The moment that changed America

While Republicans have embraced saying the quiet part out loud, here’s what no one is openly admitting: The divide in the U.S. can be traced back to a Black man in the Oval Office. For too many, Barack Obama is the epitome of “what’s wrong” in America. After all, he picked on Donald Trump🍄 – a rich white guy! In public, no less!

Man, it used to be an N-word (with a hard-r) would not have made it to the county line. Some inbred hilljacks woulda done had him strung up, tossed off a bridge, or shot in his driveway. … A Time to Kill isn’t a work of fiction; John Grisham held up a mirror to society – and we broke it. Again.

Now, the backstory isn’t that President Obama effortlessly lobbed zingers at Trump; almost everyone laughed and went on with their lives. Instead, it began when Trump whipped out a butter knife in what became a gunfight.

‘I want him to show his birth certificate’

After CPAC in February 2011, Cadet Bone Spurs boasted he might run for Commander-in-Chief. He started going on TV shows, telling President Obama to show his birth certificate because Trump didn’t believe Obama was born in the United States.

On The View, Trump said, “I want him to show his birth certificate. There is something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On Fox & Friends, Trump said Obama spent “millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue.” On Bill O’Reilly’s show, he suggested the certificate might say Obama is a Muslim.

Trump also said he sent a team to investigate, and they found surprising things. He discussed this on the Today show.

Right-wing media nut jobs were a dog with a bone. The drumbeat was incessant. So, in April, Obama showed his long-form birth certificate, proving he was born in Hawaii. Trump took credit for making Obama show it, but he wanted to look at it more closely.

Nonetheless, Trump’s whole-cloth lie hit its mark; the believe-er’thing-they-hear crowd – especially if painkiller-addled Rush Limbaugh broadcast it – took it to heart: Barack Hussein Obama II a) wasn’t born in ‘Murica🇺🇸 and 2) he was a Muslim.

Five years later, Trump admitted Obama was born in the USA.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus, by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Trump reads chapter and verse from Joseph Goebbels’ playbook. Yes, that Joseph Goebbels – the Nazi propaganda chief.

Filed under “If You Dish It Out …,” President Obama had jokes during the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30:

Donald Trump is here tonight! Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter – like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?

But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example – no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around.  But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.

Obama gave a middle finger to the adage, “Never argue with stupid people; they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” With raucous laughter throughout the Washington DC Hilton, Trump got his diaper in a bunch.

A Black man bitch-slapped a honky and got away with it. A mere 167 words birthed the Make America Great Again campaign, with a modern-day Southern Strategy rooted in the insecurities of those still fighting for The Lost Cause.

Little did we know Trump – to hide his “Thou shalt not commit adultery” from the bootlicking evangelical Christian nationalists during the run-up to the election – had paid a porn star in an attempt to cover up their affair after he married Melania and just after the birth of his youngest son, Barron. Or that Russian leader Vlad Putin was playing Trump.

The pejorative every MAGAt aches to bellow

Trump had a score to settle. And today, too many brain-rotted crackers believe another Civil War is near because of that N-word (with a hard-r) – Obama. It’s the pejorative every MAGAt aches to bellow from the depths of their over-wrought gut. But maybe the problem is that you struggle with the concept of success. Or possibly it’s because Obama is the antithesis of Trump: no affairs, no bankruptcies, no felony convictions.

Obama’s presidency started during the Great Recession, following a disastrous housing crash and a global financial crisis. Among the accomplishments of the Obama presidency:

• Affordable Care Act
• 73 consecutive months of private-sector job growth
• Green-lit the elimination of Osama bin Laden
• Supported federal recognition of same-sex marriages
• Strengthened women’s right to fair pay

Though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, Trump flipped a few battleground states to take the Electoral College. What followed was a four-year run of 30,573 lies by Trump. It’s easy to understand why Obama chaps Trump. His 261-rounds-of-golf-in-1,461-days term included:

• More than 350,000 deaths from COVID-19 in 2020
• Relying on white-supremacist ploys to fire up his base
• Overturning Roe v. Wade, stripping women of fundamental right of choice
• Russia paying bounties to Taliban-linked Afghan militants to kill U.S. troops
• Provoking an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6

In 2020, Trump became the first incumbent president to fail to win re-election since George Bush in 1992; Joe Biden won the popular vote and, more importantly, the Electoral College, 306-232. Trump chose not to attend Biden’s inauguration, becoming the first president since Andrew Johnson in 1869 to skip his successor’s swearing-in. (BTW, Johnson was also impeached during his presidency. Trump turned that trick twice.)

Under Biden, the economy has continued to rebound from the pandemic:

• 2021 and 2022 were the two strongest years of job growth in history. Since President Biden took office, nearly 11 million jobs, including 750,000 manufacturing jobs, have been created.
• Passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure, providing funds for rebuilding roads and bridges, public transit, affordable high-speed internet, more resilient power grid, and more.
• Signed historic bipartisan legislation protecting marriage for same-sex and interracial couples.
• After SCOTUS’s Roe rollback, took executive action to protect women’s access to reproductive health care, including abortion and contraception, and safeguard patient privacy and sensitive health information.
• Lowered seniors’ health care expenses, including by capping out-of-pocket expenses on prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 per year, ensuring that people enrolled in Medicare will not pay more than $35/month for insulin, and recipients will receive free vaccines.

Add another hard-r to the repertoire

Trump loves to talk about his tax plan and how “everybody is better for them.” The fact is, everybody is not. The middle class isn’t doing well and needs help. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) exacerbated this trend. The benefits of the law tilt toward the well-off. By 2027, the tax law’s benefits will flow entirely to the rich, according to an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Trump proposes to extend portions of the TCJA that expire after 2025. The Center for American Progress Action Fund, an independent, nonpartisan policy institute, concludes that Trump’s proposals would force middle-class households to work harder to pay more for groceries, gas, and clothes while taking away Americans’ health care and putting it in the hands of insurance companies.

Voting for a party’s candidate simply because they have a (D) or (R) after their name is ignorance. As Trump crowed after his 2017 Nevada caucus victory, “We won the evangelicals, we won with young, we won with old, we won with highly educated, we won with poorly educated! I love the poorly educated. We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people.” It’s always the dumbasses, but considering these gems, who wouldn’t follow Trump off a cliff:

Despite a promise to release “a full medical report,” Dr. Harold Bornstein attests in a short letter that Trump’s lab work is “astonishingly excellent,” that his “physical strength” is “extraordinary,” and that Bornstein believes “unequivocally” that the candidate would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein later tells CNN that Trump dictated the letter.

In remarks celebrating Black History Month, Trump ad-libs that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” The remark and its present tense phrasing regarding a figure who died in 1895 have never been explained.

Trump tells the Wall Street Journal that a discursive, partisan speech he gave to a crowd of Boy Scouts at the organization’s national jamboree was, according to a call he received afterward from “the head of the Boy Scouts,” “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” The Boy Scouts respond in a statement, “We are unaware of any such call.”

During an August 2018 rally in Tampa, Florida, Trump made the case for voter ID laws by appealing to the ubiquitous use of photo IDs and claimed that “if you go out and buy groceries, you need a picture on a card – you need ID.” He would repeat the claim at least twice more.

Trump celebrates the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by praising how George Washington’s Continental Army “took over airports” during the Revolutionary War.

Trump contends he has heard that the noise generated by windmills causes cancer. (There is no known or alleged link between wind turbines and cancer.)

In the Oval Office to promote an anti-vaping initiative, Trump explains First Lady Melania Trump’s interest in the subject: “She’s got a son, together, that’s a beautiful young man, and she feels very, very strongly about it.” The boy in question, Barron Trump, is also his son.

Hours before Dr. Anthony Fauci throws the ceremonial first pitch before the Washington Nationals game on MLB’s latest-ever opening day, Trump, in a fit of jealousy, says that he has been asked to throw out the first pitch before an Aug. 15 Yankees–Red Sox game in the Bronx. Reporters determine that the Yankees have not made such an offer. Trump spends the weekend of the 15th at his golf course in Bedminster,

But Trump will not go away; with 91 court counts from New York to D.C. to Georgia to Florida, he can’t. Now, after being found liable for sexual abuse and convicted on 34 felony counts in the past 125 days, Trump and his cult can add another hard-r to their repertoire: loser.