Why Do I Gotta Again?
People keep telling me I gotta give the Trump economy a chance. It takes time for these things to happen. I gotta have faith and believe that he’s going to help us, and I keep wondering, why is it again that I gotta do this? American farmers and small businessmen are begging the guy to stop before they go bankrupt, and I really want to know why I have to have faith in him.
The guy has lost more money than he ever made. He owes the Russians enough money to start a small country. (Maybe that’s what they have in mind for Palestine.) Every economist in the world is saying he’s insane. The stock market (where a lot of these economists work) wants no part of it. The guy built a luxury casino a short train ride from New York, and it failed so severely they had to implode the thing.
Contractors in New York won’t work with him because he owes them from twenty years ago. He’s a convicted felon in New York. He paid a pretty ugly porn star for sex while his wife was pregnant. He’s trying to sell a bible with his own name on it. Tell me again why I gotta trust this guy? He says he’s six-three and two hundred and twenty pounds. Does he look two hundred and twenty pounds to you?
In the beginning, I didn’t really care. I didn’t like Hillary. Nobody likes Hillary. That she lost wasn’t a surprise. She’s a hell of a lawyer, and probably would have been a good president, but people just don’t like her. I knew Trump was a clown because we’re both old and survivors of the 70s and 80s. Everybody I know in New York said he was a clown. They kept putting him on Saturday Night Live because he was a clown, and he never realized they were making fun of him.
I knew he was a clown, but how much damage can a clown do? He lost me at Charlottesville. Any president who didn’t respond strongly to that would have lost me. A woman died. Trump said there were “Good people on both sides,” and I started to be worried about what was happening here. There have been very few times when something happened in America that surprised me. Charlottesville shocked me. Shocked me enough to think maybe I should be politically active again.
I figured race was an element in his feud with Obama. A lot of guys I know were looking for reasons to hate Obama, too. Trump led the fight with three unsubstantiated rumors. Obama was a muslim. Obama was an African. Obama’s wife was a man. It’s clown stuff. You know, bullshit. Obama was (and is) an actual christian, although he might struggle with agnosticism like I do. Trump has never been a Christian, or tried to, but he’s not beyond saying he is for his own benefit. For a man, Obama’s wife gave birth to and nursed two pretty strong, strapping children. I honestly believe Obama withheld his birth certificate to troll Trump. Read what Obama said at the press dinner. He was enjoying making this weird old white man look foolish.
It made Trump so mad he put his hat in the ring. Everybody in the Republican party thought it was a joke—until it wasn’t.
After Charlottesville, the Trump Presidency started getting weird. Suddenly, where trans kids urinate became this huge issue. Is that a presidential issue? I can see the principal and maybe even the school janitor getting involved, but the President of the United States?
Then he went to war with the press. Every president struggles with the press, but I can’t remember any president ever saying “be nice to me or else” the way Trump has. Even Nixon backed off when it came to the press, even though they ruined him. Maybe that’s why Trump was so aggressive towards the press. He and Rupert Murdoch have a mutual friend that I sometimes call “America’s satan.” His name was Roy Cohn. If there’s ever some fuck shit going on in the last seventy five years in America, Cohn was involved.
Besides the “where to trans kids pee” issue, Trump has so confused the undocumented alien issue to the point where I really struggle to know what the truth is. One thing I know for sure is that Mississippi does not have a problem with undocumented workers. We make them work. You could say they’re the backbone of several of our principal industries. Getting rid of them will be a struggle for some industries in Mississippi.
Yesterday, a flooring contractor sent a Hispanic fella over to my place for a job. When I opened the door and he saw an old white guy with a white beard, you could tell by the look on his face that he was wondering, “Are we gonna have a problem?”
I have no idea if the guy is documented or not. I know he was efficient and clean. I offered him coffee. I’m not sure he understood me. He did his job and left. He never looked me in the eye. He never acted like he was comfortable. No human being should ever be afraid of me. They especially shouldn’t be afraid of me because a guy who looks like me put together an army to send people who looked like this floor guy to a concentration camp. I’m not calling it a prison anymore. Look at the pictures.
They’re blaming drug issues in America on undocumented immigrants. If you look in the history books, you’ll see where they did the same with Irish and Italian immigrants to keep alcohol out of the US. It’s like when we don’t have anyone else to blame, we blame the new people.
Don’t be surprised if you find out that keeping immigrants out doesn’t work against drugs. Blaming addictions on the traffickers doesn’t work. If you got rid of them all, somebody else would replace them. Blaming addictions on the addicts doesn’t work either. What does work is what Dicky Scruggs and Mike Moore did with tobacco. Keep it legal, but tax it enough to cope with the public health issues that arise. We’re doing that now with marijuana. It’s working out pretty well.
I’m an old guy. I’ve been through more presidents than blonde women. I don’t gotta trust nobody. They have to earn my trust. Every president in my life has promised to balance the trade imbalance with Asia. Trump people are saying I gotta trust him as he applies pressure to China to balance trade between us. I don’t gotta actually. If you haven’t noticed, China is laughing at us. Do you know what worked with China and Japan? Reagan’s free trade agenda. That worked pretty well.
Today is passover. I don’t gotta do a goddamn thing where this president is involved. I’m gonna paint lamb’s blood on my door and let this pestilence pass over me. Better days are coming, but maybe not today.
You gotta keep writing - and keep on keeping on.✌️