Category: Trumplandia

Get Mad And Stay Mad About Stephen Miller’s Nazi Border Policy #KeepFamiliesTogether

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am not going to be so sanguine as to suggest the Stephen Miller policy on the border in regard to immigrants will, in real terms, do anything to slice the festering boil that is the Trump Administration. The country is too divided and negative polarization on the Right is way, way, way too potent a force for that to happen. I will note, however, that Trump and his fellow would-be Nazis have kind of painted themselves into a corner.

This is because the more you know the fact of what’s going on, the more difficult it is to wave your hand and tell people like me to “enjoy the humming economy” and “get laid.” There’s a real humanitarian and ethical crisis taking place on the border and the question is, are we willing to do something about it in real terms, or is this just another frightening example of how the United States is lurching towards a not-so-quasi authoritarian state.

There is, at least, as small possibility that we’re headed for an enormous confrontation about the future of our nation on a historic scale. Now Trump is extremely fickle and given how easy it is for him to relieve any pressure on his administration by simply revoking the policy this could be a non-issue. And Trump is so completely devoid of shame that he could very easily wake up one morning, watch Morning Joe, and tweet out some bizarre rationale for ending the policy that blames the Democrats with maximum pandering to his base.

And, yet, there is also a chance that this policy plays so well to the base and Trump is so completely devoid of empathy that he’ll dig in for the long haul. He’ll pick this, of all things, as his hill to die on. If that happens, one of two things will happen. Either his typical, “Look! A squirrel!” approach to governance will succeed, or it won’t. If it does work, then the pot is officially boiling and we’re fucked. If it doesn’t, however, Trump is playing with fire. The fact that some religious leaders have begun to speak out about this policy — despite how Trump, personally, is ensuring the Rapture happens sooner rather than later — indicates there is a least a small possibility the Trump Administration, may, for once, get burned.

Unfortunately, it will take time for the burning to happen. We may be in a political siege of sorts as the two sides wage a slow-motion war as we simply hunker down and wait for the 2018 mid-term elections to roll around. I am very doubtful at this point that there will be a “Blue Wave.” I think while the Republicans may take surprising losses, they will maintain both houses of Congress and Trump will not only survive, but prosper. The economy is doing too well and The Resistance, at least right now, too nebulous and lacking leadership for anything of any substance to happen. And, yet, if we get mad and stay mad about this most basic of issues — the right of parents to stay with their children, regardless of the reason, we might have a small chance.

Too many MAGA people have too much invested in its continued success to even give a little ground on humanitarian grounds to the libtards they are so determined to “own.” In my own dealings with MAGA people on this subject, they either deflect or rhetorically bob and weave to such an extent that conversation with them is pointless. There are also some MAGA sympathizers who take a macro approach and say the United States needs better control over its borders and let the chips fall where they may. That neither one of these groups can’t show some compassion on the face of it once you describe to them what’s going on with this policy is pretty frightening.

What’s so disturbing to me is how MAGA people conflate the issue. They talk about how we need to enforce laws and how this happened under Obama and then they walk off and enjoy the humming economy, go to church and raise their kids. But as I mentioned, this isn’t a law, this is a policy enacted at the behest of White House adviser Stephen Miller’s demented mind. It’s a matter of policy, not law that this is happening and if we hone in on this point and use it as a rhetorical bludgeon on anyone who will listen, then maybe, just maybe something of note will happen.

The Big Lie only works so much. If every time a Trump supporter regurgitates a Big Lie talking point you flatly and politely tell them the facts of the matter and point out how devoid of compassion they are on a personal level, there’s a chance eventually they’ll feel the heat enough that Trump may feel obliged to do the right thing for a change and revoke the policy.

But Trump wants his “big beautiful wall” so bad and the base loves this concept as a form of deterrence so much that we’re in for a historic game of political chicken. It all will come down to the mid-terms. That’s it. The fate of the Republic could hinge on flipping Congress and finally putting a check on Trumplandia. I’m very doubtful this will happen, however. I just think there’s too much dark money being throw at the problem by the Right, not to mention the very real possibility of new, improved interference on the part of the Russians.

So, if you love America, if you love that idea of it being a “city on the hill,” our best hope is that you get angry and stay angry about what’s going on at the border. Take a stand. Be willing to lose Facebook friends over it. Hell, be willing to lose REAL friends over it. If Trump wants to play chicken, let’s play chicken. Just be prepared to hit their car if they don’t blink and swerve away.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. he may be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.

This Is America

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It was inevitable, given the ebb and flow of American political history that someone like Trump would become president. Trump just has put his own idiosyncratic spin on things. It’s not like if Hillary Clinton had won that we’d be in much better shape, given that the entire Right is based on a hysterical belief that it’s being oppressed.

I have said for two years that Trump is an existential threat to America and it definitely seems as though he’s getting worse. He’s starting to figure out what being president means and he’s kind of a surreal, malevolent version of Bill Clinton at this point. Clinton, too, had a lot of chaos at first in his administration and then he figured out what he was doing.

The issue now is there anything that can stop him. What’s the end game. Does Trump signal the final lurch of the United States into it’s late imperial stage or he a blip. In other words, is Trump founding a new Trumplandia or is he a Caligula. All signs are he’s growing stronger by the day and we risk losing sight of what really make America great to begin with.

Things are growing more and more dark. I’m the product of a precocious child watching too much Cold War liberal TV news. That’s my frame of reference. Mid-80s TV news liberalism. That’s the America I know and love and I don’t know what happens next. It seems as though the volk has an almost endless ability to process Trump’s dumpster fire of an administration.

When the final history of the United States is written, Trump could be the moment when we finally succumbed to our worst instincts. I like to think the individual rises to the occasion and given the opportunity he or she will show their true colors. They say history is but the biography of great men (or women) for a reason.

What would Lincoln have been without the opportunity and crisis of the Civil War. I mean, hell, Grant was a listless drunk for about a decade before fate happened to tap him for greatness. So there’s still an opportunity for individual greatness in America. Trump hasn’t sapped that out of us quite yet.

But it’s going to get worse before it’s get better — much, much worse.

It’ll get worse because Trump has no shame and will never quit and the Vichy Republican Congress will never impeach him, no matter what he does. So, we’re stuck with Trump for the time being.

Only time will tell if we can save ourselves from ourselves.

#FOTUS: 2018 Mid-Terms & ‘Obstruction, Collusion & Coercion’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It’s Broidy. Broidy is the babydaddy. He has to be. He has to be. He has to be.

Having said that, let’s daydream about what if Trump is the babydaddy. If I was a Democratic strategist and Trump’s theoretical and alleged coercion of Ms. Bechard to get an abortion in exchange for $1.6 million was proven somehow, I would ditch “A Better Deal” and plow money into the slogan: “Obstruction, Collusion, Coercion.”

That’s how you bring about a Blue Wave and end this American nightmare we’re living through right now. I only way this because Trump has no shame and the Vichy Congressional Republicans will never impeach Trump for any reason.

But if you can bang into the mind of a liberal Republican woman in the Philadelphia exurbs the slogan “Obstruction, Collusion, Coercion” you have a damn good chance of winning back Congress. The idea that a Trump coerced a woman to have an abortion in exchange for $1.6 million would be pretty damning. It’d leave a welt, if nothing else.

The Obstruction, Collusion, Coercion slogan is pithy and catchy and powers home the stakes of the mid-term vote. If you could prove coercion somehow….whoa buddy. That’d be pretty deep. Obstruction and collusion aren’t very sexxxy and they’ve already been baked into what voters believe about Trump. But the last issue, that of coercion, if you could prove it, well, that’d be difficult for Rudy to throw his spaghetti at. At least I think. Before it was over with, Rudy would have us believing $1.6 million for an abortion is “nuisance” money for Trump and, besides, you know broads, they love getting abortions at the drop of the hat because of the liberal homosexual agenda that the criminal deep state cooked up after they killed JFK.

Yet all of this is moot because Broidy is the babydaddy and I’m making a fool out of myself and I really need to shut up and look for a job.

How The #FOTUS Affair Revel Would Go Down From My Point Of View

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am going to give you a tick-tock of how the news that someone, somewhere had broken the nut of the #FOTUS Affair Theory and proved it was real.

One reason why I feel there’s not much going on right now is I haven’t seen an uptick in people accessing this site from LA, Washington D.C. and NYC. But, to let you in on a little weird observation, I have noticed something odd. In the last day, two people who were barely visible in my logs accessed this site. One person was from China and one person was from Russia.

The person from China appeared to use some sort of translation software on the site. I think. Something on their end was unpacked that would give me some indication that may have happened. Meanwhile, the Russian person popped up via a weird search engine then vanished. Now, I’m going to plant my tinfoil hat firmly on my head and speculate that….is it possible there’s some chatter bouncing around email and phones that super secret people monitor and they know something I don’t?

It’s completely baseless and bonkers, but it’s weird.

I don’t know domain names of people accessing the site so if, say, someone in New York City access the site all I know is that that is where they are. They could be a homeless person with WiFi access as best as I can tell. But I would have a pretty good idea something was going down if there was an abrupt uptick in access from any of the major media or political areas of the country. Right now, I got squat. Very few people — barely 20 — look at this site on a daily basis and generally I’m just talking to myself.

But let’s say that abruptly changed. Let’s say there was a rush of people from LA, NYC and DC. I would expect those visits to be Google searches. If people were being interviewed, they probably would freak and search this matter and find my babbling pretty quick.

That, so far, has not happened. So that leads me to believe not much is going on and, in fact, maybe someone from, say Buzzfeed or The Times asked Playboy and they laughed at them over the phone and all of this a joke and I should just shut up.

Let’s go a little farther — after that rush of people from LA (Playboy people) there would an enormous rush of people from D.C. the moment reporters turned around and said, “Well, any comment Mr. President?” If that happened, I would get really excited and run around the neighborhood screaming.

Nothing is happening right now. Nothing. I get no sense anyone cares and this is pretty much a dead end at this point. Though, I will tell you if you want me to keep writing about this get people from LA, NYC and DC to access this site on a regular basis. That would definitely get my juices flowing.

As it stands, I’m struggling to give up on this. It’s Broidy. It has to be. Broidy’s the babydaddy and all this is a joke. The alternative is jaw dropping.

My Prediction: The United States Will Be At War With The DPRK By August 2018

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have predicted this several times in the past, but while we were busy minting coins for the summit, people thought this was uninteresting, but maybe not so much anymore: we will be at work with North Korea by mid-August 2018.

I predict this because Trump lacks basic human empathy and I doubt he would see the loss of 1 million lives in exchange for there being no Blue Wave and he reaching the poll numbers he so craves. So, that’s my logic at least.

We’ll see what happens.

The Hill & Its Trollish Clickbait, ‘Stopping Robert Mueller’

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The Hill, what Capitol staffers read on the john when they are done reading Politico, should be ashamed of itself for publishing the complete and total bullshit article “Stopping Robert Mueller to protect us all.” This article, written weirdly by former Clintonite Mark Penn, is obviously a stalking horse for the current political strategy of Trump and his demon spawn Rudy Giuliani. It is embarrassing to read something that is so comical in its effort to make us believe that the evil “Deep State” is “desperate” to bring down Trump. Penn writes:

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

A quick Google search belies this dumb accusation. If anything, Mueller has been quite successful in the last year and he has plenty of reason to keep going in the days, weeks and, if need be, years ahead.

Here’s some more.

But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.

To quote Hillary Clinton during the Bengazhi hearings, “What difference does it make?”

So what if it was oppo. That doesn’t change the fact that Trump may have colluded with a hostile foreign power to rig a presidential election. It makes me apoplectic that this trash that was spewed out of the FOX News Bullshit Mountain even got written. This is all part of a concerted effort on the part of the Trump – Giuliani nexus to prepare us all for God-only-knows-what.

Even more bullshit:

Time and time again, investigators came up empty. Even several sting operations with an FBI spy we just learned about failed to produce a Delorean-like video with cash on the table. But rather than close the probe, the deep state just expanded it. All they had were a few isolated contacts with Russians and absolutely nothing related to Trump himself, yet they pressed forward. Egged on by Steele, they simply believed Trump and his team must be dirty. They just needed to dig deep enough.

If the fate of the Republic wasn’t at stake, I would laugh. But the time for us to laugh about Trump’s corruption and obstruction is very much over. What’s weird to me is people are willing to engulf themselves in the flames of the Trump pier for, what? Access to power? I mean, really, it’s not like VP Mike Pence is going to really change anything. In fact, if you’re all that concerned about “owning libs,” Pence has an actual ideology that Trump lacks. As Jim Comey confidant Benjamin Wittes famously quipped Trump is “malevolence mitigated only by his incompetence.” Pence is competent and would have an ideology beyond whatever he happened to spew in a tweet that morning.

Here more from the piece that leaves me astonished at its tone-deafness.

This process must now be stopped, preferably long before a vote in the Senate. Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again.

I am not the type of person to protest. But I can tell you for a fact that if “this….process…stopped” in the guise of Trump firing Robert Mueller without cause I will hit the streets. I would like to think other like-minded people would join me. I am not so naive as to think it would really matter in the end — even well-heeled people are apologists for Trump and the system is so broken that the book The Plot Against America is starting to look more like a documentary as opposed to a counter-factual novel. But this bullshit by Penn doesn’t exactly help the situation.

This part is spews so directly from the dark recesses of the surreal bullshit factory that runs the country right now that I feel astonished it was published.

The president’s lawyers need to extend their new aggressiveness from words to action, filing complaints with Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on the failure of Mueller and Rosenstein to recuse themselves, and going into court to question the tactics of the special counsel, from selective prosecutions on unrelated matters, illegally seizing Government Services Administration emails, covering up the phone texts of FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and operating without a scope approved by the attorney general. (The regulations call for the attorney general to recuse himself from the investigation but appear to still leave him responsible for the scope.)

The emails between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are widely seen as a non-issue by anyone who hasn’t drunk the Trump Koolaide and it’s embarrassing that The Hill would allow a writer to even mention it. Maybe the “secret society” was off the day they decided to publish it.

Mueller has done more than enough in the last year to prove he has earned the right to be left alone for the foreseeable future. Let’s just see where this leads. If we are still a Republic and not a “managed democracy” like they have in Russia, we have to do that. Trump may want to be an American Caligula, but I’d like to think we haven’t reached that point yet. I still have hope that America’s over two centuries of experimenting in self-rule hasn’t failed yet.

If we follow Penn’s advice, we are little more than a banana republic where rules and laws change at the whim of the Dear Leader. So, if anything, we have to protect Robert Mueller to protect ourselves, not the opposite.

Shelton Bumgarner is a writer and photographer living in Richmond, Va. He can be reached at migukin (at) gmail (dot) com.

Of The Mad King: We’re In A Constitutional Crisis

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Stupid Watergate has finally reached a level of seriousness where we have to stop making fun of it and sit up and take notice at the gravity of the situation. For some time now, there has been talk of this or that dumb thing Trump has done causing us to be in a Constitutional Crisis.

Today’s insane tweet on the part of Trump “demanding” an investigation into what may or may not have happened during the 2016 presidential campaign is the final straw. We’re in a Constitutional Crisis now. The logic of Trump’s legal team is so completely twisted and bonkers that it gives me a headache.

The point is not to determine the facts of the case, the point is to give the Trump base talking points they can use to “own” liberals. This, even though they’ve finally veered off any connection to the facts and now are dealing almost exclusively in lies and misinterpretations.

If the Deep State was so eager to hurt the Trump campaign, why would they keep things quiet via the use of an informant when it came to Trump while they released the second Comey letter just days before the November election. Why is this so difficult to understand.

It’s so difficult to understand for some — if not all — Trump supporters because they are comfortable with Trump’s policies, the economy is humming and in real terms they’re more concerned about their kid’s soccer scores than they are as something as complex as a Constitutional Crisis. They just don’t care. And not until they have a personal interest in all of this will they have an opinion on way or another.

So, I have a bad feeling about this. I suspect Trump is going to do serious damage to Constitutional norms, or democracy and our country. This all goes back to who is going to be Trump’s successor and how he or she addresses all this damage. Are they going to go back to what we expect in all these things, or are they going to use the damage Trump has done has an excuse to redefine what is acceptable behavior on the part of our leaders?

I Believe The Trump Pee-Pee Tape Is Real

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I think it’s pretty obvious that the Trump pee-pee tape is real. It’s got to be. How else do you explain Trumps surreal softness on the Russians? The huge question, of course, is he willful in his traitorous behavior or is he just an idiot? That’s a question we may never know.

Another question is, will we ever get to see the pee-pee tape. I doubt it. It would make no sense for the Russians to release it when they can simply uses its release against Trump as long as he’s in office. Anyway, the below videos are really interesting and I suggest you watch them. They go into a lot of detail about all of this and its implications.

Why Trump Was Inevitable

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Let me state from the beginning that I don’t have all the political, psychological, sociological and even historical insight that I need to properly tell all of this, but I am a more than casual observer of American presidential political history and so I’m going to give it a go.

Having said that, it is clear to me that Trump — or someone like Trump — was inevitable at this moment in our nation’s history. It is obvious to me that what caused Trump was that while we were all enjoying Obama’s pleasant, scandal-free administration the Right was going completely insane. Tribal politics and its associated hatred of Obama for being the nation’s first black president made it so it was inevitable that we were going to have a completely bonkers Republican president at some point.

Add to this the headwinds of historic weakness of Hillary Clinton as a candidate and the election meddling of the Russians really the only way Trump would not have won was if he hadn’t run in the first place. But, really, if you looked at who was likely to get through the primary system at the time, it is highly unlikely that Jeb Bush was going to be the nominee. He was completely detached from the national Republican Party and everyone else who might have won was in some ways worse than Trump because no only were they insanely conservative, they were competent and had an ideology they were willing to defend to boot.

But Trump has his own unique set of bonkers qualities than make him extremely dangerous to the Republic. While he may be too lazy, unfocused and incompetent to be a true authoritarian, his complete lack of adherence to political norms may cause lasting damage to the American political landscape.

So, the issue is, there were and are structural problems with the Republican Party that the average person simply was unaware of unless they happened to catch FOX News one night. When about half the political electorate lives in an insane bubble of surreal conspiracy theories and race-induced rage, it’s inevitable that once they get their opportunity to run the country we’re in for a whole lot of trouble.

The truly tragic thing about all of this is there is no easy fix. The tectonic political, economic and demographic forces that led to the creation of the cancer that is the modern Republican Party aren’t going anywhere. It could be 20 to 30 years before things work themselves out and by the time they do the Republican Party will have turn our once independent judiciary into a bastion of Right wing nutjob hacks whose entire reason for being on the bench is to give old, wealthy white people as much power as possible.

What’s more, there’s a real chance of a civil war. There’s a real risk that we’ve gone beyond the point of no return and we’re going to have an actual civil war in the United States within the next 20 years. I have no idea if it will actually happen or not, but it’s something to worry about.

It will definitely be interesting to see what happens.

Jon Stewart Would Be An Ideal Presidential Candidate At This Point

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

This is just an idle daydream, but it seems to me that the ideal person to run against Donald Trump in 2020, should last that long, would be Jon Stewart. I say this because Stewart is everything Trump isn’t — funny, smart and self-aware.

Of course, Stewart, at least at this point, has zero political experience outside of his interest in 9/11 first responder rights and a little bit about veterans affairs. And, of course, there is the obvious issue that he appears to have zero interest in actually doing anything beyond running his petting zoo.

But the match up between Trump and Stewart would be one for the ages. And regardless, I think we would need someone like Stewart to take down Trump. Yet I honestly don’t know. The nation is so divided at this point that there’s no perfect person to do the job.

Trump is so powerful with 40% of the electorate and the economy is doing so well that it will be a difficult fight no matter what. Add to this the continuing struggle that The Resistance has with trying to find some sort of messaging beyond simply being against Trump and you have the makings of a pretty bad situation.

This doesn’t begin to address the issue of what happens if Trump wags the dog using Iran or the DPRk.

We’re going to have to just wait and see, I guess.