{"id":3527,"date":"2020-12-23T08:44:29","date_gmt":"2020-12-23T08:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=142571"},"modified":"2020-12-23T08:44:29","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T08:44:29","slug":"the-final-days-of-donald-trump-absentee-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/23\/the-final-days-of-donald-trump-absentee-president\/","title":{"rendered":"The Final Days of Donald Trump, Absentee President"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pardon my silence these last few days, but the out-of-control firehose that is the Trump White House has upped the water pressure with increased insanity, mendacity and just plain idiotic behavior. It can overwhelm.<\/p>\n

The soaking seems to get worse every hour and day that remains before the swearing-in of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and for me and many others, that sometimes creates a worn out feeling just from being flooded by all the nutty news. As the Stevie Smith poem<\/a> goes, \u201cI was much further out than you thought, and not waving but drowning.\u201d<\/p>\n

This generates a funny kind of writer\u2019s block\u2014and believe me, I know what I\u2019m describing is the mosquito bite-sized problem of a privileged white guy, especially when compared to the tremendous suffering so many of us have endured during the year. But fact is, the source of so much of our pain and fatigue, Donald Trump, is becoming more and more frantic even as the writing on the White House wall becomes impossible to obliterate with bombast and bullshit. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, Diaper Don\u2014the clanging you hear isn\u2019t just in your head, it\u2019s the sound of more than 81 million voters who chose the \u201clet\u2019s save democracy\u201d option and cast you out.<\/p>\n

Yet amazingly and appallingly, the election madness goes on. Trump refuses to accept reality\u2014publicly at least\u2014with stories of ever more fevered plots on his part to overthrow the results and even refuse to vacate the Oval Office on January 20.<\/p>\n

Trump wanted to make<\/a> that madwoman Sidney Powell special counsel to investigate the election and Joe Biden. Rudy Giuiliani asked Ken Cuccinelli at Homeland Security if they could seize the voting machines. Senator Ron Johnson, the Republican wingnut from Wisconsin, held a committee hearing<\/a>  last week to once again roll out every tired and rejected conspiracy theory. And Michael Flynn, the convicted but pardoned former Trump national security advisor, told Newsmax<\/a> that when it came to the vote, the president \u201ccould order, within the swing states if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and basically rerun an election each in those states.\u201d<\/p>\n

Achtung, baby, what\u2019s a coup among pals? As per Jonathan Swan of Axios<\/em><\/a>, \u201cA senior administration official said that when Trump is \u2018retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it\u2019s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends.’\u201d (Early Sunday morning, Trump denied<\/a> the reports.)<\/p>\n

Yet all of this sedition is catnip to many of Trump\u2019s tens of millions of followers who still view him as some sort of demigod (as opposed to a mere demagogue) who can do no wrong. They cling to this cultish delusion despite the more than 17 million cases and 316,000 Americans dead from COVID, and the catastrophe Trump and his friends have made of this entire worldwide crisis\u2014including his followers\u2019 resistance to basic measures like masks and social distancing. He and they have increased the total death toll by untold numbers.<\/p>\n

This has been egged on by Trump and some of the ill-informed maniacs brought in to consult on this disaster, including the now-departed, infamous radiologist Scott Atlas<\/a> and Paul Alexander, who briefly served as a senior advisor at the Department of Human Services. In emails, Alexander advocated<\/a> herd immunity as the solution to the pandemic, writing, \u201cSo the bottom line is if it is more infectiouness [sic] now, the issue is who cares? If it is causing more cases in young, my word is who cares\u2026as long as we make sensible decisions, and protect the elderely [sic] and nursing homes, we must go on with life\u2026.who cares if we test more and get more positive tests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a much needed but grossly underfunded $900 billion stimulus bill had to go through the Senate gauntlet of cruelty and hypocrisy, ringmastered by Majority Leader McConnell. Desperately strapped citizens are offered only $600 in relief. (It\u2019s been noted that $600 is what rich people think poor people think is a lot of money.) Additional cash will have to be a huge priority for the incoming Biden\/Harris administration as it fights both the pandemic and the economic distress created in its wake for individuals, their families and struggling small businesses alike.<\/p>\n

Just to add kindling to this Yule Log of misery comes the news of a massive Russian hacking of businesses and agencies throughout the United States government. On Friday, counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, describing  this cyber threat as \u201cthe largest espionage attack in history,\u201d told CNN<\/em>\u2018s Anderson Cooper<\/a>, \u201cWhat concerns me is the Russians have broken all the rules. This is getting not only into a few government offices, but in thousands of companies. It is what the military calls preparations of the battlefield. Putting back doors in thousands of important companies and agencies, so that if they ever want to come back, in the period of crisis, and destroy those networks, they have the access. That\u2019s the real problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin\u2019s BFF, has failed to take action, tweeting on Saturday<\/a>\u2014in direct contradiction to Secretary of State Pompeo\u2014\u201dThe Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, sounding like that whiner Jan<\/a> on The Brady Bunch, \u201cRussia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).\u201d And then he concluded, because he\u2019s so goddamned fixated, \u201cThere could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA.\u201d<\/p>\n

Good grief\u2014all I want for Christmas is for Twitter and Facebook to suspend his accounts. As my friend journalist Steven Greenhouse responded<\/a>, the tweet \u201clooks very much as if it was ghost-written by Vladimir Putin.\u201d<\/p>\n

So there it is. Trump prefers to use his remaining days not doing anything useful or patriotic but wrapped in a perpetual pout, aided and abetted by the GOP and the extreme right-wing media. While officially, presidential spokespeople-types say his laser-like gaze is still focused on making America great, \u201cThose close to him paint a different picture, according to Josh Dawsey and David A. Fahrenthold<\/a> of the Washington Post<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

These days, Trump is spending most of his time in the residence, phoning allies, according to four people who have been in touch with him, and falsely tweeting that he won the election<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

Some of the president\u2019s top aides are urging him to stop litigating 2020. Advisers such as [David] Bossie have begun proposing scorched-earth tactics to cripple the Biden administration, so that Trump can better position himself ahead of 2024.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Swell. Rather than take any action to stop Russian interference or effectively stem the coronavirus, Donald Trump, as ever, lashes out and resorts to puerile petulance. He focuses solely on himself, his political future and revenge on his enemies while soaking up millions via his so-called legal defense fund and even threatening to veto the defense spending bill although, Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times<\/em><\/a> reports, it \u201ccontains two dozen provisions to strengthen cyberdefenses. It gives the federal government the ability to actively hunt for foreign hackers trying to penetrate computer networks and establishes a national cyberdirector who would coordinate the government\u2019s defenses and responses to such attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now I know this may seem a weary little missive for holiday time, but hope is not lost.<\/p>\n

The good news, of course, is the vaccine\u2014two of them so far with more in the pipeline, and thousands of frontline health workers already  getting the first jabs.<\/p>\n

The bad news is, no surprise, that this administration seems not to have put together a thorough plan for distribution and now is saying that the second round of doses is being cut for the coming week. This despite Pfizer announcing, \u201cWe have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.\u201d Is this our absentee president\u2019s punishment of blue states or basic ineptitude\u2014you decide. (On Saturday, four-star General Gustave Perna, chief executive officer of Operation Warp Speed, took the blame and apologized<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

But also look ahead to pushing through to the inauguration and the weeks and months to follow as we try to fix all the damage that the last four years have wrought. And look, too, to the days leading up to Georgia\u2019s special election on January 5 for those two US Senate seats that will determine how big a swing of the bat the new administration can take\u2014if willing\u2014to make significant changes.<\/p>\n

Early balloting already has begun\u2014more than a million cast so far. The activism of those stalwart volunteers working the phones and the streets to get out the vote for Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and defeat multi-millionaires Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, each accused of insider trading, is a superb holiday gift, suitable for the entire family.<\/p>\n

So God Bless Us, Every One. Don\u2019t let the bastard wear you down. And if you live in Georgia, vote.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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