All The Dumb Sh!t Trump Has Done As Nominee In One Mega-List
Most presidential campaigns fall apart under the weight of a single gaffe or shocking revelation. Donald Trump has proven to be the T-1000 of presidential bids. He furiously marched forward in spite of bullet wounds and a missing leg. His campaign is like if the Titanic was sinking, then got struck by a meteor, and then there were vampires, and it still didn't fully submerge until it was a mile away from Liverpool.
The Trump campaign right now.
I collected every insane story to make headlines since he accepted the Republican nomination. I will now present them all to you. I've grouped them into eight categories, each representing a different way the Trump campaign shat all over itself. I don't have the confidence to claim that this is a definitive list. There were so many stories of ineptitude and repugnance that it was often difficult to keep pace. I did the best I could. Trump, on the other hand, did not.
So grab yourself a stiff drink and hunker down in your comfiest chair, because if you plan on reading about every single instance in which the Trump campaign proved itself to be the most spectacular disaster in American political history, you're going to be here a while. Good luck, try to enjoy, and please vote.
His Feuds With Random People
Donald Trump has never met a person he didn't want to publicly shame. Google the words "Donald Trump feuds" and you'll get hundreds of articles detailing spats with random people like world-renowned architect Frank Gehry and comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who, in the fallout of his feud with Trump, said, "If God gave comedians the power to invent people, the first person we would invent is Donald Trump."
Public feuds are part of who Trump is as a person. He can't help himself. We saw this in one of the most truly baffling moments of any presidential campaign. During an interview, Trump told Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a U.S. solider killed in Iraq, that they could fuck off after they spoke out against Trump's proposal to ban the entry of all Muslims into the country. And he did it in the most Trump way possible. To Khizr's claim that Trump has "sacrificed nothing and no one," Trump responded, "I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've had tremendous success. I think I've done a lot." He barely has any time to hop into his Jacuzzi, and that's like learning your son died, right?
Trump sacrificed most of his butlers on an altar and bathed in their peasant blood.
The man hasn't come across a criticism that he can't spin into glowing self-praise of his business "prowess." Rather than lay low and wait for the whole thing to blow over, Trump spent the next few weeks fanning the flames by taking his shit-talking to Twitter, which is probably what Nixon would have done had the power been available to him.
One of Trump's most famous feuds is with Rosie O'Donnell. It began in 2006, and he still hasn't stopped talking about it. Slight him even once, and he'll hold on to that anger until you have to call in an exorcist to cleanse your home of his vengeful ghost years after he's died. Over the years, Trump has publicly fat-shamed O'Donnell, has repeatedly called her ugly, and has openly celebrated her failures, and all because O'Donnell came to the defense of a teenage beauty pageant winner Trump publicly shamed. During the first debate, when Hillary Clinton brought up the name of a different pageant winner Trump had also publicly shamed, Trump couldn't help but briefly mention his feud with O'Donnell, which is like a senior citizen plotting the downfall of someone who once made fun of his haircut in junior high.
Alicia Machado won Trump's Miss Universe competition in 1996. Trump thought she had gained weight in the months after her victory, so he publicly called her "Miss Piggy." And she's Latina, so fuck it, might as well throw in some racism by calling her "Miss Housekeeping" too. According to Machado, Trump would yell at her about her weight and call her ugly. In 1997, Trump hired a personal trainer for Machado and invited news crews to film her exercising to prove that she was dedicated to losing weight. Machado never consented to having her workouts filmed. Turns out getting consent from women is a big problem for Trump.
Look at this disgusting pig-human. She makes me want to vomit all over my jorts.
Days after Hillary Clinton brought up Machado, Trump went on a crazed 3 a.m. Twitter blitz, intent on discrediting her and telling the world to check out Machado's sex tape. During the second debate, he denied having said that, even though the tweet is still on his feed. At this point it's not even clear if he is a pathological liar or has an undiagnosed memory problem.
His "Who The Fuck Would Even Say That?" Moments
What you see when you watch Donald Trump speak is a fascinating combination of poor impulse control and a cartoonishly inflated ego. And yet he has the emotional fragility of a child who habitually rage quits video games. His speeches and interviews are a free form jazz of conspiracy and threats because he doesn't know how to communicate any other way. This all results in Trump saying things no one in his position would ever say unless they had a metal spike sticking out of their skull that made them shout racist passages from Free Republic every time it was touched.
Take the time he publicly requested that Russia keep digging for Hillary Clinton's missing emails, like it's a normal thing for would-be presidents to call on foreign nations that the U.S. has a long-standing uneasy relationship with to destroy political opponents with cyber warfare. Or, as Trump calls it, "the cyber." That's the kind of thing an evil politician from a bad Tom Clancy book would do, but at least that fictional person would have the decency to not reveal his evil plot during a press conference.
*tiny trumpet fart*
According to a report from MSNBC, during an advisory meeting with a foreign policy expert Trump asked three times for an explanation as to why the United States doesn't use its nuclear weapons. Trump fundamentally doesn't understand why instantaneously wiping out tens of thousands of people, maiming tens of thousands more, and poisoning a chunk of the Earth isn't good for international diplomacy.
But he can't have that kind of short fuse when it comes to international disputes, right? Well, he did say he would order the Navy to open fire on Iranian ships if Iranian soldiers made rude gestures. If we scale that up, Trump would respond to a terrorist attack by obliterating our solar system.
Diplomacy.
Trump has rage boiling inside him, and it usually results in him saying something aggressively stupid. Like how he used the word "hit" to describe what he'd like to do to speakers who disparaged him during the Democratic National Convention. Presidents should be able to speak a metaphorical counterpunch, not threaten to literally punch a critic. Imagine Trump sitting in his penthouse, watching one DNC speech after another, periodically saying to the empty room, "Oh, why, I oughta sock you in the nose! I'll give you one of these! And a couple of these! WHAM-BOOM! You're dead, buster!"
Some of the things he says, if they were said by you, would've prompted a police inquiry. Trump lamented to a crowd of his supporters that if Clinton wins, she "gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks," then suggested that diehard supporters of the Second Amendment should kill her before she gets a chance. He tried to hide it behind an ellipsis. Stopping a centimeter short of saying "please murder her" is as close as he's able to get to ambiguity.
Irrelevant to the point. Just wanted you to never unsee this.
On August 18, he boldly declared to a room of supporters, "I will never lie to you." This miraculously didn't cause a black hole of irony, because to supporters in Connecticut five days earlier he had said, "I might lie to you," like "Hillary does all the time." And then he pointed to a child in the crowd who was battling cancer and said, "But not to you," like he was auditioning for the role of evil dictator in the latest teen dystopia.
When he's not saying stupid nonsense, his minions are doing it for him. One of his advisors, a man Trump pays to be intelligent, suggested that the only way to get black people to pay attention to Trump is to stand him in front of a burning car. Donald Trump Jr. compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles, which prompted Skittles, a candy brand that got dragged into a debate about immigrants, to boldly declare that comparing sugary treats to families fleeing a nightmarish civil war is gibberish. And let us not forget the man who thinks polls are about as credible as teenagers trying out witchcraft.
It's like Trump has a checklist of voter bases he wants to alienate. DNA evidence irrefutably proved that a group of black men known as the Central Park Five did not rape and assault a woman in 1989, yet Trump has repeatedly said those men still deserve to be executed. And then there was the revelation that when professional rapper and yeller Lil Jon was on Celebrity Apprentice Trump thought it would be funny if he called him Uncle Tom. Not only is that racist, but Lil Jon is already a nickname. Did Trump think his parents named him Lil?
Trump suggested that soldiers who suffer from PTSD are weak. Same goes for NFL players who suffer through concussions. The eloquent Trump put on a silly high-pitched voice to mock people who, for a living, get hit in the head with such ferocity that they lose all sense of time and place. They can develop a devastating brain disease, CTE. Donald Trump wants to be known as the pro-head-trauma candidate. If Trump was tackled by an NFL player, his lard sack would explode and angry weasels would stream out.
He ate two iPhones and a camera that day.
He saves his "best" cuts for Hillary. He called for Clinton to be drug tested because he thought she was on performance-enhancing drugs during the second debate. What drugs improve your ability to debate? Does Trump think the drug from Limitless is real?
Where most would put aside politics to show class and concern, Trump chose to mock Clinton by imitating her as she passed out while battling pneumonia. It was eerily reminiscent of the time he mocked a New York Times reporter who had a physical disability. Although, to be fair, Trump claims that he didn't know the reporter had a disability. So in his mind he was just being a regular hateful jackass.
And then he revealed that he "wasn't impressed" by Hilary Clinton's ass, because apparently having buns of steel is now a requirement for the office. You can try to find a way around the sexism of that statement, but doing so would be disingenuous, considering...
Donald Trump Might Be A Sex Criminal
In the now infamous Access Hollywood hot mic audio, Trump joked about being unable to stop himself from kissing beautiful women, and then took the joke to an even weirder place by claiming that his star power was so great, he could grab women "by the pussy" with no negative repercussions. In his mind, they probably tee-hee like anime schoolgirls, when in reality they mentally shriek forever as they think of ways to get away from him, like horror movie heroines trying to escape Michael Myers.
Here's the most fascinating part of Donald Trump's sexual aggressiveness: He brags about his sexual abuse tactics, and then when women come forward to confirm the use of those tactics, he goes on the defensive and call them liars. Years ago on The Howard Stern Show, Trump admitted to going backstage during teen beauty pageants to peek at the underage girls as they changed. Then came the parade of former contestants who confirmed Trump's claim. He called them liars. Trump would argue that the sky is green if someone who inconvenienced him said it was blue.
The two types of sexual misconduct he describes in the Access Hollywood tape are spontaneous forced kissing and non-consensual vagina grabbing. Over a dozen women have come forward to publicly accuse Donald Trump of some form of sexual abuse. Let's go through some of their stories and try to find unwanted kissing and unwanted genital grabbing like we're trying to establish a serial killer's MO, except somehow it's more disgusting.
Jill Harth is a makeup artist who was twice on the receiving end of Trump's aggressive, unwanted sexual advances. During a 1992 dinner, Trump allegedly slipped his hand under Harth's dress and grabbed her vagina. A year later, Harth visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago hotel/home in Florida. He allegedly pulled Harth into his daughter's bedroom, pinned her against the wall, and tried to kiss her.
Karena Virginia only had one encounter with Donald Trump in her life, which is one more than most people deserve. She was on the sidewalk waiting for a car to take her home when Trump noticed her as he was walking by. He allegedly grabbed her by the arm, touched her breast, and delivered the classic line heard by bouncers around the world as they're throwing douchebags out of clubs: "Don't you know who I am?"
Cathy Heller claims Trump tried to kiss her as he was greeting guests during a Mar-a-Lago Mother's Day brunch. She says she mostly dodged the kiss but that he still managed to land his lips on the corner of her mouth, like a soldier who took an unlucky shot from the enemy.
A palate cleanser.
Summer Zervos was a contestant on the fifth season of The Apprentice. She said that Trump attempted to kiss her and grabbed her breast during what was supposed to be a meeting about job opportunities.
While talking with friends in a New York club in the early 1990s, Kristin Anderson felt a hand creep up her dress and touch her vagina. She alleges the hand belonged to Donald Trump. They didn't know each other and hadn't spoken at all before Trump made his move. Not that that would've helped, but if this is true, it goes to show that Trump can't hold himself back from groping strangers, a trait he has in common with mentally ill homeless men who are arrested on NYC subway cars.
The palate cleansers aren't working.
Temple Taggart McDowell was a 21-year-old Miss USA pageant contestant when, on two separate occasions, Trump kissed her on the lips rather than shake her hand the way normal, non-rapist, non-movie-Mafia-member human beings greet one another.
In the early 1980s, Jessica Leeds was offered the opportunity to move up from coach to first class on her flight to New York. She was seated beside Donald Trump. They exchanged friendly chitchat, which abruptly ended when Trump allegedly lifted the armrest and put his hand up her skirt. Leeds fled back to coach.
Dear God, why aren't the palate cleansers working?!
Mindy McGilivray claims that Donald Trump groped her at his Mar-a-Lago resort, a place that's proving to be more of a Trump sexual assault palace than a hotel. Natasha Stoynoff almost exclusively covered the ongoing absurdities of Trump's life for People in the early 2000s. She traveled to Mar-a-Lago to interview Donald and his pregnant wife, Melania, about their first anniversary. While Melania was upstairs preparing for a photo shoot, Donald offered Stoynoff a tour of the historic resort/billionaire sex crime fortress. Stoynoff alleges that seconds after they entered a room Donald claimed she had to see because it was "tremendous," Trump pushed her against the wall and started kissing her. She was saved when Trump's butler caught him in the act. She didn't know what to do, so she reverted back into business mode. Just before Melania arrived, Trump said, "You know we're going to have an affair, don't you?" When Melania showed up, Trump supposedly pivoted from pervert to devoted husband.
Wait, her story gets creepier! Earlier, Stoynoff told Donald that she had tried to book a session with the resort's masseuse but couldn't get a reservation. Trump pulled some strings and got the masseuse to come in early just for her. The appointment was made before he allegedly forced himself on her, and was scheduled for the day after. Stoynoff kept the appointment but was running late, so she called the masseuse. The masseuse told her that Donald had already left because he had a meeting to attend. Stoynoff had no idea what he was talking about. The masseuse explained that Donald had been waiting for her in the massage room for 15 minutes.
Trump addressed Stoynoff's allegation during a campaign stop. He said, "Take a look. Look at her. Look at her words. And you tell me what you think. I don't think so." He implied that Stoynoff wasn't attractive enough to sexually assault, which implies that he thinks some women are. Trump's supporters chanted "lock her up" as Trump questioned the timing of her allegation, suggesting that if she had written about it earlier when he was a star on The Apprentice, it would have given her career a boost.
Of Jessica Leeds he said, "Believe me, she would not be my first choice. That I can tell you. You don't know. That would not be my first choice," implying that he's always down to sexually assault a woman, just not this one. If he becomes president, Trump promises to sue all of his accusers within his first 100 days in office. Trump would use his power to exact revenge on women he allegedly sexually assaulted. Oh, and how can I forget: Trump has been brought up on charges of child rape. The trial begins on December 6th, 2016. Imagine having to explain all this to your kids when you see his animatronic in Disney's Hall of Presidents.
"No."
Donald Trump And Vladimir Putin: A Love Story
There was a point when Trump's connections to the Russian government and Vladimir Putin were the stuff of paranoid conspiracy. But now there's evidence suggesting that Trump and Putin aren't just in bed, but that one of them is balls deep in the other. And I think we all know who the top is in that relationship.
There are the obvious signs, like when Trump praises Putin enough to suggest that there's a weird Drake and Rihanna relationship between them. But then there are the tangible connections to the Russian government. There's Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who spent decades advising pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine's ruling party and quit Trump's campaign when it was discovered that he had been funneling millions of their dollars into Washington lobbying firms while making it look like he wasn't trying to use foreign money to influence American politics. Manafort's aide, Rick Gates, has financial ties to a security company that wanted to help Putin's government spy on its own citizens. And when pro-Russian forces were invading the Crimean Peninsula, Donald Trump was fully against it. He didn't flip to a pro-Russian position until after Trump's then-campaign chairman Corey Lewandowski was fired after he was charged with simple battery when he forcefully grabbed a female reporter, and Manafort was brought in as his replacement.
That was an exhausting paragraph describing just one of the disturbing connections between Donald Trump and Russia. Here are some more! Vladimir Putin's army of internet trolls, who are paid to spread Russian propaganda across the Western world (because yes, Russia has an army of internet trolls, welcome to the future), recently began altering the messages their accounts put out, shifting them from pro-Russia to pro-Trump.
Fear.
Add the name Carter Page to the list of Trump aides with ties to the Kremlin. Page is one of Trump's foreign policy advisers. He's being investigated because it was discovered that he has taken a number of meetings with high-ranking Russian officials. Page's meetings all seem to revolve around the lifting of American economic sanctions on Russia, which cut off a lot of the money Russia makes from oil.
Might as well toss the name Richard Burt on the pile too. Burt was paid $365,000 to lobby on behalf of a natural gas company controlled by the Russian government while at the same time helping Trump write his first foreign policy speech.
So here's the complete picture: The Russian government is trying to influence an American presidential election so they can get Donald Trump in office, because only Trump will lift the sanctions that the Western world designed to hurt Russia economically as a punishment for their military intervention in Ukraine. Since the sanctions were put in place, the value of the ruble has plummeted, and Russia is currently suffering a recession that has no end in sight. Donald Trump is Putin's great American hope.
You know you're in trouble when this guy is your only hope.
All signs point to Trump having money entangled within Russian businesses, but since he won't release his tax returns, we may never get a definitive answer. But there's a chance that he might also have personal interest in Russia's financial success, which means the longer the sanctions are upheld, the more money Trump loses.
Trump has plainly stated that he has absolutely no relationship with Vladimir Putin, which is contradicted by all the times he's confirmed that he has a relationship with Vladimir Putin. Trump has plainly stated that he doesn't know Vladimir Putin, which is contradicted by the time he said he spoke directly to Vladimir Putin and "got to know him very well." It's like a junior high will they/won't they. At this point we're just waiting for leaked photo booth pictures showing Trump and Putin making silly faces and kissing.
In spite of what is basically the entire U.S. intelligence community screaming that Russia is behind the attacks on the Democratic National Committee, Trump refuses to believe them. But then he's also called on Russia to continue hacking Hillary Clinton's emails, proving that he at least somewhat believes the intelligence briefings but is being a huge dick about it. Either way, it's like he's the Manchurian Candidate crossed with an idiot.
Oh fuck off.
When Put Under The Microscope, All Of His Dirty Business Practices Are Clear
Running for president might turn out to be the worst business decision Donald Trump has ever made in a career filled with terrible business decisions. It's not just because Trump's businesses have taken a big hit since the start of his campaign. Running for president means your entire life is suddenly scrutinized like you're an alien life form. And some journalists have been having a ball uncovering the many ways Trump's businesses are shams, are complete disasters, or were built on the backs of the thousands of people he's screwed over.
When Trump sought the Reform Party's nomination in 2000, his first speech included a vow to uphold the Cuban embargo. He didn't want to spend a penny in Cuba, knowing it would go into the pockets of Fidel Castro. Trump is still pro-embargo. Now, we're many thousands of words into this column, so you know where this is heading. Two years before that speech, a company owned by Trump did business in Cuba and forgot to tell the U.S. government about it because it was super illegal. Trump sent representatives to speak with Cuban officials to discuss the potential for Trump hotels and casinos in Cuba. Trump knowingly funneled the money for the trip through a consulting firm that disguised the illegal expenses as charitable donations. There are even reports that he may have violated the embargo as recently as 2012 and 2013.
Trump is such a prolific liar that his lies have come to life and taken physical form. The most grandiose physical manifestation of his lies is the very tower in which he lives, Trump Tower. Donald Trump, the 2016 presidential candidate, is staunchly against illegal immigration. But Donald Trump the 1980s businessman loved illegal immigrants so much that he put 200 illegal Polish immigrants to work on the construction of Trump Tower.
"I love the Poles. They have tremendous sausage."
Another one of Trump's lies whose wish to be alive was granted by a magical fairy who hates humanity is Trump's claim that he wants to fight for U.S. steelworkers by ensuring that American companies don't use foreign steel for American construction projects. Interesting, considering that for his past three major construction projects, including a hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Trump purchased steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers. Maybe those American steelworkers can get lucky and make up for their lost profits by gambling?
Trump has also allegedly dabbled in some good old-fashioned corruption, investigations of which are ongoing. So imagine that we're three years into a Trump presidency and we discover, definitively, that Donald Trump paid off Florida attorney general Pam Bondi to ignore the complete sham that was Trump University, whose degrees were about as valuable as ones made with crayon, even though dozens of other states were actively pursuing legal action.
In 2014, Trump used his charitable foundation to send $100,000 to a conservative activist group called Citizens United. Citizens United was in the middle of a lawsuit with New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who himself was suing Donald Trump on charges of fraud relating to Trump University. Citizens United is run by David Bossie, who is currently Donald Trump's deputy campaign manager. The donation ended up being the largest the Trump Foundation made all year. Donald Trump leaves obvious trails of evidence like he's a serial killer who taunts police detectives with cryptic riddles written on his personal letterhead.
Using his own charitable foundation to pay for anything he wants is a common practice for Trump. It's also illegal. But he does it anyway, because the fact that an orange-tinted sack of mushed testicles can live in a Manhattan penthouse must make him feel bulletproof. He does whatever he wants, however he wants, including using the money from his own foundation to settle lawsuits brought against his for-profit businesses. He also pilfered his charity's coffers to buy two massive portraits of himself. Admittedly, you have to be feeling pretty damn charitable to take that commission.
It's like if Vigo the Carpathian had a trust fund.
What makes it even funnier/sadder is that the Trump Foundation had never been certified to solicit donations, and Trump himself hasn't donated to his own charity since 2008. That means 100 percent of the money he steals from his own charity was originally donated by other people who thought it was going to be used for charitable purposes. Well, some of the foundation's donations have come from businesses that owed Trump money but were told to give the money to Trump's charity rather than Trump's for-profit businesses, but that's arguably even more suspicious.
As for Trump University, there's just too much wrong with it to list it all here, but here are the top three highlights. That's right, I need a list within a list to explain all of this nonsense.
1. It's not a university. In fact, calling it a university is illegal. It's a series of real estate seminars run by people who were in no way qualified to be leading real estate seminars. One of the "professors" was a manager at a Buffalo Wild Wings. When I want to learn about flipping properties, I don't turn to the guy in charge of getting the basket of wings and cheese curds to Table 6 in a timely manner.
2. State attorneys general can't wait to sue Trump over Trump University. Trump is so worried about his sham of a school being sued that there were rules written into Trump University's employee guide for what to do if an attorney general comes around asking questions, because apparently Trump thinks attorneys general wear fedoras and trench coats and tell people that they can do this the easy way or the hard way. The advice amounted to "If you dare say a word, the bomb in your chair will detonate." Trump's guidebook told employees to treat the arrival of an attorney general the way Lorraine Bracco treated the police raid in Goodfellas.
Every evil Dean of Students in a college frat movie.
3. Instructors were paid based on how many seminars they were able to upsell to existing customers. If you've worked in retail, spoken with a salesperson, or otherwise lived on this planet, you know the horrors of the word "upsell." The products they upsold were increasingly more expensive seminars. Trump University's professors were nothing more than a cross between Best Buy workers and Scientology employees.
As for Trump's main business, the Trump Organization, here are the two things you need to know:
1. In 1995, Donald Trump lost the comically absurd amount of $916 million because he is an awful businessman who makes terrible investments and overpays for every acquisition. There is a chance he may not have paid taxes for the next 20 years. Maybe he's not releasing his tax returns out of sheer embarrassment. Or maybe he's just a shrieking pit of anger disguised as a man and created by a God trying to punish America.
2. Trump has declared bankruptcy six times, because he is an awful businessman who makes terrible investments and hasn't the slightest clue how to run any of the ventures he starts. And during bankruptcy meetings Trump would lie so often that his own bankruptcy lawyers would have to attack these meetings as a tag team, because only with their powers combined were they able to catch all of his lies. It's unclear how much they drank while staring at their legal degrees after the hearings.
The Media Circus
Donald Trump is a TV personality. He is a game show host. The attainment of fame might be his primary source of motivation, and he thinks people whose star power has faded are worthless. This is why his campaign has often felt like a reality show, like it was designed for and by people who love trashy TV. That's why Trump brought in Breitbart's Steve Bannon and former Fox News CEO and sexual harasser Roger Ailes to help run his campaign. It was time to turn his presidential bid into a TV show. It was that philosophy that gave us the following three moments in which a presidential candidacy had been reduced to the unholy combination of Temptation Island and Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.
Remember Trump's doctor, who looks like he went by "Dr. Feelgood" in the '70s? Turns out the man's medical opinion may not be trustworthy, and he was forced to dash it out in five minutes.
"I've got some wine coolers in my van. It's the one with the the big-titted lady riding the dragon painted on the side."
To combat growing media chatter about his health and well-being, Trump turned the reveal of his medical records into a media circus and went to Dr. Oz to silence his critics. Dr. Oz is a doctor with a daytime TV show who admitted before Congress that he promoted diet pills he knew had as many medical benefits as wishful thinking. He's a charlatan, so of course Donald Trump chose to reveal his medical records on Oz's show.
The reveal of a candidate's medical records is usually a boring press release, but in Trump's hands it was a media sensation that lasted for days. Learning about an old man's cholesterol level turned into an unstoppable hype train. Would he or wouldn't he was the most common question, while who cares was conspicuously absent. At the hype's highest point, CNN aired live footage of Trump's private plane taxiing on a tarmac in New York, where Dr. Oz's show is filmed, while shrinking a Clinton speech containing actual content down to a tiny box in the corner. That's like cutting away from a breaking news story to report that Brad Pitt bought a new hat.
Trump's Dr. Oz episode came and went and didn't reveal anything other than the fact that Trump's an overweight old man. Trump would be the oldest president ever elected, and the fattest since Howard Taft. Being healthy at 70 is hard, but if you're worried about George R. R. Martin being too old and overweight to finish two books, you should also be worried about Trump being too old and overweight to run the most powerful nation on Earth for four years.
George would probably have a lower kill count.
Trump has also been one of the nation's leading birthers. By questioning President Obama's place of birth, he's fanned the flames of racism and conspiracy, continuously reigniting a fear of those dastardly dark-skinned foreign foes from a far-off place who want to turn us into communazi satanic atheist death-panel-creating Sharia-law-endorsing community organizers. So when the media finally started taking him to task about his birther views, Trump held a press conference to end this silly debate once and for a... ha, of course nothing changed, I can't even finish that sentence.
Oh no. I think he's on to us.
He teased a major announcement, got all cameras set on him, took the stage after 15 minutes of other speakers verbally blowing him live on every cable news network, then finally "denounced" birthers in five pathetic sentences.
"Hillary Clinton and her campaign in 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again."
"I finished it. You know what I mean" means nothing, you walking sack of Klan hoods. By the way, if you question the existence of racist messages disseminated by Trump's campaign, you can ask David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Duke is a hardcore Trump supporter who has urged his fellow racists and anti-Semites to volunteer and vote for Trump. He's said that when Trump speaks he sends "a very implicit, almost explicit" message to racists. If Trump isn't a racist, he sure says a lot of things that racists love to hear. Oh, and five days after that speech denouncing birthers, Trump went right back to being a birther. I guess it's a small mercy that he didn't announce another press conference.
Duke can be seen on the far left, organizing his high school class photo.
Trump is under the impression that he can reduce Hillary Clinton to emotional ruins and get into her head like a master of manipulation, even though that's a tactic primarily used by domestic abusers and sociopaths. We saw this when, only an hour before the second presidential debate, and in the wake of his sexual abuse victims taking their stories public, Trump decided it was wise and not at all disgusting to humiliate his opponent by holding a press conference starring the cavalcade of women Bill Clinton has allegedly sexually assaulted. Why would you punish a wife for the deeds of her husband? The whole thing was just Trump saying, "Ha, your husband cheated on you!" I wonder how the two ex-wives Trump cheated on feel about that. Or how his current wife feels about all of his alleged sex abuse. Anyway, Trump had the accusers seated in the crowd during the debate. This is the face Clinton made through most of it.
Hillary Clinton don't give a fuck about your media circus bullshit.
Miscellaneous Nonsense
I couldn't fit some of the best stories to come out of Trump's loaded clown car of a campaign into neat and tidy categories, so here's a shotgun blast of stupid.
Remember when Melania plagiarized entire paragraphs from Michelle Obama's 2008 DNC speech? That was back when Trump campaign scandals were fun and silly instead of treasonous and rapey.
Remember when Donald Trump went to Mexico to meet President Enrique Pena Nieto for reasons no one can fully explain, and it somehow wound up being a PR disaster for both of them? You know, the one the Mexican president now regrets? During that trip, Trump changed his stance on immigration too many times to count. His spectacular display of flip-flopping happened the same day Ann Coulter released her new book praising Donald Trump where she wrote, "There's nothing Trump can do that won't be forgiven except change his immigration policies."
Hey, do you know Tony Schwartz? He was the ghostwriter for Trump's famous book on business, The Art of the Deal. He told The New Yorker that Trump is a dangerous sociopathic, narcissistic maniac who would end civilization if given access to nuclear codes, and a pathological liar who completely lacks the ability to regret the lies he tells. Schwartz unsurprisingly regrets having made Trump sound smarter than he is, and he also regrets creating so much of the myth around him. He was beside Trump for hours a day, almost every day, for 18 months. He found Trump to be so scatterbrained and unintelligent that he had to cobble together bits and pieces of the Trump philosophy and fill in huge blanks with what he imagined Trump would say about himself. After his comments, the Trump campaign sent Schwartz a cease-and-desist letter. He went on to advise Hillary Clinton on how to get into Trump's head during the first debate. Apparently it worked.
Remember the North Korean propaganda children Trump had singing in one of his rallies?
Yeah, them. Well, it turns out they're suing Trump. Like so many hundreds of people before them, Trump refused to pay them what they're owed. An old man who refuses to pay singing children is a villain in a bad Christmas movie.
For Trump, lying is as habitual as blinking and breathing. This isn't hyperbole. The Toronto Star has been fact checking everything Trump says, whether it's to a crowd of his supporters, in interviews, or when he looks at himself in the mirror every morning and tells himself that people like him. The numbers range from six to 37 lies a day. They're usually in the double digits. He is the definition of a pathological liar.
Here's my favorite of the many hundreds upon hundreds of lies he's told throughout this campaign. When the debate schedule was first released, Trump was asked about it in an interview with ABC News. Here's what he said:
"I'll tell you what I don't like, it's against two NFL games. I got a letter from the NFL saying, 'This is ridiculous.'"
An NFL spokesperson immediately sent out a tweet saying that the NFL sent no such letter. He made it up. When an organization that ignores concussions and domestic abuse is distancing itself from you, you know you're a unique kind of toxic.
And Here We Are Today
And so we've reached the end of our odyssey. We've learned many things. We've learned Donald Trump will grab your genitals against your will and when you least expect it. We know he has a deep understanding of the subtle flavor profiles of Vladimir Putin's cock (mostly potatoes and gunpowder). We've learned that if Trump started a lemonade stand, he would somehow find a way to lose $916 million. There's no telling what other stories will arise in the future. But there are a few stories left that let us know where we might be headed.
As Hillary Clinton's lead in the polls widened, Trump ramped up his bullshit claim that the whole election has been rigged in her favor from the start. He makes people screaming racial slurs on Xbox Live look like gracious losers. He's taken it as far as saying he'll only accept the election results if he wins, implying that even he doesn't know what kind of crazy shit he'll do if he loses. To combat statistically nonexistent voter fraud, he's called on his supporters to act as "poll monitors." But they aren't poll monitors, are they? They're voter intimidators. Trump has instilled so much distrust of the election process into his voter base that it's no wonder that 51 percent of likely voters "express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day."
Trump has turned voting into a life-threatening act. He wants the local church or middle school or library you'll be voting in to be a military checkpoint where disciples of his authoritarian beliefs intimidate those who don't share their political views. He's practically made it a requirement to bring your voter ID and brass knuckles into the voting booth. It's scary not knowing for sure what Trump and some of his more extreme supporters might do if he loses. But I have one more story that hints at an optimistic ending.
When Trump and his first wife, Ivana, were dating, they went on a Colorado ski vacation. Donald was the first down the slope, and he waited for Ivana at the bottom. "Come on, baby!" he said. So she did. She rocketed down the slope like a pro, doing four flips throughout her run. She hadn't yet told Donald that she was an accomplished skier. Donald was furious. He had been humiliated by a woman in front of onlookers. He pouted and went back to the ski lodge, stripping off all of his gear and dropping it as he went, leaving a trail of defeat in his wake.
If we're lucky, on November 9 Donald Trump will pout, strip himself naked, and march back into Trump Tower, never to be heard from again.
Luis urges you to vote. Please? Pretty please with sugar on top? You can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.
To see the two inexplicably polar opposite muses in Trump's life, check out Donald Trump Is The JFK For Millennials (Seriously, Folks) and How Actual Nazis Are Influencing Trump (More Than He Knows).
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