He Is A . . .

If you doubt any of these characterizations, click the links for proof.

And feel free to add your own: his megalomania, his cheating little people out of money they’re due, his treatment of women, his mob connections, his recklessness, his incompetence, his multiple bankruptcies . . . but aren’t the seven above enough?

Lindsey Graham, who in 2015 called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot undercutting everything we stand for” remains a backer.

The hideous senior senator from Kentucky remains a backer.*

Even my Ivy-educated LGBT septuagenarian friend of long-standing “Chris” (as I’ll call him or her) remains a backer . . . disgraceful though Chris acknowledges Trump’s behavior to be.

After a particularly frustrating phone call in which I enumerated the above — doesn’t it bother Chris that Trump is a liar and a fascist, etc.? — I sent a link to David Leonhardt’s, “So This Is Where We Are” . . .

. . . with this rant:

<< Yes, of course you’re not for dishonesty, fascism, bullying, the Russian mob, racism, or sociopathy, Chris – but if that’s what it takes to get Mexico to pay for the big beautiful wall to reduce gang violence on the streets of [Chris’s quiet little town, where there is no violence] while we cut aid to Nicaragua; if that’s what it takes to get everybody great health care at a tiny fraction of the price [which no one got]; if that’s what it takes to allow use of pesticide killing off the honeybees as we fire all the scientists in the Agriculture Department and put a fossil fuels lobbyist at the head of the Bureau of Land Management; if that’s what it takes to move away from our “free world” allies toward autocracies and exit the Paris Climate Accords; if that’s what it takes to appoint anti-LGBT, anti-voting-rights judges – well, then, in your view, so be it. Nothing comes without a price. >>

It’s just NUTS.

But so are world wars, eating Tide pods, and all sorts of other human folly.

So I will leave you with this:

Jim Burt: “The ‘National Conservatism’ gathering was just held in Washington. The sponsoring organization was the Edmund Burke Foundation. I find two aspects of this gathering especially notable:

The name, ‘National Conservatism’ strongly echoes Germany’s ‘National Socialism,’ and I believe that was a conscious choice. They’re telling us, in essence, that their program is Nazism without the benefits.
The sponsoring organization can call itself anything it wishes, but Edmund Burke, the prophet of classical conservatism, would have been revolted to learn that an ideological organization had coopted his name. Classical Burkean conservatism utterly rejects ideology in any form, preferring a ‘whatever works’ approach with a strong bias in favor of not changing anything that is currently working.

“The attendees included the usual assortment of right wing goons, loons, and poltroons, including Missouri’s brand new Republican senator, Josh Hawley, whose keynote speech repeatedly denounced ‘cosmopolitan elites,’ a timeworn trope usually translated as ‘Jews.’ This is not likely to end well.”

→ But it can! If you have the resources, chip in to make sure it does.

*I can’t bring myself to use McConnell’s first name — it sounds too friendly. “Hey, Mitch!” “Hey, Bobby!” “Hey, Scooter!” How can one be friendly to a man who’s done such harm to tens of millions of people? And if I only use his last name, some might not know to whom I refer. So let’s just call him the hideous senior senator from Kentucky.

And while I’m at it — why does everyone call Trump by his first and last name? We all know who you mean. Adding the first name, besides wasting breath, fails to convey contempt. And I say that as — ordinarily — no fan of contempt. But for a vulgar, bullying, lying, cheating, fascist sociopath who is destroying the world? Yes: I have contempt. As Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and so many others once did.