Listen to yourself, Donald. You had a vision; you saw the future. And now, I do: I want a future where you are unpresidented.
A lot of us who respect Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House want to curl up and hibernate for the next four years. Please, let it just be four!
Actually, it could be even fewer. And you could have a hand in it. You’ve probably read how the 25th Amendment to the Constitution might be used to unseat a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Hah! Or not. That diagnosis is untested, and as open to interpretation as a waterboarded confession. Does “unable” refer to physical health? Mental health? How about imprisonment? We could “lock him up” in the White House dungeon with no cell phone and then dislodge him from office because he can’t run the country from there.
Hey Republicans, I’m just sayin’…
One idea gaining traction is that if he came to really, really hate the job, he would quit. I know, I’ve listened to some convincing “no way he’d do that” arguments. But hear me out. This man is so needy that the power of public displays cannot be ignored.
What has pissed him off the most? A Muslim Gold Star father, calling out his hypocrisy. His less-than-half of the popular vote. The size of the Inauguration Day crowd. The noisy Women’s March crowd in Lafayette Park that he woke up to on January 22nd. The leaks.
He may surf your outrage, but you can drown him in personal embarrassment. That’s what #TheIdesOfTrump is about. This is a call to action. We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more!
I cannot find the original post that I’m about to use, so I don’t know who wrote it. But this is quoted in many places across the internet. And now here:
“THE IDES OF TRUMP
On March 15th, each of us will mail Donald Trump a postcard that publicly expresses our opposition to him. And we, in vast numbers, from all corners of the world, will overwhelm the man with his unpopularity and failure. We will show the media and the politicians what standing with him — and against us — means. And most importantly, we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing Donnie that he’s fired.
Each of us — every protester from every march, each congress calling citizen, volunteer, donor, and petition signer — if each of us writes even a single postcard and we put them all in the mail on the same day, March 15th, well: you do the math.
No alternative fact or Russian translation will explain away our record-breaking, officially-verifiable, warehouse-filling flood of fury. Hank Aaron currently holds the record for fan mail, having received 900,000 pieces in a year. We’re setting a new record: over a million pieces in a day, with not a single nice thing to say.
So sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements, and see if your sincerest ill-wishes can pierce Donald’s famously thin skin.
Prepare for March 15th, 2017, a day hereafter to be known as #TheIdesOfTrump Postcards are important here! Regular mail must go through content inspections that slow them down, whereas postcards don’t have such postal obstacles.
Write one postcard. Write a dozen! Take a picture and post it on social media tagged with #TheIdesOfTrump! Spread the word! Everyone on Earth should let Donnie know how he’s doing. They can’t build a wall high enough to stop the mail.
Then, on March 15th, mail your messages to:
President (for now) Donald J. Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
It might just be enough to make him crack.
If you are out of the country, it will take longer to arrive. Figure out the timing so it arrives around March 17th!”
A futile exercise? Perhaps. But I say dig in. It’ll cost you a a few minutes and a few dollars, at most. Size is no problem: I discovered this gem looking up postcard rates: a First-Class Mail “Large Postcard” can be as big as 11-1/2 inches by 6-1/8 inches by 1/4 inch thick, and it costs just 49 cents to send.
“Regular size” postcards top out at 6” x 4.25” and travel on just 34 cents. It needn’t be a lengthy or erudite message, either:
Hey #FakePresident,
You suck.
You could try a polite-but-firm approach:
Dear coward,
Release your taxes.
Or you could go for a (slightly) longer essay on the man’s deficiencies:
President Drumpf! Loser…
You lost the vote to a girl.
You lost the crowd size to a negro.
You lost your honor to Vladimir Putin.
You’re going to lose all your remaining years to universal hatred.
Your name will define massive failure and hardship.
The only way that you’ll ever win is by cheating.
Your family’s fortune will wither.
Quit while you’re ahead.
Send a postcard. Or tweet to #TheIdesOfTrump and @RealDonaldTrump and @POTUS, no postcard required. Whichever method you choose, take action! We will see results. If you want to be part of a news story that Mr. Trump is forced to watch, along with the rest of the world, then spend a few minutes and a few bucks, and send that message.
I can offer you plenty of reasons to act. But the news is already full of complaints about Trump and his minions. The Elephant In The Room at this moment in history is the Republican Party: they hold all the power. How much of our government are they willing to see destroyed before they act?
Trump’s bogus accusation that Obama tapped his phones during the election has been called “a soft coup.” That’s not the way I heard such a thing described. Imagine an unstable president. (Hah! As if you haven’t already…) The military certainly does. What do they think about the possibility of illegal orders? Or worse, legal but irrational orders.
Resistance is easy on a small scale. You just quietly disobey an order—let’s say, decide on your own to not waterboard that captive. But what about an overt act of war? Let’s say, the order to shoot an Iranian ship out of the water because they flipped off our sailors.
When you get the order to fire, what do you do?
In 1983 a Russian officer named Stanislav Petrov committed a one-man soft coup when a Soviet computer system showed U.S missiles attacking his country. He correctly diagnosed it as a false alarm, and his refusal to respond according to protocol saved us all from a nuclear war. I’d like to thank him personally.
On a smaller scale, do you recall the Republicans’ first act as a Congress, back in January? They killed a special ethics oversight committee, until the public outcry forced them to reinstate it. The loud, angry voices at town halls, of Trump supporters who depend on ObamaCare, have likely doomed any replacement healthcare plan to fail.
What no one is saying but everyone knows: the longer the delay before Ryan and McConnell kill ObamaCare, the more likely it is to survive the long game. Maybe even improve. That’s why their desperate—and hypocritical—“We have to save it now!” is being chanted right now.
Believe it: resistance is not only not futile, it is essential. It is not too early to plan for the 2018 elections. That’s exactly what Barack Obama, Eric Holder and others are doing. Republicans have that year in mind already, too. At a March 4 Republican Party Lincoln Day dinner, Pennsylvania Representative Mike Kelly tried to invent a scapegoat for Trump’s coming failures…
“President Obama himself said he was going to stay in Washington until his daughter graduated. I think we ought to pitch in to let him go someplace else, because he is only there for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to run a shadow government that is going to totally upset the new agenda. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Indeed! Few conspiracy theories do make sense, upon examination.
“And people sit back and they say to me, ‘My gosh, why can’t you guys get this done?’ I say, ‘We’ve got a new CEO, we’ve got some new heads in the different departments, but the same people are there, and they don’t believe that the new owners or the new managers should be running the ship.’”
You got it exactly right, Mr. Kelly. And there’s more: we all remember exactly how cooperative you were during the past eight years. When can I go live in Obama’s shadow country?
Here’s a much-needed last laugh…
Stephen Colbert and a panel of experts estimate the cost of Trump’s “big, beautiful” border wall at $2 trillion:
The Political Apprentice #9
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Ernest Kearney | March 15, 2017
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KUDOS ON THE CALL TO ARMS, MY POSTCARDS ARE OFF AND ON THE WAY.