I don’t hate Donald Trump. I just hate the fact that he’s about to become our next President. I never really thought much about Donald Trump until he declared. I mean, I knew who he was, but he always seemed like a relatively harmless blowhard to me. “You’re fired!” Who cares? I was aware that the Donald was a proponent of the very silly “birther” movement, and that President Obama had handed him his lunch during the 2013 Washington Correspondent’s dinner. I got a little bit of pleasure out of that. But otherwise, who cared?

It also doesn’t bother me that Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and Bob Kraft are friends with the Donald. He got a little bump out of that fact during the primaries here in the Commonwealth, where the Donald got a nice victory over his competitors in the otherwise inconsequential Massachusetts Republican primary. I can imagine that the Donald is kind of fun to hang out with, except when you have to run around grabbing some pussy with him. He’s a guy who will most likely show you every toy he has, bore you excessively about all the beautiful things he owns, but you can probably get a really nice meal out of him. I bet he’s generous in that way. He’ll pay for everybody’s meal. Nice meals, too.

Then, when the Donald announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015 in Trump Tower, riding down an escalator, hiring people to be present and cheer, and finally going off-script to designate virtually all Mexican men who had immigrated to the United States as “rapists” – something I might have expected of Mary Daly, but not from Donald Trump – I was with all the comedians who thought, this guy’s candidacy is going to last about five minutes.

If only.

So, this is not about right or left. This is not about being a sore loser. This is not about ideology. For example:

• If Mitt Romney had won in 2012, I would have been disappointed for sure, but I would easily have accepted Romney’s win, and I would not have been worried about his possession of the nuclear codes.
• If John McCain had won in 2008, I would have been disappointed for sure, and I would have been worried about McCain’s health and Sarah Palin’s proximity to the Oval Office. But I would not have been worried about McCain’s possession of the nuclear codes.
• If Ted Cruz had won in 2016, I would have been horrified, to be honest, because I think Ted Cruz is a nasty, nasty man and demagogue, and I would have worried seriously about the direction of this country. But I would not have been worried about Cruz’ possession of the nuclear codes.
• If the Donald were to be impeached and Mike Pence were to become President, I would also be horrified, because I think that Pence simply doesn’t understand the necessary division between church and state. I fear he would literally try to make us into a “Christian” nation. But I still would not be worried about Pence’s possession of the nuclear codes.
• With the Donald, I’m literally worried about his possession of the nuclear codes. It’s not about ideology. I don’t think the Donald actually has an ideology, other than being an opportunist. But all of the Republican establishment were right all along: this man is not emotionally qualified to be President.

The reason that the Donald will never be my President, other than that he’s an unhinged Narcissist who cannot resist the impulse to respond to every perceived insult or slight, is that he’s also a world class con-man. And his most brilliant con was convincing the voters of the United States of America that he is qualified to be President. Not a majority, mind you – that was Hillary Clinton’s province – but enough to win the electoral college. That may be the greatest con job that any con-man has ever pulled. In the history of the world.

When your Right-Wing Cousin Asks the Donald to Babysit

The election of the Donald as President is like your crazy right-wing cousin asking you if the Donald can babysit your twin thirteen-year old daughters even though he’s a convicted child pornographer. “I don’t think so,” you say. “But he’s a great guy,” your cousin responds. “He didn’t even bring his camera!”

The Donald’s supporters want us to give him a chance. Kellyanne Conway asks us to “look at what’s in his heart” instead of listening to his words.

I don’t think so.

All I need to know about the Donald I was able to observe by watching how he ran his campaign, and more recently how he has run his transition. The Donald literally appealed to every lower instinct in all of us, the voters. He appealed to our racism, our misogyny, our xenophobia, our homophobia, and ironically, to both our Islamophobia and our Anti-Semitism (he got a two-fer out of that one). For his cabinet, Trump has picked a list of nominees who are distinguished by their wealth and by their being rank amateurs. The Donald also picked nominees noted for wanting to dismantle the Departments that they are going to govern. Rick Perry for Energy, the Department he couldn’t remember to name in the 2012 debates. The climate-change-denier Scott Pruitt for the EPA, a man who still has a number of ongoing litigation cases against the agency he’s supposed to administer. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, a man so racist he couldn’t get himself confirmed as a federal judge. Charter school zealot Betsy DeVos for Education. And so on and so forth.

This is a farce worthy of Monty Python.

It doesn’t matter what the Donald says today. Somebody will craft him a nice speech, and he will use the words “beautiful” and “amazing” a lot, and he will claim to be the greatest unifier that this country has ever seen.

Just like he “will be the greatest jobs producer that God ever created,” something he literally claimed in his first and only press conference as the President elect.

When I hear the Donald say things like this, I don’t know if he’s completely delusional or if he actually knows what he’s saying. The biggest con job the Donald may ever have pulled is on himself, giving himself the belief that he’s actually qualified to be President.

Along the way to the Presidential election they dragged a good woman through the mud. I’m talking about Hillary Rodham Clinton, of course. A woman whose only real sin is that she was an ambitious policy wonk who didn’t fully understand how an email server works. For that she was vilified and demonized like no woman before her. The Republicans, in a show of unrestrained hypocrisy, investigated Hillary over and over and over again, and all they could come up with is that she had been a little bit careless in her handling of classified email correspondence.

Lock her up?

I don’t think so.

But the Donald may eventually get himself (or one of his family members) thrown into jail. I doubt he’ll get impeached (because with both the House and Senate in Republican hands, his party will have little incentive to impeach him, unless they come to believe he’s bringing the whole party down), but he could definitely get himself convicted. As it is – and in a bit of irony – the Paula Jones case has already established that a sitting President can be sued while in office. The Donald still has something like 75 cases of ongoing litigation, and I understand that several women are going to file suit against him next week with allegations of sexual assault.

This really was a Rigged Election

So, the Donald was absolutely right about one thing: this really was a rigged election. If you recall, in the third and final debate with Hillary Clinton, the Donald excited all the political commentators by refusing to say that he would accept the outcome of the election if Hillary won. He kept alleging that this was going to be a “rigged” election.

And so it was.

You can buy into the arguments of the Donald’s many apologists and claim that Putin and Julian Asange and James Comey didn’t swing this election for the Donald. But you’d be a fool, just as much a fool as if you think the Donald is actually qualified to be President. I’m not going to go into all the arguments here – we’ll save that for a later day – but Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight website has demonstrated convincingly that late-breaking swing voters were greatly influence by James Comey’s shenanigans, and that the slow drip-drip about Hillary’s emails, courtesy of Vladimir Putin and Julian Asange, also had a sustained and measurable impact on the election. As Nate Silver said, “Clinton would almost certainly be President-elect if the election had been held on October 27.”

The Con-man and Liar-in-Chief

The Donald is almost like your five year old child when playing “opposite day.”  Most of what he says is actually the opposite of what is true. The man is a congenital and unrestrained liar, and so much less honest than Hillary Clinton, who was supposedly the candidate that the voters didn’t think they could trust. As someone noted “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” That was not only true for the press, but the entire left.

Shouldn’t you be able to take a Presidential candidate literally?

Not this one, apparently.

Trump claimed that he was going to “build a wall” and make the Mexicans pay for it. Sane people know that this has no chance of ever happening. Trump claimed the he was going to renegotiate all of our trade deals. Why would any of partners, who already have trade deals, want to renegotiate them? Trump claimed that he’s going to being manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Fat chance.

Meanwhile the Donald rails against the “dishonest” media – whose only sin is reporting on what he actually says and does – while he tells one big fat lie after another.

It’s like Fox News when they claimed to be “fair and balanced.” Their tag line was so ludicrous, so outrageous, that sane people around the country asked, who would possibly believe that of Fox News?

There are a lot of gullible people in this country, apparently.

And millions of them have been taken in by Donald J. Trump.

Several of the various fact-checking organizations have set up systems where they will track which (if any) of the Donald’s promises he actually fulfills. Of course, keeping up with his lies should make for some employment opportunities at organizations like Factcheck.org and Politifact.com.

Today is the High-Water Mark of the Republican Party

For all my progressive and Democratic friends, who have been walking the ledge since November 9^th, I do have some good news for you: today, right now, represents the “high-water” mark of the Republican party. It’s all downhill from here.

The GOP will discover, in no time at all, that it’s much less fun to govern than it is to throw spitballs from the sideline.

Take the Affordable Care Act, for example. By now it’s painfully obvious that the Republicans have no plan to replace it. I don’t think they ever thought they’d be in a position to repeal it. They’ve had six years to come up with a credible replacement, and so far they’ve come up with nothing at all.  Part of the problem is, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, that the “individual mandate” (which they allegedly hate so much) came out of the Heritage Institution. In other words, it was their idea. Now the Donald has promised that no one is going to lose their health insurance after the ACA has been repealed.

Fat chance.

All of their other “ideas” are going to face similar difficulty. Because none of them are, in fact, new ideas. They’re all old ideas, like “trickle down” economics, that have repeatedly failed before and aren’t going to do any better when warmed over and recycled.

Hold them Accountable

I don’t have many friends who voted for the Donald, but for the ones who did, this time I’m going to hold them accountable for what they’ve done. And we, as a movement on the left, have to hold the right accountable for what happens now. As I wrote right after the election, this particular election was a giant “FU” thrown by “real” America in the direction of the rest of America. “Unreal” America. Although “unreal” is the label that should accompany this election once and for all.

In any case, the right will not like what they’ve suddenly released in the left. After years of playing hardball while we were playing softball, suddenly we’ve joined the game. We’re galvanized. We’re mobilized. There will be millions of women (and their supporting men) marching tomorrow, not only in dozens of cities around the country, but in cities around the world.

Around the world!

Think about that.

This is the last time they’re going to get a free pass with all their bullshit and their fake news and their hypocrisy and lies. Oh no, they are not going to like what they’ve unleashed. Good luck Republicans. You’re going to need it.