Category: Trump and Trump-hatred

A Facebook friend’s post:

The upcoming US election is unlike any other. … This is not a normal election. This is a national emergency. It cancels the usual rules. … [some ideas for what Democrats should do] … Then, once the gross course correction is attained, away from the Trump course of authoritarian, corrupt, nationalistic, lie/propaganda/fear/polarization based government, we can go back to deciding how liberal or conservative our policies on 100 matters should be.

Right away from this coastal elite Democrat, scornful of religious Americans who accept dogma uncritically, we can see Millenarianism:

the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which “all things will be changed”

Of course, I couldn’t resist a simple question:

How has the stock market done during this 2.5-year “national emergency”?

I.e., why wouldn’t investors take 60 seconds to sell U.S. stocks and buy non-U.S. stocks, rather than stick around for the “national emergency” and see whether Dictator Trump would confiscate their assets, just as other dictators have done in the past? Why would foreigners continue to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. (some stats)?

The answer turned out to be, ultimately, that any question regarding whether Trump being in the White House constituted a “national emergency” was “off topic”.

If we regard Trump hatred as a religion, ideas that cannot be questioned or examined rationally would be part of the dogma.

Separately, the other day I photographed stickers on an aircraft mechanic’s toolbox:

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I posted them on Facebook, noting that they had come from a mechanic’s toolbox, and a guy who lives in Manhattan and draws his paycheck from the refugee industry responded with “Who gives a fuck” (a good summary of Democrats with regard to native-born guys who work hard at skilled blue collar jobs?). I think this is evidence for my Dutch friend’s observation regarding American elites, blue collar whites, and Trump’s election: “They forgot to take away their right to vote.”

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One of the great things about the Internet is that we can answer the question How many people would spend 19 hours listening to the Mueller Report?

The Audible version of the Mueller Report has 480 ratings!

(I recently talked to a couple of intelligent well-educated sisters. They believed that the Mueller Report proved that Donald Trump was an arch-criminal, that he would be prosecuted and imprisoned if he were not a sitting president, and that if they could only get hold of his tax returns it would prove that he was involved in “money-laundering”. Despite their passion, I don’t think that they had read every page of the report, much less invested half a work week in listening.)

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I recently spent two weeks on site at a big law firm as part of my software expert witness slavery. There are TVs in the reception and common areas of the firm, all of them locked to CNN so as to prevent unorthodox thoughts or deeds (e.g., changing the channel to Fox News!). Every time I helped myself to coffee, on-tap fizzy water, or waited for someone, therefore, I was watching CNN.

What did I see on this Channel of the Righteous? Except during commercial breaks, one name was on the screen at nearly all times. Whose name is more important than that of any human on Planet Earth? To Christians, “Jesus,” perhaps, or simply “God.” Thus a program on a Christian TV network might mention “Jesus” or “Christ” in every few sentences. Here are some sample screens:

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Yes, the word “Trump” appeared on screen roughly 99 percent of the non-break time during my informal survey.

Could it be that Trump is, from the point of view of CNN viewers, actually God or at least “a god”?

More evidence… a virtuous friend recently shared the following meme on Facebook:

“Every time T says something racist or otherwise offensive, simply respond ‘Epstein‘. That’s what he’s covering up. Don’t take his bait.”

His Facebook friends don’t know Trump personally. If they’re “responding” to Trump without ever talking to him in person, isn’t the implication that they regard Trump as supernaturally omnipresent?

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Donald J. Trump, racist, is back in the news for some unkind comments about Baltimore (a city roughly as dangerous as the countries from which caravan members are coming and receiving asylum due to the high murder rate, e.g., in Guatemala).

Here’s a suggestion for readers: When a righteous person on Facebook denounces Trump the Racist over this, offer to pay for a house or apartment in a median Baltimore neighborhood and see if he or she is willing to move in. (Baltimore itself may not have great jobs for the coastal elites who display maximum virtue on Facebook, but it is within practical commuting distance of high-paying work in the D.C. suburbs and therefore an inability to work is a not an excuse).

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To see how many folks would defriend me on Facebook, I decided to stay at the Trump Hotel (#1 ranked on TripAdvisor) during a recent business trip to D.C.

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The hotel is located in one of the most impressive buildings in Washington, D.C., the 1899 Old Post Office. This became derelict by the 1970s and a 1983 revival attempt failed to turn it into a viable shopping mall. Trump leased it in 2013, fixed it up, and opened it as a hotel just in time for the 2016 coup d’etat (in which the rightful heiress to the U.S. throne failed to obtain it).

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The ornate Trump style for which even he has mocked himself (see this 2004 episode of Saturday Night Live: “This place looks like the Liberace Museum”; “Who did your decorating? Saddam Hussein?”) works pretty well in an ornate Victorian-era building. Bring on the gold leaf!

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Basic rooms are about $400/night (roughly 20 percent cheaper than comparably luxurious hotels). A pet is $50 extra. The bathroom featured enough marble to entomb a Communist leader (Bernie Sanders will eventually have his mausoleum here?).

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A shaving kit was provided quickly and graciously by the front desk. The included razor was a three-blade Gillette, thus linking the Trump brand to a fight against toxic masculinity and to a celebration of transgenderism. Performance was truly terrible compared to anything made by Dorco.

The gym was huge (by hotel standards), with a full selection of weights, cardio, and other equipment. It was usually empty. Sadly, the gym restroom was not marked “all gender”:

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Food in the hotel is served in the main glassed-over courtyard room. Breakfast is great, at typically high luxury hotel prices. The evening steakhouse is superb, with waitstaff who are obviously quite serious about cuisine. The Trump Organization does seem to have a knack for hiring great people. Everyone in the hotel is welcoming.

One nit: The courtyard, and therefore restaurants, is suffused with a soft techno-style thumping music. This might make sense at a W Hotel (which I can’t stand!) or in Miami, but Mozart string quartets would make a lot more sense given the decor.

My Facebook friends were outraged as predicted. A national bank “community relations” executive told me that the Trump hotels were her favorite and she would always try to get a room in a Trump property for any business trip to a city where the empires. She is even more passionate about her love for Obama and Hillary, however, and stopped patronizing Trump hotels in 2016.

A DC-based lawyer with whom I work said that he was a regular drinks/dining customer at the Trump D.C. hotel, but has shied away since Trump won the election.

Given that the intensity of Trump hatred among Democrats is much stronger than the intensity of Trump love among Republicans, I wonder if the narrative that Trump hotels are getting a boost in business from his presidency is false. Maybe there are some folks who think it is fun to be a Trump customer and perhaps there are some foreigners who think that Trump will do their bidding if they are regular guests. But these have to be outweighed by those who want to demonstrate their virtue by never setting foot in a Trump-named enterprise again.

(A friend at a local Harvard Club event was listening to a talk about negotiating difficult deals. The speaker said that one had to find something to “appreciate” about the person on the other side. Once that bond had been made it might be possible to make progress. As an example, then, he asked a woman in the audience “What can you appreciate about Donald Trump?” She answered immediately, and in a huff: “Nothing.” It doesn’t seem as though she will be a customer of Trump D.C. any time soon!)

Democrats have not explained how the influence would work. I would have loved it if the room had included a doorknob hang tag with the guest’s desired change to federal regulations (my pick: FAR 135.160!).

Some more views….

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Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/09/28/presidential-debate-thoughts-did-trump-miss-some-simple-answers/ (my previous stay in a Trump hotel coincided with the first Presidential debate of 2016)

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… as told by the New York Times and the Boston Herald.Pictures of the physical papers, courtesy of an FBO:

One difference is that the Trump-obsessed NYT put this story at the top left of the front page while the Herald buried it within the interior of the paper, saving the front page for local stories.

For folks who experienced this in person or on TV, how was the show in D.C. that got American newspapers so excited?

(Also, I think this is a perfect example of why living in the Washington, D.C. is great. Americans in Hawaii, Alaska, Kansas, etc., get taxed to pay for a free air/tank-show that can be consumed only by those who are physically in D.C.)

Separately, why do we have human-occupied tanks as part of our military? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have robotic/remote-controlled vehicles? Also, what chance do tanks stand against far more nimble anti-tank helicopters and airplanes (e.g., the Mi-24 or the A-10 Warthog)? Is the idea that we use tanks against lightly armed opponents, such as ISIS?

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Here’s a scooter permanently parked on a public sidewalk in Washington, D.C. catty corner from the Trump Hotel (#1 ranked in Trip Advisor!):

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Aside from the female sex symbol with a fist in the middle (does the use of biological sex symbols from Carl Linnaeus’s time show hostility to the transgendered?), the moped reads “Girls Just Wanna Have Fundamental Rights” and “A Girl Has No President”.

[The D.C. government (100 percent Democrats since at least the 1970s) has not seen fit to remove this obstruction to pedestrians. I wonder what would happen if a politically passionate person parked a second protest moped next to this one, reading “Build the Wall that you promised” on one side and a “Deport tens of millions of illegal immigrants that you promised to get rid of” on the other. Would the local officials be as tolerant of this use of public space?]

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