Tag: constitution

Trump reads the Constitution…”It’s like a foreign language!”

1 Comment


Dunce Cap

On March 1, 2017, nearly six weeks after President Trump had raised his right hand and swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, he struggled to read aloud the words of the founding document. A film crew had come to the White House to record the new president reading a section of the Constitution. Trump chose to participate in the HBO production because he did not want to forgo the chance to be filmed for history, and he knew that as the sitting president he would be the documentary’s most important character…

With LED lights on stilts in front of him, Trump took his seat. “You’re lucky you got the easy part,” Alexandra Pelosi [the director] told him cheerfully. “It gets complicated after this.” But the president stumbled, trying to get out the words in the arcane, stilted form the founding fathers had written. Trump grew irritated. “It’s very hard to do because of the language here,” Trump told the crew. “It’s very hard to get through that whole thing without a stumble.” He added, “It’s like a different language, right?” The cameraman tried to calm Trump, telling him it was no big deal, to take a moment and start over. Trump tried again, but again remarked, “It’s like a foreign language.”

“Every time he stumbled, he manufactured something to blame people,” another person in the room recalled. “He never said, ‘Sorry, I’m messing this up.’ [Other] people would screw up and say, ‘Ohhhh, I’m sorry.’ They would be self-effacing. He was making up excuses and saying there were distracting sounds.… He was definitely blaming everyone for his inability to get through it. That was prickly, or childish.” Though stiff, he eventually made it through without any errors.

The Fake President has a perfectly aligned style. Dumb and dumber. Ignorant and unforgiving. Irresponsible and cowardly.

Next goal for reactionaries – mandate funding for religious schools

Leave a comment

Conservatives have spent the past decade warning of the evils of government mandates, how they reduce freedom and damage liberty. But the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is poised to take the cues of far-right legal interests and mandate that states send thousands of taxpayer dollars per pupil to religious schools…

The case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, seeks to overturn a Montana Supreme Court ruling that prohibited money from a voucher program to be put toward private religious schools, consistent with the state’s nearly five-decade ban on state aid for religious purposes. Thirty-seven other states have similar “no aid” provisions. But the plaintiffs, bankrolled by a right-wing organization called the Institute of Justice, are not simply trying to allow public voucher funding for religious institutions; they want to require it.

The case will be heard on Wednesday, January 22.

Keep your eyes and ears open, folks. With the short-focus attention span of American media we’re not likely to hear about anything other than the pantywaist impeachment trial of our Fake President – for the next couple of months. Regardless of the likely rigged verdict promised by Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party.