A Cost Less Christmas

In that tiny apartment that first Christmas on my own, I painted those tiny snowmen, dressed up in hats and scarves. I collected all those empty cigarette packs from my friends and wrapped them like little presents. I scoured Cost Less for cheap ornaments, little Santa Claus figures and fragile little glass balls.

A tabletop Christmas tree was never good enough for my holiday. Even in that shoebox of a space, I crammed seven feet of fake evergreen in any corner it would fit. I crammed dozens of people around it to drink and laugh and eat my bacon wraps. You could barely walk for all the wrapping paper strewn all over the floor.

Now the Christmas tree has plenty of room to breathe under high ceilings in view of a pool in a room so bonus we do not even have a name for it. But those wrapped cigarette boxes and Cost Less ornaments still hang. Because I cannot forget how it used to be.

Best Pandemic TV

There was nothing else to do for most of 2020 so here’s a countdown of the best TV I saw while dozing off on our sectional.

 

16. Fargo. No. The first and second seasons of Fargo were amazing but the third and fourth seasons were disappointing. The idea was interesting: When can immigrants call themselves Americans (or something), but the problem was that so many characters had monologues that the writers wanted to serve as thesis statements for the season. There was one whole episode that consisted of one monologue after another. Some of the characters also annoyed me. Zelmare and Swanee (Marginalized 1 and Marginalized 2) were annoying assholes who lost sympathy when they shot up a train station and killed a bunch of people. The actor who played Gaetano should be embarrassed. Oraetta Mayflower was less a character than a collection of tics and a living symbol (she was the only white non-immigrant in the cast and her name was Mayflower and she murdered her patients she was supposed to care for—get the Symbolism?). Steve summed it up the week after the show ended when we were deciding what to watch and he realized, “We don’t have to watch Fargo anymore.”

 

15. The Outsider. Mare Winningham.

 

14. The Mandalorian. I’m not as into the Star Wars lore as everyone else is but I’m enjoying this exploration of their vast galaxy. Ming-Na Wen is the Queen of Disney.

 

13. The New Pope. What the hell did I watch? A young, miracle-performing pope played by Jude Law awakens from his coma to advise a new pope played by John Malkovich, an aristocratic heroin addict and former punk rocker. It’s a sometimes-hallucinatory rumination on faith, power and duty. It also had Jude Law emerging from the ocean in a white Speedo like Venus on the half-shell, if you’re into that. 

 

12. The Boys. The show’s exploration of the Seven as neo-Nazis was heavy handed (complete with a literal Nazi) but it was necessary and fit with the style of the show to reinforce the idea that the line between superheroes and fascists can be thin. The one downside was that I had no interest in the titular boys. I didn’t care at all about Butcher, Frenchie and the other guy.

 

11. Little Fires Everywhere. No, it wasn’t as good as the book (the idea that “they all did it” was just stupid). The story about adoption wasn’t as nuanced. But the miniseries was amusing. Kerry Washington’s performance was appealingly standoffish, as one can definitely see why she doesn’t trust people. Reese Witherspoon was good as the wealthy woman who condescends to Black and poor people. It was worth it for the scene where Kerry Washington screams “Get in the car!” to her daughter while she dalliances with Trip.

 

10. Upload. Imagine that after you die, you can go not to Heaven but have your consciousness uploaded into a kind of paradise where you can “live” forever. The catch is that your living family has to pay, so if your living fiancée is on the outs with you, you are under her thumb and may end up in the equivalent of steerage. This was fun in both idea and execution.

 

9. The Haunting of Bly Manor. It wasn’t as scary as the Haunting of Hill House series but it was very poignant. I was especially taken by the sad story of Hannah Grose, who flashes back and forth through time, not realizing she’s a ghost.

 

8. Dead to Me. This was a riot and I was howling at the twists and turns like when they crashed their car into the dead guy’s brother (it was funnier than it sounds here). It was a comedy but Christina Applegate gave a great performance that walked a fine line between comedy and tragedy as a grieving widow/murderer: at times her eyes were staring a thousand miles away, like she was deep in shock.

 

7. Agents of SHIELD. We lost track of this show two seasons ago and recently binged the series with our son in time for the finale. The final season was a zany ride, a time travel adventure that was a great excuse for the cast to have fun and dress in period costumes (the bulk of it took place in the early ‘80s, so I was thrilled). A standout was the episode when they were trapped in a time loop and had to keep reliving the same situation over and over again until they found a way out, which managed to be poignant and as comic-booky as possible.

 

6. The Crown. There’s a debate about how accurate season 4 was in depicting Princess Diana’s clashing with the royal family and how responsible Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles were. I take it all with a grain of salt. I can appreciate the show taking poetic license with all this drama—and besides, if you want to know the real story of Charles and Diana’s marriage, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of resources. I liked the delving into the Queen’s lack of self-awareness of her non-maternal instincts. Emma Corrin was fiery and magnetic as Diana and Gillian Anderson was scary as Margaret Thatcher, all helmet hair and contempt for the poor.  

 

5. The Plot Against America. I was fascinated by Philip Roth’s book about an alternate future where Charles Lindbergh wins the presidency on an isolationist platform and foments anti-Semitic violence, and the miniseries was a thoughtful adaptation. It’s an always-relevant cautionary tale about hate, how it may look attractive and acceptable, and how it seduces people. Zoe Kazan nailed the scene at the heart of the book when Bess Levin, already under extreme stress, talks her son’s friend Seldon through his mother’s death at the hands of an anti-Semitic mob. It was an act of incredible kindness that really moved me in the book and the movie.

 

4. Mrs. America. This was a complex, compelling retelling of the complexities of feminism and the battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. You can understand why Phyllis Schlafly (an uncanny Cate Blanchett with incredibly subtle micro-facial expressions) opposed the ERA, even if you don’t agree with her, and you can also understand who she appealed to and how she defeated the constitutional amendment. Her story is piled with irony: She advocated for traditional womanhood but left most housework and child-rearing to assistants. She was a smart woman who would have done well in foreign policy but figured advocating against the ERA would give her a seat at the table—instead she ends up shut out of the Reagan administration and ends the series peeling potatoes at her kitchen table. Each episode goes in depth about a different woman as they battle for the ERA: Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug. I learned a lot about them and women I didn’t know about, like Jill Ruckelshaus and Brenda Feigen. It was a great look at the compromises each side had to make for and against the ERA and how it helped get us Reaganism. Also, what the hell, America—we couldn’t get it together to pass something as obviously needed as the ERA?

 

3. Schitt’s Creek. I’m so glad we binged this show and caught up just in time for the final season. It was so refreshing to watch something so funny that was also breezy and light, almost a throwback to the sitcoms that were wrapped up in 30 minutes and reset for the next episode. Except nothing truly reset: the Rose family grew and changed over a few seasons to become better people, yet remaining idiosyncratic until the end. It was also a delight to see an affirming story about a gay character with no angst at all about his being gay. All four main cast members won Emmys (as the show did for Best Comedy) and they deserved it.

 

2. Lovecraft Country. This show was a remarkable exploration of Black pain, Black mythology, Black potential and Black horror as one man searches for his father and learns about his family’s legacy. It mixed the supernatural horrors encountered by a group of smart, adventurous Black people in the Jim Crow ‘50s (those Topsy Twins, with their herky-jerky limbs, were seriously terrifying) with the more down-to-earth horrors such as racist cops and neighbors, and the profound horror of Emmett Till’s murder. Lovecraft Country blends both kinds of horrors—in one episode, in a quest to achieve some empathy, a white sorceress pays some guys to murder her like Till was murdered, resurrecting herself by using her magic. In another episode, the sorceress gives Ruby the ability to wear a white woman’s skin, which Ruby uses to get the job at Marshall Fields that she was denied and torture the boss who harassed her. In another episode, astronomer Hippolyta uses an orrery to transport herself to the past (dancing with Josephine Baker in Paris) and the future to realize her full potential that she never had a chance to fulfill. All that and the cast travels back in time to live through the Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre. Every episode gave us a lot to unpack. 

 

1. Better Call Saul. The latest season continued Jimmy McGill’s evolution into Saul Goodman and his descent into an alliance with the drug cartel. Jimmy ends up getting shot at in the desert with Mike and clashes with the wily and enormously charismatic Lalo Salamanca. Better Call Saul is Jimmy’s story but we already know what happens to him by the time of Breaking Bad. We don’t know what happens to his new wife Kim and that’s what gives the show an extra thrill. Rhea Seehorn continues to give the best performance on TV as Kim Wexler and it’s a crime against art that she’s never been nominated for an Emmy. In season 5, she faces down Lalo fearlessly and saves Jimmy’s life. She deals with the tension between her pro bono work, which satisfies her, and her corporate lawyering, which chips at her soul, by quitting her corporate job. But by the end of the season, we realize Jimmy is not the only person who has been morally deteriorating. Kim has turning toward the dark side herself. When she proposes a plan to screw over Jimmy’s former boss that even Jimmy blanches at, he tells her that she wouldn’t seriously pursue the plan. “Wouldn’t I?” she says, like slap in the face. I don’t want this Breaking Bad prequel to end and I don’t want anything bad happening to Kim Wexler.  

Are you panicking yet?!

Today we’re seeing the first snowfall in almost two years. It’s hard to think back that far into the recesses of time to remember how we used to get into the correct state of panic to be able to handle the weather. Are you buying too much of the right foods? Is your level of melodrama meeting the moment? Ideally, you should have started panicking days ago when Action News first ominously started talking about forecast models, but there’s still time to panic before the first flakes fall. Join me for a refresher course on how to panic.

 

Food shopping. If you’re rusty on what foods to buy, don’t worry about vegetables, fruits or meats. It’s eggs, bread and milk. The important thing here is quantity. To get through today’s major blizzard, for a family of four, I’d suggest four dozen eggs, six loaves of bread and three gallons of milk. Don’t worry about expiration dates—you’ll go through it all. With the avalanche of snow we’re expecting today, you might not be able to get out for a few weeks, so stocking up is very wise.

 

Also of importance is your attitude when at the supermarket. Don’t just treat it like a normal shopping day. You need to combine agitation and panic with slowness. For example, if your cart is full of gallon upon gallon of whole milk, scan it very slowly and deliberately. If there’s someone behind you who just needs three things for tonight’s dinner, don’t let him ahead of you—go even slower but maintain that attitude of EMERGENCY.

 

Driving. This doesn’t apply as much to people today, since so many people are working from home, but it’s good to brush up. You should always keep at least a quarter-mile following distance between yourself and the car in front of you; research shows the average skid in the snow and ice is 1,000 feet. In inclement weather, remember that the left lane becomes the slow lane. You should slow down 10 mph per inch of snow. So with today’s storm, if you get 10 inches, you should put your car in reverse at 40 mph on the highway. Look out for SNOW SQUALLS!

 

The guiding principle with driving in the snow is to stay afraid. Remember that time when your car slid and did a 35º years ago? Keep that terror inside you. Do not try to get over it or improve your skills.

 

Level of panic. Are you being melodramatic enough today? At all times, you should be acting like you’re starring in King Lear and the Tony committee is in the audience. So hide under the bed. Look out the window and sigh audibly. Anytime they mention the word “snow” on the weather, moan as if the weight of the world is on your shoulders. The best way to deal with a major natural disaster like this is disproportionately.

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed your refresher course on panic. It’s been awhile since we’ve had to kick into Wagner-opera-act-V-level drama, but you can do it.  

 

 

Keep 'War' in 'War on Christmas'

Enjoy wishing people a “Merry Christmas” this one last year, because with a Demmycrat moving into the White House, we’ll all be legally required next year to wish each other “Happy Holidays” like a bunch of godless commies. If there’s one thing a devout Catholic like Joe Biden cannot tolerate, it’s any mention of Christ or Christmas.

 

After a four-year truce during the Trump Administration, the War on Christmas will be back on in 2021. It sure was nice for the last few years, wasn’t it? After Obama’s series of executive orders that totally banned every aspect of Christmas from 2009–2016, the faithful could emerge from hiding in 2017, blinking in the light of the Star of Bethlehem. The last four years, we’ve brought mangers and reindeer glow molds out of hiding from the attic to display openly on lawns. No more did we fear being dragged into unmarked vans for the thoughtcrime of wishing a coworker, or a customer, or our kids, a “Merry Christmas.”

 

It's been such a relief to have a first lady who gave a fuck about Christmas decorations.

 

Starting next year, if you want to display any type of Christmas decoration in your home, you’re going to have to do it like a speakeasy, where with a push of a button, the walls turn around and the decorations are hidden to reveal state-approved portraits of Karl Marx, each festooned with “Happy Holidays” in a joyless Courier font. Christmas trees, if discovered, will be recycled and turned into Section 8 housing in our pure suburban neighborhoods.

 

How will this be enforced? The Deep State has installed a camera in each home in America (paid for by SorosBucks) and AOC will personally monitor for your compliance. Those who do not comply will be sentenced to hard labor at the Green New Deal Reeducation Camp.

 

No more Christmas music either. Traditional, wholesome songs like “Away in a Manger” and “Deck the Halls” and “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” will be automatically deleted from everyone’s devices. Congressional Democrats are already shredding every extant copy of the sheet music. We’ll only be able to listen to traditional Venezuelan or Chinese proletariat music.

 

Forget about hearing “Merry Christmas” from a cashier ever again. Instead, that Target employee will wish you a monotone “Happy Holidays.” Security cameras will make sure the cashiers do this. If not, they will be dragged from the store and sentenced to the gulag by Democrat judges.

 

Finally, roving bands of Antifa will be patrolling the streets for any signs of living Nativities. Any participants will have their blood harvested for adrenochrome. 

 

This is war. As Fox News has taught us, the best way to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace is by waging war on our enemies—by getting our backs up about broad social trends and keeping them up forever.

 

 

How Dreadfully Common

In high school, the librarian once spoke to our class and gave us some real talk about encyclopedias. We were doing encyclopedias wrong, she said. Our parents were content buying us trash encyclopedias, she sniffed, but anybody who knew anything about reference books knew that the only way to go were with the Gale Encyclopedias.

 

“Gale,” the librarian intoned with the haughtiness and authority of a daguerreotype of Queen Victoria. She seemed to have a special antipathy for the hoi polloi who were content to wallow in the mud with passe reference books like World Book or Encyclopedia Britannica. Only Gale revealed the world’s true face, its breadth and depth of topics. World capitals. Phyla. Nobel Prize winners. Laws of thermodynamics. The whole thing.

 

Oh, how she must have looked down her nose at us high schoolers. I can just hear the librarian in her late-‘80s back office in the library, chain smoking while on the phone with an equally erudite friend: “These kids and their families actually still use World Book,” she chortles. “I mean, can you imagine? ‘Volume 1: A.’ How dreadfully common.”

 

You know, they say the Velvet Underground’s debut album actually sold very few copies but that everybody who bought a copy started their own band, which confirmed how influential the band was. I wonder how influential this librarian was—how many of us in this small group of high school students had their minds blown by her words about encyclopedias and let that guide us through the next 30 years of assessing the viability of reference materials.

 

 

 

 

 

All I Want for Christmas Is

Christmas is hers. They sold it to America that way. Every shiny bauble, every twinkling light, every melodic warble. All hers.

 

Backstage, she primps in the mirror. She tilts her face until her good side shows. She will not greet the hoi polloi any other way. She cycles through several facial expressions until she reaches the desired one—a smug smirk that’s somehow incredibly sexy. It’s the type of expression that might lead the public to guess what’s in her head, but that would be futile: She is somewhere else, a Potemkin Village of emotion.

 

The caterwauling of an alarm, impressively high-pitched but mechanical, startles her. Is there a fire? No, it’s just the sound of her own voice warming up, she realizes.

 

She steps on stage in a blood red dress sparked with spangly bits, strutting through the fake snow like she’s soaked in her own carnage and surveying a world she decimated. Her acolytes pick her up and move her around the stage. She is above such things as choreography.

 

As she opens her mouth to sing, she ponders the past—the gaming of the charts, the singles sold at deep discounts to get her to the top. All those necessary calculations. Tilting her face at the camera at the only acceptable angle, she smirks and seduces as she sings the greatest hits—a fantasy, a hero, a sweet day. The Christmas trees tremble with the blunt force of her ‘90s prom themes.

 

Then at the climax, she sings the first notes of her big yuletide hit, what the masses came to hear. As she runs up and down the first three octaves, the void yawns wide. It is like outer space—no light, no life. Just the endless emptiness of absolute zero cold.

 

Outside, the moon turns to blood and the sun turns to ashes. And the Queen of Christmas slouches toward Bethlehem.  

What I'm thankful for

In this most harrowing of years, there are still plenty of things to be thankful for, on Thanksgiving or any other day. Here’s a partial list:

 

Good health

Seeing my husband’s and son’s faces across the dinner table every night

Continued gainful employment during a pandemic

A warm comforter on a cold night

Jumping into the pool after a hot day of yardwork

Chatting with Mom on the phone

Sitting in our sunroom and getting lost in a book

A fridge full of food

Three affectionate cats underfoot

Watching TV and movies with my family, settled in on our regular spots on the couch

Chocolate peanut butter ice cream

No more campaign commercials

Floating in the pool with Steve while listening to music

Sunday dinner with the family (or connecting on Zoom)

Early morning walks before the sunrise

Knowing how many friends I have, even if we can’t be together

Sunday crossword puzzles

Nieces and nephews

Outdoor space in a time of isolation

A head full of words

Too much good art of all types

Steve making me laugh

Seeing my son growing taller and taller

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

What is this feeling?

The airwaves have quieted, going from a fragmented roar to their more normal anesthetic buzz. No more do we hear about who’s getting rich off China, or how hard the recovering addict hits the punching bag, or who just got Van Drew’d. In between segments of news, now we only hear who has the best deals on used Toyotas, or who should be careful when taking Farxiga, or what’s happening tonight on The Bachelor. It’s nothing you can’t ignore.

 

Outside, we rediscover the natural beauty of the land. Those placards decked in various shades of red, white and/or blue are gradually disappearing, along with names that we will either learn about in history books or names that will be footnotes. Admire the rolling grandeur of the hills no longer covered in detritus.

 

My phone is mostly silent. No longer does it ring balefully with the seesawing tug-of-war that we have become. I have closed my tabs, no longer needing to constantly refresh sites to analyze the particular saturation of blue or red between rivers and mountains.

 

There is art. There is music. There are movies and TV. There are family and friends right there, ready to be reached out to.

 

Get out and enjoy the rest of the world.

Who was Alex Trebek?

So now what are we supposed to watch at 7 p.m.? The evening viewing of Jeopardy! is just one of those things that’s a fabric of life for a lot of people. We sit down to watch it most nights once the dinner dishes are done, while our son is playing on his phone and before we all sit down for family TV time.

 

Sometimes I have one eye on the show while I’m reading a book, or we’ll be talking with the answers in the background. I’ve always enjoyed shouting out the answers I know, to feel just a little smarter. I was thrilled that I got the final question right on that Jeopardy! championship they had recently. (I believe it was “Iago.”)

 

We can still watch Jeopardy!, of course, since it’s not going anywhere. But it won’t be the same without Alex Trebek’s inimitable style. He was authoritative, friendly and comforting all at once. His presence was one of those things that never changed for decades of evening viewing for so many people.

 

The tribute last night on Jeopardy! was like a gut punch. It reminded me of when Dick Clark’s New Years Rockin’ Eve had Dick Clark on shortly after his stroke, and it was so depressing to watch the ball drop with him so frail. It’s sad to lose an icon like Alex Trebek but his is not a sad story. He did something he loved for as long as he could and died with his family surrounding him. What more can anyone ask for out of life?

 

I don’t have a profound take here—just that it’s sad to see Alex Trebek go. He did his job flawlessly for decades and was one of those increasingly rare icons who really cannot be replaced.

The Count

As the presidential vote count drags on, those videos you see of dozens of people hunched over tables and diligently counting mail-in ballots are misleading. They’re just stock footage of an American Idol vote count.

 

In reality, each state has only two people counting ballots. Their names and Carol and Jake. It’s like this in all the close states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina. Each has just two people counting, coincidentally with the same names, and they have their charming quirks.

 

Jake needs absolute silence or he will not be able to count any of the ballots. State election officials have complied and set him up in an acoustically baffled room, and hundreds of officials watch him from the other side of a glass partition. Around 2 a.m. in Michigan, someone in the counting warehouse coughed, and Jake had to start all over with Wayne County. Wisconsin’s Jake got distracted by a fly buzzing so he was delayed counting votes in the WOW counties by an hour.

 

Carol can’t be rushed in counting because it makes her very nervous. So she’s been going over the votes in Atlanta one by one, slowly picking up each and mouthing the results silently to herself. In Pennsylvania, a supervisor casually asked her how the vote count was coming in Bucks County and she got so flustered that she had to sit quietly outside for 45 minutes and cool down.

 

So if you’re hoping to know soon which man will be president, and what kind of country this will be, think of each state’s Jake and Carol. They’re hard at work—just don’t tiptoe too loudly around Jake or try to hurry Carol along. We’ll get our results in good time.

 

 

 

(Sorry. When I’m anxious, sometimes I try to be funny. For a more serious take see yesterday’s entry.)

Are we better off than we were four years ago?

Whenever the incumbent president of the United States faces the voters for reelection, the election is a referendum on what that president has done and not done during his first term. The voters take a look at what happened during the first term and how the president improved their lives and improved the country, or not.

 

There is plenty to be said for Joe Biden’s candidacy but it would be boring to write things like “He won’t separate families and put the kids in cages” or “He will make a token effort to prevent a pandemic” or “He will govern competently.” No, it’s much more instructive to take a look at President Trump’s record during the last four years.

 

It’s not pretty. America was great before Trump took office but he hasn’t made it better and in many ways, he’s made it worse. All of the things that have been happening just during 2020—COVID-19, unrest over police shooting Black people, the cratering economy—have happened on his watch. The first term has been an out-of-control firehose of pig-ignorant incompetence, nihilistic malignance, ethical bankruptcy, and the degradation of important parts of our democratic institutions. The damage is so great, and the risks of a second term so severe, that the number one electoral priority for America is to vote him out. Trump puts himself—not America—first.

 

We’ve given Trump a chance, like people urged in 2016, and he’s failed in so many ways. Here are just a few:

 

President Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been FUBAR. The administration has given up on trying to contain the spread. Wearing a small strip of cloth over your mouth and nose can prevent a respiratory disease, but the people in the White House didn’t feel like doing that, and it got half of the government sick, including the president, first lady, several senators, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and numerous aides. If we can’t trust the Trump administration to keep its own people healthy and safe in the White House, then we can’t trust them to keep the country healthy and safe. Even after Trump got airlifted to the hospital after needing oxygen at the White House, employees in the West Wing still were not required to wear masks. This is irresponsible and idiotic. Then Trump returned to the White House with great fanfare, declaring he had beaten COVID-19 while obviously having trouble breathing and wincing in pain, telling people not to let it rule their lives after over 200,000 people have died. Trump went for a ride without a mask in a hermetically sealed car, endangering his Secret Service protection so he could satisfy his ego. Even his rallies have gotten people infected (when they’re not freezing half to death).

 

Early in the pandemic, Trump told Bob Woodward he knew how dangerous the coronavirus was but deliberately downplayed it so as not to cause panic. There was a happy medium between causing panic and blowing off the threat and Trump, tragically, chose the latter. He wasted precious time lying to the public that there was nothing to see here. That the virus was a hoax. That it was no deadlier than the flu. That it would soon disappear. That we’d have a beautiful Easter Sunday together. The president knew none of this was true, and knew how much weight his words would have carried with his followers if he’d advised caution or told people to wear masks, but instead he chose to lie to our faces day after day in those masturbatory press conferences. And what did that “downplaying” get us? We’re heading toward a quarter of a million Americans dead.

 

Trump’s response to COVID-19 was a toxic brew of denial, magical thinking, and oppositional defiant disorder. His administration disbanded the pandemic task force, because why hold onto that fire extinguisher when you never seem to need it? He imposed partial travel restrictions from China but the virus got here anyway as the ban did not apply to Americans coming from China. He knows his words carry weight with his voters but instead of urging people to wear masks, he did stupid shit like promote the scientifically unproven hydroxychloroquine as a cure and speculated that people might inject disinfectants to combat the infection. Trump got into slap-fights with governors who didn’t praise him enough so that we had not effective national response. He wanted testing slowed down. Trump’s administration fired or sidelined experts whose accurate information on the pandemic conflicted with the administration’s rosy picture. The administration suppressed or altered scientific reports. The administration exerted political pressure to produce a vaccine before election day. The administration diverted $265 million from the CDC and FDA for some dumb ad campaign to “defeat despair and inspire hope” (something that Trump could have done for free if he were competent). He inflamed, rather than calmed, tensions when those yahoos brought their guns to state capitals to defend their God-given rights to spread the virus to other people. Son-in-law Jared Kushner, a deeply-in-debt real estate investor, bragged that Trump was taking the country back from the doctors. And look what it got us.

 

Trump has shown no empathy for those who have suffered and died. He looked at the six-figure death toll and said, “It is what it is.” Early on, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all,” a convenient motto for both his pandemic response and his presidency in general. This is not what a competent leader does. The COVID-19 response was a disgraceful failure and for that reason alone, Trump does not deserve a second term, and should be run out of Washington on a rail. (But read on anyway for more reasons against his reelection.)

 

President Trump is racist as hell. This history goes back decades, like a radio station that plays the greatest hits of the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and today. But let’s take a look at just what he’s done in the last four years. During the unrest over police shooting Black people, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake (the list goes on), he scoffed at the idea that Black lives matter, not even being able to see Black people’s worth after a summer of pain. Trump has done nothing but fan the flames of violence and division (and also hide in a bunker with the White House lights turned off). He declared “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” after Minneapolis protests, and defended the 17-year-old who is charged with crossing a state line and murdering two people and shooting a third person during the protests in Kenosha, directing the Department of Homeland Security to make sympathetic statements about this kid. Does any of that sound like someone who wants to turn down the temperature of the unrest? Trump will never try to solve any of this because he relishes the chaos. He’s already president, so if he wanted to solve any of this, he could try to do so at any time. This is happening under his watch.

 

After white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in 2017 and one of them intentionally ran over protestor Heather Heyer, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and blamed “both sides”—neo-Nazis and those opposing them—for the confrontation. This is a man who calls Black athletes protesting police brutality “sons of bitches” but then has a nuanced reaction to a group chanting “Jews will not replace us” (they’re talking about his grandchildren!). Asked again during the presidential debates to condemn white supremacist groups, Trump just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He told the Proud Boys to “stand back, stand by.” The Proud Boys loved this and took it as a call to arms. This was the president of the United States using a national form to activate violence in his white supremacist followers. What a disgrace. Trump has consistently received praise and endorsements from David Duke, the KKK and the rest of the white nationalist clown car. Yet he and his administration have never had any self-reflection about why so many racists support his policies.

 

The man slurs everybody. During an immigration meeting, Trump called a number of majority Black countries “shitholes.” Trump told four congresswomen—two black women, a Puerto Rican woman, and a Palestinian woman, to “go back where you came from.” Making non-white people seem “foreign” is a classic thing racists do. These are American citizens and all but one was born in the United States. Since he has the maturity of a second-grader, Trump repeatedly calls Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and once hauled out the same slur during a ceremony honoring Native American World War II codebreakers. Trump retweeted a supporter who yelled “White power!” Like the Nazis in Charlottesville, Trump found “great people” in that crowd.

 

Trump’s entire reelection campaign is a replay of the “Southern Strategy” that the Republican Party has been using since 1968, whipping up racial grievances to make white people resent and fear Black people. He’s playing on fears of low-income housing, filled with Black people, moving into the suburbs to terrorize white people (led by Scary Black Man Cory Booker), and advocates revoking the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act, which protects against racist housing practices. Add all this up and he’s clearly, virulently racist.

 

President Trump separated kids from their parents at the border and held those children in prison-like conditions in cages. This reportedly happened in over 5,500 families. This caused predictably terrible effects on the children. There is a recording of these children wailing for their parents. Some of these children were forcibly medicated and there are lawsuits alleging sexual abuse against thousands of kids in these facilities. Now we know the Department of Justice lied to the public and knew the “zero tolerance” policy would result in kids being separated from their parents. U.S. attorneys pushed back against the policy, out of concern for the welfare of the kids, but former Attorney General Jeff Sessions told them, “We need to take away children.” They were hurting kids as a deterrent against their parents’ misdemeanor offenses, and it brings shame upon America.

 

They are still trying to reunite 545 children with their deported parents two years later. At the second debate, Trump couldn’t show any empathy for these kids. Our trashbag first lady doesn’t care either. The people who did this—Trump, Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, Kirstjen Nielsen, John Kelly and Stephen Miller—belong in Hell or at the very least, The Hague.

 

President Trump tear-gassed a group of peaceful protestors across from the White House, including a priest, so he could walk across the street to a church and hold up a Bible for a photo op. He did not speak to protestors to hear their concerns. People got hurt so this man could take a stupid photo to prop up his reelection campaign. It should go without saying that this is not Christian, or humane, behavior.

 

President Trump was impeached for soliciting help from a foreign government to aid in his reelection, which is illegal. Specifically, he held up taxpayer-funded aid to Ukraine so they could dig up dirt on Biden, which violates the Impoundments Control Act. Only a craven Republican Senate saved him from leaving office. Trump has since asked China to intervene in the election. It is telling that Trump has done so many reprehensible things in the last four years that his impeachment is just one more item on this list.

 

President Trump has consistently cast doubt on the outcome of the election and has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. In September, he said if we “get rid of the ballots,” there would not be a transfer but a continuation. When asked in July if he would abide by the election results, Trump said “I have to see,” like a parent whose kids have been nagging him to go to Itchy and Scratchy Land. There is a report that Trump’s legal team has already made plans for swing states to bypass the election results and have state legislatures appoint their own electors if it looks like Biden has won. That the commander in chief was sowing doubt about our election before a single vote was cast is an undemocratic disgrace. It crosses a Rubicon usually only crossed by dictators. If this happened in another country, we’d send over election monitors.

 

President Trump and the Republican Party have encouraged voter suppression at all levels throughout the country. After his supporters in Texas tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road, Trump tweeted his implicit support. The GOP is trying to throw out 127,000 curbside ballots in Texas the day before the election. They tried to deny Pennsylvania voters an extension to count the votes that arrived three days after today, and also tried something similar in North Carolina. The Republican Party always comes down on the side of restricting the right to vote, and it has for at least the last 50 or 60 years. It’s who they are.

 

President Trump paid $750 a year in income taxes in 2016 and 2017 because he’s poor—to the tune of $421 million in debt—from losing tremendous amounts of money on his businesses. This debt is a massive security risk, since he likely owes it to a foreign bank. He likes to puff himself up as a business genius but he’s broke and living on the public dime. What a loser. Trump probably ran for president just to keep from having to pay his debts. Oh, but he says the facts will come up soon after that audit is done. Sure, buddy—and you have a girlfriend but she totally lives in Canada so that’s why nobody can meet her. He has a bank account in China and paid $188,000 in taxes to that country. This means the president of the United States paid more in taxes to China than to his own country.

 

President Trump had no response to the report that the Russians put out bounties for the Taliban to kill American soldiers. (Whatever happened to that story?) He didn’t even raise the issue in a call with Putin. Way to stand by our people, commander-in-chief.

 

President Trump has been in complete denial about the fact, confirmed by the intelligence community, that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. He disgracefully believed Putin over our own intelligence agencies. When told by the House that Russia is interfering in the 2020 election, Trump replaced the Director of National Intelligence with a loyalist, because he doesn’t want to hear it. Trump’s own former national security adviser has said Trump is “aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to intervene in our election. This is not how a patriot behaves. This is how a traitor behaves.

 

President Trump may or may not be working on behalf of the Russians. We cannot be sure because the FBI did not conduct a counterintelligence investigation into this matter. The Mueller Report focused only on criminal activity, not counterintelligence, leaving the huge question of whether the president of the United States is compromised by a foreign power unresolved. While Robert Mueller conducted his report under the impression that he could not indict the president, there are nevertheless 10 instances of Trump obstructing justice around events such as his firing FBI Director James Comey and obstructing the special counsel investigation. But Bill Barr lied about the report to the public so many people never actually understood that the report is not an exoneration.

 

President Trump does not respect the military. He has called veterans who were killed in war “losers” and “suckers” and asked to keep wounded veterans out of parades. This was when he was in France to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the end of World War I, where he couldn’t be bothered to show up to a ceremony honoring the 1,800 American soldiers dead at Belleau Wood, saying “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Plus, it was raining and he didn’t want to get his hair mussed. Trump accompanied John Kelly to Arlington to visit Kelly’s son’s grave and said “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?” as they stood at the grave.

 

This disrespect for veterans is nothing new for Trump. In 2016, he showed contempt for Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam POW, saying he liked people who weren’t captured. Even after McCain died, Trump said “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral” and after flags were lowered to half-staff, said, “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser.” In 2017, Trump met with top military brass at the Pentagon and had the unmitigated gall to look these veterans in the eye and call them “a bunch of dopes and babies.”

 

President Trump’s idea of governance is “I have an Article II that lets me do what I want,” his dimwitted version of “l'état, c'est moi.” It’s an immature, incorrect, dangerous attitude, and the Department of Justice, under Attorney General Bill Barr, is helping him get away with it. Barr is doing extraordinary political favors for Trump’s cronies. Despite former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn pleading guilty twice to lying to the FBI, Barr ordered the DOJ to drop the charges. Despite former Trump advisor Roger Stone’s conviction on witness tampering and other charges, Barr recommended a lighter prison sentence, a recommendation that came—in a complete coincidence—after Trump tweeted that Stone should receive a lighter sentence. Barr tried to fire the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is investigating Trump, so Trump could put one of his cronies in the role.

 

In contrast to going easy on Trump’s friends, Barr goes after the president’s enemies with relish. Jowly Fred Flintstone wanted Black Lives Matter protestors charged with sedition. Not only does the nation’s top law enforcement office see thousands of protesters crying out not to get murdered by the police and tell them there’s no systemic racism, but he wants to charge anyone who disagrees with overthrowing the government. Asking people to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is to Barr one the worst violation of our civil liberties since slavery. FBI agents do not serve the Constitution, according to Bill Barr—they serve Barr. Barr is also having the DOJ conduct several bullshit investigations to help Trump win the election. It is illegal under the Hatch Act for federal employees to participate in electoral politics. Barr is politicizing the DOJ and that damages the rule of law. He is bringing the United States right up to the edge of fascism.

 

President Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria was inadequate, slow and passive-aggressive. He threw paper towels to people who were worried about survival and bitched about the money the government was spending to help Puerto Rico. He disputed the death toll, saying Democrats were making it up to make him look bad, because a destructive hurricane is all about him. Trump even wanted to look into selling Puerto Rico. The people of Puerto Rico, who are American citizens, deserved better.

 

President Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was unable to conduct himself like an adult during his Senate hearing. His partisan hissy fit against the Clintons by itself should have disqualified him for the job. Now he and his colleagues are clearly telegraphing that they will steal the election for Trump if the results are close. Trump has already stacked the courts with 29-year-olds from the Republic of Gilead. If Trump is allowed to appoint any more judges in the mold of Amy Coney Barrett, we can probably say goodbye to the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality, and hello to back-alley abortions.

 

President Trump’s administration’s ICE detainee facility has given many of its women detainees involuntary, unnecessary hysterectomies. One woman had the wrong ovary removed. People at the facility called this doctor the “uterus collector,” and there isn’t enough vomit or fire and brimstone in the world to respond to that. They’re forcibly sterilizing women.

 

President Trump has demanded Bill Barr “arrest somebody” and is livid that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden remain free. For what crime he would arrest them is unclear. This is dictator behavior. Trump has had the Department of Justice investigate his rivals and they’ve come up empty, because there was nothing there in the first place. He’s considering firing FBI Director Christopher Wray because Wray hasn’t done his bidding and investigated the Bidens.

 

President Trump’s administration will next week argue before the Supreme Court that the Affordable Care Act should be struck down, which would result in people with pre-existing conditions losing healthcare coverage.

 

President Trump has been terrible to the LGBTQ community. Transgender people have been hit particularly hard, being banned from the military in a fit of presidential pique. They are people who have served their country faithfully and to ban them or keep them in limbo over their status, particularly soon after they had gained the right to serve openly, is particularly cruel. The administration also implemented a HUD rule that would place transgender women in homeless facilities for men, because why not screw with some vulnerable adults? The administration also reversed a ruling permitting students to use the bathroom that corresponded to their gender identity, because why not screw with some vulnerable kids? The administration tried to argue that employers should be able to fire employees for being LGBTQ. The administration has also ruled back healthcare protections for LGBTQ people—the only purpose of which is to strip people of their dignity. Vice President Mike Pence and signed a law (later amended) that let in-their-feelings business owners discriminate against LGBT customers. Pence is clearly and virulently anti-LGBT.

 

As in 2016, it is still the official platform of the Republican Party to end marriage equality through the courts or a constitutional amendment, and to support conversion therapy. This is because the party was too lazy to come up with a new platform in 2020, leaving the 2016 platform in effect. With Trump installing a third conservative nominee on the Supreme Court, the justices are already signaling they will overturn marriage equality. (The official Republican platform, to the extent that they have any, is literally just to support Donald Trump.) Why would an LGBTQ person vote Republican when the GOP’s official position is to curtail your rights?

 

President Trump has not fulfilled several major campaign promises he made to his voters despite controlling two branches of the government for two years. The Republicans screamed for almost a decade that they were going to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better but they failed. No healthcare plan was ever forthcoming from Trump or the Republicans, which means this was an empty promise to begin with. Oh, but Trump says a healthcare plan is coming “in two weeks.” It’s been coming in two weeks for the last few months. That healthcare plan is like the horizon: You can race toward it but you’ll never catch it.

 

Trump was also unable to build much of his stupid wall at the Mexican border. As of last August, a whole 5 miles of wall had been completed. The human chain in Hands Across America was longer than that. What has been built of the wall is starting to erode already. Shockingly, the Mexican government has yet to write us a check for the nonexistent wall. Steve Bannon and his fellow grifters grifted the public out of money to finance the wall, didn’t build the wall, and got arrested. Trump shut down the government over the wall, furloughing hundreds of thousands of people for a month.

 

With two years of controlling the government, Trump couldn’t even manage the improvements to infrastructure that are supported by both parties. When is infrastructure week again? Trump also certainly didn’t “drain the swamp” as he promised, as his kakistocracy Cabinet is a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest.

 

President Trump treats women like shit. Twenty-six women have so far accused him of sexual assault. How does he respond? E. Jean Carroll accused him of raping her in a changing room in the ‘90s and when she recently sued him, he said she’s “not his type.” Because it’s all a joke to him. He has a decades-long history of mocking women’s appearances by calling them “fat” and “slobs” and “pigs,” denigrating them in professional situations, and just generally being demeaning. He can’t handle women journalists challenging him. He called VP candidate Sen. Kamala Harris a “monster.”

 

President Trump falls for a lot of crackpot theories and Russian disinformation. He retweeted the looney tunes idea that Biden tried to have members of Seal Team 6 killed to cover up the fact that Osama bin Laden had not been killed. During the town hall, he wouldn’t disavow the wackjobs at QAnon and implied some of their ideas might be true. What kind of president gives even a sliver of legitimacy to a group that believes Wayfair is selling cabinets with trafficked children inside them? He had Rudy “Nosferatu” Giuliani dream up some bullshit scandal about Hunter Biden and the prosecutor or Ukraine and Burizzzzzzz … (Sorry, nodded off) but it was just more disinformation from Russia, now under FBI investigation, and it went over like a lead balloon.

 

President Trump, in a possible violation of campaign finance laws, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money to cover up his affair with her while he was a married man. Truly the Republican Party is the party of traditional family values.

 

President Trump picked an unnecessary trade war with China and lost. Our trade deficit is its highest since 2008. The trade war has also cost America about 300,000 jobs, even before the pandemic.

 

President Trump pulled us out of the Paris Climate Agreement, loosed restrictions against air pollution, and committed all sorts of abuses against the environment. He’s ignoring climate change. Meanwhile, the West Coast is on fire and we’ve had so many hurricanes and tropical storms this year that we ran out of names for them. 

 

President Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is a sentient mop. She’s useless. When the parents and teachers were wrestling with whether and how to restart in-person learning this fall, she offered no guidance other than to state that schools should open—like she’s some detached observer rather than in charge of the department. She redirected coronavirus funding from public schools to charter and religious schools. She downplayed the risk of returning to schools, while several teachers have died. The coronavirus section on the department’s website is useless. DeVos once tried to cut funding for the Special Olympics. DeVos also declined to help transgender kids. What kind of heartless asshole looks at a vulnerable population of children and comes down on the side of not protecting them? Betsy DeVos.

 

President Trump caused chaos by banning Muslim-majority countries from travel to the United States. He tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and kick immigrants out of the country. These people were trying to make a better life for themselves in the United States and deserved better. Luckily, the Supreme Court overruled Trump’s repeal, but DACA is still endangered.  

 

President Trump’s tax cut, his only real legislative accomplishment, disproportionately delivered benefits to people in the top 20 percent. His payroll tax deferral would hurt Social Security.

 

President Trump, instead of divesting himself from his businesses, has used the presidency to make a buck by having domestic and foreign allies use his golf clubs and properties to curry favor with him. He even the Secret Service to stay at his hotels. This is taxpayer money flowing right into his grubby hands and it’s nakedly corrupt. He made in about $73 million from foreign sources in the first two years in office, a violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which is a safeguard against foreign interference in our policies.

 

President Trump withdrew our forces from northern Syria, paving the way for Turkey to invade Syria, betraying our supposed allies the Kurds once again.

 

President Trump issued an executive order that gives strips job security from civil service employees. These are the non-partisan employees who provide important continuity to our government through changing administrations, and Trump’s action makes it easier to fill these positions with sycophants.

 

President Trump’s foundation was dissolved by a court order due to “a shocking pattern of illegality.” The Trump Foundation mishandled $6 million in funds that were supposed to go to veterans’ charities, mishandled money that was earmarked for 9/11 victims, and misused funds for a lengthy list of improper purposes.

 

President Trump wanted to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. This is in violation of the Constitution, which plainly directs a count of all people, not just citizens. He’s continuing to screw around with the Census deadlines to manipulate the accurate representation of the people of the United States.

 

President Trump tried to block funding for the United States Post Office to make it harder for people to vote by mail in a pandemic. He admitted this.

 

President Trump bragged that he “saved (Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s) ass,” getting Congress to back off on MBS, who the CIA confirmed as having ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This is the president of the United States bragging about defending the man who dismembered Khashoggi with a bone saw. But law and order, right?

 

President Trump is inciting domestic terrorism against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In the spring, Trump used irresponsible rhetoric to encourage yahoos in Michigan to protest the state capitol while armed, as it was just too onerous to wear a small strip of cloth over their faces. After some of those yahoos were charged with plans to kidnap and execute Whitmer, Trump called for her to be locked up—I guess for the crime of nearly being kidnapped?

 

President Trump has visited golf clubs at least 283 times since his inauguration. It has cost taxpayers over $141 million. So much for being too busy working for the American people to play golf. (Compare this to President Obama, who in eight years played golf 306 times.) Trump is lazy as hell. He spends “executive time” watching Fox News and tweeting about the things that bother him. Last month, with a pandemic sweeping across America and a campaign in full swing, he had nothing better to do than call into Rush Limbaugh’s show to yap for two hours. Must be nice. Half the time he governs like a septuagenarian who spends all day watching Fox News, is horrified by what the government is doing, and tweets what a disgrace it is—unaware that he actually has the power to do something.

 

President Trump’s adult kids are a bunch of grifters. Ivanka and Don Jr. misled real estate investors, which could have resulted in criminal charges if the investigation was not squashed by their father’s Department of Justice cronies. Trump paid $747,000 in consulting fees to Ivanka, which is double-dipping, since she works for his Trump Organization. Ivanka used her father’s influence to net several trademarks in China, meaning she is making money off her position in government. Eric has had to testify in investigations into whether the Trump Organization lied about its real estate assets. Son-in-law Jared got a shady bailout from Qatar to pay his massive real estate debts, and has so much general shadiness about him that he should never have received a security clearance. These people are corrupt and have no qualifications to be involved in government.

 

President Trump eats his well-done steak with ketchup.

 

President Trump’s first national security advisor; three of his four 2016 campaign managers; his first 2020 campaign manager; his lawyer; and his longtime advisor all have been arrested or are in jail. He can pick ‘em, huh?

 

President Trump’s administration has repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, which bars most federal officials from using their offices to participate in political activities. At least 14 from his administration have violated the Hatch Act. Kellyanne Conway violated it dozens of times and faced no consequences for breaking this law. They also violated it by having the convention speech at the White House. This is one more way this administration says, “Law and order for thee, not for me.”

 

President Trump is pig-ignorant. He does have a certain intelligence for spectacle and manipulating the public, but has been generally stupid about so many basic things that it’s really ruined his ability to govern. He won’t read so his staff has to present him with charts and pictures in briefings. He looked directly at an eclipse. He thought you could fight coronavirus by injecting disinfectant. He thought forest fires were caused by not raking the forest floor, and that it would get cooler after the West Coast basically burned down a few months ago. He bragged about acing a dementia test that has people identify animals and draw clocks.

 

President Trump is an asshole. He’s not a “counterpuncher.” He’s not “unfiltered.” He’s not “unorthodox.” He doesn’t “tell it like it is.” He’s not “politically incorrect.” He’s just an asshole (and calling someone “politically incorrect” is ironically just a politically correct way of calling him an asshole). He really only cares about himself, rather than the country, and shits all over anyone who gets in the way of his self-interest. Trump libeled a 75-year-old protestor who got pushed down by police and ended up with bleeding from his ears, in the hospital with a head injury. What kind of person does this? An asshole.

 

In 2020, we need an Electoral College victory, not a moral victory. VOTE!