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THE ABSURD TIMES
TRUMP: OUR FACE TO THE WORLD
@honestcharlie [twitter]
@honestcharlie [twitter]
Trump and how he makes us look: DONALD TRUMP: DEPLORABLE BULLY
If you need a compendium of facts and data concerning what Trump means or represents, this is the only account you can trust.
I remember vividly a recent march, not for women's rights, or justice, or some other such cause, but a march in favor of FACTS!!! Now just let that sink in for a second. Who in their right mind would oppose facts? Did you ever think that it would be a time to actually march or demonstrate in favor of facts? The entire thing is absurd.
In fact, some time ago, we decided to cut way back, even cease or suspend publication as absurdity had become so obvious that we were not need in order for them to be recognized. There are simply too many to keep up with.
Well, in the excerpt for the book cited below, Dennis Campbell and his team of "Muckrakers," a lovely and forgotten word evoking the days when news mattered, you can see what is in the one book I recommend.
A few words about Denis himself: his biography is included below, but there are a few things I would like to add. For example, he is well conversant with both United States and British Culture. He spent some time as an MP in England as a Lib Dem. While that party did little but give the conservative government a majority, its politics were not at all conservative. It was actually high time that the so-called "New Labor" personified by the glib Tony Blair was ousted and given a chance to become the Labor Party again. He resigned his career in professional politics to return to journalism.
At one point I became aghast at the idiocy of the two women running to head the Conservative Party. The one who lost actually said that she was a better candidate because she had given birth and implied that no other qualification was needed. He actually brought that up on his podcast with his fellow journalists who actually thought I had made it up. Nope, things were that bad in England that sane people could not believe it. Well, it turns out that Brits had enough sense to realize how absurd things had become and yet many were surprised when Jeremy Corbyn, sort of a Bernie Sanders in the states, won his party's leadership swimmingly, so to speak. The current Prime Minister called an early election and people were amazed at how she just managed to squeak by with the narrowest of margins as Mr. Corbyn opposed her.
At any rate, here is a bit of the book and what it's about (he sent me this in a pdf file and this is the best I've been able to convert it, sorry sport!):
DONALD TRUMP:
DEPLORABLE BULLY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Denis G. Campbell is the author of nine books on politics, business and personal development. For two decades, he continues to provide global political and business commentary to dozens of broadcast outlets and numerous newspapers and magazines. He is under contract to four international television, and five global radio, properties. He is founder and editor of UKProgressive.co.uk Magazine and Producer/co-host of The Three Muckrakers, a weekly political show that for three years has covered US, UK, EU and international politics. He spent the last 14 years living and writing in Wales, United Kingdom from the seaside villages of Ogmore by Sea and Monknash.
Denis is a global business consultant in London, Singapore, Beijing, Washington, Miami and Los Angeles.
He was a director with Price Waterhouse and a business and
regulatory lobbyist in Washington DC and LA. He is the
managing director of the global consultancy Target Point
Ltd.
He is an Honors graduate of Boston College and has lectured at the Universities of Miami, Maryland, Johns Hopkins, American University (Washington, DC and Beirut), Erasmus Universiteit in Rotterdam, Zayed University in Dubai, UCLA, UWIC, Cardiff University, and others, on politics and business topics. A dual British and US national, he lives and writes high atop the cliffs of the historic Glamorgan Heritage Coast.
Please follow him on:
· Twitter – @ukprogressive
· Facebook – Denis G. Campbell: World
Politics Series
· Instagram – ukprogressive
…SEVEN MONTHS HAVE AGED US…
The worry over what this angry, bullying, petulant, tweeting man-child will do next, scares us to death. We are grateful for Sundays because that seems to be the only day in ANY week where we can catch our breath for about ten hours before he careens off, bored at the "dump" of a White House he feels he is forced to live in, and creates his next crisis. He has spent almost 60 days of the 230 or so in office at one of his hotel or golf properties.
There is a feckless meanness to every action he takes that terrifies us. He has been completely enabled by the mainstream media and a Republican tea party that turns its head the other way, sticks its fingers in its ears and sing, "La-la-laaa, I'm not listening!"
This book should have been written during the presidential campaign. Let me explain why wasn't. In 2012, I wrote four books from various stops along the campaign trail. I followed the then "seven dwarfs," traditional Republican candidates standing that year against President Obama.
It was a traditional, conservative, red-meat feast within the Republican/GOP/Tea Party (they are by the way, one and the same. I use the terms interchangeably and the letters GOP stand for its nickname, the Grand Old Party). They followed predictable culture war memes in 2012. It all felt quite sane and digestible. Seven candidates fought each other for the right to challenge a very popular President Obama in November. It was orderly. It was measured. There was time to think and react to the news of the day. You could go out for lunch and know you would not miss earth-shattering headlines during that hour.
2016, however, was nightmare-inducingly insane. There were literally no words to describe a 71-yearold man-child wandering around the world in his pajamas, yelling and tweeting at the world.
3
Forget a 24-hour news cycle. Trump made sure this was a two-hour, peripatetic, never-ending news cycle. And his presidency continues down the same exhausting path. A month of activity in Trumpville can be measured in dog years.
So much crazy occurs in any 24-hour cycle, that every time I sat down to write about a topic, seven other things would happen to throw me off the scent due to the sheer frenetic pace.
The plan for 2016 was to do a reprise…sit and write four 60-page books and combine them at the end into a recap. That was made impossible in January of 2016 when seventeen candidates entered the race. And, if we were playing chess, Trump strode in like a carnival barker and threw the board and pieces into the air. He was a tweeting, insulting, exhausting, childish, pedantic, peripatetic, attention-seeking, whore-mongering celebrity who made any serious, real-issue discourse impossible.
And he was winning.
He was the perfect candidate for our social-mediafilled, celebrity-obsessed, culture. The media helped to create him, then complained about his antics. Every time he spoke it was like watching the 1970s E.F. Hutton television commercials: "When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen." Everyone fell silent to see what worldsalad nonsense Trump would release.
The campaign threw all political and journalistic science out the window. Indeed, it set the window and the house on fire. Forget discussing issues. This was a 140-character assault, aided and abetted by a complicit and pandering mainstream media. Everyone's senses and sensibilities were under constant emotional attack. You didn't know what to believe any more and you just wanted it all to stop.
Rather than discuss issues, this was the politics of Twitter and personal attack. That ensured any reasonable and qualified candidate would fall quickly by the wayside.
4
It was political campaign as reality show. Survivor on steroids, as each week another candidate was voted off the island.
In January, prohibitive favorite Jeb Bush was struggling. Just like his brother before him in 2000, the GOP establishment lined up with checkbooks in hand to give him a huge financial lead. More than $100m was in his war chest.
He did poorly in Iowa. But no worries, the Bushes always were uncompetitive in that state's corrupt beauty contest caucus system. He was still tapped as the prohibitive populist favorite in New Hampshire and South Carolina. These were the first real contests where the Bush family name and history always resonated with establishment Republicans.
So, Jeb pretty much ignored Iowa. Rose above the fray in the debates when Donald attacked him as "lowenergy Jeb" and got his ass whupped but good. Trump was landing massive body blows in the fight. Jeb brought a butter knife to a gun fight and he never recovered. The fight was personal, nasty, and completely off most campaign operative's scripts. Jeb's team were like a production crew in the booth trying to find their place in the script and advance the teleprompter fast enough. It was classic Donald Trump.
Trump had no campaign staff. He conducted no opposition research. Produced no polls. Didn't buy any advertising. And yet he won New Hampshire in a field of fourteen candidates with 35% of all votes cast. Jeb Bush gave lengthy policy speeches. Trump did pep rallies attacking his opponent and Hillary Clinton. Bush finished a distant fourth behind Trump, Kasich and Cruz with only 11% of the vote.
South Carolina was to be Jeb's firewall. This was where he would spend every penny of what he had left to get on the field and in the game. He did even worse. Jeb finished fourth again in a winner-take-all primary. In delegates, Trump led 61-3. The rout was on. $100m of 5 organization and media time bought Jeb two embarrassing fourth place finishes. He dropped out of the race a few days later.
Trump sold massive amounts of merchandise. His red Make America Great Again (MAGA) hats were a profit-making arm of his branding business. With no hint of irony, they were made in China and shipped by the container-load. Trump sold his hats and filled up arenas with angry supporters. Aside from arena rentals, his biggest campaign expense was merchandise, but it was income, not expense. Trump was about to run the first political campaign in history that made a profit for all his businesses.
His opponents were barnstorming across states with multiple stops each day. Trump showed up for one big event a day. The news media followed and usually broadcast it live because no one knew what he would say next. Trump was ratings gold because he was so unpredictable.
The rules of campaigning no longer applied. Nothing he said was outrageous enough to disqualify him because he was not a politician. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted.
A Missouri politician in 2012 was crushed in his
Senate election when he uttered the words "legitimate
rape." Donald Trump bragged about "grabbing women
by the pussy." And yet, he won.
Most thought his stunts on the campaign trail were him just doing what he felt he had to do win the election. Almost every pundit said, "Once there, the gravity of the office is such he would have to pivot towards running the country and become much more presidential." We were all very, very wrong.
The mainstream media ate his act up. He was the perfect candidate for our times. An internet troll who spoke his mind. People identified with that. I would reply during numerous interviews trying to explain that, "Look, my uncle speaks his mind too. That doesn't mean 6 he is qualified to be president."
At the end of the campaign, it was estimated that while other candidates spent millions on television and online advertising, Trump earned a massive $2.4bn in free advertising as his Trump-branded Boeing 757 pulled up to airport hangars filled with his supporters. Every media outlet covered each move and word. The media even covered his attacks against them for being fake news. He'd bound off his jet, speak for 40 minutes and then fly home to sleep each night in his own bed. Journalists and campaign operatives were befuddled.
It worked. He got the lion's share of the media coverage. He also knew better than anyone how to touch a midwestern rust belt, racist, anti-immigration, raw, aggrieved white person's nerve. It was like what UKIP did in 2016 in the United Kingdom over Brexit.
The stream of angry @realDonaldTrump tweets was relentless; five new crises would befall the campaign daily over them. And, somehow, at the end of each day, despite condemnation by the other candidates and the President, he would move on untouched in the eyes of his base to fight another day.
His fans liked him because he was a straight shooter, despite the serial lies. He convinced people in closed factory towns that he would fight for them no matter what. He converted solid former Democratic Party voters, upset that their candidate Hillary was ignoring them and their plight. They wanted to send a message to Washington to focus on matters here in our country. When the General Election votes were tallied, a mere 80,000 out of the more than 120,000,000 votes cast, decided three key industrial states. Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were reliably blue states that were angry no one in either party was listening to them. Despite an overall national majority of 3,000,000 votes, Hillary lost these three states and, as a result, the Electoral College vote. That was the ballgame.
Trump was the only candidate who consistently 7 showed up at airports. He would pledge that he, and he alone, would help them, bring back manufacturing jobs and solve their problems. A huge majority believed him despite pledges that proved to be campaign-trail lies at Carrier Air Conditioning and other locations. The more outrageous Donald Trump behaved, the crazier the coverage became of his airplane landing in a new city. That led to bigger voter turnouts for him in those primary states. He was Britain's Nigel Farage writ large. A place for voters to, at first, lodge a protest vote and a personality everyone wanted to want to have a pint with…if he drank.
Then, something funny happened. Hard-working folks believed he could win. They ignored Trump's oftrepeated lies as "fake news." He was as charismatic to them as a travelling Baptist preacher. He pledged to "drain the swamp" and clean up Washington. He would be the working white man's champion. They believed his hype and refused anything that resembled a provable contrarian fact. They did not want to know, nor did they care, about his past. He alone would shake up Washington and bring change. This was a television reality star unleashing every trick in the book to build an audience.
And it worked.
No one in the political world understood what he was doing or how he did it. This was largely because no one knew what he would do next. His rallies gained steam and attracted thousand to venues. He placed the press in pens like circus animals, then blamed them for poor coverage, and called out reporters by name. They were subjected to incredible abuse online and offline from his minion followers and Russian social media bots. He incited violence. Told supporters to "Knock the crap out of protestors," and that he would "Pay their legal bills," which, of course, he never did. The mediacreated monster climbed atop the Empire State Building swatting away the heavy artillery aimed at him.
8
At the point of writing this book, we are 45 weeks into an improbable election win and presidency. We start 12 days before the election with a real October surprise, assisted by then FBI Director, James Comey. He announced a reopening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. That saw her go overnight from a 10-point lead in the polls to a loss.
She never got back on the front foot and Trump used his time in those last few days to beat "Crooked Hillary," and "Lock her up!" drums. Despite her being cleared a second time a few days before the election, the damage was done. Hillary was a dead woman walking. The book ends with a Friday night news dump as Hurricane Harvey hits Texas, Sheriff Joe Arpaio is pardoned, a detailed memo to the military demands they ban the service of transgender troops in the US military, Trump then clumsily handled the Harvey relief efforts, and his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program meant new chaos and fear on the immigration front. DACA temporarily lifted the threat of deportation for immigrants brought to the US before they were 16 now Trump was ending the programme and threatening them with deportation. Oh, and a Category 5 hurricane, Irma, was taking dead aim at Florida and there still were no leaders heading The Federal Emergency Management agency (FEMA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) or the Department of Homeland Security since John Kelly was elevated to be his Chief of Staff.
The Three Muckrakers
For three years, I have produced a weekly current affairs programme and iTunes podcast in the United Kingdom called The Three Muckrakers. Our first broadcast was on the day of the 2015 Scottish Referendum to leave the UK. 133 episodes later, we have broadcast 44 weeks/year 9 covering US Congressional and Presidential Elections;
Brexit; the devolved government elections for Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland; elections in France, The Netherlands, Germany and other EU states; and two UK General Elections.
I am joined weekly in the studio by the political and religious commentator, Paul Halliday. Past co-presenters included co-founders: Phil Parry, former BBC anchor and editor of The Eye Investigates and Dr. Dario Llinares, senior lecturer in media at The University of Brighton. Many weeks we have been joined by as many as 40 news and thought leaders on various topics including:
North Korea; Mexican-American discrimination in the USA; healthcare; environment and anti-fracking; US, Dutch, UK and EU members of Parliament and Congress. We discuss political developments weekly in the US, UK and around the globe.
The as-aired scripts and topic rundowns form the basis of this book. It was, frankly, the only way we could keep up with the breathtakingly-mindless pace and continual misdirection, smoke and mirrors of this new administration.
Shameful "45"
In the USA, President Trump is often referred to as "45", his number in the line of presidential succession. (Washington was number 1, Lincoln, 16, and Obama was 44).
It's been 45 shameful weeks of President 45. They truly feel like 45 months or even 45 years. It has been a wild ride so far. We will look at:
· The Russian election hack and cozy Putin relationship.
· The Mueller investigation.
· The former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's
10 dossier and related crimes that, even if pardoned, will continue in New York state.
· His fight with the intelligence community.
· Cabinet officers who fill vs "Drain the
Swamp."
· His tweets and their aftermath.
· The Charlottesville racist protest and death led by white supremacists / neo-Nazis.
· His limited vocabulary and speech
schizophrenia.
· "The Wall" and immigration.
· His personal attacks on eleven US senators…in his own party!
· The Administration labelling any news it does not like as "Fake News" and their dishonest media attacks backfiring spectacularly.
· Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria: Trump's
Katrinas.
· Trump as a totalitarian leader, whipping up his
base and dividing the nation.
Let's start with how we got here.
