How President Trump Will Spend His Last Hours as Commander in Chief
Well folks, after four long years, two impeachments, one Presidential Twitter ban, and several existential crises to our nation's wellbeing, including, but not limited to, a global pandemic and an insurrectionist attack on our nation's Capitol, it seems we're finally hobbling past the finish line for our current administration. Today, my friends, is President Donald Trump's final day as our nation's Commander in Chief.
So how, exactly, does 45 plan on spending his last hours in the Oval Office? According to a press release New York Times White House reporter, Maggie Haberman posted to Twitter a lot of um, vague productivity? "President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening," the document reads. "He will make many calls and have many meetings." Wow, I didn't know Vincent Adultman from BoJack Horseman left his lucrative job at the Business Factory to write White House briefings.
Despite Mr. Adultman's, um, comprehensive (?) press release, it seems as if Donnie's final hours in office have been, and will continue to be, significantly more eventful than depicted in official White House documentation.
Don't Miss
As we mentioned yesterday, POTUS will reportedly issue approximately 100 pardons and commutations today, however, it seems we may have a stronger grasp on who will or will not be exonerated in light of several recent reports. First up? Everyone's favorite middle school rapper, Lil Wayne. Last month, the "Lollipop" artist and notable Trump supporter plead guilty to a federal gun charge after Florida authorities found a gold-plated .45 handgun, complete with a pearl handle, on his chartered jet, according to the Miami Herald. Weezy, who was facing a sentence of up to 10 years in prison on an upcoming hearing scheduled for January 28, may be off the hook. According to Reuters, President Trump is expected to grant the rapper clemency, meaning hip hop fans will only have to wait for seven years for Tha Carter VI, as opposed to potentially a whole decade.
The notoriously flatulent Borat 2 star, Rudy Giuliani, and literal grim reaper Steve Bannon, aren't so lucky. Neither of the President's former allies will receive a pardon in the coming hours, the international news outlet reported. The move comes as Bannon and three others were charged with defrauding donors out of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in a fundraising campaign allegedly for building a border wall between the United States and Mexico, according to CNN. Although Bannon pled not guilty to the charges, he is set to begin trial in May of 2021.
Aside from choosing who to pardon, Trump also took some precious time out of his day to, um, start a statue garden? A part of his response to last year's Black Lives Matter protest calling for racial justice in our nation, according to NPR, 45 issued an executive order -- with no funding from Congress -- to create a National Garden of American Heroes. Featuring a motley crew of American icons, the garden will include beloved trailblazers like Harriet Tubman, Dr. Seuss, Neil Armstrong, Kobe Bryant, and Jackie Robinson, as well as some straight-up misfires like Thomas Jefferson, who notably owned slaves, and Andrew Jackson, who spearheaded the Indian Removal Act, which caused the deaths of approximately 4,000 Cherokees. After all, folks, this is still Trump's America. Who needs systemic reform when you can just give Jefferson, Jackson, as well as people like Henry Ford, a notable racist and anti-semite, commemorative statues?
Yet somehow, Donnie managed to make matters worse on the topic of race. On Martin Luther King Jr Day, a commission he created in an attempt to rebuke a growing number of schools teaching students more accurate information about the horrors of slavery, came out with a pretty damn racist report, which among other points, excused that America was founded on the basis of slavery, and compared progressives to Mussolini.
The 1776 Commission's report also spews baseless nonsense, arguing that identity politics are "the opposite of King's hope that his children would 'live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,'" and slamming affirmative action, alleging "the Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders."
The paper also slammed the American higher education system, labeling universities as "hotbeds of anti-Americanism, libel, and censorship that combine to generate in students and in the broader culture at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country."
In light of these egregious claims, several experts took to Twitter to denounce the report, with Princeton History Professor, Kevin M. Kruse pointing that none of the work's authors were actual American historians ...
... with Ibram X. Kendi, the best-selling author of “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," and the director of Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research, rejecting the offensive work in a 13-part thread.
"I finished reading the 1776 Commission Report. It claims America is 'the most just and glorious country in all of human history' -- the nation's great founding truth. But anti-Americans are disregarding this great patriotic truth, the report argues. "But it does not take long to read this report as the last great lie from a Trump administration of great lies."
After expertly dissecting several of the report's phony claims, Kendi concludes his work with a call for Americans to resist this bad information. "The 1776 Commission Report is calling forth our fealty to tyranny. But we will resist, like we resisted the proslavery founding fathers and their ideological descendants who wrote this report."
The Trump administration has been, and will always be a stain on our nation's history, defined by public health negligence, caging babies, and several other horrors. Yet tomorrow, it will be just that, a stain on our nation's history. While the threat of domestic terrorism and the dangerous ideology of Trump and his supporters will remain a threat to our nation's sanctity, 45 leaving the White House is still a small victory. We resisted for four years, and we will continue to resist in the face of injustice -- under the unique challenges of any administration. Happy Inaguration eve, friends.
For more internet nonsense, follow Carly on Instagram @HuntressThompson_ and on Twitter @TennesAnyone.
Top Image: Shutterstock
