Donald Trump

Who Won the Week? 02/28/2021

Fandango17 Comments

FWWTWThe idea behind Who Won the Week is for you to select who (or what) you think “won” this past week. Your selection can be anyone or anything — politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors, bloggers, your friends or family members, books, movies, TV shows, businesses, organizations, whatever.

I will be posting this prompt on Sunday mornings (my time). If you want to participate, write your own post designating who you think won the week and why you think they deserve your nod. Then link back to this post and tag you post with FWWTW.

This week’s “winner” of Who Won the Week is idolatry, as in the worship of idols. It’s also defined as “excessive or blind adoration, reverence, devotion, or love for something or someone.” So why am I going this week’s honor to idolatry?

Well, you may recall this post in which I mentioned that Donald Trump will be making his big return to the national stage this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where he will be giving the keynote speech at the conservative conference tonight.

You may also be familiar with the the biblical story of the Golden Calf. It is one of the most famous stories in the Old Testament. The Israelites, newly freed from Egyptian slavery, have a crisis of faith while God is speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai. They melt down their gold jewelry to construct a physical god — a statue in the shape of a calf — to worship in place of their abstract, invisible deity. It’s a story about the allure of idolatry, how easy it is to abandon one’s commitments to principle in favor of shiny, easy falsehoods.

So what does this Bible story have to do with anything?It seems that someone involved in the CPAC conference constructed a golden statue — not of a calf, but of Trump — and wheeled it out to cheers from conference attendees.

It doesn’t take a religious scholar to see the parallel to this ludicrous idol worship of Donald Trump and the Golden Calf episode in the Bible. And yet these religious Christian conservatives attending CPAC just don’t get it.

I don’t believe in God, but should there is a God, I think it’s time for him/her/it to smite Donald Trump and the GOP.

What about you? Who (or what) do you think won the week?

He’s Never Going Away

Fandango35 Comments

Donald Trump will be making his big return to the national stage this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He will be giving the keynote speech at the conservative conference on Sunday and is expected to declare himself the “presumptive Republican presidential nominee” for 2024.

Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, pictured above with his hero, Donald Trump, is a staunch supporter of the ex-president, and he is very enthusiastic about his former boss’ return to the spotlight. Meadows said that, “You’re going to see a speech on Sunday that talks about not only the beginning, but what the future may look like, and I’m excited about it.”

Unfortunately, Meadows is in the company of many Republican Trump supporters who want to return to what they consider to be America’s halcyon days of 2017, when Trump was in the White House and the GOP controlled both the Senate and the House. They don’t realize that they are like lambs being led to the slaughterhouse, blindly and naively following the ultimate poster boy for autocratic leadership and the demise of democracy in America.

But scariest of all, Meadows added, “What we will see on Sunday is the start of planning for the next administration. And I can tell you, the people that are at the top of that list, all of them have Trump as their last name.”

I’m not a religious person, but all I can say is “God help us.”

Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One- Word Challenge (staunch), Your Daily Word Prompt (enthusiastic), The Daily Spur (company), Word of the Day Challenge (halcyon), Ragtag Daily Prompt (lamb), and MMA Storytime (poster).

The Big Lie

Fandango17 Comments

One aspect of the fallout from the Trump administration is that there exists an ongoing threat to the safety and security of the United States. This is due to the “Big Lie” promoted by Donald Trump and reinforced by a number of powerful, complicit Republicans in Congress, many of whom still claim that this situation we’re in is serendipity, rather than as a result of a deliberate campaign of lies and misinformation designed to incite violent, domestic, Trump-supporting, right-wing extremists. These MAGA-maniacs are now threatening to blow up the Capitol building when Joe Biden is expected to give the State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress and to kill as many members of Congress as possible.

Any astute, bipartisan observer should be able to read the calligraphy on the wall. The Republicans need to immediately disavow Trumpism and distance themselves from the former president or our nation will not survive.

Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (fallout), The Daily Spur (safety), Word of the Day Challenge (serendipity), Your Daily Word Prompt (astute), and MMA Storytime (calligraphy). Image credit: Shutterstock.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back In the Water…

Fandango22 Comments

I saw this disturbing headline in this morning’s newspaper. A now embolden Donald Trump, after his impeachment trial acquittal by the U.S. Senate, is ready to step out of his self-imposed hibernation and to step back into the spotlight. Oh joy.

He is apparently going to work with Republicans to help them regain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. He plans to throw his weight behind more extreme, far right candidates and to exact his revenge on Republicans who supported his impeachment and who resisted his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Trump has assured his supporters that his post-presidency movement “has only just begun.”

Isn’t that special?

Who Won the Week? 02/14/2021

Fandango13 Comments

FWWTWThe idea behind Who Won the Week is for you to select who (or what) you think “won” this past week. Your selection can be anyone or anything — politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors, bloggers, your friends or family members, books, movies, TV shows, businesses, organizations, whatever.

I will be posting this prompt on Sunday mornings (my time). If you want to participate, write your own post designating who you think won the week and why you think they deserve your nod. Then link back to this post and tag you post with FWWTW.

Up until yesterday I was going to designate the U.S. House of Representatives impeachment trial managers as my Who Won the Week winners. They did a truly outstanding job in presenting a strong and compelling case against Donald Trump. The case they presented was extraordinary and left no doubt in the minds of reasonable, impartial, nonpartisan individuals that Donald Trump was responsible for inciting his MAGA-mob to violently storm the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th, which ultimately resulted in death, destruction, and scores of injuries.

But yesterday afternoon, 43 Republican senators out of 50 voted to acquit Trump of the charge of inciting an insurrection. The final tally was 57 to 43 to convict Trump, but an impeachment conviction requires a two-thirds majority of senators, or 67, to vote to convict, so the needed two-thirds margin fell short by 10 votes. Thus, the only U.S. president who was twice impeached was also twice acquitted, thanks to the spineless Republican Trump sycophants in the Senate.

So my Who Won the Week designees are the seven Republican U.S. Senators who were patriotic enough and had the backbone to stand up for the Constitution rather than to protect a wannabe autocratic dictator.

And those seven Republican senators are:

  • Richard Burr, North Carolina
  • Bill Cassidy, Louisiana
  • Susan Collins, Maine
  • Lisa Murkowski, Alaska
  • Mitt Romney, Utah
  • Ben Sasse, Nebraska
  • Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania

Good for you, Senators Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, and Toomey. I salute you.

And as to the 43 who voted to acquit Trump, well fuck you all. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

What about you? Who (or what) do you think won the week?