Oh Will you just kill me!! Great column!! I do understand the Trump appeal. A huge part is because we had the audacity to elect a Black man for President and dared to enact some much needed Progressive reforms. Trump is the backlash. Christian nationalism. White supremacy. Whatever you want to call it.
This is one of your best pieces ever!! Plus I just adore your humor. Thanks for all you do!! You are much appreciated. 💙🇺🇸
Another well executed article. Keeping our enemies within easy site, I'm guessing that your scope needs zero adjustments. Unfortunately, there are several of our neighbors who are in need of serious debriefing tactics. Keep on being you.
<<First, he’s very entertaining. Those years appearing on WWE and The Apprentice helped his timing tremendously. He can be genuinely funny at times. More importantly, he learned that Americans love fake shit: wrastln’ and “reality television.”>>
I understand that.
As someone who grew up in north Jersey, though, I knew him from more than WWE and The Apprentice. Less entertaining bigotry, stiffing contractors, multiple bakruptcies, rumored mob ties, contempt for anyone who wasn’t in a position to benefit him. Oh, and being anti-NATO as far back as 1988. [I.e., when we still had the Berlin Wall.] Then years of pushing ‘birtherism’…. For me that made him not an option when he came down that 'golden' escalator. Even before he described people trying to find a life in the U.S, as "*some* [i.e., less than a majority] , I guess, are good people." (I'm not saying open the borders, but if you can't comprehend why people - including good people - want to come to the U.S., as messed up as parts of it are, then you probably need to learn a bit more about the world outside our borders.)
Broke a streak two and a half decades of voting GOP.
Wish more folks who did see him in The Apprentice and WWE had seen him for decades in NY as well.
* * *
But yes, we do - better or worse - team up with some colorful characters.
Abdul Rashid Dostum, "Pasha" - loved Afghanistan's Uzbeks so much he wouldn't risk letting anyone else rule them, and willing to commit mass GVHR in defense of them. Also instead of putting away much/most of what funding he got in banks in the Gulf, he seems to have spent most of it (or more than most other warlords at least) on his militias or the Uzbek population (he had to sell a house to fund a party congress before one set of elections.
Or Abdul Rasul Sayyaf – in his earlier days was a major commander in the Afshar ‘Offensive’ (aka the “Afshar Massacre”), an offensive in 1993 during the Afghan civil war in a predominantly Shia section of Kabul that saw ~500 Hazara civilians and hundreds of Wahdat prisoners killed. (Mohammad Fahim, the senior Jamiat commander on the ground, was later defense minister and first vice president in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban; seemed we were good with that.) When I first went there in 2005, that part of Kabul still looked like pictures of Berlin in 1945.
Sayyaf, though, when a number of former commanders – most from the civil war period – wanted to oust Ghani – opposed it. He didn’t like the Afghan constitution, didn’t like how the country was going – but he'd been there from the beginning, learning Islamism from Niazi, the ’73 uprising, the Soviet war, the Afghan civil war, the Taliban period (when most other Pashtun party leaders fled to Rome or elsewhere), post 9-11. He’d seen Afghanistan dragged through the knothole, and didn’t want to see it happen again in another civil war. So he defended a political system that wasn’t working the way he preferred as better than the alternative.
Both those guys – as imperfect as they were (to say the least), as someone I’d not trust my kids to or like on my local school board– I’ve felt love their country more than “The Donald” loves his. Because for Trump, it’s always transactional.
Which he will do to MAGA. He’ll come for MAGA when they’re no longer useful to him. Just like everything else he has turned on in the last 40+ years.
Great stuff!
Oh Will you just kill me!! Great column!! I do understand the Trump appeal. A huge part is because we had the audacity to elect a Black man for President and dared to enact some much needed Progressive reforms. Trump is the backlash. Christian nationalism. White supremacy. Whatever you want to call it.
This is one of your best pieces ever!! Plus I just adore your humor. Thanks for all you do!! You are much appreciated. 💙🇺🇸
"He’s the permission structure they’ve always wanted so that they can be gigantic assholes to their fellow Americans."
This is the key. Trump didn't change the GOP; he just stripped away the veneer and revealed its core for what it really is.
Thanks for adding that young writer to your developing media empire. She is a delight, with her excitement and enthusiasm.
PS, you left out Jerry Springer, the grandfather of fake, overdramatic entertainment. I think trump took cues from his playbook
Oh I definitely agree with that.
Another well executed article. Keeping our enemies within easy site, I'm guessing that your scope needs zero adjustments. Unfortunately, there are several of our neighbors who are in need of serious debriefing tactics. Keep on being you.
Yes!!! I have family members included in that group.
NO PAY FROM ME - GO AHEAD AND CANCEL ME - AT 89 I THINK I WILL LIVE OUT THE WEEK WITHOUT ANY OF YOU!
<<First, he’s very entertaining. Those years appearing on WWE and The Apprentice helped his timing tremendously. He can be genuinely funny at times. More importantly, he learned that Americans love fake shit: wrastln’ and “reality television.”>>
I understand that.
As someone who grew up in north Jersey, though, I knew him from more than WWE and The Apprentice. Less entertaining bigotry, stiffing contractors, multiple bakruptcies, rumored mob ties, contempt for anyone who wasn’t in a position to benefit him. Oh, and being anti-NATO as far back as 1988. [I.e., when we still had the Berlin Wall.] Then years of pushing ‘birtherism’…. For me that made him not an option when he came down that 'golden' escalator. Even before he described people trying to find a life in the U.S, as "*some* [i.e., less than a majority] , I guess, are good people." (I'm not saying open the borders, but if you can't comprehend why people - including good people - want to come to the U.S., as messed up as parts of it are, then you probably need to learn a bit more about the world outside our borders.)
Broke a streak two and a half decades of voting GOP.
Wish more folks who did see him in The Apprentice and WWE had seen him for decades in NY as well.
* * *
But yes, we do - better or worse - team up with some colorful characters.
Abdul Rashid Dostum, "Pasha" - loved Afghanistan's Uzbeks so much he wouldn't risk letting anyone else rule them, and willing to commit mass GVHR in defense of them. Also instead of putting away much/most of what funding he got in banks in the Gulf, he seems to have spent most of it (or more than most other warlords at least) on his militias or the Uzbek population (he had to sell a house to fund a party congress before one set of elections.
Or Abdul Rasul Sayyaf – in his earlier days was a major commander in the Afshar ‘Offensive’ (aka the “Afshar Massacre”), an offensive in 1993 during the Afghan civil war in a predominantly Shia section of Kabul that saw ~500 Hazara civilians and hundreds of Wahdat prisoners killed. (Mohammad Fahim, the senior Jamiat commander on the ground, was later defense minister and first vice president in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban; seemed we were good with that.) When I first went there in 2005, that part of Kabul still looked like pictures of Berlin in 1945.
Sayyaf, though, when a number of former commanders – most from the civil war period – wanted to oust Ghani – opposed it. He didn’t like the Afghan constitution, didn’t like how the country was going – but he'd been there from the beginning, learning Islamism from Niazi, the ’73 uprising, the Soviet war, the Afghan civil war, the Taliban period (when most other Pashtun party leaders fled to Rome or elsewhere), post 9-11. He’d seen Afghanistan dragged through the knothole, and didn’t want to see it happen again in another civil war. So he defended a political system that wasn’t working the way he preferred as better than the alternative.
Both those guys – as imperfect as they were (to say the least), as someone I’d not trust my kids to or like on my local school board– I’ve felt love their country more than “The Donald” loves his. Because for Trump, it’s always transactional.
Which he will do to MAGA. He’ll come for MAGA when they’re no longer useful to him. Just like everything else he has turned on in the last 40+ years.