My Own Personal War Against Donald Trump

If only I could have won it.

Photo by LINLI XU on Unsplash

I’m taking stock today of the hundreds of hours I’ve spent at my keyboard trying to stop the Trump onslaught. I’ve been onto and after Donald Trump since early 2015, at my blog, Ramona’s Voices, at Dagblog, at Liberaland, at Crooks and Liars, and anywhere else I could find a soapbox and maybe an audience. So many like-minded blogs and websites were doing the same. Since early 2015, hundreds if not thousands of us have been at it, trying to put an end to the Trump phenomenon, and so far we’ve all failed.

But here’s the one thing we’ve got going for us: we were there early. We were there first, sounding alarms, practically on our knees begging the people and the press to see what we saw and to think of all of it as a significant threat and not as shocking entertainment.

I’m tired of hearing TV pundits bragging about how they got there first. Whenever I hear some pundit brag about something they said about Donald Trump, I can pull out something I wrote that got there long before them. And I can point to dozens of other independent websites (like Crooks and Liars) that did the same. We got there early and we said it all OUT LOUD. And nobody listened.

We barely made a blip.

For my part, I was blogging and I was my own boss. I could say anything I wanted to say. I didn’t have to go through an editorial board that would then have to think about profits first before throwing out caution signs. Looking back, everything I said I would say again today. I was right about it all. (Except the parts where I swore Donald Trump would never win the presidency. I was utterly, embarrassingly wrong about that.)

I wrote it all in earnest, with a burning passion, with horror, with angst, with humor and ridicule, sometimes late into the night, yet nothing I ever wrote made a damn bit of difference. (Note the dates in the quotes below. All of them, except the last, were written before Trump ‘won’ the 2016 election and became president. The last one was a warning before the 2020 election. These are just a select few. You can read more in the archives at Ramona’s Voices if you want. )

Here’s the upshot: My own personal war against Donald Trump was a bust. I lost. He won. But nobody can say I didn’t try.

In The Nothingness of Donald Trump (9/2/2015) I warned against him:

You know what's sleazy?  A man like Donald Trump having so little respect for our American system of government that he would use his guise as candidate for the presidency to spread his laughable malarkey, to push his one agenda, his own self-aggrandizement; to mock and insult anybody who isn't fawning over him and who dares to get in his way as he moves toward what he wants when he wants it.

You know what's perverted?  The notion that a man like Donald Trump could be considered for the job of President of the United States.  Right now, as I write this, he polls at the top of the Republican contenders.  He's a panderer who hasn't given an honest thought to the needs of the citizens of this country EVER.  He's a man who admits he'll do anything to get a deal.  He's a ruthless businessman who prides himself on not knowing anything about politics or foreign policy and sees that as a plus for his side.

In Curtain Down on the Trump Show Already. Please (11/23/2015) I warned against him:

On Sunday he told George Stephanopoulos he has no problem with waterboarding because "it's peanuts compared to what 'they' do".  (Almost every Republican could be heard groaning.  Cheers, though, from Dick Cheney, who, until that moment, hadn't even considered pushing for the job of choosing Trump's vice president.)

Then, with cameras still rolling, Trump assured Stephanopoulos that what he'd said the night before about seeing thousands and thousands of Arab people in New Jersey cheering as the World Trade Center came down was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

George suggested in an adorably nice way that there are some--or maybe all--who can't find a single solitary bit of footage or eye-witness account that would make what Donald said even slightly true.  Donald chalked it up to reporters wanting to be politically correct, and George, not ever wanting to be branded a politically correct reporter (oh gawd no!), thanked him ever so kindly for his time.

I watched that and breathed such a grateful sigh you wouldn't believe.  At last!  Caught in his own terrible lie!  Hoist[ed] with his own petard!  Stick a fork in him! He's done!

But you know what happened, don't you?  Come on, admit it.  You know.

Trump's poll numbers went up.  The crowds loved him even more.  Fifty five percent of likely Republican voters now say they would trust him over all other candidates to do the right thing about terrorism.  (What would he do about terrorists? Namely ISIS?  He would "bomb the shit out of them!" and take the oil. Yay!)

He is a serial liar and is the number one choice among Republicans for the next president of the United States.  (These same people, so deathly afraid of refugee families fleeing for their lives, have no fear of a Donald Trump presidency.  No fear!  None at all!  But there I go again.)

You know by now--because I keep telling you--I tend to take these things personally.   My America is not a plaything.  It's not a joke.  Turning my country over to a non-politician with no government experience would be punking of the worst kind.  But even thinking for one second of turning it over to a lying billionaire braggart who has a history of taking but not giving, who calls people ugly names and shuts up anyone who disputes him, who is such an embarrassment even countries with their own embarrassing characters can't believe we've topped them--that's insanity undisguised.

In The Donald Dilemma: Loves the Crowds, Hates the Presidency (1/27/ 2016) I warned against him:

I've been watching Donald Trump pretty closely (How to avoid it? Dear God in Heaven, how to avoid it?) and I have a theory.  Bear with me now, because at first you're going to laugh.  I know I did.  But here it is:  The billionaire Trump would rather die than be president of the United States.  But then he'd rather die than give up the attention, the fabulous, almost surreal attention.  From the people, from the press, from the Big Guys in Washington, from the world!  It's all his!  Donald Trump's!  He can't give it up!  He just can't!  But, damn, he does not want to be president.

He came up with a clever slogan.  Such a clever slogan, you wouldn't believe: "Make America great again!"  Word got around that this billionaire with no political ties was going to make America great again.  The crowds came.  They roared.  He roared.  They were hooked.  He was hooked.

It didn't matter that he didn't have a plan.  It was enough that he agreed to hate all the people they hated, that he spoke off the cuff, that he said the most outrageous things--godawful things--and got away with it.  It became a spectacle and the show began to run on its own steam.  It was better than any juicy, shocking reality show.  It was better because they were all in it, participating, instead of just watching it on their TV screens.

But then something happened.  Donald Trump began to be taken seriously.  Some members of the fawning press went from enjoying the pure folly of it to asking him the hard questions.  The questions any serious presidential candidate should know.  Questions about the economy, about policy, about world affairs. But that's not what interested him.  Not in the least.

And, of course, he knew nothing about any of those things. In order to make them stop, Trump saw he would need to attack the press and make them look silly.  And again, because everything he touched miraculously turned to gold, it worked!  Beautifully!  The press, because his campaign was the best copy ever, became his lap dogs.  To his own surprise, they gave him so much free time he didn't have to spend a dime of his own vast fortune to get him to the very top.

In Clinton to Trump: I’ll Take the High Road and You Take the Low Road (5/10/2016), I warned against him:

No matter what scandal Trump wants to use as ammunition against Hillary Clinton or anyone else who gets in his way, the real scandal is Trump himself.  His behavior is not acceptable, or even normal.  Most of the people voting for him wouldn't put up with him in their own living rooms for a single day, let alone four years.  I don't pretend to know what goes on in their minds.  It's one thing to be sad and disappointed and frustrated and angry at the perpetrators of what looks like wholesale destruction of the very fabric of our society, but it's quite another not to know you're backing a goddamn idjit for president.

What Trump still doesn't get--and maybe never will--is that for all his popularity he has many more haters than fans.  Those thousands filling every venue, cheering him on, are the same thousands who filled Sarah Palin's venues, cheering her on whenever she went on the attack against the establishment.  It fills a need, it satisfies an itch, clichéd beyond all reason ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"), but it does nothing to change what many perceive as a dysfunctional government.

The way to make change is to get involved.  In Trump's case, a first step might include a high school civics class.  The GOP nominee for president has built his case for being president by showing the world it pays not to know anything about being president.

He aced the test, not by studying or giving the right answers, but by blasting everyone who tried to tell him he's not ready to graduate.  He's the E-minus student running against the Valedictorian, having full confidence that he can bully his way to a diploma.

In Coming Soon, The Trump Show Finale (8/1/16) I warned against him:

There is one thing [Trump] is not.  He is not a candidate for president of the United States.  He pretends he is because he knows if he drops the act his fans will go away. The presidency is the furthest thing from his mind.  He drops hints that he might not take the job if he wins.  He used his son as a surrogate to warn potential vice presidential candidates it'll be a much bigger job than they might think: they'll be doing the day-to-day job of the president, taking care of policy, both foreign and domestic, while Trump will be--and I quote--"making America great again".

Trump is a showman and this season's show is called "The Presidency".  When he loses--and he will lose--a whole new career will open up for him.   He'll become the anti-president--the man who could have got it done, if only.  Every zany, unworkable idea he ever had will balloon to colossal size, now lost to us because of the shortsightedness of the entrenched establishment who, if you can believe it, were terrified of his power.

Days after Trump ‘won’, In America, What Have You Done? (11/6/2016) I warned against him:

The postmortems will be coming fast and furious in the days ahead, but the die is cast, our bed is made, our new president is a nasty narcissistic loose cannon who will be in a position to fill his cabinet with his equally slimy agenda-driven cronies, to fill the Supreme Court with Scalia clones, to shut down needed social services, to rape our public lands, to deny climate change, to end the Affordable Care Act, to finish off Roe v Wade, to send packing anyone whose skin color, religion, or ethnic background, doesn't match his idea of a pure America.

He has threatened to send his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to jail.  He has threatened to take away the freedom of the press. He has threatened to "bomb the shit" out of Isis. He has aligned himself with the ugliest elements in our society, including the gun toting militias, the KKK, the NRA, and the religious right.

Vladimir Putin has already sent his congratulations.

And, again, in his race against Joe Biden, in Donald Trump Will Not Win, (9/27/2020) I warned against him:

More than 200,000 COVID deaths, most of them completely avoidable but for Trump’s stubborn pretense that his giant brain is far superior to every scientist and epidemiologist in the land.

Kids in cages. They’re still crying, their parents are still crying, we’re still crying.

Attacks on women, minorities, the disabled, and the disenfranchised.

Name-calling and childish insults, laughable word-salad adlibs thrown in to speeches written by Stephen Miller, as if despots were still in vogue and this wasn’t America.

And now Trump, always so insanely inappropriate for the highest job in the land, has the chance to select a third Right Wing Supreme Court nominee and get her in place before the election.

And he's not done yet.

To the delight of his followers, and, let’s face it, the press, Trump is impishly pretending he might not leave office if Joe Biden should, by some slim off-chance, win. But he will leave, and we even know the date: January 20, 2021.

Over and over, blog after blog after blog. And, as I’ve said, I wasn’t alone. There were multitudes sending the same warnings—and almost none of them worked in the mainstream media, where those warnings would have meant something.

So Donald Trump prevailed. In 2016 he won. We lost. Then, in 2020 we won. Trump lost. But did he go away? You know he didn’t. He’s still out there, like every fire-breathing dragon in every fantasy tale where evil reigns and the little guys work to save their corner of the world. Scene after scene. Chapter after chapter. The dragon returns, chaos reigns, death and destruction follow. And by the time the story ends and the dragon is vanquished, the cheering competes with the grieving and there isn’t a life that hasn’t been forever altered by the fact that a deadly fire-breathing dragon came into their lives.

But here’s what keeps me and so many others going:

In the end the little guys always win. They go through hell, their innocence is in tatters, they suffer defeats and disappointments and betrayals, and good people suffer. But in the end they win. They have to. The never-ending story of civilization demands that the good guys win.

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Comments, as always, are open.