Donald Trump was miffed last weekend when the No Kings rallies against his Project 2025-style regime drew an estimated 7 million protesters and got extensive media coverage.
Ever craving attention, he posted an AI-generated video of himself wearing a crown and flying a fighter plane that dropped feces on the demonstrators.
It was both a grade-school level retort to his detractors and a boot-licking validation of his delusional self-image.
But didn’t anyone in the White House realize it’s also an apt metaphor for what Trump, his Project 2025ers and their allies have been dumping on the American people all along? Or as his former chief strategist Steve Bannon infamously put it, flooding the zone with excrement (generously laced with toxins)?
A shameless liar for most of his life, Trump has spread so much disinformation as a politician — from his first inauguration’s crowd size to the 2020 election results to immigrants’ dietary preferences — that it’s hard to keep track of it all.
Sometimes I see fellow liberals’ social media posts of statements he made that are so unbelievable that I have to look them up to make sure they’re not fake.
Competitive as Trump is, it’s surprising that he commuted the seven-year sentence of George Santos, whose whoppers are even more outrageous than his. Perhaps he considers the fraudster/former New York congressman a spiritual twin; as someone with a track record of balking at meeting any obligation, Trump even let Santos off the hook from more than $370,000 in court-ordered restitution for his victims.
Meanwhile, our own Congressman Dan Meuser is spending a good chunk of time … trumpeting … the administration’s falsehood that Democrats shut down the government to extend federal health insurance to undocumented immigrants.
The truth is that Democrats want to restore Medicare funding and Affordable Care Act subsidies that the GOP members of Congress cut when they passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill for billionaires. If that doesn’t happen, premiums will skyrocket for millions of Americans.
(Pennie, Pennsylvania’s ACA marketplace, expects the average rate to double statewide, with far bigger increases for some counties. Schuylkill policyholders on average would pay 186% ($347) more a month.)
Until the government reopens, Trump and GOP members of Congress refuse to negotiate, but what’s stopping them during this nearly four-week shutdown? Political gamesmanship has obviously … trumped … any interest in constituents’ health care.
Too bad there’s no higher authority to keep all the liars out of the government. Instead, this job falls on the voters, too many of whom have fallen for the MAGA line.
We don’t have a shot at undoing the damage from the Trump/Project 2025 administration until next year, but Pennsylvanians can foil the deceptive maneuvers of MAGA megabillionaire Jeff Yass and his cronies in our state Supreme Court retention election right now.
It bears repeating that this ballot question of whether to give a second 10-year term to Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht is very important.
In fact, it’s important enough to the Yass organization, which includes Commonwealth Partners, the Commonwealth Leaders Fund and Citizens for Term Limits, that it made up separate lies for each party.
For the GOP, it claimed the justices gerrymandered a congressional district map to favor Democrats. (False. GOP legislators drew it to benefit their party, and the Supreme Court overturned it in 2018.)
For Democrats, it claimed voting “no” would term-limit the court. (False. It takes a constitutional amendment to do that.)
What kicking the justices off the bench would probably do is leave us with a deadlocked Supreme Court for as long as two years, when we’ll need decisions on tough cases, including those involving the midterm elections.
Apparently, Trump isn’t the only MAGA billionaire who loves confusion.
By contrast, the Pennsylvania Bar Association has lauded the justices for qualities anyone should seek in a judge: fairness, open-mindedness, judicial temperament and intelligence, to name several.
Their decisions for fair redistricting, equitable funding for public schools, environmental protection, abortion access and voting rights may have irked right-wing megadonors like Yass, but many Pennsylvanians have benefited.
There are practical reasons to vote “yes” for retention, but checking those boxes on the ballot also tells the Yass crew and other MAGA propagandists that they can’t fool us.
Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.
Photo: Dall-E
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