By Andrea Shorter–
Treasonous. Disgusting. Abhorrent. Embarrassing. Buffoonery. These are but a few of the heated, yet kinder, adjectives hurled against the President of the United States of America in the wake of his creepy embrace and acceptance of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “strong” denial of his country’s clearly evident interference and attack on our 2016 election for President.
Absurd. Ridiculous. Unbelievable. These are more terms used to describe President Trump’s equally creepy, clunky and totally unconvincing attempt to walk back his worldwide broadcasted “gaffe” when back home, one day, two time zones and miles away from his KGBFF at his side: “I thought that I made myself very clear, but having just reviewed the transcript … I realize that there is a need for some clarification. The sentence should have been ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.”
Yeah, ok, Mr. President. If you say so.
Nah, I don’t think so.
Michelle Obama said it best: being president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.
The truth of the matter, Mr. Trump, is that you are a rabid, compulsive and bold-faced liar.
It is foolish and folly to expect that you will change. Who you are was revealed well before you set foot into the Oval Office. We’ve known this about you all along, even those persons that offered to give you the benefit of the doubt that maybe, just maybe, you’d change once you’d assumed the mantel of the highest office in the land.
You lie about pretty much everything. Every word that comes out of your mouth is likely to be riddled with lies.
There is truth to the punchline: “How do know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” Even still, most politicians understand and at least attempt to heed to Bob Marley’s caution, “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
The President of the United States is a big fat liar. He has betrayed the power and dignity of the office as Commander in Chief by siding with the world’s chief dictator against our own intelligence agencies and national security forces as Russian operatives are, without a doubt, the culprits who interfered in our elections within our albeit flawed, but most fundamental, tenant of democracy. As the elected standard bearer of democracy, his betrayal as the President of the United States of America puts all forms of democracy in danger.
Trump’s suck-up to Putin signals much more than a semantic slip in a sentence that can be half-heartedly corrected in a day or two after the Helsinki press conference. His original statement assuring his trust in Putin’s denial over overwhelming evidence to the contrary regarding Russia’s organized cyberattacks against our banner stronghold of free elections might have been the most truthful words he has spoken since he has been president.
Mr. Trump is far more concerned that his election as president is viewed and accepted as totally legit against perennial foe Hillary Clinton, the mutually despised enemy of both him and Putin. Blinded and driven by his own alpha-maniacal ego to prove that he is as strong, tough, large and in charge as any other admired dictator on the block, he neither has the time, interest nor capacity to stand up against the clear and present threat to his own country he sworn to protect and defend against the likes of a man he so desperately wants to please, befriend and perhaps somehow fantastically prevail against as the winner in whatever wayward mano-to-mano mutual admiration society he thinks he is erecting.
On the mano-to-mano tip, what exactly does Putin have on him? If it’s an embarrassing video of Trump basking in a fetish of golden showers in a Moscow hotel suite, as a supposedly strong, tough guy, wouldn’t he just make up another lie to swat that away as fake or untrue, despite what we might see in a video? You know, similar to lying about inauguration crowd sizes? It’s got to be something far more troubling than a now urban legend pee video.
Perhaps it’s the millions of dollars he reportedly borrowed from oligarchs (and money possibly laundered through multiple business holdings) that he so desperately needed to continue propping up his real estate interests and the carefully crafted Trump brand that keeps him at the knee and in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, the biggest gangster oligarch of them all. Is he in hock, indebted to, and compromised by whatever not so artful deal he might have made with such devils to the point that his eventual run for president was to help sow the seeds of division to help make us all the more vulnerable to cyber and psychological warfare by our most venerable enemy?
Is Trump an unwitting witless agent of Russia? If so, what exactly is it that he is to deliver? He declares that his administration has been toughest through sanctions on Russia than any other president before or after the Cold War. Still, even if his administration is putting the squeeze on Russia, if he is materially engaged up to his eyeballs with some nefarious Russian interests, perhaps payback would include working to lift whatever restrictive barriers (sanctions) that would allow for greater prosperity, especially for Putin, who is reported to be one of the world’s wealthiest men to the tune of at least $40 billion reaped from real estate, oil and questionable dealings.
So, that’s a lot of deep-end speculation and perhaps irresponsible accusation against this president. Unfortunately, with a personal-brand obsessed, overdosed ego-driven president who lies, and then lies to cover the lies he just told in habitual rinse and repeat fashion, such farfetched and hyperbolic notions and conspiracy theories might not be as far off the mark as one would hope of any sitting U.S. president.
At this point in whatever possible Faustian bargain that might have been struck involving Donald Trump, or whatever else motivates or drives him, is perhaps ultimately, fatefully and sadly immaterial. The damage is done. And, the damage keeps being done over and over again under his increasingly authoritarian-bent command. Beyond the ongoing and apparently deepening investigation by special counsel into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia to undermine our elections to advance his Putin preferred win, the case against this president is swelling by the New York minute.
If the cruelty and savagery of ripping thousands of children apart from their migrant families or those seeking asylum at our nation’s southern borders and throwing them into concentration camps as a deterrent to migration and for hardball political sport to cripple any chance of a blue wave sweep ahead of the mid-term elections hasn’t been enough to send you into protest mode, please wake up.
If the fact that his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court was chosen because of his rendered opinion that the President of the United States cannot be subject to indictment while in office hasn’t been enough to make your skin crawl, then please, wake up now.
If there was ever a time to be triple caffeinated woke, it is now. We are well beyond pearl clutching, righteous tweets and retweets. This is the time to get up, stand up.
If you are a Democrat, do all that you can do to support and elect Democrats to take back the majority of the U.S. House of Representatives. If you’re not a Democrat, please do the same. If James Comey and George Will are urging to vote Democrat, surely you can, too. The GOP is no more. They have relinquished whatever shreds of their former selves to the fear of being tweeted and hated on by their new leader, who is fashioning anything and everything in his orbit into his own, self-satisfied image. Under this leader—who has little to no respect for the rule of law, our institutions or the vast majority the American people—and his feckless party, the checks and balances between the three branches of government are eroding. In his mind’s eye, he and only he alone is the only government we need.
Whatever art of the deal, new world order is being concocted between Trump and Putin—perhaps unlike whatever was privately discussed between these two men in Helsinki, and maybe actual details are to come after Putin’s announced visit to the White House in the fall—it is most assuredly no good. That’s no lie.
Andrea Shorter is a Commissioner and the former President of the historic San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. She is a longtime advocate for criminal and juvenile justice reform, voter rights, and marriage equality. A Co-founder of the Bayard Rustin LGBT Coalition, she was a 2009 David Bohnett LGBT Leadership Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
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