Democracy's fate will be decided by what happens with all the Trump gates. By Hal M. Brown

 

Yesterday I wrote “Crashgate, Donald Trump drives the economy into Herbert Hoover Hell” I began my “gate” series the day before with “What's next, Tarriffgate? Will Trump's presidency be known for its gates?”

These are the articles from RawStory shown in my illustration: 'Obama better get off the golf course!' CNN tees off with supercut as Trump works on swing and Trump buried by Dem vet for skipping event for fallen soldiers so he can play golf.

Loomer was the breaking story yesterday (White House fires multiple administration officials after president meets with far-right activist Laura Loomer) but RFK Jr. was also in the news with clips of his anti-vaccine statements when a vaccine expert working for the FDA resigned rather than be fired. He had a team working on vaccines that in addition to known diseases would be used for new diseases including those that had been weaponized. Futhermore, he had a team working on treatments and vaccines for cancer. (See Top vaccine official resigns from FDA, criticizes RFK Jr. for promoting 'misinformation and lies')

We’ve all heard RFK Jr. speak in his not-ready-for-radio (let alone TV) voice. I’d never heard Laura Loomer so I found this YouTube profile of her with her speaking:

You may recall she sued Bill Maher for suggesting she’d had sex with Donald Trump (reference).

Trump takes advice from two kinds of people with two, not mutually exclusive, psychiatric disorders. He has his group of sadistic psychopaths who wouldn’t know an empathetic feeling if it slapped them in the face. Stephen “Goebbels” Millerand Kash “Casket” Patel are the worst of these. Then he has Laura Loomer and RFJ Jr. who are conspiracy believers and may come close to being clinically delusional.

There are so many potential gates looming (sorry, that’s the appropriate word) down the road.

One comes to mind because my partner and I and some friends are attending one the many Hands Off! rallies this afternoon. (See website)

Threre are lots of suggestions offered for protesters who want to make signs. We thought we’d make “HandsOff! our Constitution” and “HandsOff! our Democracy.”

Because we are in a Portland suburb we worry that this may attract counter-protesters from the Proud Boys. Portland, because it is so progressive, has seen protests where the Proud Boys and Antifa squared off against each other. (See: “Who Are Antifa and the Proud Boys? Portland Protests Explained.”)

We have new friends we met yesterday (shoutout - they know who they are) who are going to a rally in Vancouver, Washington. An old friend is going to one on the waterfront near Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, MA. with her 14 year old daughter. Of course this is where a group of immigrants were met by the only real native Americans.

I don’t know what “gate” we could call it if one or more of this or another protest ends up in violence.

On MSNBC this morning Michael Steele said that there here are bad actors out there who want to cause trouble. He cautioned us to be smart and not “mess up” because Trump wants nothing more than an excuse to use the Insurrection Act to declare martial law. 

InsurrectionGate? Martial Lawgate? Police Stategate? On the later, I wish we had a federal police state where the police were really there to protect and serve rather than act as enforcers for a ruthless dictator.

I expect to see a large law enforcement presence at the Hands Off! protest and the more of our police I see the more reassured I will be. Oregon law enforcement does not cooperate with ICE, but I will be keeping an eye out for ICE thugs roaming the crowd demanding brown-skinned people prove they are citizens. (See: Portland police chief says bureau ‘does not engage’ in immigration enforcement amid federal crackdow.)

On the subject of ICE, another fascist police state travesty of the Trump administration is his deportations to the Salvadorian prison of both real gang members here illegally (who don’t deserve to be treated the way they are in that prison hellhole) and people, some here legally, who had never commited a crime beyond getting a traffic ticket. How Gestapo-like does something ICE does have to be for us to have an ICEgate? Already we have Joe Rogan and Ann Coulter breaking with Trump over ‘horrific’ deportation enforcement. (Article)

Trump, on his chaotic and rage fueled revenge juggernaut, seems intent on burning our democracy down as if he relishes creating one gate after another.

Read my previous Substacks here.

Crashgate, Donald Trump drives the economy into Herbert Hoover Hell, By Hal M. Brown

 

This a sequel to what I wrote about all the “gates” Trump has survived and the ones that may be coming in the future. 

What's next, Tarriffgate? Will Trump's presidency be known for its gates?

How many "gates" can a president survive?

Given the drop in the stock market yesterday we might add aother couple of gates to Trump’s dubious accomplishments: Crashgate. Herbert Hoovergate.

Here’s a short profile of Pres. Hoover:

The 31st President, in office from 1929 to 1933, Hoover was inaugurated at the end of the Roaring Twenties. He was President for the start of the Great Depression, which resulted from the easy credit of the 1920s and the stock market crashing, a few months after his inauguration. During his single term, he initiated policies that plummeted the economy. During the Great Depression, he became an awful leader by causing trade conflicts. He also refused unconditional aid to those suffering, despite cutting taxes and launching initiatives to boost employment, he failed to address human suffering. Reference:

No matter the name, if Trump’s tarriff war leads to a severe recession he will have to do some fancy-dancing Trumpstyle footwork to come off smelling like roses.

Happy Spring?

I find nothing remotely amusing about Turmp’s blunders but sometimes it is healthy to take a break from despairing over the fate of the country. In that spirit I offer for your enjoyment this video from the classic movie the Producers and the video below.

Click above to view.

Here’s wishing Trump a decidely unhappy Springtime.

Read my previous substacks here.

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What's next, Tarriffgate? Will Trump's presidency be known for its gates? By Hal M. Brown

 

Tarriffgate hasn’t happened yet. At least nobody is calling it this. However we could say Trade-Wargate has been engaged.

Related to Trump’s tarrifs, another “gate” could be Stupidgate:

Another “gate” that shows indications it may be around the corner is Muskgate. 

With the market cratering 1000+ points this morning (article) we now can consider a pending Recessiongate. 

My life partner and intrepid proofreader added Stagnationgate.

Some horrors may not lend themselves to a short “gate” term but still have a grim ring to them. A good example is Starving-Childrengate. 

How about Bird-flugate? For that matter, if we have more than one disease reach epidemic or pandemic levels we could have Diseasegate we can blame on Trump and RJF Jr.

With enough excesses in Trump’s manic sadistic quest to punish his enemies we could have Police-Stategate.

A lot of these don’t have the simple one word “gate” name which we can thank a Washington, DC building complete for:

When the Signalgate story broke, I wrote Trump survived Pussygate unscathed. Will he survive Signalgate unscathed?

The term Signalgate was used in only three articles that night. By the next morning it was everywhere. 

One has to be careful about labeling something a “gate” too early. You can run a “gate” up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes and hope that if it doesn’t turn into a damaging scandal people forget you predicted that it would. 

Wikipedia has a list of some 800 gate scandals (here) most of which never went anywhere.

Aside from Watergate, which brought Nixon down and sent people to jail, there are two other famous ones. Emailgate might have contributed to Hillary Clinton losing the election. Pussygate proved that not enough people cared that Turmp was a gross disgusting sexual assaulting misogynist to keep him out of the White House.

So far Trump is the only politician to have had two gates: Pussygate and Signalgate. He survived the first and is so far well along the way to surviving the second.

I predict that the gate that may yet hurt him is Tarriffgate. Trump may have put way too many of his eggs in one basket with his tariff war.

Read my previous Substacks here.

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The Trump war on fake evil Canadian Fentanyl pushers and a f*cken nuts president, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

Wake up America. It’s clinical. Maybe you don’t need me to explain his various psychiatric diagnoses again and I should just say that he is fucken nuts. I say this as someone who worked as a psychotherapist for 40+ years and diagnosed countless patients.

Is this what a mentally stable person does in the evening?

"Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy. They are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels.

The Senate Bill is just a ploy of the Dems to show and expose the weakness of certain Republicans, namely these four, in that it is not going anywhere because the House will never approve it and I, as your President, will never sign it," he added on Wednesday. Why are they allowing Fentanyl to pour into our Country unchecked, and without penalty. What is wrong with them, other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly known as TDS? Who can want this to happen to our beautiful families, and why? To the people of the Great States of Kentucky, Alaska, and Maine, please contact these Senators and get them to FINALLY adhere to Republican Values and Ideals. They have been extremely difficult to deal with and, unbelievably disloyal to hardworking Majority Leader John Thune, and the Republican Party itself. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

The bill he is railing at the senators about would end the national emergency he has used to impose a 25-percent tariff on Canadian imports. The tarrifs are part of what Trump will announce today on what has dubbed shamefully and disgustingly "Liberation Day."  I wrote about this yesterday.

Trump manages to implicate Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins,Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul as accomplices to the make-believe evil Canadian Fentanyl traffickers just by including them in the same Truth Social rant. Whether deliberate or not it shows how Trump manages to be damn good at manufacturing a kind of guilt by association attack when there’s absolutely no association between these senators and Fentalyl coming in from Canada or anywhere else.

Aside from Trump’s usual raging at anyone who doesn’t kiss his ample royal posterior he may demonstrate his own delusions in posts like this, but he definitely insults the intelligence of the American people (and every Canadian) by trying to sell the idea that many proudly and affectionately call Canucks are evil drug trafficking gangsters.

There’s no doubt that Fentanyl is a drug of abuse and that it kills, however it should go without saying that it is an important part of the doctors arsenal to help patients, many of whom are dying, with pain so excruciating that even morphine doesn’t alleviate it. I know this from personal experience because it was the only medication (don’t call it a drug when it is used properly) which made the last few days of my wife’s life bearable. 

Trump has never spent four days sleeping on a cot next to a loved one like I did in the hospital who had a Fentanyl drip going into a vein making it possible for them to say goodby to all of their loved ones. Trump is incapable of empathizing both with these patients and those who love them.

Fentayl isn’t only used with dying patients. Consider this: No Longer a Scourge, Fentanyl Is Now Most-Needed Drug in COVID-19 War.

As far as Trump is concerned he would be thrilled to take credit for totally eliminating the abuse of Fentanyl in the county even if it meant that patients who really needed it couldn’’t get it.

Addendum: I got the idea for this Substack from 'Get on the bandwagon': Trump slams 'unbelievably disloyal' GOP senators in overnight rant in RawStory.

GG: From the comments to that article:
Why is it that NOBODY ever equated Canada with Fentanyl prior to Donald Trump's fever dream obsession?

• NellCote71

  I think less than 1 percent crosses the Canadian border.

  Stuart Underwood

  Because the claim is 99.999% bullshit.

  Most fentanyl still comes in through our ports, just like most heroin and cocaine. Intermodal shipping with mixed cargo containers is almost custom built to facilitate smuggling.

  And, of course, this is just a supply and demand issue. If there wasn't a demand, the supply would dry up. Want to stop fentanyl or heroin or whatever? You stop it at the user level. And that means messy treatment and recovery programs, and all those squishy liberal ideas that have actually worked to reduce rates of drug use over the years.

  50+ years of getting completely spanked in the "war on drugs" and these fucking GOPers still can't imagine it as anything but a law enforcement issue.

Related: 

Fentanyl compared with two less potent pain relievers.

There’s a pain reliever more powerful and dangerous than Fentayl. Most people, me included, never heard of it. It is used to anesthetize elephants.

Read my previous Substacks.

Another "how dare he from Trump," this one may be his most insensitive one yet, By Hal M. Brown Trump wants you to celebrate his Liberation Day. Let's remember the real liberation days when millions of lives were saved.

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The photo above shows Dutch civilians and Canadian Army troops celebrating the liberation of Utrecht, Netherlands, May 7, 1945. (Credit: Alexander M. Stirton/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-134377). You can click this photo and the other photos below to go to the websites which featured them.

A good friend of mine experienced a true liberation day when she was a child. She lived in a small village in the Netherlands that had been occupied by the Nazis. Even though she was a young child at the time she has an indelible memory of the day that American paratroopers landed in the village square and people came out to greet them. 

Several American soldiers ended up in front of her house and her parents invited them inside and gave them a meal. 

Several years later some of those soldiers came back to visit them for a heartfelt reunion.

The Canadians played an outsized role in liberating the Netherlands. This is particularly both ironic and disgusting since Trump has turned Canada into an enemy he wants to basically invade.

The photo below is from “A Dutch Spy’s Photographs of the Liberation of the Netherlands – May 1945.”

We’ve all seen photos of concentration camp survivors which were taken by Allied liberators so I won’t include them in this Substack.

You’ve been hibernating if you have missed Trump’s hyping tomorrow as his Liberation Day.

I can’t imagine that Trump doesn’t know that this term has a deep meaning to millions of people. How warped and pathological can a person be to use these words to glorify himself for instituting a political policy? I don’t have to answer this.

It is hard to find words to express how insensitive and downright disgusting it is that he uses this term in reference to tarrifs, the word he says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. He may not know that Trumpism is in the dictionary.

The liberation of Nazi occupied Europe began with D-Day, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. There was an enormous number of Allied casualties on just D-Day itself. This is estimated at 4,900 Allied troops were killed, went missing, and were wounded during the assault.

The total number of casualties that occurred during Operation Overlord, from June 6 (the date of D-Day) to August 30 (when German forces retreated across the Seine) was over 425,000 Allied and German troops. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties:

• Nearly 37,000 dead amongst the ground forces

• 16,714 deaths amongst the Allied air forces.

• Of the Allied casualties, 83,045 were from 21st Army Group (British, Canadian and Polish ground forces)

• 125,847 from the US ground forces.

Reference.

World War II took six years before the Allies achieved their final victory with the surrender of Japan. This was formalized on on the Battleship Missouri:

(Personal note” When I was a child the Missouri visited New York harbor and we went on a tour and saw where the capitulation was signed. I was amazed to see the inside of those gun turrets and the six inch thick armor protecting the ship.)

Addendum:

If you subscribe to The Washington Post this is well worth reading (here).

This is what Phillip Bump wrote:

I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long. There’s not a really great comparative model, but countries like Ukraine and Ecuador have kind of broadly resembled that in the last 30 years. The United States is a much more high performance state in democracy than those two countries, so we’re not going to really look like Ukraine or Ecuador. But the idea of passing back and forth between governments that behave well but don’t perform well and more autocratic governments that also fail to consolidate power? I think that’s right now where I’d put my dollar.

You probaly know who Ruth Ben-Ghiat is. If not, she’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda and democracy protection.

This is what she wrote in Phillip Bump’s Washington Post column “What America could look like a decade from now? Political scientists and historians weigh in on authoritarianism’s impact on the United States.”

If Trump and MAGA stayed in power for the long term, the U.S. would be acting in concert with authoritarian leaders and would have likely invaded some territories of democracy, as well as lending support to others’ autocratic aggressions, for example in Taiwan.

Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.

However, I believe there will be a reckoning as the outcomes of the plunder operation on benefits and government and the costs of propping up Russian leader Vladimir Putin become clear to Americans. To stop that reckoning, recourse to repression may be necessary, and that will also be unpopular.

Of all the experts writing heir prediction her’s may be the most optimistic.

Consider: 

This is from Thomas Pepinsky, the Walter F. LaFeber professor of government and public policy at Cornell University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The long-term implications of the second Trump administration are sobering. The administration’s simultaneous attacks on the legal profession, the federal bureaucracy, higher education and the U.S. military are destroying the societal pillars of American greatness with blinding speed.

Basic government functions are being turned off, seemingly at random and illegally, by Elon Musk and his ragtag crew of coders. And U.S. alliances are fraying, as countries around the world are adjusting to an administration that publicly threatens to abandon its treaty commitments while beating a hasty retreat in the face of Russian aggression and Chinese power. For its part, Congress has abdicated its own responsibility to serve as a check on the presidency, with GOP members counting on Trump’s brashness and charisma to protect them from voters.

Back to the Nazis. It took six years for World War II to end. We don’t have to speculate as to what the world would look like 10 years later. Russia became a dictatorship and a superpower. Democracy won the day in Germany and Japan. The NATO alliance was established in 1949. The United States was the undisputed leader of the free world.

We do not know what Trump will turn the country into during his tenure at president. If it is the one or another form of authoritarian state we don’t know how long it will take for democracy to be restored or what it will take to achieve this outcome.

The war to undo what the Axis did took six years. The only efforts so far have been in courtrooms where despite victories against Trump as far as having an effect on stopping Trump’s blitzkrieg have been about as effective as shooting Nerf balls at a tank.

Read my previous Substacks here.

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