All hail Augustus Trumpus! All hail the American Putin, whom none can criticize! All hail the Great All Knowing One, who reveals “realities” that are not there and finds “facts” that mere mortals cannot detect.
Once again, The Amazing Donald has demonstrated his phantasmagoric power of perception, having a new outcome in November’s election that others haven’t seen. Trump has been greatly perturbed by the official results, which showed that while he won the Electoral College majority, he was not the people’s choice. Instead, Hillary Clinton won the popular ballot by a margin of more than two million votes. Growing increasingly furious at this affront to his supernatural sense of self, the master of factual flexibility went on Twitter with an amazing revelation: “I won the popular vote,” decreed our incoming tweeter in chief.
Wow, how did he turn a two million vote loss into a glorious victory? “I won,” he tweeted, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Wow again! Millions? You’d think such a massive conspiracy – with millions of illegal voters in line at thousands of precincts – would’ve been noticed by election officials, GOP poll watchers and the media. How did Trump find this truly incredible fact?
It seems he channeled it
from the mysterious tweetasphere, specifically from a Texas conspiracy
hound who had earlier posted a tweet declaring: “We have verified more
than three million votes cast by noncitizens.” But this guy turns out to
be part of a right-wing fringe group chasing non-existent voter frauds –
exactly none of those three million “illegal” votes have been verified.
Stunned that Trump would cite his tweet as proof, he asked sheepishly:
“Isn’t everything on Twitter fake?” Get used to it – fakery is reality
for America’s next president. Unfortunately for us, it is not just
fakery that we will have to get used to because President Trumpus
happens to have a real knack for irony as well.
Trump,
who campaigned as populist champion of the working-class, promising
that – by golly – he was going to take on Wall Street and the corporate
elites. But the bitter irony for the working class is that they now see
what he meant – he’s literally “taking on” the moneyed powers by taking
them onboard his administration. For example, he’s brought in Wall
Street billionaires to fill the three top economic policy positions in
his cabinet.
Then
there’s Betsy DeVos, the billionaire heiress to the scandal-plagued
Amway fortune. Her life’s work has been trying to defund and privatize
the public
schools that working-class and middle-class people count on and to
eliminate the working-class and middle-class jobs of teachers and
support staff. Her new job with Trump? Secretary of Education, where
she’ll now use our public money to try killing off our public education
system. Add to the list Myron Ebell, the honcho of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute – a corporate front group funded by fossil fuel
profiteers like Exxon and the Koch brothers – where he pushed
relentlessly to gut the Environmental Protection Agency. Where’s he now?
Heading Trump’s EPA transition team.
Also,
more than half of those making up The Donald’s Department of Defense
transition team have been executives or lobbyists for such military
contractors as Boeing corporation. Overall, according to watchdog group
Public Citizen, threefourths of Trump’s transition teams – which are
organizing, staffing and shaping his new government – come from the
corporate world. Not a single working-class populist has been allowed a
seat at his power table.
As
America’s working stiffs know, if you’re not at the table, you’re on
the menu. And now we know what Augustus Trumpus will be serving. Trump’s
no populist; he’s a full-time corporatist.