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I waver between bewilderment and rage when reading these daily summaries. I can almost "understand" his more political moves - installing loyalists, withdrawing troops, even trying to sell access to the Defense Department's wavebands. I don't agree or condone these actions, but they're consistent with his approach to governance to date.

What's comprehensible is ignoring - in any and every way - the coronavirus and its impact. Unconscionable doesn't begin to describe his failure to acknowledge the deaths of 280,000 Americans, or to endorse any means of protecting each other as best possible. It's inhumane. It's devoid of empathy, morally vacuous, and ethically deplorable. It is unequivocally and unalterably wrong.

And yet 74,000,000 thought it acceptable to return him to office. McConnell has personally obstructed any efforts to extend relief for 8 months and counting. It's Hobbseian in its social brutishness. Even Hobbes might be appalled. And Republican leadership is mute.

I'm almost beyond shock. Since the beginning, many thought each of Trump's transgressions would be the last straw, yet nothing happened. The only apparent imposition of accountability is his having lost the election. Court losses haven't swayed him. Our perverse campaign finance laws have given him license to steal despite the misleading fine print. His Cabinet, always incompetent for the task, is asleep, silent, or in on the game. Each day goes by with no visible effort to limit his efforts to salt the earth in advance of his successor. And Republican leadership ignores or enables him to proceed unhindered.

He's unmoored. He's looking to preemptively pardon family and loyalists who are most likely would be criminally liable but haven't yet been charged. His most ardent supporters are almost insane (read Giuliani and Powell) or seditious (read Flynn and Lin Wood). And still the Republican party watches with bloodless faces and dead eyed stares, saying not a word.

What is one to think? How does one explain this to children? How can one reason with any family, friends, or acquaintances who somehow believe Trump is in the right, brought low only by a grand, silent conspiracy of wrong minded citizens and foreign actors?

Perhaps history can look upon Trump's reign of terror more dispassionately. Today, however, I and many others feel like we're helpless, our minds and sensibilities best represented by the visage of horror in Edvard Munch's The Scream.

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One of the things that has gotten me over the past four years, and moreso this past month in which four years of Trumpcrap has been compressed into 30 days, is that I cannot figure these people out. I have for a number of years worked as a creator of dramatic fiction, during which time I gained a reputation for being able to create "honest, believable characters." Not that all were honest, moral people, but rather that they were honest portrayals of people who might do the good, bad or indifferent. But with these Trump people, I really can't figure them out, how they got to the level of awful they inhabit. I mean, how did an otherwise unremarkable kid from a middle class Jewish home full of what appear to be decent people, become this kid who went out of his way to be an asshole, who got his jollies from the outraged responses of others to his assholery, become Stephen Miller, who I can only compare to Reinhard Heydrich, even though he likely doesn't have the stones to become the author of a Holocaust? Lewandowski, Bossie, O'Grady, mentioned here tonight. You look at who they were and their previous unremarkableness is the constant. What turned them into monsters, or were they always monsters but just able to maintain a facade? And why were/are they? Most of them don't appear to be getting rich from their involvement with Trump, but they're drawn to him like moths to a candle.

'Tis a puzzlement.

And then there's the response they raise in me, which is best left to the Dylan line - "If my thoughts 'n dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

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Last night I broke a rule of mine never to respond to a comment on a public Facebook post unless it is to wish someone a happy birthday, congratulations, etc. I save any other comments to private groups. I also have found the snooze and unfollow feature of Facebook to be very handy tools. However, last night, a story from a local news station about an organization here in Lexington helping with food insecurity garnered unexpected comments, especially in this uber religious area of the country. The first comments I would have expected is "God bless their work." Instead comments were made "Get a job", "You are only helping lazy people", and my personal favorite "Learn to grow and hunt your own food." To be clear, there were comments commending the project and push back on the negative comments. The comment I had to comment on was about why hasn't the Democrats, specifically Ms. Pelosi, pass a coronavirus relief bill. I pointed out that they had passed such a bill in the House last spring but that that bill along with many others are stalled in the Senate thanks to Mr. McConnell. First I was told that "Mitch does this because it doesn't make any sense to pass any bills the president is going to veto anyway" and then a diatribe about how evil Nancy Pelosi is and how the Democrats only want to burn cities, etc. I signed off with a grace to you and obviously we disagree. I have pondered on these comments. I could say they need a civics lesson (they do) or that they are crazy or uninformed. However, the main theme I see and hear is fear. Fear of losing everything. Fear of their health. Fear of the other. All sides of the political, religious, media and other secular organizations are responsible for this fear. And I believe this fear led to the rise of 45 and to our current situations. I believe ignorance can be overcome. Fear is more difficult. And 45 and his ilk are masters of stoking this fear. Heck, they are fearful themselves and fear is contagious.

As far as the unmasked gatherings, these remind me of "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe. Invincible in their own minds until they are not.

I see that we as citizens have a lot of work to do if we value our democracy. I stand with Lincoln and his vision. It is worth the work.

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Hannah Arendt's book (based on her reporting for The New Yorker), "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" encapsulates the issues TCinLA and the people who posted replies to it raise. I have read only bits of it but what she presents is a picture of evil that is stripped of glamour and that indicts everyone. As she says about Eichmann, "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all." If you have access to JSTOR (you can read online for free but not download if you don't have access through a library) there is a great short article in The History Teacher (1981) that discusses Arendt and her book in clear and concise terms. https://www.jstor.org/stable/493684

Miller and most everyone else surrounding the Deranged Cheeto--including the criminal enablers in Congress--fit Arendt's description perfectly. They are not monsters. They are not (most of them) pathological narcissists. They are sterile, unoriginal, uncreative people who have decided that personal advancement through doing terrible things is fine with them. It is actually harder, in our modern world, to be a good person than to be an awful one. Empathy, emotional maturity, awareness, and wisdom all require effort on the part of the individual. One has to engage, one has to become self-aware, one has to be brutally honest with oneself. Evil simply requires reaching down to that lowest common denominator of the id: a desire for self-advancement by any means necessary.

This is why they all seem so petty, so puerile, so childish, so joyless. This is why their tantrums are so infantile. And this is why Biden and Harris seem, by contrast, so refreshingly mature, so willing to allow joy. Both have been radically affected by what Hegel referred to as the "slaughter-bench" of history. The subhumans surrounding the Unelected Ex-President have not got enough imagination to be affected by anything except their own hunger.

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"Exactly what Trump is doing with this packing of the Defense Department is unclear."

I see Putin's fingerprints over all of this, including hi-tech defense hardware sales to small-time Middle East players.

I see every Trump appointee in the Defense Dept. as a de facto Russian agent. Joe McCarthy's paranoid assertion that the US government is riddled with communists has come a cropper, though modern Russia under Putin is about as far away from Marxist/Leninist communism as one could get.

We'll see if enough Senate Republicans have the moxie to stop those arms sales. They may have to buck not only Trump but Moscow Mitch McConnell as well.

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Thanks Heather. This is certainly alot to unpack, but so worth the read. I honestly did not realize the people involved in the 5G deal. Thanks for the clarification.

I was at the Doctor's today and she was mentioning how COVID-19 is truly effecting us all in ways we may not consider. She has been a General Practitioner for many years and is seeing the tally on literally everyone that comes through the door. The infected and those who have family, friends, employees, the neighbor down the street etc and the crippling fear of contracting it is so damaging. The spectators are ending up quite ill from it like nothing she has seen. Depression, anxiety, gastrointestinal problems, cardiac problems, PSTD are some of what she has seen for months attributed to COVID-19.

I would expect some issues may recede as the Covid numbers go down and the Medical field gets a handle on this. I imagine years from now we will see reports on this phenomenon.

I've said it before, but please be safe, be well. Take a breather from what you have control over and what controls you, my friends.

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Morning, all!! Morning, Dr. R!! Praying that Biden and his team can sidestep whatever comes their way in the remaining lame duck days. Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Wash your hands.

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Maybe trump thinks that if he packs the Pentagon with his civilian toadies (sorry toads everywhere) that they can force the men and women at the Pentagon and in the military around the world to support a coup to put him in lifelong power. That he always has and always will seek the spotlight without having done anything worthwhile to deserve the attention will haunt the GOP for years unless SDNY can lock him and his crime family away for a good long stretch.

That he keeps shuffling people around even this late in the game speaks of nothing but desperation and a loss on a grip of reality. I hope the GOP suffers for years for lacking the spines to push for use of the 25th Amendment to remove him and the gutlessness of not being willing to convict him at the impeachment proceedings.

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I never thought that I could feel such disdain for a leader of the United States of America, a country that I so admired since childhood. Sadly, that contempt has also surfaced for his family, his followers, and his henchmen.

I hate these sentiments that burn through to the very core if my being, most of all because of the reality of the death, sorrow, and destruction that he has inflicted on so many good people. I knew that he would not leave without some form of revenge, but I'm beginning to think that my imagination hadn't envisioned such malevolence from one who feigns to love his country.

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I said all along, the T**** "team" isn't sharing the vaccine distribution plan with the Biden transition team because there is no plan. The "plan" is the same as it has been all along since the pandemic started: let the free market decide.

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The burning story is definitely Covid now that we are inching towards the 300,000 mark. Politics has always been ugly but never has it been this horrendous where our economy is tanking and a leader of our country could care less about the people. It not be easy for me to forgive those who voted for this moron to run us into the ground. For what?? For money? Greed? Do the Republicans not equate that some of their people who supported them have died?

Sessions did rightfully recuse himself about his contacts in Russia but what he and Stephen Miller did to those families is unconscionable! Tonight, we found out that the administration actually did have phone numbers of places where those children were sent to. All of this time, they lied that they didn’t keep any notes as to their whereabouts. Those children and families have suffered terribly. This is an act of unmitigated cruelty. I haven’t rested easily because of their disappearance and I won’t until all of them are found.

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Amazing how the Hatch Act and Emoluments Clause have both not just been ignored by Trump, but trampled in the dust. From the incredible amounts charged by the Trump hotel to the RNC Inaugural Committee (Yes, Ivana) to this 5G fiasco, he has been more openly money-grubbing than even Vlad Putin. How magnanimous of him to forego his salary....

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Once again nearly speechless with these revelations, with regards to the purging of competent experienced people and their replacement with unqualified IQ45 loyalists. I hope Biden/Harris will be able to clean house when they take office. These past few weeks seem to have intensified the crafty (Putin) lunacy of 45 as he tries to destroy and disrupt as much as possible before the coming succession. Sad.

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I have one nit with this post -- it is the word winning: "Trump’s obsession with WINNING an election he has clearly lost has brought into relief the struggle for control over the Republican Party." While Trump is clearly obsessed with remaining President, he has only one route to do that, and that is to STEAL the election. When we way he is trying to "win" the election, we are giving credence to the idea that there is some legitimate path for him to win. There is not.

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It is exhausting and depressing to try to figure out how 74 million people could support a sociopathic fascist and yet we have to keep trying. He’s not going away and we will have to listen to people in our own families repeat his lies. Idiocracy, The Dead Zone, The Animal Farm, 1984 have already showed us what can happen and we ignore it. Good luck TC in LA. For nonfiction, there is always Hitler.

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Trump's recent actions move me to reject the prevailing view that he is merely a power-hungry egotist. Labels like "insane" or "mad man" sound flip and over-dramatic, but Trump's current behavior is so vindictive, paranoid, and fueled by fantasy, that he seems actually unhinged.

I don't believe he is "acting out" just because he once thought he was untouchably powerful yet now faces a different reality. And while I understand that maintaining an extreme fiction about election fraud helps him financially, I disagree that his desperate craftiness shows he's "in control."

Given the trajectory of his unruly behavior apparently beginning in childhood (not to mention his family's mental health record, e.g. addiction, dementia, etc.) what is happening now cannot be attributed to garden-variety, anti-social behavior. It is much worse than that and should be approached as such.

Look at where we are now. Millions are hungry. Whole segments of the economy face ruin. Hundreds in government (both elected and appointed) are doing nothing. Every day, people are dying by the thousands. It is anyone's guess what our situation in the U.S. will look like if and when we get to January 20, 2021. I am terribly fearful for us all.

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