeat anything here today. And last week we saw this candidate actually bragging about sexually assaulting women. And I can’t believe that I’m saying that. A candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women and I have to tell you that I can’t stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. So while I’d love nothing more than to pretend like this isn’t happening and come out here and do my normal campaign speech, it would be dishonest and disingenuous for me to move on to the next thing like this was all just a bad dream. This is not something we can ignore. It’s not something we can sweep under the rug as just another disturbing footnote in a sad election season. Because this was not just a lewd conversation. This wasn’t locker room banter. This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior. And actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us are worried about our children hearing it when we turn on the TV. And to make matters worse, it now seems very clear this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s one of countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life. I have to tell you that I listened to all this. And I feel it so personally. And I’m sure that many of you do too. Particularly the women. The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman. It is cruel. It's frightening. And the truth is, it hurts. It hurts.

Trump knows all about "reducing generals to rubble"

"I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble." --Donald Trump at NBC's "Commander in Chief Forum," September 7, 2016

Just as Donald Trump has gained a tremendous amount of foreign policy experience by owning the Miss Universe pageant (not just "Miss World," but "Miss UNIVERSE"!), as a young tycoon in the 1980s he also learned a great deal about generals by owning a stable full of Generals (specifically the USFL's New Jersey Generals), and in reducing them and their football league to rubble.

"He's like the polestar of human evil..."

Everything I pick up to read lately seems to have a direct connection to Donald J. Trump. Last week it was the parallels to August Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now.  Last night I finished reading Part Two: Perestroika of Tony Kushner's Angels in America in which Donald Trump's mentor Roy Cohn is a major character.

Louis Ironson has slowly come to accept that his current lover is married, a lawyer, a Mormon, and even a Republican, but when Louis is told by Roy Cohn's nurse that his new lover is also working for the abrasive McCarthyite lawyer who taught Donald Trump everything he knows, then Louis loses it:

I don't believe you. Not Roy Cohn. He's like the polestar of human evil, he's like the worst human being who ever lived, he isn't human even, he's... You think everything is black and white, good and evil, just because somebody is Republican they're in bed with Roy Cohn. People like you finally fail to have an adequately grown-up, nuanced view of the world, you're Manichean... [Act Four, Scene 2]

Not all Republicans are in bed with Roy Cohn, but at least one was and is, and he's running for President now.

My next book is John Meacham's American Lion about Andrew Jackson. I wonder if there will be any Trump parallels there.

"When a man's frauds have been enormous there is a certain safety in their very diversity and proportions."

At this point, about two thirds through Trollope's The Way We Live Now, shadowy London financier August Melmotte is making his first foray into the political world, running for Parliament and finding out that one of his recent shady real-estate transactions might be exposed publicly right after he had hosted a dinner in his home for the Emperor of China attended by the great men of England and Europe.

My current pleasure reading takes a political turn.

...I think he took some pride in his own confidence as to his own courage, as he stood there turning it all over in his mind. Very much might be suspected. Something might be found out. But the task of unravelling it all would not be easy. It is the small vermin and the little birds that are trapped at once. But wolves and vultures can fight hard before they are caught. With the means which would still be at his command, let the worst come to the worst, he could make a strong fight. When a man's frauds have been enormous there is a certain safety in their very diversity and proportions. Might it not be that the fact that these great ones of the earth had been his guests should speak in his favour? A man who had in very truth had the real Brother of the Sun dining at his table could hardly be sent into the dock and then sent out of it like a common felon. (page 472 of Penguin Classics paperback)

With legal cases about Trump's so-called "University" still pending, his complicated tax returns still unreleased, a history of bankruptcies, thousands of "minor" lawsuits, and more, the "diversity and proportion" of Trump's financial shenanigans put August Melmotte's to shame (though Melmotte did it from nothing without being given a head start by his father). If we do see any of Donald Trump's tax returns before November 8 (unlikely at this point as he continues to thumb his nose at the voters and the media), the chances are that, unless he gave nothing to charity or paid no taxes, the rule-bending in those thousands of pages would be so financially arcane that it would take teams of forensic accountants to root it out and another team to try to reduce it to layman's terms. It's only "the small vermin and little birds that are trapped at once."

If I entertained any notion that Donald Trump might have the attention span to tackle it, I might think that he had modeled parts of his life on The Way We Live Now.

Is there any proof that Donald Trump ever voted (before voting for himself)?

Trump on Facebook, 13 August 2016, promising to
change system from "Rigged" to "Fixed."

It was strange when Ivanka and Eric Trump couldn't figure out the rules for voting as Republicans in this spring's New York primary (I figured out how to switch from "No Party" to "Democratic" even without my father running), but maybe voting has never been a high priority within the Trump family before 2016.

This feeling was reinforced when Donald Trump said the following to Bill O'Reilly as he started his latest free-fall in the polls:

“The whole thing with voter ID identification I think is really — I mean people are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows? They are going to vote 10 times. I am very concerned and I hope the Republicans are going to be very watchful and I hope the authorities are going to be very watchful.” --Trump on Fox News, August 2

Who knows? Anyone who has ever been at an actual local polling station knows that this sort of casual "going to vote 10 times maybe" would be impossible. I've only voted in five different places in two states (New York and New Jersey). None of them ever required photo IDs, but once you signed your name in the book, there would be no way to sign twice (or ten times) without having created multiple identities at multiple addresses in advance. How could a significant number of people be recruited to commit these crimes?

By this week in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump was keeping the same conspiracy theories alive, though now admitting that the thousands or millions of vote fraudsters might only be voting half as many times:

"We're gonna watch Pennsylvania. Go down to certain areas and watch and study and make sure other people don't come in and vote five times. ... The only way we can lose, in my opinion -- and I really mean this, Pennsylvania -- is if cheating goes on. I really believe it." --Trump in Altoona, Pennsylvania, August 12

Trump is currently down by more than 9 points in the latest Keystone State polls, and he has never led there, but if he loses in November it will only be due to "those people" voting 5 or 10 times? This is dangerous anti-democratic and anti-American demagoguery aimed at the most credulous elements of his uneducated base of supporters, and it will be amplified by the Republican spokespeople of Fox News who still harbor fictions about Romney losing Pennsylvania because of fraud.

Now, even though every polling place already has official poll watchers from both parties at every local site (something that most 70-year-olds with a lifetime of voting behind them would probably know), Donald J. Trump is asking supporters on his website today to volunteer as "Trump Election Observers" to "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!"

As seen on donaldjtrump.com on August 13, 2016.

There has never been more of a need for an absolute landslide for Hillary Clinton. Every vote in every state counts in 2016. A decisive electoral college victory will not be enough to convince the most hardcore conspiracy theorists, but a popular vote burial of trumpism will insure that the conspiracy theorists might remain a very small nutcase fringe rather than a main current of Republican thought.

And are we ever going to see any documentary proof that Donald Trump visited an actual polling place before he voted for himself in 2016?
(UPDATE 10/21/16: Click to see video of DJT and Billy Bush voting in 2004.)

"I don't think Trump is Hitler at all; I think he's fuckin' Satan" --Marc Maron

Anyone who listens to Marc Maron's WTF podcast (and if you're not listening, why not?) knows that the highlight can often be the twenty-minute preface/rant/chat before the conversation with the comedian, actor, writer, or POTUS sitting in the chair across from him in his L.A. garage even begins.

The subject line of this post comes from Episode 729 with Roseanne Barr, which I listened to on the ride from work tonight. I get the sense that Marc normally tries to avoid pure political speeches that could date these recordings, but in this episode he couldn't resist questioning why anyone would support Trump other than as a nihilistic way of saying "Fuck it. Fuck it all." After the rant about the pure evil that is Donald Trump, he gave a short peroration to the dudes in his audience (and his audience has a lot of dudes) about the reluctance some of them might still be harboring about supporting Hillary Clinton. I felt like it might be helpful to transcribe it for my readers (some of whom also have a reluctance to support Hillary):

...And I know a lot of people, a lot of intelligent people, men specifically, I know I know I know, it's hard man. You just want to see that woman lose. It's hard for a lot of men who are secretly infantile, who feel gipped, who have issues their mommies or their daddies. It's uhhh, you know, when you watch a woman with authority speak with authority, deliver a strong leadership vibe, a grounded person ... for a dude sometimes there's only one way to take that in, and that is, "Uuhhh, I hate this teacher. Uuuuhhh, she's so mean this teacher. I wish the substitute was here. Remember that guy?"
Grow up! 
That's all the righteousness that may come out of me for this cycle. We'll see. Don't get alienated. Just let me have my feelings. OK? Can you do that? Can ya?...

EVERY Vote Counts against an Anti-American and Anti-Democratic Donald Trump

Donald Trump crossed another line today in Ohio when he told a group of supporters:

"First of all, it [the primary season] was rigged, and I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged. I have to be honest. Because I think my side was rigged. If I didn't win by massive landslides — I mean, think of what we won in New York, Indiana, California 78 percent. That's with other people in the race, but think of it." 

  Last week in Iowa, Trump planted the same seed about the general election:

 "Now we have one left, one left, one left, and in theory, in theory it should be the easiest, but it's a rigged system. It's a totally rigged system. The elections are rigged."

This is another reason -- if not the main reason -- that every vote counts in 2016, even in safely red or blue states. There should be no thought of throwing your vote to a third party or writing in a name that no one will read, just to make yourself feel better or more politically pure this November. During the Democratic convention last week I heard one Bernie supporter from Utah being interviewed on the radio; she told the reporter that she was definitely going to vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party because her state was voting Republican no matter what she does; however, she said she might vote for Hillary if she lived in a swing state like Florida or Ohio, in other words, if her vote mattered.

However, in 2016 every vote counts in every state. Try to imagine a situation where, like Gore in 2000, Trump loses a close electoral vote and wins a close popular vote. Would Trump, like Gore in 2000, leave the stage with grace and silence? Would he go back to his gilded penthouse with congratulations for Madame President Clinton? Or, more likely, would his speeches and press conferences and tweets and Facebook posts about vote rigging and "Crooked Hillary" rise to an unprecendented din? And how would some of his core supporters among the well-armed and poorly-educated conspiracists, white supremacists, Fox brainwashees, and "Bikers For Trump," react to his endless whines about unfairness? Would we want to find out?

It's safer simply to make sure that Donald Trump is buried by a vote count, both electoral and popular, that leaves no room for doubt.

The Trump Quote of the Weekend

In the flood of hateful idiocy and untruths coming from Donald Trump's mouth over the weekend, it was hard to zero in on the blackest kernel, until I saw this tweet in my timeline just now.

In email statement, Trump keeps insisting he was wronged by Khizr Khan. No walkback of comments on Ghazala Khan > pic.twitter.com/hgcJWG1LOx

— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) July 31, 2016

Doesn't saying Khizr Khan "has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution" prove that Donald Trump has never read the Consitution?


(But if that phrase isn't enough to prove he's no constitutional scholar, there's also the fact that he told Republicans in Congress that he wanted to protect Article XII of the [seven-article] Constitution.)