Independence From Donald Trump Day, 2019
On July 14, 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron invited Donald Trump to help him celebrate Bastille Day in Paris.
In France, it’s a military parade which celebrates the storming of the Bastille in 1789 during the French Revolution.
Trump loved it, because it’s a military parade, and he promptly ordered his top brass to prepare plans for a military parade in Washington on Veterans Day 2017 at a cost to taxpayers of $90 million — and seems like he probably doesn’t have to pay any taxes.
But that didn’t go anywhere, because here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we celebrate Veterans Day with parades honoring our veterans, and we celebrate Fourth of July without our Commander-in-Chief making a speech.
These days, we don’t have a Commander-in-Chief who has the least idea how much harm he’s already done; we have a Twitterer-in-Chief, a Disrupter-in-Chief, a Liar-in Chief, and a few other epithets that our numerous associate solitary reporters have yet to come up with.
The Bastille was originally a fortress against the English in the 14th century, in the Hundred Years War, when England’s King Henry V led his troops in battle and the psychotic French king was nowhere to be seen. Then the French made it into a prison, which it was until July 14, 1789, when revolutionaries stormed it, killed the superintendent, and released seven political prisoners. Then, during their Revolution (which was inspired in part by ours), it was destroyed, and the French replaced it with the Place de la Bastille.
Between 1659 and 1789, 5,279 prisoners called the Bastille home. Many of them were housed there because they had broken French censorship laws (authoritarian regimes, like the French monarchy, Xi Jingping’s China, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, don’t like to have free presses. Trump’s close personal friend Kim Jong-un doesn’t even need a big military parade to show off his many rockets.
As we said on June 22, Trump thinks he’s the Center of the Universe, and that he can do anything he wants and say whatever he wants (https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2019/06/22/at-camp-david-trump-says-he-wants-to-make-iran-and-north-korea-great-again/).
So it was no surprise to our Washington-based associate solitary reporters, Susanna Sherman and Keith Coleman, that when, against their better instincts, but at the urgent request of DNC Chair Tom Perez, they showed up at Trump’s military parade today. Their commute was easy, as they are both permanent residents of the Hay-Adams Hotel, where they live because they are tasked with keeping a very close watch on Trump and his minions, and they can see the White House from their rooms. They both stayed far away from the tanks that Trump had brought to the parade by rail from Georgia.
ASRs Sherman and Coleman were not surprised in the least when Trump, standing before the VIP section at the base of the Lincoln Memorial (the Memorial was closed to the public, and the seats in front were reserved only for Trump’s hundreds of mega-donors and Republican members of Congress, with no Dems invited), that Trump began his speech by announcing that he has fired his Secretary of Commerce, 81-year old Wilbur Ross, for botching his order that the constitutionally-required Census include a question, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
Ross, a billionaire, told Congress that he had talked with the Justice Department about Trump’s demand, and he also told Congress that nobody in the White House had told him what to do; but then it turned out that Trump’s former Campaign Chairman, far-right Steve Bannon, then an adviser to Trump in the White House, had told him what to do.
Ross claimed, with no basis, that he put that question in the Census to help enforce the Voting Rights Act.
Problem is, Trump doesn’t believe in the Voting Rights Act (which SCOTUS has helped to eviscerate), because he knows that it was passed under LBJ to make it slightly more possible for black people to vote.
When it came to the highest Court in our land, the Court correctly ruled that Ross’ rationale for putting that unlawful question in the Census was contrived.
Not only that, top GOP strategist Thomas Hofeller had, before his death in 2018, spelled out for the RNC precisely why Trump should put a citizenship question in the Census: to scare people of color and immigrants, or people who don’t look like Trump, from voting.
Associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones just told us that Ross has taken refuge in the office of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who has told Ross that Trump will soon tap him to be his ambassador to Germany, the wealthiest member of the EU.
As soon as he announced Ross’ firing, Trump spoke behind a protective glass during a rainstorm and yelled that he has told Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to get the ATF to dynamite Lincoln’s 19-foot high statute and erect in its place a 25-foot statue of himself.
But Bernhardt doesn’t have the money to do that, because Trump made Bernhardt move $2.5 million from his Department so Trump could break tradition and give a political speech.