Trump pledged to roll back protections for transgender students. They’re flooding crisis hotlines

1 of 3 |

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump walks from the podium after speaking at a campaign rally at Lee’s Family Forum, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024, in Henderson, Nev. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

2 of 3 |

FILE – Protesters advocating for transgender rights and healthcare stand outside of the Ohio Statehouse, Jan. 24, 2024, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Patrick Orsagost, File)

3 of 3 |

FILE – Jude Armstrong and fellow Benjamin Franklin High playwriting class students perform their play, “The Capitol Project,” on the steps of the Louisiana Capitol in Baton Rouge, La., March 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

We knew he was going to go to this, but remember the only one talking about trans people was the republicans. Harris never mentioned them. This is totally a manufactured outrage. No one cared before a few religious republicans got talking constantly about it. I think you all need to ask yourself how trans people affect your lives? There are what 1,400 trans people in the country? There are 5 trans kids in sports? There has never been a trans woman sweep the awards at any event yet that was the constant talking point. Trans women who they mistakenly call men / boys are going to steal your daughter’s trophy. But it never happened and they couldn’t show it. How was this something people voted to switch the election on? Think on it right wing voters on how you were played. So silly and stupid. Plus the religious people now in charge of the military intend to remove trans people and gay people. That will not only harm readiness because the military keeps saying it doesn’t affect the readiness at all. I know from experience that if you remove the LGBTQ+ from the military, it will gut the military entirely and that will harm readiness. Hugs

By JOCELYN GECKER and SHARON LURYE

Updated 12:50 AM EST, November 13, 2024

Transgender youth in the United States have been flooding crisis hotlines since the election of Donald Trump, who made anti-transgender themes central to his campaign. Many teens worry about how their lives could change once he takes office.

During his presidential bid, Trump pledged to impose wide-ranging restrictions and roll back civil rights protections for transgender students. And his administration can swiftly start work on one major change: It can exclude transgender students from Title IX protections, which affect school policies on students’ use of pronouns, bathrooms and locker rooms.

One ad that aired over 15,000 times crystallized Trump’s stance on rights for transgender and nonbinary Americans: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

For one Alabama teen, the ad seemed to paint transgender and nonbinary people as a threat to society. The weekend before Election Day, the 16-year-old teen, who identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns “he” and “they,” called a crisis hotline at the Rainbow Youth Project. The group that serves LGBTQ+ young people has received more than 5,500 calls to its crisis hotline in the past 10 days, up from the 3,700 calls it typically gets every month.

The teen was in despair and struggling with suicidal thoughts, according to his mother, Carolyn Fisher. She said she hadn’t realized the depth of her child’s depression and how painful it was for him to see political ads that felt like a personal attack.

With the help of crisis counselors, Fisher said her teen has begun feeling better. But bullying at school has gotten worse, with some students telling her child Trump is going to make him “go back in the closet,” Fisher said.

”The kids who have taunted him are now proud of themselves, and they rub it in,” she said.

Opposition to transgender rights was a focal point of Trump’s campaign: Republican ads attacking political opponents over transgender or LGBTQ+ issues have aired over 290,000 times on network TV since March 2023, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact.

The messaging may have resonated with many Americans. More than half of voters overall — and the vast majority of Trump supporters — said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters nationwide.

President Joe Biden’s administration expanded recognition of transgender rights just this year. Interpretation of Title IX, a landmark sex discrimination law, is largely up to the executive branch, although court rulings can affect enforcement.

Originally passed in 1972, Title IX was first used as a women’s rights law. This year, Biden’s administration said the law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, but Trump can undo that. Biden’s new guidance had limited implementation in any case: After a spate of lawsuits, courts had issued injunctions pausing the rule in 26 states.

“Title IX will be a top priority. It is emblematic of all the culture war issues that have been created over the past few years surrounding gender identity versus sex,” said Candice Jackson, a lawyer who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the first Trump administration.

Trump also has said he would ask Congress to pass a bill stating there are “only two genders” and to ban hormonal or surgical intervention for transgender youth in all 50 states. Most Republican-controlled states already have banned gender-affirming health care for transgender youth under age 18 or 19, and several have adopted policies limiting which school bathrooms trans people can use.

While Biden’s election-year guidance did not extend to transgender students in sports, Trump has promised to end “boys in girls’ sports.” The administration likely would “approach these issues from a traditional understanding” of what Title IX has meant, “with a biological, binary understanding of sex,” said Bob Eitel, who served during the first Trump administration as a senior counselor to the education secretary.

In the U.S., 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender and another 2.2% question their gender, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released last month.

The survey found 72% of transgender and gender-questioning teens experienced persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness in the past year. These teens also reported higher rates of bullying at school compared with peers. About 1 in 4 transgender students said they had attempted suicide in the past year, the CDC said.

LGBTQ+ advocates are mobilizing to address the despair they see rising among transgender and nonbinary youth. The Rainbow Youth Project, for one, has increased virtual peer groups and town halls so LGBTQ+ youth can connect. Another organization, It Gets Better, has focused on reaching young people online through social media platforms like Twitch and YouTube to create supportive environments even if legal protections are rolled back, said Brian Wenke, the group’s executive director.

Across the country, particularly in conservative areas, LGBTQ+ youth are discussing whether it would be safer to live somewhere else.

Jude Armstrong, a transgender high school senior in New Orleans, has led protests against Louisiana laws that regulated pronoun usage and discussions of gender and sexuality in the classroom. With the potential for federal changes on the horizon, Armstrong, 17, said he has thought of going to school in the United Kingdom, but worries about leaving behind the queer culture and history he loves at home.

“How do you feel like you’re protecting your own community when you’re leaving that community and going to another country?” he asked.

FILE – Jude Armstrong and fellow Benjamin Franklin High playwriting class students perform their play, “The Capitol Project,” on the steps of the Louisiana Capitol in Baton Rouge, La., March 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

Alejandro Jimenez, a sophomore at Texas State University, dreams of being a theater teacher in Texas. He knows how important it is for trans kids to see someone like them in the classroom. Now, he’s not sure if he’ll stay in his home state.

Already, tensions have risen on his campus in a way that makes him feel unsafe. The day after the election, two protestors held up signs that said, “Homo sex is sin” and “Women are property.”

“I feel it’s my duty to stay here, but I’m scared of being pushed out,” said Jimenez, who is transgender.

Under the new Trump administration, advocates worry efforts anywhere to accommodate transgender and nonbinary students could face scrutiny. Trump’s platform called for pulling federal funding for any school pushing “gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

“It sounds really dystopian to say that trying to be more inclusive could actually result in punishment from the federal government. But that is a risk,” said Elana Redfield, federal policy director for the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

With so much uncertainty, Eli, an 18-year-old trans college student in New York, stressed the importance of community, especially online for youth who feel concerned right now.

“You are not alone,” said Eli, an ambassador for It Gets Better, who asked to be identified only by his first name for safety reasons. “We will come out the other side. There are queer adults who have lived long and happy lives, and you will get there too.”

A special request from me.

I have posted and told people in email or comments about my friend kamyk who is a fellow abuse survivor. He was kidnapped at age 7, trained and abused to be a sex toy for wealthy men. Then for some reason no one will admit to he was returned to his family after months of being used and abused, filmed and made to do sex acts with adults, other kids, and dogs. He then was abused all his childhood until he became an adult and then sadly was pimped out and sexually abused until at 40 he escaped and started a life trying to understand himself / what happened to him.

Some background for those that don’t know and I have his permission to share this much. He was born premature and with an intestine system not fully formed and so he had intestinal troubles and pain all his life. It effected his bowl movements badly which was bad when he was being abused. He had diverticulitis which went bad and became full blown diverticulosis. That means the pockets formed on the outside of the intestine and attached to it forming a pocket got super infected and then burst. One burst into his bladder. During the time his infected pockets ruptured, his pain in his lower intestines got really bad and he developed a high fever of 104. He was taken to a walk into care which sent him to the hospital. They admitted him and shortly he had what they called a dirty surgery. That was when they couldn’t clean his system out and they couldn’t get a scope inside him because his intestines were so inflamed. They had to remove his sigmoid colon.

After the surgery he had a bad incident where a person ordered him up out of bed and ignored his pleas to get help from the nurse. That caused his abdominal wound to open up among other things. He was put in the ICU. He was taken from the ICU and placed in a specialty care facility to further heal. I tell you all of this because I have a request for my followers who care.

When he talks to me he is very unhappy, he feels trapped, he feels unworthy to live, he feels depressed, he is lonely. This afternoon his sister reached out to me and asked me to ask those that knew him and my friends to send him get well cards. She felt he needed to be flooded with love. I contacted those on the Male Survivor site I have email addresses for who have asked me to keep them informed and asked them to forward the message to the site. But they have a strict rule against posting addresses of survivors so that might be hard.

I am asking you who would care to do so, to please send him a card or well wishes to the address I will put below. You don’t need to be specific or even mention all I wrote. Just tell him you heard about his situation and that he was in recovery from Scottie and wanted to send him a get well message. Or anything like that. You people all care about others so may know far better how to write a get well message, I admit I am sort of a klutz or clueless at that stuff, Ron does it for us. On those kinds of things I don’t understand or function well.

Thank you to everyone. I used to spend hours at night listening to him cry out his anguish as new memories of his abuse surfaced. I was doing for him what Randy did for me in 2014 when I had my emotional breakdown for the same reasons. But now he needs more than someone to listen, he needs to know people care about him. Thank you. Hugs

Select specialty hospital
Attn: Kamyk Robinson
8049 South Ave room 103
Youngstown Ohio 44512

Today in Good, almost Karmic, News

You Cannot Make This Up: The Onion Buys InfoWars

I am so tired of the lies about immigrants to please the maga bastards.

OK this is me just ranting before bed. Sorry. See I was an abused kid. Most of you who come here already know and don’t need any extra help in that to show you how badly I was abused. So I don’t need to show you more than my occasionally over the top ranting about my childhood abuse or the republicans claiming the republicans are stealing kids at the border … which is really what the republicans did. They separated parents from children and then gave the children to Christian adoption agencies to sell for profit. I wonder how their god feels about that. But please let’s keep talking about how Biden lost all these kids … who were never lost. Does any one else mind they are doing this????? Because as a human trafficked sexually abused and traded person … I fucking sure DO! Hugs.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-misinformation-migrant-children-missing-7ab0cea2fd2238346197429e952baa8b

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2024-10-02/fact-focus-claims-that-more-than-300-000-migrant-children-are-missing-lack-context

I am so very very tired and sorry if I hurt anyone tonight. It just hurts what the republicans are doing and keep doing. They hurt adults … They hurt kids. They care for no one.

I wrote this post days ago and fell asleep before I could publish it. Hugs

Peace & Justice History 11/13:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november13

Fact Check: Did Kamala Harris Lose More Than 325,000 Migrant Children?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/fact-check-did-kamala-harris-lose-more-than-325-000-migrant-children/ar-AA1rcC4F

I am so tired of this stupid lie. The right / republicans keep using it because the children they stole from parents at the border back during tRump’s term have never been found and returned to their parents. That is what this asshole false claim is about. Here are the facts. And also notice that the time frame includes tRump’s first term! Want to know why this pisses me off so much !!! Because as an abused kid I could have been saved if people had cared enough to do it. Instead the republicans do this shit that helps no child, helps no kid. Hugs

Kamala Harris is expected to visit the U.S.-Mexico border during a trip to Arizona this week as the Vice President attempts to win over voters on immigration policy ahead of the November election

Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted Harris over the number of border crossings during the Biden administration, highlighting the role handed to her by the president to investigate the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle of Central America.

Trump went after Harris again earlier this week during a rally in Pennsylvania when he accused her of losing hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who had entered the country.

Kamala Harris speaks during a press conference at El Paso International Airport, on June 25, 2021 in El Paso, Texas. Donald Trump has claimed the Vice President is responsible for the disappearance of 325,000 migrant children. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images© PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

The Claim

At a speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on September 23, 2024, Donald Trump claimed that Kamala Harris had lost more than 325,000 migrant children.

“She [Kamala Harris] lost more than 325,000 migrant children,” Trump said.

“They’re gone, nobody knows where they are. Many of them are dead, many of them are in sex trade, many of them, but many of them are dead, they’ve been trafficked, they’ve been raped. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand children are missing.”

The Facts

Donald Trump’s claim is wrong with some caveats.

It appears his claim is based on an

August 2024 audit by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) that uncovered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) statistics on unaccompanied migrant children (UCs).

Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, ICE transferred over 448,000 unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). After apprehension by the Department of Homeland Security, children are transferred by ICE to ORR.

ORR handles the care and custody of these children awaiting immigration hearings. Care and custody include placing children in shelters or with a sponsor. ICE is responsible for managing immigration cases, and the audit showed the agency struggled to monitor the whereabouts of many of these children after their release from ORR custody.

ICE reported that more than 32,000 children had failed to appear for scheduled immigration court hearings between 2019 and 2023. ICE also failed to serve Notices to Appear (NTAs) on 291,000 children, leaving them without scheduled court dates and outside the formal immigration process.

The “more than 325,000” figure appears to be a combination of the 291,000 children who had not been issued a court date and the 32,000 who did not appear for scheduled dates, off by a couple of thousand.

Crucially, the main figure to focus on is the 32,000 children who missed their court date, the audit noting that ICE “was not able to account for the location of all UCs who were released by HHS and did not appear as scheduled in immigration court.”

The audit also said that failure to send an NTA could limit the chances of maintaining contact when children are released from ORR custody, adding ICE did not always inform ORR about the failure to appear in court.

“Similarly, when ICE does not share information with HHS regarding UCs who did not appear for hearings, HHS personnel are unable to determine if UCs need wellness checks or post-release services for individuals at an increased risk of being trafficked,” the report stated.

“Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”

However, Trump combined the figures even though the audit did not say that the 291,000 who had not been issued an NTA were lost.

The report also does not say that ICE could not find all 32,000 children who had not appeared in court. ICE is not a child welfare authority either; as explained here and in previous Newsweek fact checks, unaccompanied minors are placed into the care of sponsors if available which ORR is meant to monitor. Although there have been concerns regarding the risk of exploitation in this system, the context of who carries responsibility here is important.

Furthermore, the OIG audit covered cases between fiscal years 2019 and 2023. Although more children were transferred into ORR custody between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, Trump’s administration oversaw transfers during the 2019 and 2020 periods and part of 2021.

Newsweek has contacted media representatives for ICE, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the White House via email for comment.

Trump also claimed during his speech that “many” of the children were “dead”, “in sex trade”, and “raped.” The report does not make that conclusion. While the OIG report mentions exploitation vulnerability, it does not support Trump’s claim.

The Ruling

False.

Trump’s claim is based on an audit that showed between fiscal years 2019-2023 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had reported that more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not appeared in court for immigration proceedings. The audit found that ICE “was not able to account for the location” of all these children.

The audit also said ICE had not issued orders for 291,000 children to appear in court.

Trump appears to have combined these two figures to try to make 325,000. The audit did not state that the 291,000 without court orders were missing, nor did it say that all 32,000 children could not be located. ICE is not a child welfare authority and unaccompanied migrant children are placed in shelters or with a sponsor by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is meant to monitor placements.

The audit monitored reporting under the Trump and Biden administrations.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team

FACT FOCUS: Claims that more than 300,000 migrant children are missing lack context

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-misinformation-migrant-children-missing-7ab0cea2fd2238346197429e952baa8b

By MELISSA GOLDIN

Updated 6:29 PM EST, October 2, 2024

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have recently claimed that hundreds of thousands of migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied are missing, then criticized the border policies of the Biden administration and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, repeated the claim during Tuesday night’s debate.

“We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” he said as he met Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in what is likely the last debate of the 2024 presidential campaign.

But immigration experts say the claims regarding missing migrant children lack significant context.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: The Biden administration has lost more than 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children.

THE FACTS: This claim misrepresents information in an August report published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, which faulted Immigration and Customs Enforcement for failing to consistently “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” once they are released from federal government custody.

The report noted that more than 291,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not, as of May 2024, received a notice to appear in court. Additionally, more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children got a notice to appear but then failed to show up for immigration court hearings. Those figures came from ICE and covered a period from October 2018 to September 2023. During that period there were a total of 448,820 unaccompanied children released by ICE to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.

But experts say it is a stretch to refer to roughly 300,000 children as “lost” or “missing.”

“This is not a ‘missing kids’ problem; it’s a ‘missing paperwork’ problem,” Jonathan Beier, associate director of research and evaluation for the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program, wrote in an email.

Plus, President Joe Biden only entered the White House partway through this period. It includes approximately 15 months when Trump was president and does not specify how many children arrived in the U.S. under each president.

Experts say there are many reasons why the children might not have appeared for hearings or received a notice to appear in the first place. For example, they only get a notice to appear when removal proceedings against them have begun, and if ICE hasn’t started that removal process, they wouldn’t have gotten a notice in the first place.

A lack of communication between government agencies could mean a notice is sent to the wrong address if it has been updated with one agency and not another. A child’s guardian may be unable to take them to court, perhaps because they live on the other side of the state.

The report does not provide any explanations.

“All of these factors can explain some of the deficiencies and a conclusion that the children are missing could be very, very premature,” said Raul Pinto, deputy legal director for transparency at the American Immigration Council.

Carmen Hills, an ICE spokesperson, said the agency agreed with the inspector general’s recommendations to improve information sharing within ICE and externally with HHS, but disagreed with the suggestion that the children are missing.

“We are concerned that the report’s findings are misleading and may be misconstrued because they fail to acknowledge key facts,” she said.

Hills said ICE does not generally issue court notices to unaccompanied children “until after they have been placed with sponsors who have been vetted by HHS” so that they can get settled and seek legal help.

Representatives for HHS and Vance did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

An unaccompanied migrant child is defined by the U.S. government as someone who is under 18, lacks lawful immigration status and has no parent or guardian in the country to take custody of them. When they’re apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security, they’re transferred to the HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement.

They are then placed “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interests of the child,” according to the resettlement office. That can mean shelters, foster care or residential treatment centers, among other options. If possible, children are released to sponsors, often family members, who can care for them.

Removal proceedings may be initiated by ICE and the Department of Justice. Some children are able to stay in the U.S. legally if they qualify for asylum, special visas for victims of abuse, trafficking and other crimes, or other types of immigration relief. In those cases, removal proceedings may never start.

___

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.

MELISSA GOLDIN

Goldin debunks, analyzes and tracks misinformation for The Associated Press. She is based in New York.

How Trump’s second term will be different

Trump names Stephen Miller to be deputy chief of policy in new administration

https://apnews.com/article/trump-stephen-miller-policy-immigration-9cc6ad3118779b23bff88022ca5e2260

Please remember what Stephen Miller wants to do. He is a white supremacy Nazi with Jewish heritage. His own family immigrated here. But I am sure they will be safe from the purge as was Melania and her parents. Remember he was behind the separation of children from their parents who cross the border. The parents were deported while the children were given to Christian adoption agencies to sell. Many have never been found. He was behind the lawsuits that wanted any and all DEI programs stopped in the collages and private business claim it displaced white men for every job given to a woman or brown / black person. Remember he wants to end both birthright citizenship and deport people born to undocumented people even though they are US citizen. Remember that during tRump’s first term many non-white people were deported even though they were citizens and had a hard fight getting back into the US. It is back to carry your papers if you are not white and even then it is going to be hard for many. Hugs.

Stephen Miller speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Lititz, Pa., Sunday, Nov. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

By MICHELLE L. PRICE

Updated 12:05 PM EST, November 11, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump is naming longtime adviser Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, to be the deputy chief of policy in his new administration.

Confirming the appointment, Vice President-elect JD Vance posted a message of congratulations on Monday to Miller on X and said, “This is another fantastic pick by the president.” The announcement was first reported by CNN.

Miller is one of Trump’s longest-serving aides, dating back to his first campaign for the White House. He was a senior adviser in Trump’s first term and has been a central figure in many of his policy decisions, particularly on immigration, including Trump’s move to separate thousands of immigrant families as a deterrence program in 2018.

Miller has also helped craft many of Trump’s hard-line speeches, and was often the public face of those policies during Trump’s first term in office and during his campaigns.

Since leaving the White House, Miller has served as the president of America First Legal, an organization of former Trump advisers fashioned as a conservative version of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenging the Biden administration, media companies, universities and others over issues such as freedom of speech and religion and national security.

RELATED COVERAGE

Trump is likely to name a loyalist as Pentagon chief after tumultuous first term

US top climate negotiator: ‘We won’t revert back’ as Trump prepares to take over

Kremlin rejects reports of a conversation last week between Putin and Trump

He was also a frequent presence during Trump’s campaign this year, traveling aboard his plane and often speaking ahead of Trump during the pre-shows at his rallies.

Miller drew large cheers at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden during the race’s final stretch, telling the crowd that, “your salvation is at hand,” after what he cast as “decades of abuse that has been heaped upon the good people of this nation — their jobs stolen looted and from them and shipped to Mexico, Asia and foreign countries. The lives of their loves ones ripped away from then by illegal aliens, criminal gangs and thugs who don’t belong in this country.”

“We stand here today at a crossroads,” he went on, casting the election as “a choice between betrayal and renewal, between self-destruction and salvation, between the failure of America or the triumph of America.”

Because it is not a Cabinet position, the appointment does not need Senate confirmation. ___ Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

MICHELLE L. PRICE

Price is a national political reporter for The Associated Press. She is based in New York.

sanewashing and wishcasting: how the press continues to fail us

by Jeff Tiedrich

if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay Read on Substack (Language NSFW, as always with Jeff Tiedrich’s writing)

the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media utterly failed us during the 2024 campaign season.

New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn came right out and said it: defending democracy is a ‘partisan act,’ and we won’t do it — and, fuck us all, the press kept their word, and didn’t do it. they enthusiastically put their fingers on the scale for Donny Convict.

arguably, the media’s worst transgression was the sanewashing — the cleaning-up of Donny’s incomprehensible blitherings, to hide his obvious cognitive disintegration and make him sound coherent.

a minutes-long disjointed word-salad about how tariffs on Chinese goods were going to lower the cost of childcare became “a major economic speech.”

Donny’s inability to keep his increasingly-demented mind on the topic at hand — his crazypants pinballing from they’re eating the dawgs to Hannibal Lecter wants to have you for dinner to would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted — was explained away by Donny as his brilliant “weave.”

that explanation, to The New York Times, “did all sort of seem to make sense.”

post-election, the media has mostly moved on from sanewashing, and has now jumped feet-first into wishcasting.

what’s wishcasting? over to you, Wiktionary.

[Wishcasting is] the act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion; a wishful forecast.

sure enough, the media has now gone into overdrive, churning out piece after piece in which they promise us that if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay.

not twelve hours after the election had been called for Donny, the Times wasted no time in assuring us that the election of a vindictive fascist is an amazing opportunity for vindictive fascism not to happen.

as I wrote three days ago,

the New York Times can fuck all the way off.

what kind of magical, everybody-gets-a-pony thinking is this? just fucking stop it.

did Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat both experience some kind of recent head trauma that has caused them to forget the years 2017 through 2020? Donny’s first presidency was a dumpster fire of corruption, mismanagement and mass death — but somehow now, given a second chance to fuck shit up worse, Donny’s going to bring us an “American renewal”?

anything’s possible, right? overnight, Donny Convict could magically become a wise and fair statesman — also, technicolor pigs could fly out of my ass.

oh my god, the media never stops imagining that Donny is going to somehow become presidential. during his first term — over and over — every time Donny stopped short of taking out his dick and pissing on the floor, the press would fall all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to proclaim him presidential.

spoiler alert: Donny never became presidential. not from the the first time he threw a ketchup-hurling tantrum in the White House, to the moment he absconded back to his Florida golf motel, taking with him boxes of stolen classified documents.

now, what the small-batch artisanal fuck is this?

the premise here is that if we’re respectful to Donny — if we fucking kowtow to him, and stop opposing him — he’ll be nice to us in return. he’ll become — dare I say it? — presidential.

Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery.

Mike Luckovich, explain to the nice people at the Atlantic why they’re living in a fever-swamp fantasy world.

news flash for Newsweek: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are not going to save us.

okay, I will grant that Newsweek may be half right. Lisa Murkowski seems to genuinely loathe Donny, and we can probably count on her to vote against the worst of his fuckery — but Susan Collins? the credulous naïf who assured us over and over again that Donny had learned his lesson, and would never transgress again?

now, let’s bask under some rays of hope from people who aren’t just blindly wishcasting, but are actually offering reasoned arguments.

in the middle of a fairly clear-eyed assessment of the Trumpian horrors to come, the Guardian gives us this:

Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”

Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen,” she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”

here’s Tom Nichols, in a piece titled Democracy Is Not Over.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

here’s Adam Serwer, from There Is No Constitutional Mandate for Fascism.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

I sure hope to fuck they’re right.

This is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means disengaging with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.