Former Clinton secretary of labor Robert Reich was none too pleased with President Trump’s planned 2019 State of the Union address, claiming Trump uses “divisive” language to appeal to his base. “There’s another reason Trump aims to divide,” Reich added, “and why he pours salt into the nation’s deepest wounds over ethnicity, immigration, race and gender. He wants to distract attention from the biggest and most threatening divide of all: the widening imbalance of wealth and power between the vast majority, who have little or none, and a tiny minority who are accumulating just about all.”20 Well, that covers nearly all the major themes of this book. Leftists consciously divide us while falsely accusing us of racial, gender, and class divisiveness. Reich is saying that Trump and his supporters are racist, and so Trump ingratiates himself to them by fueling their bigotry. This is sick stuff. The last thing Trump supporters want is to divide the nation along racial, gender, and economic lines. We do wish, however, that leftists would quit pouring salt into wounds they themselves have inflicted.
Democrats and the media constantly paint Trump as a racist, which is their lazy, fallback attack on every Republican president at least going back to Reagan. There’s no evidence whatsoever that it’s true—notwithstanding widespread but utterly false reports that Trump praised neo-Nazis who rallied at Charlottesville21—but they hope to make it conventional wisdom through sheer repetition. AOC tweeted, “The President is a racist. And that should make you uncomfortable.”22 Discussing Trump’s border wall proposal on CNN, journalist Carl Bernstein declared, “We have had in this country situations where maybe half the country hates the president of the United States at one time or another. We’ve never had a president that hates half the country.… We’re talking about a wall here that is a symbol that says, ‘brown people, we don’t want you.’ ”23 MSNBC’s Chris Hayes alleged that Trump’s base wants “an ethnically pure America in the sense of not having immigrants, not having folks of color here.” He added, “The wall originated as a device to jog the President’s memory, to make sure to remind him to cater to the most xenophobic part of the base of the Republican Party because there is a cluster of people in the Republican Party who catapulted Trump to his win in the primaries who hate and/or fear immigrants and not only that, these are people who define their political life by stemming and stopping the invasion of people who do not look like them.”24 Racism is one of the most damning smears that can be leveled against people, and it says something about leftists that they freely sling the bogus charge without evidence not only against Trump but his millions of supporters as well.
AOC also accused Trump of anti-Semitism, which is rich, considering her alignment with anti-Semitic progressives. When asked about the anti-Semitism of the Women’s March, she tried to turn the tables. “First of all, right now in this moment, in the United States we have to center this conversation, I think that concerns of anti-Semitism with the current administration in the White House are absolutely valid and we need to make sure we are protecting the Jewish community and all those who feel vulnerable in this moment,” said AOC.25 Is this blind projection or cynically strategic? If she were truly concerned about anti-Semitism, she’d stop defending the constant anti-Semitic eruptions from her close colleagues, Reps. Omar and Tlaib, instead of lobbing baseless charges against Trump, who has been a stalwart friend of the Jewish people and of Israel. But such inconsistencies give leftists no pause because what truly animates them is their animus against conservatives and their agenda. Being a raging anti-Semite is easily excused among fellow leftists for the good of the cause. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as they say.
UNLEASHING INVESTIGATORY HELL
Progressives fantasized that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would produce a report resulting in Trump being frog-marched out of the Oval Office in handcuffs. Mueller’s failure to deliver such a report—or find any Russian collusion at all—didn’t deter them, much less move them to contrition. Even before the report bombed, the House Democratic majority began unleashing investigatory hell on the president. Democrats had long been chomping at the bit to impeach the president—Rep. Cedric Richmond is clearly not the only congressman who views impeachment as his “sole focus.”26
In early 2018, sixty-six Democratic House members voted to move impeachment proceedings forward. Congressman Brad Sherman even filed a resolution of impeachment on the very first day the Democrats took control of the House in January 2019. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York noted that these efforts were not based on a detailed bill of particulars against Trump. Sherman’s resolution was based solely on Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey—which Trump had full authority to do, as Comey himself admitted27—and the Comey memos. Meanwhile, impeachment articles filed by Rep. Al Green sought to oust Trump for “sowing discord among the people of the United States” because of his comments on Charlottesville, transgender troops, and Muslim immigration.28 Witlessly admitting his purely partisan motive, Green confessed he was “concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”29 That’s rich, coming from a party that routinely accuses Trump of being anti-democratic.
Speaking to MoveOn.org activists on the same day Sherman introduced his bill, incoming freshman Democrat Rashida Tlaib vowed, “[W]e’re going to go in there and we’re going to impeach the mother****er.”30 When a video of her remarks became public, instead of apologizing for her profanity Tlaib denounced Trump for being “completely unfit to serve as president” and tweeted, “I will always speak truth to power. #unapologeticallyMe.”31
Hypocritical leftists who are always harping about Trump’s alleged crudeness constantly ignore vulgarity from their own leaders. Indeed, they often applaud it, as was the case here. “I identify with [Tlaib] because I’m capable of saying something like that off the top of my head at a rally,” said The View’s Joy Behar.32
“WE’RE DESPERATE TO GET TRUMP OUT OF OFFICE”
America’s left-wing entertainers are among Trump’s greatest haters. When the Supreme Court refused to set aside President Trump’s ban on transgender military members, singer Cher tweeted, “No One Is Really Safe in trump’s America Unless They’re MEMBER OF MAR-A-LAGO, LIVE IN trump TOWER, WHITE, OR WEARS MAGA HAT. My amazing Trans Son is Kind, Smart, Strong, Loving, Talented, & Patriotic American. Trump ‘Judges NO ONE By the Content Of Their Character.’ ” Earlier in the month, Cher tweeted about Trump’s cabinet members, “These White Men Sat Around a Table, & Stared Breathlessly at trump like he was going To Donate a Kidney To One Of Them. I CAN’T WAIT TILL THEY ALL GO 2 JAIL.”
Joy Behar unwittingly conceded the left’s blinding bias when discussing why the media happily prejudged the Covington Catholic High School students. Cohost Whoopi Goldberg asked, “Why do we keep making the same mistake?” Behar replied, “Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office.… I think that’s the reason. The press jumps the gun a lot.… We are basically hoping that [Trump lawyer Michael] Cohen’s got the goods, so it’s wishful thinking.”33
Behar is a one-woman army of anti-Trump venom. She asserted that Trump could start a war to avoid having his sons go to prison, that he needs to be “medicated and hospitalized… or he is going to just kill all of us,” and that he is less sane (or moral) than Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin. She claimed participants of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference have a “penchant for Nazis.” On MSNBC’s The Beat, Behar called Trump a “psycho” and an “anarchist.” On another show, she castigated the CMA Awards hosts for failing to inject politics into their event, since “democracy is at risk, and everybody should be speaking up, everybody.” (Notice, however, that she only wants to hear from Trump haters.) On yet another show, she attacked retiring senator Orrin Hatch. “He is going out of office. He has nothing to lose by speaking, against, truth to power about Trump. Maybe he needs to go to jail, too.”34
Behar is no fan of the First Lady either. She once suggested that a body double was standing in for Melania Trump during he
r public appearances.35 She also belittled Melania’s immigrant background, declaring, “OK, she was a model, now she’s the First Lady. I mean, come on. She is now enjoying the fruits of the American country.… You know, she was in Slovenia doing nothing. I don’t know what she was doing there.”
Actor Robert De Niro has long been an enraged critic of President Trump. When Trump was the Republican presidential nominee De Niro proclaimed, “I’d like to punch him in the face.”36 At the same event he called Trump a “punk,” “a dog,” a “bullsh*t artist,” “a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” an “idiot,” an “embarrassment to this country,” a “fool,” and a “bozo.”37 At the Tony Awards, De Niro continued in the same vein. “I’m going to say one thing, F*** Trump,” he declared while pumping his fists in the air. “It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump.’ It’s f*** Trump.” The leftist crowd gave De Niro a standing ovation.38 “We’re at a point with all of this where it’s beyond trying to see another point of view,” the tolerant, open-minded actor has further stated.39
Trump Derangement Syndrome has also spilled into the arts. “Ivanka Vacuuming” is a performance art exhibit on display at CulturalDC’s former Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, D.C. The exhibit features an Ivanka Trump look-alike with a pink dress and stiletto shoes vacuuming crumbs off a luxurious pink carpet. Viewers are encouraged to interact by taking crumbs from a pedestal and tossing them at her to vacuum up. In The Federalist, Kelsey Harkness notes the irony in the exhibit’s reflecting “every stereotype feminists claim to stand against, oversexualizing Ivanka’s body and ignoring her hard work. (One can only imagine the feminist rage if it were, say, Michelle Obama on display.)” Harkness points out that the exhibit not only mocks Ivanka’s looks but also demeans her success as a businesswoman and White House advisor. “Worse, in the process of shaming stay-at-home mothers, ‘Ivanka Vacuuming’ encourages onlookers to throw trash at her.”40
Trump hatred seeps into sports as well. So thoroughly have the Democrats and media smeared President Trump as a racist that some members of the champion New England Patriots team stated they would refuse to visit the White House if President Trump invited them.41 Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe showed that athletes will be called out if they don’t adhere to the proper political viewpoints; he denounced Tom Brady because a MAGA hat could be seen in his locker during a postgame interview.42
Sportswriter Natalie Weiner had an even more extreme reaction to a MAGA hat. Triggered at a jazz festival she attended, she took to Twitter to unburden herself. “Just yelled at a pr*ck with the audacity to wear a f*cking make america great again hat in the middle of a jazz festival,” she tweeted. “He was walking to see [singer] irma thomas and he doesn’t deserve to be within a 10 mile radius of irma thomas.” Oblivious to her own hypocrisy, she said, “I don’t understand how people can be so hateful I really don’t.”43
“HIS SUPPORTERS KNOW HE’S A CRIMINAL. THEY JUST DON’T CARE.”
Actor Jim Carrey has taken to political art, drawing sketches to express his uncontainable angst. He directs his hostility at Trump and his millions of supporters. He also has a strange fixation on Republican women, particularly those who serve in the Trump administration. He drew an image of Alabama’s pro-life governor, Kay Ivey, in the shape of an unborn baby, being aborted by having her brains sucked out.44 He posted a sketch of former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders as “the Gorgon,” a creature who will “turn your heart to stone.” He drew a picture of Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen after calling her a kidnapper and a murderer. He drew Mississippi senator Cindy Hyde-Smith as a ghoulish figure holding a noose while standing with Trump in front of a burning cross. “Nothing comforts a federally-abducted refugee child like a photo op with a Slovenian model wearing a coat that says she doesn’t give two craps about your misery,” wrote Carrey within a drawing depicting Melania Trump. “Smile for me darlink [sic]. I came very long way.” How many strictures of political correctness did Carrey violate there? But who cares? Certainly not hypocritical leftists.
Carrey also mocked Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s faith. “This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked. Monstrous!” he wrote on a drawing of her. When Sanders’s father, conservative commentator and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, defended his daughter and called Carrey a “pathetic bully, sexist, hater, bigot & Christaphobe,” Carrey doubled down, boasting that he had incurred the disapproval of Sanders’s defenders. “I am so gratified by the reaction to my little drawings. It is the job of a political cartoon to vex those who abuse power or enable those abuses,” said the self-important Carrey. “This administration has been lying to the American people from day one while plundering the country and debasing our values. And those who cover for this shameful mobster of a President are putting makeup on a melanoma and telling the cancer patient that everything’s fine. Monstrous? You bet!”45
Carrey also sketched a picture of a chimpanzee wearing blue glasses and thinking about the evolutionary process in reverse, with a red-capped Trump supporter at the beginning of the chain ultimately devolving into an ape. In his Twitter post of the sketch, Carrey said, “Let’s remember this year that according to very sound scientific evidence, human beings evolved from apes and not the other way around.”46
Actor Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, claimed Darth Vader is morally superior to Trump and former vice president Dick Cheney because Vader repented for his sins. “He saw the error of his ways,” said Hamill. “I don’t see either one of them doing that.” Hamill also tweeted a parody advertisement for “Trump tear gas,” saying, “NEW: TRUMP TEAR GAS FOR TODDLERS!!! ‘1st of all, the tear gas is a very minor form of the tear gas itself—It’s very safe. The ones that were suffering, to a certain extent, were the ones putting it out there. But it’s very safe!”47
Comedian Chelsea Handler tweeted, “Everyone in the president’s inner circle is a criminal because they all work for one.” Handler also ripped Trump supporters. “It’s not whether or not Trump is criminal,” she tweeted. “He cheats, lies, steals, any time he talks. His supporters know he’s a criminal. They just don’t care. But, what about Republicans in govt. who know and do nothing at the expense of everyone in our country? That is criminal, too.”48 Where would we be without Chelsea Handler’s criminal law and political expertise? At least she seems to be adjusting well after she claimed Trump’s election drove her to therapy. “I had a midlife identity crisis once Trump won, because I had never had my world feel so unhinged, I think,” she told HBO host Bill Maher.49 Somehow that is not difficult to believe.
Actress Meryl Streep has repeatedly shown her animus for Trump, as when she turned her Golden Globes acceptance speech in January 2017 into a tirade against the president-elect. She did the same in an interview with Stephen Colbert, who contributed his own barbs as well. Colbert said, “What’s it like for you to see somebody who is the President of the United States who is the top politician who is indifferent to the idea of empathy? I’m not sure he knows what you mean when you say it.” It’s telling that so many leftist Trump bashers are indignant about his supposed callousness while demonstrating a pathological hatred for him. Streep’s bizarre response was revealing. “I’m scared. I’m scared by him, by his possibility,” said Streep. “And I do empathize with him. I can’t imagine what his 3 a.m. is like. There’s a gathering storm—everyone feels it, he feels it. His children are in jeopardy, and I feel that. I think, ‘What if my children were in jeopardy?’ I would do anything—
anything—to get them out of trouble. So we should be afraid. That’s what I think.”50 So Trump may act recklessly to keep his kids out of jeopardy—a strange action for a guy supposedly lacking empathy.
A MANUFACTURED CRISIS—THAT HAPPENED TO BE REAL
The left ramped up the attacks on Trump during the partial government shutdown of December 2018 and January 2019, which stemmed from congre
ssional Democrats’ refusal to fund a border wall. Denouncing Trump as a “dangerous menace,” HBO Real Time host Bill Maher urged Democrats not to cave. “Trump is holding this country hostage,” Maher exclaimed. “You don’t deal with terrorists.”51 Nancy Pelosi also accused Trump of holding the American people hostage and insisted he stop manufacturing a border crisis.52 Likewise, referring to Trump’s border security speech, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said, “But the big scam of the whole address was that there is a crisis. There is not a crisis.”53
Speaking about the border, Congressman Robert Menendez said, “I hate to say this about the president of the United States, but he lies, and he is, you know, fast with the… half-truths at the end of the day.”54 NBC’s Chuck Todd attempted a similar attack. “The President has manufactured one heck of a political crisis for himself,” he claimed, implying Trump’s “manufactured” border crisis had turned into a political crisis for him.55 The liberal media echo chamber enthusiastically repeated the Democrats’ mantra that Trump was “manufacturing” a border crisis and lying about conditions there—though eventually even they were forced to acknowledge the emergency, at which point they effortlessly switched from denying a crisis existed to blaming the entire situation on Trump’s racism.
On the House floor, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke unleashed a tirade tying together many of the Democrats’ disparate insults—Trump was a despot, a plutocrat, a tormentor, a thief, and a grifter, all rolled into one:
Let’s be clear, this government shutdown is not a—about a border wall. Our country is in the midst of a government shutdown because a man who has fashioned himself after a Banana Republic dictator, a con man engaging in the proverbial bait and switch, has decided to pickpocket the American people for an immoral border wall policy that the American people do not support. This billionaire bully is intentionally imposing pain, anguish, and anxiety on 800,000 federal workers, including over 14,000 New Yorkers holding them and their families hostage in order to extort billions of dollars from the American taxpayer to satisfy a broken promise to his supporters that Mexico would pay for his wall.56
Guilty by Reason of Insanity Page 38
