Trump is Gone: The Time Has Come Today
Posted on Sun Nov 08, 2020 at 10:29:09 PM EST
Tags: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Time Has Come Today (all tags)
The time has come to leave Donald Trump behind. He's toast. The fat lady sang. The Supreme Court is not coming to his rescue. He's lived high on our dime (and the dime of the Secret Service covering his and his kids' international and domestic travel) long enough.)
As soon as the media stops covering Donald Trump, which it will shortly, he'll be on his way to somewhere like Abu Dhabi faster than the speeding bullet trains in Asia can get him there. (He can't possibly be dumb enough to think he's safe from arrest at Mar-a-Lago and he would never be able to adapt to a non-opulent lifestyle or a place where English isn't widely spoken). So why is he hanging on to his desk in the oval office so tightly? What is he afraid of? My theory is five-fold: [More....]
- (1) He's afraid Deutsche Bank will call or sell his loans on the Trump hotels in Florida, Wasington, DC and Chicago and thinks he can ward them off while still in the White House
Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization, the president’s umbrella group that is currently overseen by his two sons, according to filings made by Trump to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in July and a senior source within the bank. The three loans, which are against Trump properties and start coming due in two years, are current on payments and personally guaranteed by the president, according to two bank officials.
In meetings in recent months, a Deutsche Bank management committee that oversees reputational and other risks for the lender in the Americas region has discussed ways in which it could rid the bank of these last vestiges of the relationship, two of the three bank officials said. The bank has over the years lent Trump more than $2 billion, one of the officials said.
More on Trump and Deutsche Bank at the NY Times here in 2019. Deutsche Bank has not been without its own problems.
- (2) His "immunity" from prosecution (which is only a DOJ policy, not the law) will end on January 21, 2021, and he is facing criminal investigations of his finances in both state and federal court in New York. He has no ability to pardon himself in a state case
- (3) he will have to face civil suits such as the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll who claims he raped her in a dressing room at Bergforf Goodman's in New York in the 1980's
- (4) He thinks if he goes out as a loser, as opposed to a "fighter" and someone who was "robbed", his brand will suffer and his licensing deals (in which he sells his name to be used on hotels and golf courses rather than building anything himself) will tank, and
- (5) His only viable path to make money going foward is to create a radical right TV network filled with fake news to compete with Fox, but Jared has been too busy bringing peace to the middle east and handling Trump's COVID response to close the deal.
So with Trump irrelevant, the time has come to hold Joe Biden's feet to the fire and make sure he doesn't bail on the progressives, African Americans, Latinos, seniors and youth who voted for him over Trump.
The Biden-Harris transition team is already making appointments. Progressives need to watch their every move, because Joe Biden is not one of us and never has been. He's certainly preferable to Donald Trump, but we need to watch his back on criminal justice issues, especially the war on drugs; on raising global tensions in the middle east and Africa (i.e., getting us into another war); health care for all Americans and climate change.
Can we all just be honest about one thing? This election was not a referendum supporting Joe Biden. It was a rejection of Donald Trump, his family and everything they stand for. Donald Trump may have disgusted suburban women, and everyone with a brain knows his failure to adopt a national policy on Covid-19 resulted in unnecessary deaths, but it was progressives like AOC 's endorsement, Stacey Abrams' organizing skills, Black Lives Matter protests and Latino voter registration drives (that have been building for the last decade, not just in Florida but in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada) that brought it home for him and Kamala.
Today is the time to shift our focus to ensuring Team Biden-Harris appoints fair, unbiased and competent jurists to the bench; expands every Americans' right to universal health care; decriminalizes simple possession and use of all drugs, not just pot; ends the use of the federal death penalty and draconian mandatory minimum sentences which are arbitrarily imposed and disproportionately affect people of color.
So, I'm sorry Joe and Kamala, but you will get no honeymoon here. We trusted you with our votes, and now you must earn it. The devil with a desk in the oval office will soon be leaving, tail between his legs, but that old adage that the devil you know is better than the one you don't is simply not true.
We can be happy that now we have principled leaders, two honest hard-working and experienced individuals who profess to care about "the soul of the nation" (an ambiguous phrase if ever there was one) to lead us on the long path to restoring America's standing in the world and eliminate our internal divisiveness, but that is a task I imagine will take at least a generation.
As for the unity shtick, forget it. I hated when Obama used the phrase ("We are not blue states or red states but the United States") and I hated it more every time Biden used it this week (without attribution of course). The reality is we live in a two party nation and there are principled reasons to judge Republicans harshly. Our disagreements shouldn't lead to physical violence, or police brutality. But it would be foolish to regard Republicans as our friends. They are not. We need be vigilant and ensure that Biden doesn't align with the former Bush neo-cons in the Lincoln Project believing he owes them something. He owes them nothing. We owe them nothing. They didn't win the election for Biden or defeat Trump. We, the people, won it for Biden and Harris, by getting off our as*es and organizing and getting out the vote because another four years of Donald Trump in charge of anything but his cell phone was unacceptable.
Also unimportant: whether young progressives and Bernie Sanders call themselves "Democratic Socialists" vs. Social Democrats. Some argue they are different in that Democratic Socialists want more, but I think that's hair-splitting and they are birds of the same feather, that exist on the same continuum, with one just wanting more government involvement than the other. (Denmark, Norway and Sweden, are social democracies).
The current crop of young progressives are not trying to end capitalism. They are not trying to transfer title to your house to the community. They want the government to provide basic human services like quality health care, including mental health services, to all of us; ensure our senior citizens are financially provided and fund home health care, assisted living centers, and nursing homes; ensure all Americans have sufficient nutritious food so no one goes hungry; provide early childhood education so that every child has an equal chance to succeed; provide for clean, safe housing at an affordable price, no one is left to live in a car or tent on the street or shelter for the homeless; ensure the financially less advantaged among us have access to the same universities that the wealthy attend (not just free access to community colleges)and for those who don't want further academics, access to affordable or free technical or vocational training, including the performance arts. And, of course, take on the obligation to address climate change and eliminate student debt.
Social Democracy is not about who owns the means of production (which is the distinction between capitalism, socialism and communism) -- it's about ensuring the state provides for its citizens' basic needs. The bigger question is who is going to pay for these needs? Increased taxation of the rich? That's is one way that seems to meet with approval, but not the only way.
If I had the answer to that question, I'd have run for office or become an economist long ago. This is why in a democracy we elect smart people to lead us and figure it out. Biden and Harris are up to the task if they will just take it on. In the meantime, while it would help if Bernie and AOC reverted to calling themselves "Social Democrats" instead of "Democratic Socialists", if only because the word "socialist" seems to scare even smart Democrats who should know better, in current parlance, I think it's a distinction without a difference. For the same reason we don't refer to people as "illegal" but as "undocumented persons" (no human being is illegal), our fellow progressives would do every one a good turn if they would revert to using the term "Social Democrat" instead of "Democratic Socialist". (I get that there is an organized political party named "Democratic Socialists" in the U.S. but not a currently functional and operational party named "Social Democrats" (just a website that says hopefully it will revive itself, but still....the word socialist makes too many people nervous, while the label "social democrat" doesn't conjure up the same fear.
We, the people, have the ability to make this election a new dawn. The time has come today. Let's push Congress, the Senate and our state houses left on legislation and show the nation and the world what a huge improvement it will be when we stop funding the building of new prisons, border fences and tanks and weaponry that may destroy life on this planet and start funding the most basic needs of every American and the towns and cities they live in.
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