Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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GRAB ‘IM BY THE PUSSFACE

When Vladimir Putin sets his blood-stained werewolf claws on U.S. soil Friday, a massive contingent of the world’s peacekeepers should grab him and his henchmen.

After putting Putin and the lot in handcuffs, they should board a nonstop flight to The Hague. That’s where he could stand trial at the International Court of Justice – credibly accused of crimes against humanity in his country, Ukraine and throughout Europe.

I’m sorry. That was just my imagination, running away with me.

Alas, what’s going to happen is that Putin will be greeted by perhaps his most ardent admirer, Donald John Trump. Who, unfortunately, holds the title of President of the United States.

Trump believes he can help facilitate a peace agreement after three and a-half years of Russian aggression against Ukraine. He’s doing this without any legitimate representative of Ukraine any closer than the nearest McDonald’s.

So, basically, this is the excuse Trump needs to get face time with his dream boy, Vladdy P. 

Some people think he’s also looking for a diversion from the flap over the Jeffrey Epstein files. But if you’ve fallen for the idea that there’s something about the Epstein files that’s going to undo the Trump presidency, the Brooklyn Bridge is available for a small fee. 

We all know that Trump joined the debauchery of Epstein Island – we know because the girls, now young women, told us. It still hasn’t caused the MAGA pickup truck jockeys and frat boys to back away from the gold-plated demon.

As for Putin, it’s a chance to travel to another country and actually get welcomed.

This meeting is taking place at Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage, in part because Alaska doesn’t have a town named Munich. It’s also on the base, someplace you can’t imagine the leader of a world power going, because there’s no safe place in America for Putin other than where he can be protected by the U.S. military.

There are more than a million Americans of Ukrainian ancestry. And there’s more than a few, I imagine, who fantasize about doing something to Putin that would only partially make up for the horror he’s inflicted on extended family and friends.

Putin signed off on bombing hospitals. Housing projects. Water supplies. Electrical power grids.

He’s on board with kidnapping children. With torturing prisoners.

But despite overwhelming numbers and seemingly unlimited munitions, Putin hasn’t been able to take Ukraine – something he thought he’d do in three days. The Ukrainians lucked into one of the greatest leaders of my lifetime in Voldodymyr Zelenskyy and he has perservered.

So far.

Joe Biden recognized how important it was to support Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians. He did all he could, especially given the fact that the moronic Republicans controlled the House after the 2022 midterms.

Trump, on the other hand, clings to a bunch of fantasies.

One is that he is the equal to Putin. Another is that, if Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter could be Nobel laureates, so could he.

He’s bought into the smoke being blown up his massive ass from Benjamin Netanyahu and that Cambodian leader that he’s some sort of man of peace. As opposed to a demented tyrant who’s perfectly fine with kidnapping people off U.S. streets and hustling them to jungle jails outside the country or concentration camps inside.

(Note to those who cry foul when we call the places ICE takes its victims “concentration camps”: If you complain now, you’ll be considered complicit when history books call them concentration camps 50 years from now.)

And Trump’s idea of peace is that you have to let Russia have the land they’ve stolen from Ukraine in order for the fighting to stop. In other words, he’s the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century.

That’s why Zelenskyy is warning Europe that Putin is pushing to take as much land as possible ahead of the Alaska meeting. “Wait, Donny, don’t forget this town we took last night in your ‘peace’ offer,” or the Russian version of that.

Whatever happens Friday, it will be another pathetic day in American history perpetrated by Donald Trump. January 6, 2021 tops the list obviously, but the Helsinki meeting with Putin will have a new challenger for second place in total humiliation.

That is, unless Trump is smarter than we all think and has the zipties and orange jumpsuits ready for Putin and his gang.

Fat chance.

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BEWARE THE SHINY OBJECT

This is THE thing.

Jeffrey Epstein. He’s Trump’s kryptonite.

His files – once and if they’re ever revealed – will show Trump’s mendacity to all his worshippers. The disclosures in there – about how Epstein procured Florida girls to provide companionship for his A-list clients. Including Donald J. Trump, who once referred to being best friends with Epstein.

This. This is what will make all the MAGA types sit up and take notice. This will show them what he really is, how he’s duped them for years about who he is.

If you watch TV or social media or just walk around and hear desperate Trump haters talk, you know what I’m talking about.

This is the scandal that won’t go away. His supporters won’t let this go away, despite his rantings on Truth Social and in the White House, where he is supposed to be working for us.

Yeah. Right. Sure.

It wasn’t that long ago that the fracture between Trump and Elon Mask was the event that would break MAGA fever. That without Musk’s financial support and with his opposition to the budget framework, the bill would fail to pass.

How’s that going?

There are people who think Trump is bothered by all this Epstein talk. They’re Charlie Brown believing Lucy is going to hold the football as he kicks it.

Jeffrey Epstein died at his own hand in a New York prison cell in 2019. He had been arrested once before – in 2005 – on child sex charges. But his punishment from Florida officials – including one who later became Trump’s Secretary of Labor – was beneath lenient, and many of the girls who were victims had no idea of the easy terms.

The Miami Herald, led by reporter Julie Brown, shed new light on the case in 2018 and that’s how Epstein came to face the federal charges that resulted in his suicide. 

When those stories were published, they were mandatory reading for the journalism class I taught at WIlliam Paterson University in New Jersey. I told students – when they would ask how long an assignment should – that it should be as long as it takes to tell the story well. Most often, that’s three paragraphs. In the case of “Perversion of Justice,” it was thousands of words.

It was a disgusting tale and, of course, it immediately attracted denial from Trump – who was president in 2018, not Joe Biden or Barack Obama. 

Was Trump somehow involved with Jeffrey Epstein’s cruel and disgusting business? Look at the pictures and then try to convince yourself otherwise.

If you have half a brain, that exercise won’t last long.

But like everything else with Trump, he has a way of rolling off these things that’s super- – or sub- – human. 

And the people who support him – the ones loudly proclaiming they’re through with him over his administration’s failure to “release the Epstein files” – are – I’d say – about 10 days away from doing a George Costanza. 

They’re going to act as if nothing happened.

Yes, MAGA people used Epstein as a centerpiece of their message that Washington elites – particularly Democrats – are pedophiles and belong locked away forever. Or rubbed out. It helped get Trump support that helped blind people to the things in his agenda that would harm them.

Let’s face it, next to child sex allegations, tariffs on Canadian lumber and penguins in the South Pacific aren’t nearly as salacious (well, maybe the penguins). The absolutely insane notion of attempting to fire the Federal Reserve chairman that Trump bandies about will probably decimate your stock portfolio – but isn’t the Ghislaine Maxwell stuff so much more titillating?

Epstein is yet another of Trump’s shiny objects aimed at distracting you from mass deportations and climate change failures. He’s right, actually, when he says there are more important things to worry about – like how Texas miserably failed to protect girls at a summer camp from flooding or how Netanyahu seems intent on setting the entire Middle East on fire.

In the end, I predict one of two things will happen.

One is that he “begrudgingly” releases the Epstein files (I know Pam Bondi is the name of the releaser, but independence is not a word she’s trained to understand). Lo and behold, there are no prominent names in there. Somehow. Or somehow they’re all people who’ve run afoul of Donald Trump over the past 79 years.

Two is that he stonewalls. At some point, his followers are led to the conclusion – probably by some pseudo-holy clown like Franklin Graham – that maybe certain “elders” should be allowed to partake of 15-year-old females. 

And then the MAGA crowd decides, hey, maybe that’s right. Shouldn’t our leader be infallible in his judgment of what’s proper?

Sounds far-fetched, huh? 

Think about this.

Donald John Trump was convicted by a jury of his peers of 34 felony counts of fraud.

A jury in a civil suit found he had raped E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s. Other women, including his ex-wife, sued him for various forms of sexual misconduct. He made the “Access Hollywood” tape bragging the free reign he thought he had with women. He’s accused of deliberately walking to the dressing room of teenage girls during a beauty pageant he ran.

If not of this stuff is bad enough to make people realize what a horrible piece of human excrement Trump is, what makes you think that anything he did with his buddy Jeffrey Epstein will change any MAGA moron’s mind?

Sure, let the Epstein thing play out. Justice should always be served.

Just don’t count of any consequences when it comes to the 47th presidency of the United States. They haven’t happened yet.

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THAT’S THE NEWS

I lucked into a daughter whose love of theater surpasses my own.

In fact, she’s written plays that were staged or read, and – BRAG ALERT – they’re really good.

What my daughter doesn’t write is news copy. That’s what I used to do – for much of a 40-year career.

I’m glad she loves writing. I’m also glad she’s not in the profession that helped pay for the education that led her to writing plays and TV scripts.

The reason this thought  came up this week is that my daughter took me to see the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck.” It stars George Clooney, who directed the film from which the play is derived. In the play, he portrays broadcast journalism legend Edward R. Murrow after playing Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, in the film.

In case you haven’t seen it, or forgot, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” highlights Murrow’s CBS broadcasts on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose crusade against people he perceived as Communists led to an atmosphere of fear in the 1950s. It captured – and was focused – on the fear of the era, educating another generation about a dark period in American history.

The movie is excellent and I recommend it if you can find it on a streaming service or old DVD. 

But I thought the play underscored a great point in a way the movie didn’t.

The play, much more that the film, takes place in the CBS “See It Now” newsroom. It depicts what’s great about journalism – the collaboration among colleagues, the rush of tracking down a hot story, the matching of wits with really smart people.

Murrow and his crew were disgusted by McCarthy’s intimidating and smearing. The parallels to 2025 America are obvious to anyone who checked their news alerts at the theater before turning off their phones.

But the play also highlighted the nature of the business known as broadcast journalism.

TV stations and networks have big newsrooms. They produce some incredible work – few newspaper pieces can match the power of a well-produced piece on a “See It Now” or its offspring, “60 Minutes,” not to mention some of the great PBS documentary series such as “Frontline.”

But big newsrooms are expensive. And, as many of the scenes in the play highlight, they don’t exactly bring in big numbers – news only gets ratings when it’s catastrophic, like the September 11 attacks. People even turn off Election Night coverage to watch old movies

There are scenes throughout the play when CBS’ chairman, William Paley, reminds Murrow that it’s the sponsors who pay his and his co-workers’ salaries. Murrow and Friendly even have to pay the costs of their McCarthy broadcasts because sponsors won’t.

I’ve seen the respect for broadcast journalism go from awe to awful. When I was young, there were icons on the air – Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Daniel Schorr, Judy Woodruff. Barbara Walters was an outstanding interviewer, pressing for a point when a politician kept trying to dodge it. 

People trusted and admired these men and women. They accepted that what they reported was as factual as it could possibly be.

Time, unfortunately has eroded that trust in two ways.

One is the quality of what we call news. Too much of what passes for news in the 21st century would have been scoffed at when I was young. Somebody setting a record on “Jeopardy!” A male celebrity’s stupid remark. A female celebrity’s apparel choice.

On TV, local newscasts forsake important issues in their community if they have video of somebody being rescued from a river in Thailand. The only stories that seem to take place in their market are easily filmable crime scenes and suspects, often the exceptions to the statistics that show crime decreasing in a city.

Celebrity and sensational stuff have been increasingly infringing on news. Even Murrow, the patron saint of broadcast journalism, did interviews with people like Liberace and Zsa Zsa Gabor to satisfy CBS’ ratings cravings. 

The other problem has come up a lot more in the past 30 years, since the creation of Fox News by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch: Calling propaganda “news” and blaring it 24 hours a day.

It plays on people’s fears and addiction to personalities. And it makes crises out of nothing – think famously of Barack Obama wearing a tan suit or Joe Biden eating an ice cream cone. It trumpets clowns like Donald Trump – unless he accidentally does something that hurts Fox’s bottom line – and promotes morally bankrupt ineptitudes like Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity as “newsmen.”

In the play’s final monologue, Murrow – speaking to some unnamed awards dinner – muses that television should inform as much as it should entertain. That primetime should be used not just to show westerns and comedies, but also discussions of domestic problems and foreign policy.

The problem is that it’s unlikely you’d get even 1% of the audience for “Tracker” or “Chicago Fire” for those kinds of discussions. The most popular news show, “60 Minutes,” is a notable and laudable exception, but it is more about hot-button issues than in-depth discussion of matters that matter.

As a result, we’re not as smart as we should be. We’re susceptible to demagogues and liars.

I went into journalism as my way of informing a world I wanted to improve. I thought the truth, whether it fit with what I believed or not, was the most important thing – that’s what I told the Northwestern professor who interviewed me in 1971. He warned me that, while my thinking was admirable, the truth was not as rock solid as I thought.

As “Good Night, and Good Luck.” reminded me, I love journalism. I love what it accomplishes when it’s good. There are still colleagues of mine doing incredible work – and I’m so proud I know them.

But I’m happy my daughter is a playwright and screen writer. Because I think that, in 2025, she’ll help people find the truth about the world a lot more efficiently than if she worked in a newsroom. 

This isn’t Edward R. Murrow’s America any more. We’re all the worst for that – and the path back from that is hard to see.

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MAKE AMERICA GREATER

There are just four days left in the Biden administration and it is my intention to enjoy each one as a gift.

A decent, hard-working man – perhaps a bit too old for the job but still good at it anyway – graced us from noon ET on January 20, 2021 to this coming Monday at noon. Like every other presidency, Joe Biden’s wasn’t perfect. But it came as close as any in my lifetime.

Joe Biden guided us gently out of the gloom of the COVID-19 debacle inherited from the guy who’s replacing him. They might be a pain in the butt, but all those highway construction projects you see are making our roads – along with the rest of our infrastructure – more suited to the century we’re now a quarter of the way into.

He stood for Ukraine when Vladimir Putin got frustrated by waiting for his imperial dreams to come true. He combatted climate change and showed respect for people who have been traditionally belittled in American society.

The American economy is the strongest in the world. He managed to blast America’s way out of the pandemic-induced recession and then brought the growth lower with a brief spike in inflation.

That spike, however, did in both him and Kamala Harris. And so we get Trump again for four years – assuming the blowhard makes it to age 82.

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Both Joe Biden and Barack Obama spent way too much of their presidencies cleaning up the messes left by their predecessors.

Biden, of course, had the aftermath of the pandemic. Obama faced both the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and an American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I suspect just about everyone reading this and liking it agrees there will be an equal or worse clusterfuck to deal with four years from Monday.

And yet, that’s the mistake we make and the other side doesn’t.

We concentrate on fighting them. They fight us – don’t get me wrong – but they also develop new, crueler, stupider ideas to foist on both the left and the cucumbers who voted for them in November. 

There will be a lot of angst to go around. But part of their gameplan is to frustrate us – to make us concentrate on their latest perverse idea or vendetta.

Right now, you’re seeing it with the wildfires in Los Angeles. How California is a failed liberal experiment and the disaster is due to a combination of its godlessness, diversity and economic initiatives. Just check out some of the comments from Wyoming Sen. John Horsesasso.

It’s meant to drain our energy. And it has to, at least to some extent. You can’t claim to be a decent human being and then deny aid to Los Angeles, or just uproot millions of people living and working here peacefully because they didn’t get the documents you demand. Or tell women they risk prison or worse if they try in any way to end an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy.

But we need to be better this time. And the way to do that is to think about what we want to do to make America greater.

See, I think Peruvian restaurants and Hmong gymnasts and Somalian-born soldiers make this country great. Not McDonald’s or Walmart or Tesla – or not by themselves, anyway. 

And it certainly is not a hateful convicted felon who is absolutely clueless about what it takes to lead an amazing land.

So we need to advance our agenda. To come up with ideas we think will improve our country and, maybe with it, the world. 

They don’t have to be popular now. Some absolutely won’t be. But we need to advance the case so that we can sell them from conviction and evidence. And begin the process of educating and converting some of the just shy of 50% of American voters who actually chose Trump over a really smart, energetic woman.

Over the next five weeks, I’m going to put forward some ideas I’ve thought about as ways we can show how we’re looking toward 2100, not 1900.

The ideas:

— Universal basic income: This is what Andrew Yang promoted when he ran for president in 2000, and then got weird. 

Both liberals and conservatives have reasons to like this idea. But Trump and his supporters will see it as free money (that they don’t think they’re getting) and squawk.

— Police reform. I bristle every time I see a car with one of those black versions of the American flag and the blue stripe in the middle. As if policing in this country should go unquestioned and unfettered. 

But when you see three or four cops together, do you feel safer? Or nervous? And do the answers depend on what you look like? Frankly, few things are in more need of improvement in this country than how we police ourselves.

— Immigration reform. Trump and his minions don’t want to reform immigration. They want to abolish it – unless you can make a considerable donation to the GOP after you get here. The question of how we treat people coming here, for more than four centuries, is one of our greatest dilemmas. 

We should aspire to be better than that – this doesn’t seem like that intractable a problem if we come up with creative and humane solutions.

— Getting around. It’s believed one of Trump’s first executive orders will be to maximize oil production and end credits for electric vehicles – the short-sighted, idiotic “drill, baby, drill” mantra.

Let’s get past both those forms of transportation – there have been few innovations in creating new ways to go places compared with communication technology. Let’s encourage imagination.

— Kindness. Mean will be in power starting Monday. Mean will be the default approach of the White House, Congress and Supreme Court. Mean will drive the stories you see on the news and the attitude of the plurality. If you don’t believe that, explain why a house near me still flew its “Fuck Biden” and “Fuck Kamala Harris” flags as late as New Year’s Eve. 

We have to create new, innovative ways to be kind – to look out for people who are pariahs to the MAGAs. Kindness is our not-so-secret weapon for making America greater – a task that will be easier once we get past Trump and his ilk.

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GOOD THINGS THAT END

Jimmy Carter’s passing reminds us that human lives aren’t eternal – even ones as worthy of going on forever as the 39th President’s.

Carter died Sunday at the age of 100, the longest-living American president. That’s a nice fact, but here’s a nicer one – he appears to have been a genuinely good person. He was honest – perhaps too much for American politics – and saw the future when others found it safer to stay in the past or present.

Because his opponents – on both the left and right – found it convenient, the narrative they painted was of a failed presidency. 

His firm stand on human rights and only tepid support of the corrupt Shah of Iran was seen as leading to the Iranian Revolution, 

In turn, that was seen as leading to the taking of American hostages at the embassy in Tehran and a largely unwarranted surge in oil prices. 

And that in turn led to some of the worst inflation in my lifetime. Which resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan.

That all sounds really bad. But Carter got what we would now call “trolled” a lot. 

He was not popular with the Washington establishment – to be fair, he was a bit haughty about it, but there was certainly some justification. His focus on human rights ticked off the Arab nations, right-wing dictators in Latin America and the Soviets. And once the U.S. right – Reagan et al. – and the left – Ted Kennedy et al. – ganged up on him, he was finished.

But Carter saw climate change and the energy crisis coming. He established diplomatic relations with China and negotiated the Camp David accords that still keep the peace between Israel and Egypt.

More important, he didn’t talk to the American people as though they were idiots. His August 1979 address to the nation – often called the “malaise speech” – is perhaps the bravest any American president ever delivered. 

But by telling the American people that there might be something wrong with them, he opened the door to opportunistic types who knew they could curry favor by pandering. (see Trump, Donald J.)

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The timing of Carter’s death seems like quite a coincidence. It’s three weeks before Trump’s inauguration – just in time for Carter’s family to avoid having Trump play a major role in the commemoration of a man he belittled for decades.

Instead, a eulogy will be delivered by President Biden, who was among the first major political figures to support Carter’s long-shot 1976 presidential run. (It also says a lot about Carter that the man he defeated for the presidency, Gerald Ford, will eulogize him through a letter written before he died.)

That’s a reminder that another good thing that’s ending, unfortunately, is Biden’s presidency.

The Biden and Carter presidencies share a lot. They both inherited a mess from a disreputable Republican predecessor. Biden got the mishegas Trump left because of his botching of COVID. Carter came on in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace following Watergate, something the more honorable Ford couldn’t overcome.

Both men confronted a fanatical and fantastically well financed assault from the far right. Carter contended with the so-called “Moral Majority,” the slime such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. For Biden, it’s the megabillions of Elon Musk and other would-be oligarchs seeking favor from their bought-and-paid-for candidate.

The final thing the two men share is that their presidencies being appreciated more than 40 years after the fact. Carter’s vision and humanity is coming to the fore now that he’s no longer around to accept the accolades. 

That, I’m afraid, is what will happen to Joe Biden. Americans blamed him for higher gas prices and whatever it was they were paying for a dozen eggs. It didn’t matter that the supply chain problems that produced the inflation came as a result of Trump’s COVID failure.

In the process, Biden not only rebuilt the economy, but managed – along with the Federal Reserve – to cool its overheating without inflicting a recession on this country. He actually get the funding for thousands of project to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.

Biden stood steadfast behind Volodymyr Zelensky and the people of Ukraine when threatened by Vladimir Putin – who seems to be Trump’s hero. And while he couldn’t get out of the trap Putin, Iran, Netanyahu and Trump set for him in Gaza, he never stopped trying to get a fair solution and an end to the horror – his critics notwithstanding.

Joe Biden – in fact, probably you and I – won’t be around when historians realize how lucky we were to have a man of such compassion and intelligence as our president. That’s little comfort as 2024 ends.

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If my GOOD THINGS THAT END headline seems a little off to you, I understand.

The proverb is “all good things must come to an end.” I’m guessing its intended meaning is that you should appreciate what you have when you have it.

But while that might apply to vacations in Hawaii, a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream, and the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, it doesn’t – it can’t – apply to everything.

Caring about the other people in our world. Compassion for the sick and needy. Encouraging dreams and hard work. Civility. Diversity. Generosity. Creativity. 

Democracy.

In the eight weeks since the election, I’ve taken the first breather from news in my 70 years. I’ve avoided social media except for wishing good tidings to friends and family – and sharing my thoughts about holiday music. I refused to let the latest outrage, the chaos meant to consume and disable us, spoil my holiday season with friends and family.

Now, it’s time to reengage. We have less than three weeks until we are mandated to give the White House back to its desecrator. It’s time for the fight of our lives.

Because there are many good things about America that can never be allowed to end.

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TURN THAT DIAL

Because it evades my understanding, I’ve tried to imagine why anyone supports Donald Trump.

When he first announced his candidacy for President, back in 2015, I thought it was a joke. I brazenly told my brother that he’d lose all 50 states if he was the Republican nominee.

One reason for my stance was that Trump was a walking punchline in New York. His braggadocio wore thin when he filed for bankruptcy umpteen times. He was obviously not the business genius he claimed to be. 

But I should have gotten a hint when I went to a party and people were raving about “The Apprentice.” It gave him an image of strength and savvy that was, like everything else in his life, a fraud.

He built a following. Republican politicians didn’t take him seriously. Democrats didn’t take him seriously.

Nine years later, he’s still here. His sense of grievance struck a chord with millions of Americans. And, despite botching COVID, leading an attempted coup and being convicted on 34 counts of fraud, he stands a decent chance of becoming our 47th President.

Why? What’s the appeal?

TV. 

My generation – the baby boomers – are the first people to have grown up in a completely televised age. 

My parents used to talk about listening to Jack Benny and Bob Hope on the radio. That didn’t happen for us. We watched everything – I’m old enough to remember black-and-white – every night. 

And it was simple. There were three major networks. If you lived in a big city like New York, there were a couple of independent channels. There was no concept of the choices we face today.

So the TV you watched was pretty streamlined in the values and concepts it conveyed. Crime shows depicted a dangerous world that could only be preserved by steadfast law enforcers. Westerns showed the power of the good gunman. Game shows gave away dreamy prizes. All the people in sitcoms lived in houses that were much nicer than yours.

It was an aspirational world. And I think maybe my generation – and the generations that have followed – thought that. I can be a civilian and stop a criminal mastermind. I can be a factory worker and still have a 4-bedroom home. I can ride a horse into the sunset.

When our lives didn’t measure up to the ones we saw, it frustrated us. It’s not that easy to be Perry Mason or Dr. Kildare or Joe Friday. 

I think maybe Trump’s appeal is to that frustration that we didn’t get the lives we fantasized on TV. And if we did – if we did get the McMansion in Bergen County or the beach house in Hyannis – we know there are people out there who want it, too. 

And for both groups, there’s the perception that there are people who are newcomers or just different from us who are getting something for free – getting to that dream life we want – without the travail we endure.

When Trump talks about making America great again, he’s talking about that romanticized view of America and the disillusion that’s spreading from the boomers to those younger – and even to some who are not white, because they sense that they’re getting shut out, too.

Over the past days, I’ve tried to share my thoughts about Kamala Harris’ policies, particularly ones I believe show her aptitude and understanding of what America’s problems really are. They’re not magic cures. But they are ways to move the country forward.

She hasn’t been able to get her ideas heard because her opponent’s best chance is to manifest grievance. 

It’s cynical and sad. Giving Trump another chance will tear us apart. It will end with the demise of American greatness and consequences that are almost unimaginable.

There is no alternative to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. In the next few days, we’ll find out if we’ll make it.

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