I, sometimes, when I’m feeling especially dark and especially low, and deep into depression, wonder what a Donald[t]Rump presidency might look like.
You know, Putin says something [t]Rump doesn’t like and he holds a press conference to call Putin a loser. He declares the British Prime Minister to be low energy; he finds some female head of state particularly unattractive and announces to the world that she’s ugly.
That’s President [t]Rump. Now, that might just be my imagination, but this, sadly, is not.
After [t]Rump recently lied about seeing "thousands and thousands" of Muslim Americans in Jersey City, New Jersey, cheering and celebrating the 9/11 attacks, his lie has been called out by someone who knows the truth.
Back on September 11, 2001, Serge Kovaleski was a reporter for The Washington Post and he wrote a piece about police interviewing people accused of allegedly celebrating the attacks that day. None of those accusations or reports turned out to be true, and Kovaleski said so in a New York Times interview.
Last week, while once again saying he saw it and so it was true—just like he ‘saw’ people jumping from the towers as he sat in his apartment four miles away—[t]Rump decided to mock Kovaleski, and began imitating the symptoms of artrogryposis, a disability from which Kovaleski suffers.
Yes, a grown-assed man, running for the highest office in this country, stooped to making fun of a disability.
How-effing-presidential. Let’s roll the tape ….
And when the New York Times called Trump's mocking of their reporter "despicable," he issued a statement.
“I have no idea who this reporter, Serge Kovalski [sic] is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence. I don’t know if he is J.J. Watt or Muhammad Ali in his prime — or somebody of less athletic or physical ability. Despite having one of the all-time great memories I certainly do not remember him.”
Sadly, [t]Rump’s memory is another one of his lies, because Serge Kovaleski was a reporter for the New York Daily News from 1987 to 1993 and he knows Donald [t]Rump:
“Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years. I’ve interviewed him in his office. I’ve talked to him at press conferences. All in all, I would say around a dozen times, I’ve interacted with him as a reporter while I was at The Daily News.”
The Greatest Memory doesn’t remember that; but, remember that this isn’t the first time that Donald [t]Rump has ridiculed someone for their disability. Last July, he attacked columnist Charles Krauthammer—who is paralyzed from the waist down—for calling [t]Rump a "rodeo clown" :
“I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?”
[t]Rump tried to explain it away by staying he was referring to a different, non-disabled, columnist, but that’s not the truth … either.
Look, we all get to vote for whomever we choose, and I get that some people like the idea of someone outside the Washington Beltway being in office. But do we want someone who cannot have an adult discussion? Do we want someone who blatantly lies, gets called out on his lies, and continues to lie? And, worse yet, do we want a president who mocks disabled people because they called him a name?
Do we?
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