Contributors

Saturday, March 31, 2018

The Knives Are Coming Out

The other day Ann Coulter had a discussion with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, in which she expressed a great deal of contempt for Donald Trump. I have long said that when Trump supporters figure out that he's been playing them for suckers, they will -- as the Trump phrasing goes -- turn on him like a bitch.

Now Ann Coulter is saying the same thing:
Bruni: The $1.3 trillion spending bill that he signed last week sent you over the edge.

Coulter: Yes. This is a different category you’re seeing now: Former Trumpers. That should be terrifying to the president. Maybe he’ll actually keep his promises. Unlike Marco Rubio. Unlike the rest of them. Unlike Mitch McConnell. We have been betrayed over and over and over with presidents promising to do something about immigration. If he played us for suckers, oh, you will not see rage like you have seen.
"If?" Lady, Trump has played everyone he's ever done business with for suckers (remember the $25 million settlement he paid for Trump "University"?). Trump voters thought that since he was a vulgar, bragging racist and pandered to their basest instincts, he was somehow more "authentic" than politicians who pretended to be nice to brown people.

But Trump has always been a dishonest, incompetent, multiply bankrupt lying real estate huckster and sexual predator. Just because his racism was the only thing that was authentic about him did not mean he would be able to carry through on his useless wall. He has proved to be as incompetent a manager and negotiator in the Oval Office as he was in the casino business.

Donald Trump is a lying braggart, seeking only to bloat his own ego. Nothing he says can be trusted. And anyone should have known this, after seeing him constant lie and brag, and the obnoxiously cloying way he talked and prissily preened during the campaign. He might have been entertaining to some people on television, but he's worthless as a president.

The immigrants Ann Coulter wants to keep out pick our fruit and vegetables, clean our houses and hotel rooms, butcher our livestock, cook our food, take care of our children and our grandparents, mow our lawns, roof our houses and help hospital patients go to the bathroom. In short, they do all the poorly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs Americans refuse to do.

But as long as businesses don't pay Americans a living wage to work for them, there will be a demand for immigrant labor. And Trump himself is a prime example of the problem: he hires hundreds of foreign workers for his golf courses, hotels and resorts like Mar a Lago: in fact, Trump refuses to hire Americans for those jobs.

Trump voters knew (or should have known) this before the election and yet they still voted for him!

To remove the need for immigrant labor, we would need to unionize all service jobs, institute a $20 minimum wage and universal health care, as well as beef up regulations in dangerous work places so that Americans could take those tedious, dangerous and dirty jobs. Which means increasing the budgets for EPA and OSHA, not cutting them.

But hard-core Trump voters don't care about real solutions to our problems. They just want to bitch about immigrants. They want a giant wall on the southern border as a symbol of their racism, even though it would do almost nothing to limit illegal immigration and drug trafficking, because of things called "boats" and "airplanes."

I have an idea: let's just move all those Confederate statues across the South to the Mexican border and declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

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