A Threshold (Trumping Transformation)

#trumpswindle | #wellduh

There is breaking report today via NBC News explaining that Donald Trump’s lawyers are reportedly negotiating with Robert Mueller and the Office of Special Counsel, both for the terms of a presidential interview and in hopes of avoiding one altogether. We ought to mark the point simply as a matter of threshold: Last year, or, that is to say, last month, we heard from the president’s lawyers an expectation that Mueller and OSC would be wrapping up their investigation and clearing the president. Today we hear chatter that they are maneuvering to drag out the inquiry by trying to keep Special Counsel Mueller away from President Trump.

Say what we will about inevitability, but the transformation would seem to mark a threshold.

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Image note: President Donald Trump reacts to the song as he arrives at a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, Tuesday, 22 August 2017, in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

Welker, Kristen, Carol E. Lee, Julia Ainsley, and Hallie Jackson. “Initial talks underway about Trump interview in Mueller Russia probe”. NBC News. 8 January 2018.

A Particularly Straightforward Example of an Extraordinarily Mundane―That Is To Say, Neurotic―Rhetorical Accident

This is one of those straightforward distillations; Alli Joseph, for Salon:

“Once Obama called all people from Texas ‘swamp crazy,’ people pretty much decided to vote for Trump next time,” she said matter-of-factly. There’s a germ of truth there: At an Ohio Democratic dinner on Oct. 13, President Obama said that some Texas officials who had believed that a routine military exercise might lead to martial law belonged to the “swamp of crazy.”

See how that works?

No, really; it’s an essential transformation that, in other circumstances, actually looks like people rushing to throw in with undesirable outcomes in order to complain that the politician they already don’t like has somehow insulted them. It comes up quite a bit, actually.

This is just a particularly straightforward example.

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Joseph, Alli. “Deep in the heart of TrumpLand―even Texans want our national nightmare to be over”. Salon. 30 October 2016.

The Heart of the Fight

Warren Blumenfeld writes:

History is replete with groups and individuals facing colossal odds for simply expressing their truth, and for that, they were often forced to pay the ultimate price. Governments and powerful individuals have devised ways of silencing opposition for the purpose of maintaining and extending its control and domination. They commit genocide upon the true human liberators, the profits, the visionaries who advocate for a just and free world. These visionaries, who were persecuted in their own time, have achieved not only exoneration, but more importantly, have become venerated as the visionaries they truly are.

The list of who we have lost along the way is a tortuous exercise in heartbreak. The list of who we have yet to lose is a terrifying mystery.

This can be the year. This should be the year. We can save our world from ourselves. We have every reason to, and we’re well past out of excuses for not.

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Blumenfeld, Warren. “Trans* People Murdered for Truth Telling”. Tikkun Daily. 16 February 2015.