The Ride Is Over

 

To my conservative friends,

I grew up in what I thought was a pretty liberal town on Long Island. We went to the beach a lot, smoked a bunch of weed, and listened to a lot of hair bands. It was fun. But when I hear from you these days, I realize that many of you have become quite conservative in your lifestyles and political views.

I'm cool with that. I don't appreciate being called a libtard or ignorant or things that I refuse to type because you should be embarrassed to use words like that towards anyone, let alone somebody who passed you a doobie 40 years ago, but, hey, if you've figured out where you stand on faith, taxes, education, immigration and all that real life stuff, that's great. And I accept it.

But I won't let you be suckers anymore. 

Donald Trump is, was, and always has been a con man.

People (like me) make fun of him for going broke running casinos in Atlantic City. But that's not what happened. He pulled a variation on the old "bust out" scam. A mobster loans a business owner some short term money at high interest. When the mark can't pay it back on time, the goons move in and run up bills in his name until he has no credit left and no goodwill, either. The goons move on and leave him holding the bag. Trump figured out how to do this to himself, bleeding money off of his own casinos by using his own businesses to provide services and charging himself exorbitant rates. He always paid himself first and screwed over everyone else. Eventually taxes were overdue and paychecks started bouncing.

He had (and still does) have a nasty habit of stiffing his contractors. Who wouldn't want to get a gig installing marble or cabinetry in Trump Tower? It could set your small company up for life. But when the job was complete, he could always find some flaw in the work and he had his contracts written to allow him to wriggle out of them, sometimes offering pennies on the dollar. The contractors could sue... but he has lawyers on retainer. You might think that it would just be cheaper to cough it up and move on, but there's something wrong in that Lizard Brain of his. He doesn't win unless somebody else loses. Even if that person is Rudy Guliani.

He's never been the self-made success he presents himself as. Only someone with just one foot in reality could call a million dollar gift from his father in the '70's "a small loan". When Forbes did a profile of him back then, he drove the reporter all over New York, showing off his buildings. The problem was they all belonged to Daddy. The reporter didn't check. All of a sudden, he was on the cover of the magazine, being called a billionaire.

The Apprentice? Forget it. He never made any of the decisions on that show (unless he went off script). All the hiring and firing was done by Mark Burnett , who often had to rearrange manufactured plotlines to make Trump look decisive. Poor Meat Loaf.

He doesn't even build things anymore. He and his family just find foreign investors to finance buildings and they license the prestige associated with his name to them. He doesn't even own the hotel in DC.

But he's been so good for (fill in the blank)!

That's what he says. Trump is the guy who sees a parade and jumps in front of the marching band and acts like he's leading it. It took a long time for the economy to improve after the Bush Years. It wasn't going to take a nose dive after Obama. It continued afterwards on the same trajectory. Yes the stock market went up, but after his tax cuts, so did the deficit and national debt. And stock market gains only benefit people playing the market. Most people don't.

He's tougher on Russia than anybody? Tell that to our soldiers with bounties on their heads in the middle east. Tell it to our intelligence agencies who can't get him to even ask Putin about hacking us.

He's beating China on trade with tariffs ? American companies pay those tariffs and then pass the costs on to us in the form of higher prices. They can't be forced to buy domestic if the products or raw materials are no longer produced here. 

Have we turned the corner on the virus yet? if he'd spent as much time coordinating a national policy as he did blaming China and Fauci and pitting the states against each other in Operation Thunderdome, we might have. We'll never know. But we do know that 380,000 Americans are dead.

And now seven more. Three of them cops, two who took their own lives after the insurrection Last week's fiasco sits squarely on his shoulders. BLM didn't push those losers through the doors. He did. Antifa didn't organize the protest. They make the Democrats look like a precision drill team. It's on him. He wound them up and turned them loose and went back to the White House to watch the results on Fox.

Seven people are dead because he couldn't stop lying. And he knew just who he was lying to. Ordinary people that had faith in him, that he could play like a fiddle, because he trained them to trust him and not their own lying eyes.

No matter what he says, he didn't win this election. The reason Democrats came up with seven million more votes is that they got seven million more people off their couches and to the polls. You know, all those people who sat on their asses in 2016 because they thought he'd never beat Hillary. Well , they've been watching this train wreck for four years. This time they were ready. 

While I'm at it...

He can't handle stairs.

He can't close an umbrella.

He spent Thanksgiving golfing and left his wife and son alone.

When he got home, he probably ate a bucket of KFC in front of Fox News. 

He's not good at wrangling toilet paper.

He can't resist punching down, even though he's the most powerful man in the world.

When champion athletes visit the White House, he insults them by serving cold, fast food.

He has no sense of humor unless he's laughing at someone else's discomfort. 

He never had a pet.

He doesn't pay royalties for the songs he plays at rallies. 

He ignores the wishes of the artists who want him to stop.

He has no clue what those Village People songs are actually about. 

He should have asked Roy Cohn.

He's a bully and a liar and a serial abuser devoid of empathy. 

Did I mention he plays golf?
And cheats?

And he can't dance.

This has been the clown face of America for the last four years.

I know it's hard to admit. But you must have felt it, over and over again. You got conned, like falling for that Ethiopian Prince's email. He's Starbuck in The Rainmaker. He's Harold Hill in The Music Man. But worse. He's a character out of a David Mamet play who will not only screw the mark, but also screw over his partners and walk away whistling.

The hardest thing about being conned is admitting that you were. The mark hangs onto the illusion rather than admit that they were taken for a ride.

Admit it.

You were taken for a ride. 

Now, the ride is over.