I am polishing these words just a few weeks before the November 5th presidential election which, needless to say, will be watched closely by Americans of every variety, and by most of the rest of the world. It’s going to be fun. I still can’t believe that a clueless female mongrel may be the next occupant of the White House, and judging by the number of lawn signs I’ve seen, has considerable support from middle and upper class White voters. This is clown world on steroids, and her opponent only adds to the spectacle.
I’m not a prophet so I rarely make predictions, and I’m not going to make one here, though I think it’s safe to say that there will be turmoil around election time, and the next four years will be interesting. What I’ll do regarding the outcome of the election is make a guess. My guess is that Donald Trump will win, that he’ll be inaugurated in January, and that something will happen and he will not finish his four-year term. I’ll leave it at that.
When Trump was campaigning in 2016, prior to defeating Hillary Clinton for the presidency, I must admit that, even though I’d given up on America many years ago, he caught my attention. I had never known another politician, not one, who talked the way he talked, who so easily reached the hearts of millions of White blue collar workers, still the backbone of the nation, along with much of the frustrated White middle class, with his straight-shooting style. I thought that maybe, just maybe, he could turn things around a bit, and slam the brakes on America’s toboggan ride into the abyss. I was fooled, and so were a lot of other people.
Just about everyone, it seems, has a strong opinion either way about Donald Trump, and I’m no exception. I despise him. Of course, I’m not one of those afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” the fitting title given to swarms of liberal idiots who live in fear that Trump is “the next Hitler.” If only he were! So why am I writing this, what can I bring to the table that’s new? Well, hopefully a more thorough analysis than you’ve come across, enhanced by the fact that, in the last three years, I’ve read four books “by” and about Trump. These books, in the chronologically backward order I read them, are Donald J. Trump (subtitled “America’s Last Conservative Hope or Ultra-Zionist Psychopath?) by Hugh Akins (2020); Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth (subtitled “The Deals, The Downfall, The Reinvention”) by Wayne Barrett (2016), originally published as Trump: The Deals and the Downfall in 1992; Trump: Think Like a Billionaire “by” Trump with Meredith McIver (2004); and just last month, in order to learn more about the punk, The Art of the Deal “by” Trump and Tony Schwartz (1987). Henceforth, I will refer to these books by their title acronyms.
I put the word by in quotation marks above, because as with so many people, including several cabinet members in his first (and last?) administration, and others including family members, Trump had a major falling out with the ghostwriter of TAOTD (named in the usual byline of “with” Tony Schwartz). The dispute involved Trump taking credit for the writing while Schwartz maintained that this was an outright lie. Schwartz made some interesting comments thirty years after the book was published. He described his portrayal of Trump as “putting lipstick on a pig” and said if he were to write the book today, he’d title it The Sociopath. He also said that Trump did not fit the mold of any person he’s ever known. How true; the man is absolutely unique.
TAOTD was Trump’s first and most famous book, published when he was only 41 years old and practically unknown outside of the New York City real estate scene. So far as I know, it was the only one of his several books that was an outstanding commercial success, landing on the bestseller list for nearly a year and selling more than a million copies. Whether or not he penned his own words, he revealed a great deal about himself, even at this early stage, on the very first page, which begins:
I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks…. There is no typical week in my life. I wake up most mornings very early, around six, and spend the first hour or so of each day reading the morning newspapers. I usually arrive at my office by nine, and I get on the phone. There’s rarely a day with fewer than fifty calls, and often it runs to over a hundred. In between, I have at least a dozen meetings. The majority occur on the spur of the moment, and few of them last longer than fifteen minutes. I rarely stop for lunch. I leave my office by six-thirty, but I frequently make calls from home until midnight, and all weekend long. It never stops, and I wouldn’t have it any other way….
So right from the start we learn that Trump is one of those rare people who is extremely wealthy, and also that he lacks a sense of culture, and is driven by an insatiable appetite to haggle, to make deals. Negotiating is an occasional necessity, as when one buys a used car (which Trump would know nothing about) or a house, and I think most would agree that there’s nothing exhilarating about it, but for Trump it’s the meaning of life. We also learn that Trump, like most people, is ill-informed, that he takes the mainstream media seriously. And that he’s a world-class bullshit artist. Show me someone who has the time to make a hundred phone calls and attend a dozen meetings in one day and I’ll show you a gorilla that speaks Chinese. All of this on the first page.
If you want to know how Jewish New York City is, just read the first chapter, “Dealing: A Week in the Life.” It’s Donald in action, schmoozing with anyone and everyone with a connection to big-time real estate development. There are so many Jewish names you’d think you were in Tel Aviv. And among them are the worst kind of Jews, as Trump himself admits on page 34, without using the word Jew: “….New York real estate, where you are dealing with some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world.” And he became one of them, though he doesn’t say that either.
As a matter of fact, Donald Trump is the most Jewish non-Jew I have ever come across. Just in this month of October, perhaps goaded by his Jewish son-in-law Jarod Kushner, a flaming Zionist, he has been doubling down on his fanatical devotion to Israel, his opposition to domestic Jew haters, as he calls them, and his belligerence towards Iran. His friendship with Jews, his fervent support of Israel, his warm speeches to Jewish groups, and sympathy for all the terrible things they supposedly went through – all this and more is so well-documented that even many normies know about it. Neo-con con man Mark Levin once introduced Trump as “the first Jewish president” which made Donald smile. Trump once even implied that anti-Semitism should be punishable by death. Nor does he have any problem associating with Jewish perverts. After his father Fred, himself a real estate racketeer, Donald’s most important mentor as a young man was the famous lawyer Roy Cohn, whom he most admired for his toughness and loyalty, though Cohn had a reputation as New York’s most corrupt “fixer,” which Trump was well aware of. (TAOTD, page 68: “I don’t kid myself about Roy. He was no Boy Scout. He once told me that he’d spent more than two-thirds of his adult life under indictment on one charge or another..”) He was also aware that Cohn was a homosexual (he died of AIDS in 1986), a low profile type who nevertheless attended many social functions with handsome young men. None of these things bothered Trump, nor, years later, did the thinly veiled sex crimes of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein (“Jeff’s a terrific guy”) which later became public knowledge, after which Epstein, a Mossad blackmailer, supposedly committed suicide in a jail cell, though some maintain that he’s alive and well in Israel today. (I doubt that, but anything is possible with these people.) Another creature Trump looked up to was Steve Rubell, co-founder of New York City’s Studio 54, which for three years in the late 1970s was the ultimate in debauchery for the rich and famous and for ordinary losers who were able to get in. If you’ve never heard of Studio 54 you should read about it on the net. Like Roy Cohn, who he had used as a lawyer, Rubell was a Jewish queer who died of AIDS, and unlike Cohn went to prison for tax evasion, but not before it was revealed that he had masturbated on a huge pile of cash the club had taken in. In TAOTD Trump calls Rubell “an incredible promoter” – years after Rubell spent fourteen months behind bars. This is on page 10, just below where Trump discusses his phone call to Ivan Boesky, yet another Jewish financial criminal who, unknown to Trump, or so he claims, was about to plead guilty to insider trading and was imprisoned for three years. Other sources on the net that I find credible assert that Trump was a regular at Studio 54, though only as a spectator and speculator, probably looking to rub elbows with some filthy rich degenerate to cut a deal; he did not take part in the orgies or cocaine-snorting marathons that went on all the time.
Like the man himself, there’s practically nothing of substance to TAOTD. Media hype is the only explanation for its commanding sales. Admittedly, in five or six passages, Trump shows some humanity and honesty, but on the whole the book is the tedious saga of an empty suit. I found it terribly boring and forced myself to finish it. Trump breathlessly takes you along on his many and varied business ventures, but after you tire of all the flamboyance, what’s left? Who wants to read about the complex, sterile world of high-rise building construction, mostly in Manhattan, of huge loans, tax abatements, zoning ordinances, inspections, “air rights,” endless court hearings, the proper shade of marble in atriums, sinking $20 million into this, $80 million into that, $150 million into something else? What does all of this have to do with living? How and why would 99% of Americans relate to any of this? I don’t know, but several readers gave it five stars on Amazon. There are many strange people in this world, but I suppose they would say the same thing about me.
TTGSOE by investigative reporter Wayne Barrett was a much different and much more satisfying read. Like Tony Schwartz, Barrett got to know Trump personally by riding in his limousine, taping hours of Trump holding forth, and interviewing him in the relaxed surroundings of his penthouse suite. Although Barrett’s work was originally published in 1992, five years after TAOTD and under a different title, he had begun digging into Trump’s background much earlier, in 1979, during a stint at the Village Voice when Trump, at age 33, suddenly popped up as “the new kid on the block.” There’s a great deal of overlap in these two books, which cover the same business deals, but at 450 pages it’s nearly twice as long as TAOTD and a much deeper dive, with many names and details that Trump, with Schwartz possibly playing along, chose to omit. The second updated edition came out in 2016 during Trump’s successful run for the presidency. The back cover blurb, which says it all, is worth reproducing:
Donald Trump claims that his success as a “self-made” businessman proves that he will make an effective president, but this devastating account…. reveals how Trump put together the biggest deal of his life – Trump Tower – through manipulation and deceit; how he worked with questionable characters from the Mafia; and how it all nearly came crashing down. Here is a vivid and inglorious portrait of a man whose campaign for the American presidency has shocked the world. In Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth, Barrett unravels the myth and reveals the truth behind the mogul’s wheelings and dealings…. Instead of the canny businessmen that Trump professes to be, Barrett describes Trump as a person who exploited his father’s banking and political connections to grease his first major deals. Barrett paints an intimate portrait of Trump: a brash man driven by bravado and ambition, with an anxious ruthlessness to subdue his rivals and control his allies. Through interviews with scores of adversaries and former colleagues, we are given a unique look at Trump the businessman in action: arrogant as often as he is brilliant, reliant on threats as much as on charm, and failing as often as he succeeds….
TTGSOE is by no means a hatchet job, but rather a straightforward chronicle. Should you ask how I know it’s the truth, my answer would be that obviously I don’t know for certain, but that it fits the pattern of all his mealy-mouthed assertions, evasions, lies, and absurdities that he has projected for all the world to see these past eight years in his spoken words and “tweets,” in and out of office, since he first came on the scene as a presidential contender.
I’ve forgotten most of what I read in TTLAB, but I do remember that the tone was exactly the same as in TAOTD. Both works include several photographs, but one in TTLAB stands out. It shows Donald in his luxurious apartment in Trump Tower (he liked to plaster his name on his buildings, the same way that African dictators like Idi Amin in Uganda and Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo named lakes after themselves) sitting on the stool of a grand piano on which his wife Melania is lying. She’s wearing a sexy dress with her tits hanging halfway out, which tells you something about her values as well. Trump has a serious look of accomplishment; the photo is captioned “Life at the top is exactly as it seems – wonderful!” I was not impressed.
But let’s go back to his childhood, his formative years before age thirteen when his parents packed him off to military school in upstate New York. Trump is only seven years older than me and grew up just ten miles away, so as youngsters we lived in the same world, in a sense. But not really. I grew up in a middle class Long Island suburb, while Trump grew up in Jamaica Estates, Queens, one of the wealthiest enclaves in the five boroughs. He had it made from the start, his father having made a small fortune in the construction business prior to Donald’s birth in 1946. If Donald is telling the truth, his father, whom he greatly admired, came up the hard way, doing odd jobs and carpentry work before becoming a prosperous home builder. Barrett fills us in on a great deal more about Fred, none of which Donald mentions, depicting him at times as a sleaze and a cutthroat, traits which he obviously passed down to his middle son.
Donald tells us precious little about his childhood in TAOTD, perhaps because there’s little to tell. He never mowed lawns, shoveled snow, or delivered newspapers, as I and millions of boys of the boomer generation did by age thirteen – jobs that helped build character. He mentions that he frequently tagged along with his younger brother Robert to his father’s construction sites, and that he and Robert enjoyed playing with building blocks. Okay, normal enough. But unlike his brother, Donald was aggressive in the schoolyard, and as a second grader even gave his music teacher a black eye “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled” (page 49). I’ll bet you did, Donald. Seven-year-olds punch their teachers in the face all the time, don’t they?
I would guess that at some point in his 78 years, Trump has read a book or two outside of the classroom, any book other than one of his own, but if so I haven’t heard of it. Neither, apparently, has he had a pet dog or cat at any time in his life. Even the most squalid of presidents, like Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, were attached to their furry friends who had the run of the White House – FDR’s Scottish Terrier, Fala, and Clinton’s cat, named Socks. Even Joe Biden is lucid enough to know that he owns three German Shepherds, though one of them, Major, didn’t work out too well, charging and biting staff members. I guess Trump has no interest in animals because they can’t make deals. So far as I know, in his entire life the man has never gone fishing, hunting, hiking, camping, horseback riding, boating, snowmobiling, or taken part in any other outdoor activities that so many of his duped supporters enjoy.
Everything is a deal with this guy, even his three marriages which involved written nuptial agreements that covered the distribution of large financial sums, and which went into effect after he divorced his first two wives, the late Ivana Zelnickova and Marla Maples. These two, and his current wife Melania Knaus, must have been as emotionally barren as he is to be attracted to a man who has nothing to offer but money. I have never seen any sign of affection between Donald and Melania; on the contrary she often seems to maintain a cool distance. What do any of these people know about genuine love and devotion? Of course, it’s natural for any man to be sexually attracted to the kind of beauties that Trump married, but his appetite goes beyond that of most men. Everyone has heard of the lawsuit filed against Trump by porn actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. It seems certain that Trump and the slut had a one-night stand in 2006, and that she was paid $130,000 in hush money by Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen ten years later during his presidential campaign so that she wouldn’t go public with the story. A cascade of court proceedings followed for everyone involved, ending with Cohen receiving a prison sentence and Trump being convicted for falsifying business records, a conviction which is still hanging over his head. In my view, a man’s sexual inclinations, when they’re publicized like this, say much about his character, and a man who has sex with a porn star is as trashy as she is. I’ve known plenty of rough men, but few, I believe, who would stoop this low.
Orange man had revealed his colors earlier when a very lewd conversation was recorded with Billy Bush, a TV journeyman and relative to the Bush crime family. Like the Daniels fling, this surfaced just before the 2016 election. Trump said, in part, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” He said a good deal more, later shrugging it off as “locker room talk.” The whole story is on the Wikipedia page titled “Donald Trump Access Hollywood Tape.”
In the same time frame, the late 1990s and early 2000s, Trump was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern show, one more sewer rat Jew who was formerly in his orbit. As an aside, I have never understood how some fairly normal people – I’m thinking of musician Sheryl Crow, for example – have given this unfunny bag of garbage legitimacy by appearing on his show. In any event, the two often chatted crudely and lightheartedly about sex. During one edifying conversation in September 2004, Stern asked Trump about his daughter Ivanka. Trump, who had just called her “voluptuous,” said “She’s beautiful.” To which Stern responded, “Can I say this? A piece of ass.” “Yeah,” Trump replied. To say such a thing about his own daughter!
Well in advance of his political ambitions, Trump starred in his own “reality” TV show, The Apprentice, which featured a panel of job seekers competing with each other for a position in Trump’s real estate empire. I never watched it but I knew about it, and I knew of his famous line, “You’re fired!” To get a better feel for the program and Trump’s role as a demanding boss, I watched a couple of You Tube clips. It was not real life, of course, but it reminded me of the only job I was ever fired from, at age 18, right after I dropped out of college, pumping gas at a busy filling station. Looking back, I deserved it, even though I did my job well enough. I had a bad attitude and a habit of running my mouth; I had some growing up to do. Even so, I never expected it and was crushed when my boss told me, “John, I’m gonna have to let you go,” even though I was still living with my parents and had no financial obligations. It also brought back memories of working in the home heating oil business as a delivery driver for two different full service companies, meaning that both drivers and oil burner mechanics worked as a team keeping our customers warm during the cold weather months. Driving an oil truck is not what I would call a skilled job, but it is a responsible job; you can’t afford to screw up, particularly in regard to having a spill, which can easily happen if you’re not on the ball. In some circumstances, even a small oil spill of less than a gallon can have serious consequences. Maintaining and repairing oil burners requires much more training and a mechanical aptitude which most people, including me, don’t have. The two bosses in question, for whom I worked a combined sixteen years, were younger than me, one by twenty years, had graduated from college, and then Daddy immediately put them behind a desk. In both cases, Daddy had gotten his hands dirty in the business – at least that’s what I was told – but I’m sure they didn’t want to be embarrassed by their sons failing miserably at real work. Better to let them call the shots and do the hiring and firing. Over the years I was acquainted with many oil drivers and mechanics who were fired, and deserved it, but I remember three who most certainly did not. They were decent guys who did a good job and were liked by all their co-workers, but had minor grievances that could’ve been resolved with a man-to-man talk. But a boss who has never held down a real job, and is handed a business worth five or ten million dollars has no idea how devastating it is for an honest workingman to be unjustly and unexpectedly fired – a man with a family to support and bills to pay. Both of these young bosses were shady in their business practices, as their fathers were, and even though they treated me well, and I played the game and even liked them on a superficial level, they would’ve fired me too if they knew what I really thought of them. They were a spitting image of Donald Trump on a smaller scale. Firing people, even on a reality show, made him feel like a big man. From the earliest age, he didn’t have a financial worry in the world, knowing he would inherit the business, and as soon as he got out of college he stepped into his father’s shoes, though Fred remained active in the background, as my bosses’ fathers had. Donald knew the nuts and bolts of the construction business, as my bosses did of the oil business, but although he often showed up on his construction sites wearing a hardhat, not once did he ever work – he never poured concrete, installed plumbing, operated a crane or a bulldozer. In fact, to this day he has never known the satisfaction that comes from putting in an honest day’s work, nor can he empathize with the distress of being fired, especially in an unfair way. But he does know how to be the man in charge. “You’re fired!” I know I’m making too much of this, but for someone who has never done physical work gloating over firing people who tried hard but couldn’t make the grade, even in a fictional setting, nauseates me. What a phony tough guy. What an asshole.
Not so tough, though, when it comes to fighting a war, despite his love affair with the U.S. military. Trump was a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. For kids who came from rich families and had connections, and for others who were creative, it was easy to avoid the draft one way or another. Despite playing three collegiate sports, Trump got a medical exemption for having “heel spurs.” I remember those years very well, because had I been born three years earlier, I likely would’ve been drafted myself. I don’t think there was anything wrong with dodging the draft for that obscene, pointless conflict. I often asked myself if I would’ve done it, and I’m glad I never had to make that choice. But let it also be said that those men who were drafted and dreaded being sent to Vietnam, but went anyway because they felt it was the patriotic thing to do – let it be said that they were far braver than those who didn’t go. What I find so despicable about Trump is that he weaseled out of the draft, yet he loves to shoot off his mouth like some strutting warlord, his latest outburst, on September 25, threatening to blow Iran to smithereens if that country’s leaders are found to be plotting to assassinate him – laughable nonsense planted in his empty head by the horrid Jewish director of National Security, Avril Haines. Trump joins many other warmongering “conservative” frauds who were of military age during the Vietnam War, but ducked the draft – a long list that includes Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Bill O’Reilly, George Bush and the late Rush Limbaugh.
You may recall all the bluster, during his presidency, directed at Kim Jong-Un in 2017. North Korea was going to face “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” he announced to the press during a cabinet meeting, repeating his threats in his first address to the United Nations shortly afterward. For a while it looked like we were on the verge of war over the issue of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, as Trump and Kim exchanged insults and threats. Then, just like that, they became buddies, Trump flying to Singapore in June 2018 to meet Kim in what was billed as an historic summit. This is because Trump, as he explains in his books, respects a tough adversary who drives a tough bargain – someone like himself. At the time, I was naive enough to believe that this was a most positive development, the first step in normalizing relations after so many years of hostility dating back to the Korean War. I had traveled to North Korea in 2013, and was so touched by the kindness of these long-suffering people that I put a great deal of time and effort into being the first American to personally take a high school or college group there, mainly a sports team. Then came the Otto Warmbier incident, followed by three scuzzy congressmen introducing a bill making it illegal for U.S. citizens to visit North Korea, which Trump signed into law. It took effect on September 1, 2017, ending American tourism to the country. So much for our “freedom.” So much for Trump and his accomplishments. Trump met with Kim Jong-Un two more times, in Hanoi in February 2018, which was inconclusive, and at the DMZ which separates North and South Korea, in June 2019, in which old John here got snookered again, believing it to be some kind of historic event that would bring about a long overdue rapprochement between our countries. Now, in late 2024, we’re back to square one with North Korea, reliving the Cold War years. (Note: In the “Travel Stories” page on this site, I have written a great deal about North Korea, including facts about Otto Warmbier that were not reported in our mainstream media. If you’d like to learn more about North Korea that you’ll never learn anywhere else, including photos and videos of my trip there, see orinocotravel.com, my now defunct website which is still up and running.)
Donald Trump rode into the White House on the promise to “Make America Great Again” – a meaningless slogan if there ever was one. Can someone tell me what makes a country great, and the last time America met that standard? But people ate it up. Many of them are still eating it up the second time around, eight years later. Back then, while on the campaign trail, he said that Hillary should be in prison, to the delight of his supporters who chanted “Lock her up! Lock her up!” at his rallies. So what did he do a few months later at his inaugural luncheon with the Clintons in attendance? He said, “I have a lot of respect for them,” and never spoke ill of Hillary again. Actually, he had been close friends with the Clintons for years, and Bill was an old golfing buddy. In the wake of the February 14, 2018 Parkland, Florida school shooting, he voiced support of firearms confiscation, saying, “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” This did not seem to faze the head honchos of America’s largest pro-gun organization, the NRA, of which I am a longtime member, nor most gun owners around the country, who continued to look up to Trump as a champion of their cause. As to the issues of abortion and gay rights – or to use a better term, faggot privileges – Trump, the Republican “family values president,” like every worthless politician, has made so many contradictory and ambiguous statements, depending on which group he’s addressing, that it’s impossible to pin him down. The fact remains that he has spoken warmly to LGBTQ audiences in rooms decked with the rainbow colors, and is the first president in U.S. history to appoint an open queer, Richard Grenell, to a cabinet post.
While on the campaign trail he promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington – then after he was elected he stacked his administration with swamp creatures – entrenched bureaucrats, corporate CEOs, and high finance movers and shakers. While it’s true that the alien invasion along the southern border greatly accelerated under Biden, they were still streaming in while Trump was in office, and as for the wall he said he’d build, with Mexico paying for it no less – don’t make me laugh. More than three months of George Floyd riots in towns and cities all over the country happened under his watch. A true leader would have turned to the military and issued shoot to kill orders against the rampaging mobs of arsonists, looters and vandals. One volley of gunfire in one city with twenty or thirty wild animals lying dead in the street would’ve stopped the rioters in their tracks. Trump talked tough but did nothing. Instead – and I remember this so well – he walked from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church with plenty of police protection, amid the violence swirling around the capital, and held a bible up for the photographers to capture. I can’t imagine a more pathetic gesture, and am still wondering what it was supposed to mean. He announced that he was going to get to the bottom of the September 11 terror attacks, but that was quickly forgotten. Would anyone expect him to point his finger at the real perpetrator, Israel, the country he loves, praises, and supports more than any other president?
He abandoned his faithful J6 supporters – from what I understand, several who had swarmed the Capitol but committed no violence are still rotting in prison – while pardoning numerous white collar criminals in his last month in office. I do believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that he’s being selectively prosecuted by a judicial system that’s as comically corrupt as that of any banana republic, but the fact remains that Trump truly is a bona fide criminal, and if he ends up doing time in a federal penitentiary, which I think is unlikely, he won’t get any sympathy from me.
The one sound idea that the blowhard had, the only one I know of anyway, was that vaccines cause autism. This is true, of course. He actually once said that he knew people whose children became autistic after getting vaccinated, and that as president, he would appoint Robert F. Kenndy Jr. to a commission that looked into the issue of vaccine safety. (As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m no fan of RFK, who is two-faced on the issue, but he has done some good.) Of course, that never happened. Bill Gates dropped by the White House a few times in 2018 and disabused him of the cold, hard facts about vaccine harm. From that point on, Trump has been on board the vaccine train. Indeed, while presiding over the Covid plandemic for nearly a year, and going along with all the terrible advice of his health advisors, Anthony Fauci in particular, he announced, with great fanfare, the implementation of Operation Warp Speed. Unless you have been living in a treehouse, I hardly need to tell you how many times he touted the wonders of the Covid vaccine and crowned himself “Father of the Vaccine.” I don’t like to throw big numbers around that are difficult to verify, but I find it entirely plausible, from what I’ve read, that this vaccine has killed more than half a million Americans and left many more with crippling injuries. Whatever the actual numbers are, the worldwide injection campaign rates as one of the gravest crimes against humanity on record. The narcissistic moron is incapable of understanding that. What he understands is deals – and I wouldn’t be surprised if he secretly made a few with Pfizer and Moderna before rolling out Warp Speed. I could go on and on and on. In preparing to write this essay, I jotted down a boatload of points I intended to make, but I’m going to leave the rest of them out because there’s no need to go further. Perhaps he did make a few cosmetic improvements while he was president – I’ll acknowledge that. But really, how were things any better under four years of Trump than under four years of Biden, or eight years of Obama for that matter?
At the beginning I mentioned Hugh Akins’s book DJT, which I haven’t touched on, though it most certainly is a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to dig into all the details of what a total fraud, hypocrite, liar, and moral leper Donald Trump is – and importantly, unlike most of Trump’s rational enemies, Akins doesn’t shy away from his close connections to numerous Jewish criminals, whom he names. My one criticism is that Akins writes from a traditionalist Catholic viewpoint and inserts quite a few bible verses, which is not my cup of tea, but in no way does that detract from the book’s value. DJT and TTGSOE are quite different in style and content, but they complement each other well, and between them you can learn just about all there is to know about this man. As I’ve already said, he really is unique. I don’t know of any person, past or present, who compares with him. He’s like some weird phantom, a piece of styrofoam in human form that blows around in the wind and floats with the current at the mercy of Jewish forces to which he knows he must pander. In that regard he’s the same as most every other politician, but truly exceptional as a master at telling good White people what they want to hear, and winning their hearts and minds, then never delivering on his promises.
What a choice this November: Harris or Trump. America is not a serious country. It’s depressing to see signs and banners expressing support for the gangster of choice – and any White man or woman who votes for Kamala Harris is beyond the pale. That’s like voting for an empty beer can. A vote for Trump is equally futile and hardly more intelligent. I won’t get into the freak show this past July in Milwaukee that was the Republican national convention. God help this country, what’s left of it. I never talk to normies about politics, including my own family when I see them, so I really don’t know what the general consensus is about the election. The one ray of hope I’ve seen in past elections is that around half of eligible voters don’t bother going to the polls because they’ve given up on the System. For now I’ll leave it at that. Interesting times lie ahead.
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I’m a guy who believes in lightening up and having fun, especially after writing about such a dreary subject, so I’m going to shift gears and let my hair down, while still sticking to the topic of presidents and elections. I’ll even give you a little history lesson. So let me tell you about the five-day mini-trip to New England I made just last month with my son – same as last year but driving on different roads and seeing new places. One new place was the tiny village of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, home of our thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge. This had never been on my bucket list, nor did I even know that Coolidge was from Vermont, but when I noticed the little notation on my map, I thought why not, let’s check it out. I knew less about Coolidge than any other twentieth century president, even less than Warren Harding, whom he served under as vice president. His boyhood home – I saw the bed where he popped into the world on July 4, 1872, the only president born on the Fourth of July – was plain but pleasant, harkening back to the old America. Plymouth Notch barely exists – I saw a church and a general store, but no post office, no gas station and only one pedestrian – but it’s beautifully situated in the rolling hills of a beautiful though oddly liberal state, with the first hint of fall foliage, of the maple trees transforming into fiery reds, oranges and yellows – one of Nature’s grand spectacles for which Vermont is famous.
We went on a guided tour of the grounds with a dozen other visitors. Afterward, in the modest little museum, I watched a 20-minute film about Coolidge’s life, which included footage of his presidency from 1923 to 1929. I even heard him speak, and was reminded of what I had forgotten, that he became president when Harding died suddenly of a heart attack. And then it hit me: the reason I never knew anything about Calvin Coolidge is because there’s nothing to know. He was surely the quietest and most non-descript of all our presidents, a man of few words. “Silent Cal,” they called him, though for some reason he was popular and handily won the 1924 election. Of that election, H. L. Mencken, the legendary “Sage of Baltimore,” the wittiest and most astute journalist who covered the political scene in the first half of the twentieth century, wrote:
Democracy is that system of government under which people, having 60,000,000 native-born adults to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of state. It is as if a hungry man, set before a banquet prepared by master cooks and covering an acre in area, should turn his back upon the feast and stay his stomach by catching and eating flies.
Calvin Coolidge bears comparison to Gerald Ford, who also came into office accidentally in 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned, ending the insufferable Watergate soap opera. Ford, like Coolidge, was a low-key, harmless airhead. One of the few things I remember about him was that he once wore a button on TV that read “W.I.N.,” which stood for Whip Inflation Now. So you see, we had clown world back then too. Gerald plodded on for two years, then was narrowly defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election. Speaking of whom, guess who turned 100 on October 1st, the only president to reach that milestone? I never liked Carter when he was president. He struck me as a cynical liar, even a traitor in some ways. I got tired of the “down to earth peanut farmer from Georgia” gimmick, another media lie I fell for, though my political education was just getting underway back then. Many Americans obviously agreed, because he lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. He promptly faded away, but over the years he wrote a bunch of books, none of which I’ve read, and spoke his mind in a positive way. He became a roving diplomat who strove for peace and understanding among nations. Even as president he was one of only two in my lifetime, if I’m not mistaken, the other being Ford, who didn’t involve us in any senseless military adventures. In retrospect, he was one of the least corrupt while in office and one of the most honorable in retirement, which isn’t saying much, but it’s something. He really tried to pursue an even-handed policy in the Middle East and never sucked up to Israel, becoming outspoken about the rogue state later as a private citizen, which earned him the wrath of many prominent Jews. To be sure, he’s no hero of mine, but I actually came to like the guy. While it’s true that his wife Rosalynn was a meddling birdbrain, and their one daughter, Amy, who lived in the White House as a child, became an annoying liberal brat, he had good family values and a happy marriage for a whopping 77 years; Rosalynn died just last year at the age of 96. So, Jimmy, a belated Happy Birthday! We boomers miss you, and strange to say, I even miss Nixon and Ford. The 1970s – how good a time it was, compared to the state of the nation today.
Getting back to Calvin Coolidge, here’s a fun fact I learned from our guide: he was in Plymouth Notch, visiting his family, when a telegram arrived with word of Harding’s passing in San Francisco. His father, John, woke him up in the middle of the night and broke the news. Later that morning, August 3, 1923, John Coolidge, who was a justice of the peace, swore in his son as president, right there in the parlor where we were standing. What simple times they were. Can you picture such a thing happening today?
For his own reasons that he never explained, Silent Cal decided not to seek a second term in 1928, leaving his successor, Herbert Hoover, to take the rap for the Great Depression, which came a year later. Coolidge died on January 5, 1933 at the age of sixty, like Harding of a sudden heart attack. Mencken wrote a brief tribute of sorts, which appeared in the April issue of American Mercury magazine, going easier on him this time, but not by much:
In what manner he would have performed himself if the holy angels had shoved the Depression forward a couple of years – this we can only guess, and one man’s hazard is as good as another’s. My own is that he would have responded to bad times precisely as he responded to good ones – that is, by pulling down the blinds, stretching his legs upon his desk, and snoozing away the lazy afternoons….He slept more than any other President, whether by day or night….There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.
Among the items for sale in the museum gift shop were buttons which read “Coolidge for President ’24.” I wondered if they were original, but they were probably replicas; they looked too shiny to be a hundred years old. I thought about buying one, but since I’m not the type who likes to draw attention, I didn’t. Now I wish I had, to wear in public, as when going grocery shopping or standing in line at the post office. Like I said, I’m always good for a laugh, especially in these trying times, and what better way to elicit a few chuckles while cheerfully poking fun at the unraveling System.