I’m disappointed that The Signal chose to dismiss Trump’s alarming attacks on everyone but FOX News as little more than “words.” (“Our View,” Aug. 16.) Words matter, friends. The Constitution and We The People are under daily assault, and I believe anyone who turns a blind eye or ear to Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is complicit in it.
Facts are not fungible; they are incontrovertible. Every day, inconvenient facts are covered up with lies from Trump’s mouth, his Twitter feed and a White House press shop led by a disgraced former FOX News executive with the ethically challenged Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the podium. Has The Signal ever used the word “lie” to describe just one of Trump’s more than 4,000 (so far!) lies indexed by the Washington Post and other news organizations?
Simply put, attributing this to “just words” or dismissing it as little more than “outlandish rhetoric” is dangerous. It’s even worse than those who are sitting back in silence and hoping he’ll just shut the hell up. That is no longer an option: Trump is not going to stop tweeting and in his seventh decade on Earth, he’s not going to stop lying, either.
Yet in the greatest irony of all, 45 may have met his match in his onetime real-life apprentice, Omarosa Manigault Newman.
Dr. Franken-Trump is quickly learning that this “crazed, crying lowlife” HE created knows his game better than he does, and he can see that she’s coming back to get him. Why else would he label yet another African-American a “dog”? His repeated dog whistles to America’s abhorrent racists can be ignored no longer, regardless of how hard The Signal might try. And as Omarosa appears on more and more television shows and produces more and more tapes, I predict Trump is going to take additional (unprecedented, if not unhinged) actions designed to stop her and distract us. You know, like pulling the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, which Trump admitted to the Wall Street Journal he did because Brennan was involved in leading the “rigged witch hunt” into Russian interference in the election, and therefore the firing “had to be done.” He’s attempting to neuter the witnesses!
Sending out insult comic Rudy Giuliani to spout silly nothings is one thing, but by removing Brennan’s clearance, Trump took a step that actually tears at the fabric of our republic, undermines our democratic institutions and imperils national security. It makes America less safe, because it removes Brennan from the small list of resources our security leaders can turn to in a crisis. And Trump is threatening to do the same thing to several other of his loudest critics, other heroic justice and intelligence experts who have served our country unselfishly under both Republicans and Democrats. Why? Because they refuse to sit idly by as he wreaks havoc.
Trump conveniently pumps out this “enemy of the people” smoke purely to shroud the truth, hide the corruption, and to distract and exhaust the American public. But I’m confident there’s one Republican who won’t get lost in his fog … special counsel Robert S. Mueller. Mueller will keep following the facts wherever they lead him, and when he’s done, I suspect Trump will be done, too.
For now, watch for longtime Trump associate Roger Stone to be indicted soon, followed by Don Jr. around Labor Day. ‘Mueller time’ is coming, folks. And when it does, will The Signal be on the right side of history? I hope so.
John Zaring
Santa Clarita
