The Dipshit Election of 2024

We know Donald Trump is horrible as a person, but don’t forget that he was a shitty President, too.

So bad that even his former running mate wants nothing to do with him.

What an absolutely exhausting country this has become.

If the polls are to be believed, there is a 50/50 chance that the American electorate returns Donald Trump to the White House. His time out of office is bookended on one side by the attempted coup of January 6, 2021 and resulting riot, and on the other with his ever-increasing threats to our constitutional order and, frankly, blatant fascism.

You don’t have to listen to me. You can believe Trump’s former Chief of Staff and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally, people are overcoming their reluctance to call Trump what he is – a wannabe fascist dictator thug. An American Orban or Putin. Trump would gladly silence any dissent or opposition. He would happily jettison the Constitution in favor of raw power. Declaring anything he dislikes to be “woke”, he will happily use the levers of power not to govern but to rule. The greatest threat Trumpism poses is not to privileged white people like me (although, as a child of immigrants who were not citizens at the time of my birth, I would be in line for revocation of my birthright citizenship and subsequent deportation), but to members of marginalized communities – ethnic, national, religious minorities, and anyone who does not conform to a strictly binary and heterosexual gender identity as defined at birth.

Because 99.9% of Republican “ideology”, such as it is, is what we call the “culture war.” That culture war is about reassuring cisgendered white people that they are still special like daddy said. 99.9% of that is fearmongering – about gays and immigrants and transgender people and Venezuelan gangs and migrants. These people would consider Barry Goldwater to be too woke. The American right knows it cannot win on its policy goals (see the wildly unpopular Project 2025), so it has to rely on trickery and subterfuge instead. It has to rely on gerrymandering and a systematic erosion of voting rights and access. It relies on a nakedly partisan Supreme Court to help it achieve policy aims in a blatantly undemocratic manner. Project 2025 gets implemented if Trump wins, regardless of its unpopularity.

The American right brought you the Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade. The result? Increased threats to maternal health and safety, and fetal deaths on a level you might expect to see in a third world backwater and not in a country that considers itself to be the best in the world. But more importantly than optics, these outcomes are as avoidable as they are disgusting and unacceptable. How can you reconcile being “pro-life” with increased harm to mothers and infants?

How do you excise a right to privacy from federal constitutional jurisprudence? How do you decide to allow certain states to be less free than others when it comes to reproductive rights? Why is a woman in Alabama or Texas less free to make decisions about her own body than a woman in New York or Massachusetts? How does that jibe, exactly, with the Equal Protections clause of the Constitution?

The catastrophe around abortion rights is just one example of unchecked Trumpism. Project 2025 provides the blueprint going forward for an “anti-woke” illiberal, undemocratic Christian theocracy founded on nativism, racism, and minority dictatorship. 50% or so of your compatriots are willing to go along with this because, I dunno, Trump is based and gas was $1.90 at the height of the Covid pandemic, which Trump botched to the tune of a million Americans dead.

Trump was a fascist from jump street. As early as 2015, I explicitly said that Trump was one step from fascism. I was wrong about him never being able to win election, but I was right about everything else in this piece.

Donald Trump would accomplish nothing. He would do nothing for education, for the poor, for upstate’s economic malaise, for Buffalo, or for anyone except the tea party and the ultrarich. The headlines related to the upstate effort to recruit Trump for governor should have read, “Lawmakers to Massage Trump Ego, Trump Reacts Favorably”. 

He’s been a fascist throughout the last decade. He was a fascist last year, when he threatened the Manhattan DA with a baseball bat. So miss me with all of this. Here’s something that no one is talking about: the fact that Donald Trump’s presidency – you know, the one he actually had from 2017 – 2021 and that everyone has memory-holed – was really pretty shitty in almost every way.

Donald Trump was a lousy President and that is not getting any attention whatsoever.

The first thing that pops to my mind when I think about what a lazy and divisive chief executive he was is the time when Homeland Security shut New Yorkers out of Nexus and Global Entry because the state had begun giving driving permits to undocumented immigrants.

Then I remember how he blew up the deficit giving huge tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy while saddling the rest of us with the bill.

Then I remember how he completely mismanaged the Covid pandemic, which hit just months after he shut down the country’s pandemic response office.

Then I remember how he tried repeatedly to kill the Affordable Care Act and went out of his way to weaken it.

Then I remember how he deliberately and cruelly separated immigrant children from their families.

Then I remember how he refused FEMA assistance to jurisdictions that had not voted for him.

Then I remember Sharpiegate and buying Greenland and legitimizing Kim Jong Un and the nepotism and the corruption and how they did nothing when Saudi Arabia murdered and dismembered a Washington Post columnist and Green Card holder and then dissolved him in acid and how he adores dictators like Orban and Putin and how he has never actually uttered a negative syllable about Putin and how he wants Ukraine to capitulate and how he completely botched Covid and told people that maybe injecting bleach was a good idea to pursue.

Then I remember how he kicked almost a million people off of SNAP food aid.

Then I remember how he gutted the right to overtime pay through regulatory shenanigans.

Then I remember how he began to dismantle environmental protections.

Then I remember how his Department of Education went out of its way to funnel money to religious organizations and weakened protections against fraud due to for-profit colleges and predatory lending practices.

Then I remember how he gleefully ignored norms of governance and we just let him do it – things like holding the 2020 RNC Convention on the White House Lawn or hiring his kids or making money off of the sale of hotel rooms to foreign diplomats and federal agencies or releasing his tax returns or health records.

Then I remember how he was able to stack the Supreme Court with right wing judges-for-life who completely shat on any semblance of conservatism by jettisoning stare decisis and overturning Roe v. Wade and rolling back voting rights and abolishing affirnative action.

Then I remember all of it. How every day was exhausting. How every policy and practice was designed to enable Trump’s dictatorial ambitions, erode constitutional democracy, and to elevate raw cruelty as not only an aspirational ideal but set policy goal.

Donald Trump isn’t running on his record because his record sucks. What I don’t understand is why Democrats aren’t going after his record, because it sucks. Oh, your gas only cost $1.80 a gallon in 2020? That’s because we were all locked down because he botched Covid, for fuck’s sake. Oh, grocery prices shot up after the economy opened back up, yeah because demand skyrocketed and companies also decided to grab some profits while they could.

How are the markets doing? How’s unemployment? The big numbers are all at historically good places. While everyone expected a recession after the post-Covid recovery, instead we got a soft landing.

It’s not enough to say that Donald Trump wishes he could be like Orban or Putin or any other neo-fascist dictator. It’s not enough to point out that he’s a sexual predator, an Epstein acolyte, a dirty old man, a doddering old fool, (just compare a 2016 speech to a 2024 speech). He was a crappy President who made the country weaker, sicker, less free, less stable, and poorer.

The Donald Trump presidency of 2017 – 2021 was an abject failure. A disaster. It will hopefully go down in history as a one-off aberration and not an indication of a fundamental dumbing down of America or a turn to authoritarianism led by malignant billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and others.

Harris and Tim Walz make an amazing team, and the Biden Administration’s return to policies that put Americans first is something that we must continue.

LOCALLY

NYS Proposition One: In New York, everything that Proposition One says is already settled law. This proposition would add these provisions into the Constitution to prevent some future rolling back of these freedoms and liberties – you know, like how they’re doing on the federal level. Please vote YES on Proposition One.

Erie County Proposition One: Listen, if you want Republicans to do what they always do in this region and plunge something into fiscal disarray, then go ahead and vote for them. Proposition Two would allow a simple legislative majority set the sales tax rates in the county and this only makes sense. Vote YES on County Proposition One.

District Attorney: Gardner’s ads against Keane are pretty despicable and anyone who goes around saying “make crime illegal again” should be laughed out of contention for any serious job. Using a 40 year old ticket from when Keane was a college senior is weak as fuck and Gardner uses that because he doesn’t have really anything else to run on except vibes. Vote Keane.

Here is the early voting information for Erie County, which starts October 26th. Bank your vote. Make a plan. Get your sample ballot here.

Election Day is November 5th.