An Eight-Year-Old Writes the GOP

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

[For a note on Elizabeth Warren’s haymaker in South Carolina, updated today 2/27, click here.]

Dear GOP,

I don’t know what “GOP” means, but I know you like Trump. You say you don’t like him, but you back him up.

He’s hard on us and lots of the people who live in our neighborhood. You let him do bad things. You cheer him on.

To me, you look like a big gang. Trump leads your gang. You do what he says, but you say you don’t like to. You know he’s a bad man, but you do what he says.

That’s what gangs do, right? They do what the boss man says, even if it’s bad. Does that make you bad, too?

Trump is often mean to girls. He’s mean to big girls and little girls. My Mom says that’s not good. What does your Mom say? What does your wife say?

You say Trump made us rich, or at least kept us from getting poor. My Dad says it wasn’t Trump, but the black guy with the funny name, who dug us out of the hole that the banks put us in. My Dad got a good job while he was President. Now my Dad’s afraid he may lose it because of Trump’s sheriffs, or something like that.

My Mom gave the black guy five stars. She says you tried to steal his five stars for Trump. Is that true?

My Mom also says your big tax cuts help the rich but no one like us. If you stole the black guy’s five stars, whose stars will you steal when Trump’s sheriffs put us back in the hole again?

Then there’s this guy, the “Burn.” You curse him. You say bad things about him. But my Mom and Dad say people who work for a living like him. He wants them to get a fair shake. He wants everybody to live well. He wants everybody to have a doctor. Aren’t those good things?

Anyway, the Burn guy seems to care about us and the people on our block.

Does Trump care about us? Do you?

When you bad mouth the Burn guy, you sound just like the gang in my school yard. They pick on the smart kids. Most of us like the smart kids. They are nice to everybody, and they know lots of cool stuff. More of us like the smart kids than are in the gang, but the gang doesn’t know that.

My Dad says Trump is just like that guy from the big war, when we fought the Germans. I can’t remember his name, but it starts with an H. My Dad makes him sound like Hell. He says the H guy started with small bad things and then worked up to big bad things. His worst things just snuck up on everybody. Mom and Dad are scared that’s just what Trump will do.

When you get in the booth to vote, will you vote for Trump? My Dad says you want us to think so, so we won’t vote for the Burn guy.

But is that true? Do you have kids like me? Do you want someone like the H guy taking care of your kids and their future? My Mom thinks you love your kids and know it’s time to stop this nonsense.

My Dad thinks you bluff. He say you might not vote for the Burn guy but anyway won’t vote for Trump. My Dad thinks we should all call your bluff, and vote for the Burn guy.

I think so, too. I like the Burn guy, and I think he likes us.

Which do you hate more, someone who likes us and people like us, or someone like the H guy? You might have to pick soon.

Your friend,

Jimmy

Endnote: Warren Gets Tough

While we’re on the subject of things an eight-year-old can understand, let’s talk about toughness. If you want toughness, I hope you watched the debate in South Carolina Tuesday night.

Elizabeth Warren had started taking Mike Bloomberg apart on the stage as early as the Nevada debate. But on Tuesday she rose to a whole new level. If she were a boxer, you could only describe her punch as a “haymaker.”

She accused Bloomberg of telling a pregnant worker in his firm, who had been concerned about keeping her job while pregnant, to “kill it,” apparently meaning her fetus. Bloomberg repeatedly denied saying that, and his denial was credible. But Warren stood her ground, saying that that’s what the pregnant woman in question had accused Bloomberg of saying.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. I have no idea what the truth is. Nor, I think, did many, if any, of the listeners. It’s hard to believe that Bloomberg said those exact words; that doesn’t sound like him. Maybe his denial was a lie. But more likely he just didn’t remember what he said. Maybe he had said something to the same effect, possibly being sarcastic, and his accuser dramatized it. Maybe the accuser was lying.

But in this case the truth doesn’t matter so much. Remember Judge, now Justice, Brett Kavanaugh? A woman—a professor, no less—accused him of sexually assaulting her when he was young (and drunk). Kavanaugh denied doing so, and later flew into a rage on camera. Everyone, including most of the Senators on the Judiciary Committee, said the accuser’s testimony was credible. Yet the “investigation” that followed was every bit as much of a sham as the no-witness, no-document “trial” of Trump in the Senate, by which he was just acquitted.

It’s generally known, and research tends to show, that when a woman accuses a man of sexual misconduct and the man denies it, people of both genders tend to believe the man. They do so either just because he’s a man or because, being a man, he’s more likely to hold a position of power and responsibility. People believe the man because of the consequences of not believing him to his firm, his organization and society in general. In other words, we all tend to believe the man because the consequences of not doing so are or seem to be (except to the woman) more serious and risky.

Women of course can’t stand this reality. But not only women. I have an X and a Y chromosome, and I thought the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh with barely more than a fig leaf of investigation was one of the most rotten things I’d ever seen in this country, until Trump’s sham acquittal.

The thing about Kavanaugh is that there was nothing special about him, except the credible and damning claim against him. Trump had a whole list of equally conservative judges to elevate. Presumably few or none suffered from Kavanaugh's peculiar “disability.”

In an earlier, more innocent age, a few key senators would have discreetly warned both Trump and Kavanaugh, and Kavanaugh would have quietly withdrawn his nomination. But not now. Instead, Trump and McConnell rammed his confirmation through. It was much like that image in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, of a boot repeatedly stomping on a human face in cruel celebration of raw power.

The final point of brilliance in Warren’s attack was that it spread easily across the aisle. Imagine how the words “Kill it!” sound to a fervent believer in the right to life. The uncertainty of the claim and Bloomberg’s weak response no doubt made many conservatives as sick to their stomachs as this progressive over the whole affair.

So here’s what Warren’s haymaker did. First, it reminded every woman how her personal safety and credibility depend on the credibility of the men she knows and deals with. That is, it reminded every woman of the MeToo movement and how there but for the grace of God goes she. It reminded sympathetic men of the whole Kavanaugh fiasco and how fundamentally unfair our political/legal system is to women, including the women they love. It reminded all these people, willy nilly, of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. It had the potential to fire up people on both sides of the aisle, progressives and conservatives. And when Warren implied (I don’t recall her saying directly) that the “kill it” woman was one of those whom Bloomberg or his firm muzzled with a nondisclosure agreement, she made it all seem so much worse.

All this was going on at the semi-conscious or unconscious level in listeners, including me. I only figured it out later, as I sat down to write this post.

In his bland and dogged claims of innocence, Bloomberg gave no sign of understanding any of it. Do you think Trump, whose intelligence compares to Warren’s as a glow worm to the Sun, would do any better? If you want a fighter who can knock Trump stone cold without him even knowing he’s been hit, you’d better take another look at Warren. And by the way, Trump gives Warren a lot more to work with than does Bloomberg.

permalink to this post