Dear GOP: America is not going to forget — and many Americans will never forgive

Thom Hartmann
26 March
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) speaks at a House Republicans press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 12, 2024.

Dear Republicans,

Here we go again. A large chunk of Trump‘s cabinet and our national security leaders just endangered our country and our pilots who were flying over Yemen with their arrogance and frank stupidity.

Their lies about it were so egregious that Jeffrey Goldberg published the actual transcript in The Atlantic this morning.

Only the best people, right?

After the corruption of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations crashed the world economy, kicking off the Republican Great Depression in 1929, it took your party decades to rid itself of the stink.

After Nixon committed treason to extend the Vietnam War to get himself re-elected, unnecessarily killing over 20,000 American soldiers and a million Vietnamese civilians, and then got busted for Watergate and the bribes he solicited in the White House, it took you almost a generation to rid yourselves of the stink.

But you’ll never rid yourself of the stink of Donald Trump, America’s first convicted felon and accused rapist president. At least never in the lifetime of anybody around today. Trump’s stench is a tragic part of American history that will last generations.

The entire world knows the fetor of his whipping up a crowd of thousands to try to assassinate the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House because he lost an election.

Trump’s minions pissed on the carpets in the hallowed halls of Congress, smeared feces on the walls, damaged priceless paintings from the founding era of our country, and murdered three police officers protecting our nation’s Capitol. That stink will never fade, no matter how aggressively his allies try to rewrite history, blur faces, or tell their phony stories about bizarre “deep state” conspiracies.

Seriously, Republicans, did you think Americans would forget the stink of the 30,000+ documented lies he told America and the world while he was first president, and that he’s started up with again? Or the lies he routinely spouts every time he speaks in public, so frequent now that even Fox “News” has to correct the facts when covering him?

Or his stealing classified documents and then leaving them in public places with an industrial-sized copy machine as he invited known spies into Mar-a-Lardo? Or his fake electors’ scheme to overturn a fair election?

How about the reek of his dictator-like destruction of the American Civil Service, filling our government with corrupt toadies, and proclaiming his intention to imprison his political enemies and send the US military into the streets like Lukashenko has done in Belarus and tinpot dictators do all across the world?

Speaking of the behavior of tinpot dictators, Trump has now arrested a bunch of Hispanic-looking men and claims that they are Venezuelan gang members, sending them off to one of the world’s most brutal prisons for indefinite years of torture. He never bothered, however, with any sort of legal process to actually prove they’re not just people who came here looking for a better life for themselves and their children.

He’s signed over 100 laws, rules, and EOs gutting our environmental regulations and is actively promoting the fossil fuel industry, which funds the GOP with billions while it’s destroying the lives of our children and grandchildren. He pulled us out of the Paris Agreement, has packed the EPA and Department of the Interior with fossil fuel lobbyists and toadies, and killed off a government program to build EV charging stations.

Do you really believe that we would forget the stink of his sucking up to murderous dictators like Putin, MBS, and Kim? Now that effluvium is being smeared all over Republican politicians, one after another, as they follow Trump’s orders — which he no doubt received from Putin — to abandon Ukraine, shut down the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, and to sabotage NATO.

You are cowards, all. Covered in your wretched, cowardly, unpatriotic stink.

This is the man who tried to blackmail a democratic ally into manufacturing dirt on his political opponent, withholding aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian attacks. The stink of that crime was so heinous he was impeached for it.

His Muslim ban wasn’t just racist; it destroyed lives, separated families, and alienated allies. His refusal to condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville (“very fine people on both sides”) marked the first time in modern history a U.S. president openly pandered to white supremacists.

What about the stink Trump created when he referred to mostly-Black nations as “shithole countries” and our veterans who’d died in war as “suckers” and “losers”? When he told General Mark Milley he didn’t want to again share the stage with an injured veteran because such heroes “don’t look good”?

Or when, at the height of the pandemic in April 2020, Trump ordered people back to work and began to ridicule wearing masks, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths (according to his own science advisors: the British journal Lancet put the number at around a half-million)?

At that time, most Covid deaths were in Blue states (CT, NY, WA, NJ) and Trump agreed with Jared that they could politically benefit by blaming the deaths on Democratic governors. An “effective political strategy” they called this decision redolent with the stink of mass death.

That same son-in-law, by the way, who Trump helped hustle $2 billion from the Saudis in exchange, apparently, for downplaying the murder of a Washington Post journalist and looking the other way at how they oppress women. Do you think we failed to notice the reek of nepotism and corruption?

Speaking of women, do you really believe that the stink of your support for a man credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by over 20 women, including one as young as 13, would just go away? Particularly after he was found by a court of law to have raped “as the term is commonly understood” the first woman whose case finally made it through the courts?

As average working Americans struggle to pay their taxes, Trump pushed through an odious $4 trillion tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies, creating the largest budget deficit by any president in the history of the nation. And now he’s planning to repeat that debacle, adding another $4.5 trillion to our nation’s debt while massively enriching himself and his fellow billionaires.

Do you think Americans — who, unlike Trump and his billionaire buddies actually pay their damn taxes — will forget?

Or the stink of his multiple business frauds? He was convicted and forced to pay millions in restitution to victims of his Trump University fraud; they shut down his phony New York charity; he was found by a New York court to have committed bank, tax, and insurance fraud.

How about the overwhelming stench of tearing babies from their mothers’ arms at the border and then trafficking them into phony “Christian adoption” services that then vanished, leaving over 1000 grieving families still not knowing the whereabouts of their little girls and boys to this day?

Or supporting Putin’s kidnapping over 100,000 Ukrainian children to sell into the thriving Russian child sex industry (the only large country where possession of child porn is legal) by shutting down the group documenting Putin’s child crimes?

Or the stink from the naked campaign lies he blithely told to get votes, promising a new national healthcare system, a revitalization of America’s infrastructure, or his claims that he supported organized labor at the same time his appointees to the Department of Labor are now working to block unionization efforts across the nation?

Even worse, this adulterer — who had affairs outside his marriage with every one of his three wives and never goes to church but still claims to be a Christian — told sincerely religious people he was their champion. Not noticing the sulfurous smell that surrounds Trump, many believed him and still do. In actual fact, he was only championing the hypocritical multimillionaire TV preachers who shared their hustle with him: he supported their violations of tax law in exchange for their endorsement from the pulpit.

Then he tried to overthrow an election he knew he lost by 7 million votes, and has now pardoned the violent criminals who helped him out. The whole world is aghast at the stink of that tinpot dictator effort, and terrified that he may succeed the next time he decides to get his goons and militia buddies to attack America.

How about his destruction of American soft power around the world by dismantling USAID? Or his ongoing destruction of the Social Security administration and the US Postal Service? His attacks on judges and law firms that are essential to a functioning democracy?

Germans still struggle with the stink of a leader who referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and promised he was going to “root them out.” Who attacked the press because they told the truth about him. Who played on and amplified people’s fear of “the other.” You will, too, for generations after Trump himself has shuffled off this mortal coil.

Pathetically, you Republican members of Congress have now smeared yourselves with the slime that has surrounded Donald Trump his entire criminal life. Have you noticed how many of your colleagues are avoiding town halls or trying to sit this presidency out in silence? Do you really think you can ever wash off yourself the reek of your association with treason, an attempt to betray and overthrow America, even worse than what Benedict Arnold tried?

Seriously, Republicans, do you think America can’t smell what’s going on? Trump bragging that he ended women’s rights to bodily autonomy with his Supreme Court picks? His promotion of guns and assault weapons because the racist nutcases who follow him think they’re going to be soldiers in a upcoming civil war? His refusal to do anything about the climate change that is now killing Americans every day?

And now he’s empowered a fanatic South African nepo-baby to take a chainsaw to our government, delighting Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, firing veterans left-and-right while gutting the Veterans Administration, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid.

Do you really think Americans — particularly women and minorities — will forget how he’s stripping memorials and histories of pioneering Black and female heroes from government sites and history books? How he reversed LBJ’s 1965 Executive Order, making it again legal for defense contractors to engage in racial and gender discrimination in hiring? Or how he and his Republicans in Congress are right now trying to make it hard for married women to vote in the next two elections?

America has had a few truly awful presidents. Andrew Jackson “The Indian Killer.” Andrew Johnson who tried to undo Lincoln’s legacy. Warren Harding and Teapot Dome. Richard Nixon’s criminality, Ronald Reagan’s commitment to destroy America’s middle class, George W. Bush lying us into two wars as part of his 2004 re-election strategy.

But none stink as bad as this miserable caricature of a man, with his bizarre orange spray-tan, absurd comb-over, and compensatory phallic-length red ties. Or the retinue of sycophants and billionaires who pathetically suck up to him.

America is not going to forget, and many Americans will never forgive.

You will never wash the stink of Donald Trump off yourselves or your party. Never.

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