~by Colleen O’Brien
The Fourth of July this year was perfect nostalgia – a late afternoon potluck in the country, friends and friendly people I’d not met before, interesting and fun conversations, happy children running around, fab food – a Chicago original chip dip of garlic and spinach, 20 pounds of smoked pork, mac and cheese [I think at least three kinds of cheese], fruit salad, pasta and veggie salad, watermelon and cheese salad, deserts made by a locally famous cake-baker.
And lengthy fireworks by a master of fireworks. From our over-the-top backyard spectacle in Cooper, we could see Jefferson’s fireworks and Grand Junction’s to the north and possibly Jamaica’s or Yale’s to the south, and Dawson’s to the southeast.
The breeze was gentle, the mosquitos elsewhere, and the evening simply fun. We were ooh-ing and ah-ing like fireworks crowds always do, and my sister and I drove home happy for a few moments in the dark recalling a childhood scene just like the one we’d left.
And when we arrived home, we turned on the TV to watch the news and were bombarded with a hate-filled speech by the man who calls himself President.
I heard the voice from the bedroom, unaware that it was his because my habit has been to shut off the sound as soon as he comes on any of my devices, his voice and message and visage alien to any sense of decorum or intelligence. As I walked down the hall toward the TV room, I thought, “Gee, they could have chosen someone with a good speaking voice; this guy has no rhythm to his speech, no flow, and his voice is so un-euphonious. When I walked into the TV room, I saw that it was what I wished was our erstwhile prez.
But, sad to the ear and eye, it was our present one. I always turn him off because I’ve never liked his voice or what he was saying, and this time I felt tricked; watching him was like getting spit in the face. My sister and I sat there for a bit listening to him damn the Democrats as Communists – it was shocking, even after all these years of his cruelty because it was so hate-filled. And then he told his audience that he would like to kill us all.
I left the room about then and went to bed to read my book. When I told a friend the next morning my reaction, she said, “Doesn’t he (Trump) know this has been tried before? Blaming all the Dems of being Pinko Communists – you remember?” she asked. “Joe McCarthy.”
She was so right. I can remember coming home from school in fifth grade [mid- 1950s] and hanging out with my mother while she ironed and watched the McCarthy hearings transpiring in the Senate in the Capitol Building in D.C. The cranky, accused-of-drunken-behavior Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin spent many days accusing the Army, Democrats, actors, writers and artists of being and spreading deathly, democracy-killing Communism.
His advisor for ill behavior, for getting away with everything simply by exhaustive repetition and clever manipulation of media was 26-year-old Department of Justice prosecutor Roy Cohn.
In the 1970s, Cohn became New Yorker Donald J. Trump’s mentor and advisor, for Trump’s feeble reputation for building poor edifices in New York and New Jersey and not paying the contractors for building them. Trump was tutored by Cohn to manipulate the media by constantly repeating one’s own opinions [lies]; using blithering storms of aggressive litigation; never admitting any wrongdoing; never apologizing.
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And thus, we have the loudmouth on the warpath once again to win (illegally) – the 2026 mid-terms in November — by repeating lies (All Dems are Communists), continuation of suing everybody who annoys him, bribing to gerrymander voting districts in order to exclude Blacks, browns and probably the educated; not admitting that he’s lying and never apologizing when he’s mean or cruel or litigious to the legions who disagree with him.
So, here we are folk: for the next five months we’ll be bombasted by sneaky coercion, phony outrage, snotty accusation toward “stupid” reporters from “bankrupt, dying media that no one ever listens to anyway.”
It makes me queasy to think about the next half year; one of the problems – a main problem, actually, is Fox News. It prospers as an entertainment outlet while it does not report the truth on any regular basis because it is the mouthpiece for a corrupt and lying president.
This means that around 30 percent of our population believes Trump. They do not listen to MS NBC or even CNN, BBC, Reuter’s or the AP; let alone read long investigative reporting on their hero and his appointees in The Atlantic, Mother Jones or The New Yorker.
So, the Trump faithful remain ignorant of his actual behavior. They know little of his stealing their tax money to build a ballroom “everyone for 150 years has wanted a ballroom in America’s capitol,” he lies; it has a bunker underneath for his future – never leaving DC while pretending once again that he’s really a president. The faithful probably know nothing of his many money schemes to separate MAGAs themselves from their money via cryptocurrency; or the Anit-Weaponization Fund that is taxpayer-funded to give to him $1.776 billion in compensation for his tax records being leaked to the public; or the America’s 250th celebration funded by us for the few who attended; or the decrease in Obamacare, the near-obliteration of Medicaid, fewer watchdogs for legitimate new drugs, clean air, clean water, cheaper energy via wind and sun. It’s endless what he’s denied the citizens of his country.
And on another note, Trump is publicly supporting Monsanto’s Round-Up [glyphosate], notifying that it is not the cause of thousands of non-Hodgkins’s lymphoma cancer patients, so they cannot legally sue. Round-Up is sprayed on Midwestern crops and all of our national park forests to make corn and soybeans and trees grow weed free. Monsanto is protected by this administration.
There are many more vile things the true MAGA folks do not know or do not believe even if someone tells them. It is a true anti-democracy situation that I hope we can reconcile or at least diminish by November.
