The Real Donald Trump

 All it took was a night at home in the Fortress of Turpitude, a couple of sessions on the golden throne, and Trump was orange, rested and ready.  He had a tough weekend, between golfus interruptus and the indignity of having to read that limp criticism of white supremacy, stumbling over unfamiliar words like "egregious."  And then the haters out in the street yelling about "blood on your hands" or something, those completely full-size manicured hands, no problem with the hands, believe me -- how are people supposed to sleep?  But the marble floors and the oil paintings of fruit, and the very expensive air freshener, and the Filet-o-Fish and chocolate cake, they restoreth his soul. 

So when the fake media started asking questions, not about all the great infrastructure stuff but that riot in Virginia someplace, he was totally ready.  So many bad people on both sides...on both sides...those alt-left people who want to destroy all of our beautiful history, those racists who want to take down the statues of Washington and Jefferson because they were slave-owners.  Those grandstanders quitting the American Manufacturing Council, who do they think they are?  They're probably working for George Soros anyway.  There's been racism for a long time, so it's Obama's fault, like North Korea's missiles and the opioid crisis and the violence in Chicago.  And wire tapps!

Let's be clear.  The fascists who rant about their heritage and history are full of shit.  They select history that supports their hatreds.  All they know of history is what they want to know and can use.  The United States has a far more recent history of violent opposition to fascism.  It's called the Second World War.  There are people living who took part in it, and if you can't find one, try cable TV, where series like The World At War run continually.  Read a book.  We as a nation said "No" in thunder to the kind of racism that David Duke and Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon  -- "a good person," Trump insisted -- want to celebrate and restore.  We did it with a segregated army and a lot of veterans who returned to the same old Jim Crow, and with Japanese-Americans disgracefully locked up in concentration camps, and with Jewish citizens careful to portray the war as anything but a fight against anti-Semitism, but somehow we did it.  We are trying, inch by inch, to pull ourselves out of the muck that Robert E. Lee and the other traitors represent.  We were, until today.

I think there's far too much fuss about symbols like statues.  Symbols only have the power we give them.  A statue of Jefferson Davis would just be a guy in a frock coat if the social order Davis fought for had been snuffed out in the 1860s rather than maintained for another century.  Most of these statues were erected long after the Civil War, during the Klan resurgence in the early twentieth century; they aren't about memorializing the past, they're about controlling the future.  The flag of treason was run up most flagpoles only in the 1960s, as a retort to civil rights. 

The Justice Department is demanding the names of people who visited DisruptJ20.org, a website where the Inauguration Day demonstrations were organized.  It has no interest in investigating right-wing terrorists.  The EPA, largely in secret, is rolling back every Obama regulation it can find that protected water and air.  The FCC is barreling through approval for Sinclair Broadcasting, an outfit that thinks Fox News is too mainstream.  Thousands of Americans have already been purged from voting rolls because they haven't voted in several years, though it isn't clear how this feeds into Trump's favorite lie about "millions" of illegal voters.  These things are real.  They aren't some birdshit-encrusted Johnny Reb on a sleepy courthouse square. 

Forget the damn statues.  Pull down the monsters.