Josh Carter

Dear President Trump, 

Fuck you.

Insisting that schools open in the middle of a pandemic that is your fault is outrageous. Are you insane?  Your lack of leadership has caused the death of over 135,000 people already. You and your goddamn Republican enablers have become angles of death, and a curse on the American people. Your insistence that schools reopen is just the latest of the outrages inflicted on us. Claiming that children are not generally susceptible to the virus is shocking, but what do you care? How many children are you and your fellow bootlicking Republicans willing to see die? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? You are willing to sit on your sorry ass while 135,000 people died. Are you willing to let 135,000 of our children to die also? How much death does it take for you to open up your eyes and realize that you are in charge? God help us.

There has never been such a lack of presidential leadership in the history of this country. You refused to implement a national policy to fight this plague. You have shirked your duty to protect America from this pandemic. You have failed to lead while the United States as led the world in infections and death from this pandemic. You said that you claim no responsibility for the virus spreading throughout our country. We know that. Your administration has pressured the states to virtually ignore the crisis confronting our nation. You and the goddamn Republican governors who kiss your ass like the craven shits they are have caused the worst public health crisis in history. 

You have made the Republican party a death cult. It’s all about you, isn’t it? The virus is just a hoax, isn’t it? While you play golf and get tested three times a day, ordinary Americans are dying because of your malfeasance. Your Republican governors have fallen into a predictable pattern of denying reality until the dead bodies pile up until even they can no longer ignore the pain and suffering and outrage of their constituents. It is inevitable that Governors in Texas, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida will sooner or later be forced to shut down their states in the face of the deaths of thousands of citizens unfortunate enough to live in their states. How many will die first?

But no. There is no responsibility to be laid at your door, right? It doesn’t bother you a bit that 135,000 Americans have died, does it? It’s all about your reelection, isn’t it? Well, we are not stupid. Those of us who can afford to not send our children and grandchildren back to school are not going to do so just so you can continue to pretend that the virus does not exist. You don’t care for our children but we do. You won’t even wear a goddamn mask.

Mr. President, you and your fellow Republicans are responsible for this plague. An election is coming and you and your fellow Republicans are going to pay for yours and their malfeasance.  It looks like you and your party are going to be flushed down the toilet like unwanted shit. I hope so. I hope I live long enough to vote against you.

Very Truly Yours,
Jeff Carter

The Washington Post has a schadenfreude-tastic article this morning where GOP strategists are concerned that Dear Leader’s baseless attacks against Mail-In Voting might leave the GOP baseless.

The GOP fears that enough dumbass MAGAhats will skip voting this year because their president is attacking the only safe way to vote during a pandemic. Republican candidates are getting blowback from their constituents whenever they advise on how to vote for them by mail. That’s fewer votes for Cory Gardner, Kelly Loeffler, David Perdue, Joni Ernst, Susan Collins, Thom Tills, John Cornyn, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell. Suits the hell out of me.

Trump has made over 60 completely fabricated claims warning about the “fraudulent” nature of voting by mail. As usual, Donald Trump is wrong, and the evidence is negative.

The right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation came out with their most damning evidence about voter fraud in America. Their document Truth about Voter Fraud can be found on the White House’s website. In large-font all-caps against a scary red background, you the reader are first alerted with their summary of “1071 PROVEN INSTANCES OF VOTER FRAUD”. Since 1988… That averages out to what… about 67 per election? So?

Out of this list of 1071 voter fraud cases spanning over three decades, a whopping 70 of them relate to absentee voting. These charges include eye-popping crimes such as the 1988 crime of Mr. Ernest Newton, former state senator of Connecticut, who agreed to pay a civil penalty of $1,000 for assisting in filling out someone else’s absentee ballot.

In the 2016 election, there was precisely ONE case of mail-in voter fraud. The case was in Iowa, where Terri Lynn Rote pleaded guilty for voting for Donald Trump twice.

In contrast, 18,610 votes were not counted in Florida in 2000 due to dimpled or hanging chads. Katherine Harris’s “Scrub List” erred in kicking off about 26,000 eligible voters that were neither felons nor dead. The United States Commission on Civil Rights found that African-Americans made up 11% of Florida 2000 voters and 53% of the uncounted votes. Again, these numbers are for one election in one state. The comparison is not even close.

There are a lot of issues of ballot access in the United States. Voting by mail is a solution, not a problem. The evidence shows overwhelmingly and unambiguously that voting by mail is a great way to vote. Voter fraud is vanishingly small and insignificant in our election system. The embarrassingly low number of cases that The Heritage Foundation uncovered in their 3-decade nationwide search is proof positive. But Trump supporters are immune to evidence by definition. Dear Leader told them it was a problem, so now they think it’s a problem. Surely, politics are in play (gasp!), but according to a recent NYT/Siena College survey, 88% of Biden supporters support expanding vote-by-mail in a pandemic, and 72% MAGAhats oppose it.

New Jersey’s Primary this year was mostly by mail. Five states–Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, and Utah, are completely vote-by-mail. Utah voted for Trump in 2016. Arizona, which went for Trump last time, is about 80% vote-by-mail. Even before Before COVID changed everything, twenty-one states allowed voting by mail to anybody who wanted it. Access has only increased since voting by mail became the obvious public-health-conscious solution to preserving our democracy in a pandemic. Evidence shows that both Democrats and Republicans are elected by mailed-in ballots.

So a funny story about Trump supporters refusing to vote has extremely dire consequences. Trump is amplifying his message of two possible outcomes. Either Trump wins the election, or the election is fraudulent. And if recent surveys of vote-by-mail opposition approximate MAGAhats’ adoption of Trump’s worldview of the 2020 election, we will have a large bloc of people baselessly believing that the election was stolen from Dear Leader.

Absolutely nothing in Trump’s history gives any confidence that he will accept the results of an election where he is the biggest loser on the biggest stage on the planet. He still doesn’t accept the 2016 election that he lost by nearly 3,000,000 votes but still got the office.

Trump knows there is nothing wrong with mail-in ballots. He is attacking elections because he does not want an election. As was true for the past 3 and a half years, Trump fancies himself a dictator, and the dictator is attempting to pre-emptively nullify the election. He is actively, relentlessly, daily, attacking the very fabric of democracy. Nothing less than the peaceful transfer of power hangs in the balance. Trump is unambiguously clear on his position.

News broke that Russia is paying the Taliban bounties for killing American soldiers. Trump responded by attacking the New York Times for reporting it.

I hope that anyone who voted for this shit last time will think long and hard about that sequence before voting for this goddamn traitor again. There is not a lot of evidence that the MAGAhatted are capable of thinking. After all, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 19,128 times, I must be a Trump supporter.

But this one is simple. In the happy times before Trump received the fewest votes and became President, if we found out that Russia is paying a terrorist group to kill American soldiers, we expect the President of the United States to support America.

Not Trump.

“Nobody briefed or told me, [Vice President] Pence or Chief of Staff [Mark Meadows] about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an ‘anonymous source’ by the Fake News . . . Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us. […] nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump administration.”

Trump, via Twitter, June 28, 2020

As usual, none of what he says is true. And also, as usual, the facts are damning and worse than expected. It is not, to use the President’s word against him again, “possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax.”

The most generous explanation is that Trump didn’t know about any of this because Trump installed the two dumbest motherfuckers in America into some of the most critical positions in Washington.

His Chief of Staff is Mark Meadows, a Tea Party lunatic and the former chair of the House Freedom Caucus. His previous accomplishments include ousting John Boehner for being too moderate, shutting down the government thinking that Obama would end Obamacare, angling for the United States Congress to default on America’s debt, and then trying to shut down the government again. He thought that Republicans shutting down the government a second time would make the Democrats look bad.

His Director of National Intelligence is Trump’s lap poodle, John Ratcliffe. He’s an ambulance chaser turned Tea Party blowhard, turned Trump loyalist. Ratcliffe’s National Intelligence resume includes dramatically overstating his involvement in investigating money funneling to Hamas, and completely fabricating a story that he used to arrest 300 “illegals” a day. Ratcliffe was so comically unqualified to run America’s $60,000,000,000 National Intelligence infrastructure that Senate Republicans forced him to withdraw the first time Trump brought it up. Even amongst the Tea Party hivemind, Ratcliffe shows a nearly Trump-level immunity to facts, evidence, logic, and reason. It’s hard to think of a worse person in government to be the DNI, so he’s a perfect catch for the Trump administration. His disingenuousness and bad-faith approach to government fits perfectly.

It is entirely possible, if not reasonable, to conclude that these dumbasses were just too incompetent to receive the information. And if they did receive the information, it would be charitable to assume that they were just too incompetent to figure out what to do with it. In fact, that was precisely the opening party line, with a dig at the media, of course.

“We are still investigating the alleged interference referenced in media reporting and we will brief the President and Congressional leaders at the appropriate time. […] Unfortunately, the unauthorized disclosures now jeopardize our ability to find out the full story with respect to these allegations.”

“The selective leaking of any classified information disrupts the vital interagency work to collect, assess, and mitigate threats and places our forces at risk. It also, simply put, a crime.”

DNI Ratcliffe, through a statement on Monday, June 28, 2020

The Director of National Intelligence should know that when the government so maliciously aligns itself against American interests that they’ll let Russia get away with paying terrorist groups to kill American soldiers, the American intelligence officers will go to the press. This is precisely why the First Amendment protects the press. And now we know that the truth, and the truth is horrifying.

We know from none other than John Bolton that the White House knew about this since March 2019. Trump was briefed again and again since February. Updates were in his PDB since this Spring. Trump has known for over a year… a year (!!!) that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill American Soldiers.

But the White House is playing dumb.

A specific message for Moscow? No, because he has not been briefed on the matter.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, June 30, 2020

Still not briefed? We’re supposed to believe that shit? Think of all of the times that Trump has protected Russia since March 2019. It feels like 400 years ago, but March 22, 2019, is when Barr received the Mueller report and March 24 is when he presented his “findings”. On May 3, Trump calls Putin and jabbers for an hour, braging about the end of the Mueller investigation. On June 28, Trump and Putin meet privately at the G20 for 90 minutes, and Trump proudly proclaims to the press that the topic of their conversation is “none of your business.” On July 25, the Republican-controlled Senate Intel report found that Russia penetrated all 50 states in their attack on our election. Trump’s response, that very day, was to call the President of Ukraine to extort them, in part, to invent evidence that rogue actors in Ukraine were behind the 2016 election attack instead of Russia. On July 31, Trump and Putin again share a phone call that nobody knew about until Russia reported on it. On August 20, Trump proclaims that Russia should be back in the G8, which is a call he has repeated and repeated up until just last month!

Trump’s propaganda network at Fox News can claim that there is “no corroborating” evidence, and our nakedly partisan DNI John Ratcliffe can bitch about the damaging “leaks”. None of their arguments stand up to actual financial evidence and the chorus of career intelligence professionals, both inside and outside the United States. The only damaging thing about the leaks is that it exposes, once again, that the President of the United States is the worst possible person in this country to hold this office.

Get this fucking traitor out of the White House.