If Donald Trump had given a State of the Union address this week it would have been a sweaty, sniffy, slurry rant for an hour and a half about all the ways the world has wronged him.
He was a millionaire by the time he was eleven months old and a multi-millionaire by age three - thanks to the trust funds his father set up for his children to avoid paying his fair share of income taxes.
Trump was a poor student who has struggled to read his entire life but covered it up by paying others to take his tests and hiding his grades via lawyers’ threats and donations to alma maters.
He embodies the baked-in mediocrity of a certain subset of white America.
Dumb and lazy and resentful.
Stubbornly clinging to an unearned sense of superiority while failing in any metric used to measure both aptitude and class.
He’s only rich because he learned to rip off others, something he had been schooled in from birth.
There is nothing that Trump has in his life that wasn’t handed to him from somebody else - including his victory in 2016.
It was as if the elegance and excellence of President Obama seemingly broke much of white, red state America - so they repudiated his class and intelligence with the sloppiest, stupidest, most deviant human they could find and tried to make him a king.
If Trump had stood in front of the Speaker’s desk on Thursday night he would have aired his aggrievement and railed against his personal criminal indictments.
Many of the ninety-one felony counts, an extension of the violent insurrection he had exhorted his followers to carry out in that very room.
Imagine the next Vice President sitting behind Trump at a State of the Union address, knowing full well he tried have the last guy hanged by an angry mob for upholding the Constitution.
That is not hyperbole - it is a fact - and one that is openly embraced by the GOP. Their inability to stand up to Trump and the innate corruption of the party was on full display during Biden’s speech.
Jeering the thought of making the wealthiest one percent among us pay their fair share and sending sideshow clowns into the chamber to heckle the President - while they sat on their hands and chewed gum.
The same party that fully supported the men and women who defiled and defaced the U.S. Capitol and absolved its leader of any responsibility.
Speaker Johnson’s eye roll at the mention of January 6th said it all. A little simp of a man play-acting at leadership in a Brooks Brother’s Boys Dept. suit and Oliver People’s finest.
A man dressed for the part with no desire to actually do the job: he was there to perform for an audience of one.
President Biden was there for an audience of 330 million.
The President gave a remarkable, fierce and inclusive reclamation of who we are as a people and where this ship of state should be heading based on the principles of freedom and democracy.
Bearings that are entirely absent from the Republican agenda which consists of zero policy and one objection; to satiate the ego of their warped and criminal leader and keep him out of jail.
President Biden was not just preaching to the choir but those beyond the church walls - who can already sense the bad news Trump brings and have no desire to head back in that direction.
It was a reassuring speech as well as a repudiation of the chaos and violence of the Republican agenda. Violence and retribution towards migrants, minorities, women’s healthcare, Social Security, ACA and public education - to say nothing of history and culture.
GOP policies are vicious and punitive; designed to punish and control constituencies while handing out more giant tax cuts to billionaires and corporations.
It is a party that has seemingly not only passed its expiration date, it has curdled into something much more toxic and nefarious.
The GOP is fast becoming no different from the extremist ideologies that have caused so much terror and suffering in the modern age.
Imagine being Mitch McConnell and knowing you spent the last forty years blocking any sort of progress - not only for your own constituents but for your country as a whole - while helping to empower a madman bent on destroying democracy.
All for a paycheck from Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch and former President of Rusal, who attempted to set up shop in Kentucky thanks to Mitch McConnell’s lobbying on behalf of Russia to lift sanctions.
Don’t even get me started on Rand Paul’s efforts on behalf of the Kremlin.
For a party that deifies Ronald Reagan, the GOP’s current allegiance to Russian interests is quite staggering (and obviously mentioned quite frequently in these pages).
Foreign policy decisions that would have once been deeply ingrained in the structure of American identity are now routinely up for opposition if not outright blocking in the GOP.
McConnell used his time (and his filibusters) in the U.S. Senate to block every progressive initiative - not only of Obama’s Administration but at the advent of Biden’s and all throughout Clinton’s two terms. An enemy of progress who set himself against the will of the people and took ghoulish pride in his ability to hinder legislation.
‘Moscow Mitch’ in essence broke the Senate and was paid handsomely for his efforts by his billionaire backers who were allowed to stock SCOTUS with their bought and paid for Justices.
And billionaires subsequently took over our political campaigns thanks to their Citizens United ruling - McConnell’s swan song of sorts.
When you compare the damage done to the cost of their allegiance, men like McConnell came pretty cheap; unfortunately the rest of us will pay a heavier price.
The GOP and Trump campaign have no policy beyond ignorance and trolling.
They’re counting on the same 70+ million Americans to choose an awful human being over a good one because the wretched man hates the same folks they do and that feels good when you are broken inside.
‘Hurting people, hurt people’ as the saying goes.
They cling to their guns and flags and pay performative lip service to principles they’re about to flush down a golden toilet but have too much toxicity in their minds and hate in their hearts to recognize it.
It is a sad moment in American life but not one beyond redemption.
Vote for the healer, vote for the man who truly understands what is at stake and how to get us beyond these rocky waters to calmer seas.
Vote for hope over the retribution of a criminal whose only aim is to steal your future.
Vote Blue.
On one hand I see all the democratic wins we've had in 21, 22, and 23, I think there's no way we can lose in 24, but the Republicans play so dirty, I'm always nervous about some fake scandal they will come up with at the Iast moment that will turn voters against Biden. I'm hoping people remember Hillary and don't fall for it again. I heard Biden say the other day 'Remember how it felt when you found out Trump had won?' Such a jarring memory, is was horrible. I hope I'm not the only one that feels this way.
The MAGAs see Trump as a pseudo-Michael Bloomberg, a successful businessman/entrepeneur who is civic-minded, pragmatic and capable. But that is the conman's illusion they have fallen in love with thanks to Celebrity Apprentice and a by-cable-ratings-damaged news media ecosystem. I know I've skipped all over the racism/bigotry which I think we can all agree is vital to the MAGA movement.