Trump's goal: Make America hate again

“Under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker and sicker and poorer.” And, unfortunately, stupider too.

by Tom Maertens, Vox Verax co-editor

Tom Maertens served as a White House National Security Council director during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

We are suffering the worst health crisis in a century, with over 5,000 coronavirus deaths per week, while simultaneously enduring a 16% unemployment rate and experiencing the worst civil unrest in more than 50 years.

And what is the president doing during these crises? Making America great? No, making America hate again.

On May 10, Mother’s Day, Trump tweeted 125 insults, bizarre conspiracy theories and false accusations at the rate of one every seven-and-a-half minutes. That is sixteen hours of tweeting.

On June 5, he posted 200 tweets/retweets.

He accused dozens of opponents of criminal acts ranging from murder and treason to espionage and electoral fraud.

Among Trump’s targets were two television news hosts, a comedian, five former officials from the FBI and Justice Department, the state of California, a television station and at least five top national security officials from Barack Obama’s administration.

Trump’s Twitter archive (http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com) shows that he has complained about the media over a thousand times, “fake news” 650 times, referred to 185 people as “stupid” and hundreds more using “dope,” “fool,” “moron,” and other derogatory terms.

He has regularly accused people of perjury or mishandling classified information without evidence, and recently, termed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park terrorists.

The British writer Nate White wrote that “Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults — he actually thinks in them.”

Over Memorial Day weekend, Trump mocked former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight, ridiculed Nancy Pelosi’s looks, and called Hillary Clinton a “skank.”

He has repeatedly claimed that former congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough “got away with murder” in the death of a former staff member, Lori Klausutis. She died in Scarborough’s Florida office while Scarborough was in D.C., 800 miles away. The police found no evidence of foul play and the coroner reported that the cause of death was a fall against a hard object precipitated by her floppy mitral valve disease.

Trump nonetheless tried to get David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, to “investigate” him. Pecker is the guy who paid Karen MacDougal, the former Playboy model, $150,000 to “catch and kill” the story of her affair with Trump while Melania was recuperating from childbirth.

Trump continues to claim that Obama officials committed “the biggest political crime in American history, by far,” but he can’t explain what that crime was, so he invokes “Obamagate” because he knows that the Fox Noise Machine will repeat any story he makes up.

He retweeted a video that begins with the line “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” and then claimed the words didn’t mean what they say.

Trump regularly retweets posts from QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory promoted by anonymous sources that asserts there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, and imagines that Trump and the military will suddenly arrest and execute or imprison top Democrats.

The FBI considers QAnon a potential domestic terror threat; Trump has nonetheless invited QAnon supporters to the White House.

As Max Boot wrote in the Washington Post, “The GOP is becoming a modern-day Know Nothing Party … a cesspool of prejudice and irrationality.”

Trump has been far more vitriolic in attacking mail-in voting than he has Russian interference in our elections, despite the fact that Russia organized at least 60 demonstrations in the U.S. under a false flag during the 2016 elections (Wall Street Journal).

What we know about Trump is that he will blame Obama, China, radical leftists, “thugs” and others for the current conditions — anybody but himself.

The second certainty is that he will lie. The Washington Post fact checker found that Trump tweeted an average of six lies per day in 2017, which turned into nearly sixteen per day in 2018, and then increased to more than twenty-two per day in 2019.

Meanwhile, at least twelve retired four-star military officers have publicly criticized Trump for misusing troops for his political purposes; General Barry McCaffrey called Trump a threat to the Constitution, and Colin Powell called him a liar and a threat to the nation. Bill Cohen, the former secretary of defense and GOP senator for Maine (for whom I worked in the Senate) said Trump is leading us down the trail toward a dictatorship.

The Republican-led Lincoln Project has written: “Under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker and sicker and poorer.” And, unfortunately, stupider too.