The Real Power of Hurricane Florence: She Blew Trump Out of the Headlines

For the last few days, if you have been watching CNN, you will have witnessed something that hasn’t occurred in over two years - Trump-free news reporting. He was nowhere to be seen on the front pages of major newspapers. Even Manafort has been getting second billing. Hurricane Florence had taken the lede.

I confess that my initial reaction to the 24-hour coverage of weather on CNN was empathetic worry, which eventually turned to boredom. That felt … weird. For many months, watching the news has produced polyrhythms of depression, fury, and profound dread. Boredom never factored into it. That’s what caught my attention. That is when I realized Florence was bigger clickbait than Trump. 

As of 5 PM Friday, September 14 (ET), ‘metropolitan storm’ Trump had not even registered on the political weather map of the United States for 20 miraculous hours. The clouds gathered and the angels wept tears of joy. Check his Twitter feed over that period. He tweeted nothing about himself, choosing to post OPTs (other people’s tweets), and strategically, all of them were from official sources like NOAA Weather Service, NOAA Satellites, and NOAA Ocean Services. Science, apparently, is suddenly believable.

This is what it looks like when Trump understands when he’s been trumped. It’s like the reverse eye of the hurricane. The slower Florence moves along the eastern seaboard, the stronger the winds, the greater the storm surge, the longer Trump stays out of the news. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper inadvertently summed up the situation perfectly. "Hurricane Florence is powerful, slow and relentless," he said. "It's an uninvited brute who doesn't want to leave." Trump may wish for this natural disaster to end, but only because he wants the spotlight back.

As truth is not a factor for this man, his tweets are as deranged as they need to be to deliver the one thing he feeds on: national attention. He grabbed headlines in the lead up to Florence’s arrival by singing his own unsung praises about his Puerto Rican achievements after Maria. The closer Florence came to making landfall, the more Trump had to up the publicity ante by claiming the 3000 deaths after Maria had been falsified. Outrageous, yes, but he knew he was up against a Category 4 storm that was barreling for the Carolinas - the heart of his base. The result? Florence: 1 - Trump: 0. He miscalculated. You can’t dispute old death scores when one million people are fleeing for their lives.

I’ve wondered what it would take to make this happen. That’s two storms that have now beaten Trump into submission: Ms. Daniels and Florence. Both are relentless. Both are powerful by their very nature. Both have moved very slowly. And both have paddled Trump’s ass. Michael Avenatti should be taking notes here.

Enjoy the weather while it lasts.

#ThoughtsAndPrayers and a Golf Trophy OR Pipiatum ergo tristis sum- I tweet, therefore I am sad.

The ‘thoughts and prayers’ that cascade from the fingertips of US politicians is now the standard operating language that follows a national tragedy in the US. I believe it is meant to make the families of victims of tragedy feel better or less alone in their grief. At the very least, I’m sure it makes politicians feel less complicit about how they’ve allowed certain tragedies to happen.

REQUISITE SIDEBAR: It does not explain exactly what “warmest condolences” means, but it appears that Trump was touched so profoundly by the events in Las Vegas that he did not turn to his hired human-simulator speech writers and decided to give it a go on his own. It was a tweet after all and his base expects authenticity. The effort was apparent. Eschewing the more obvious first six choices and reading all the way down to Sympathy Choice #7 , Trump landed on the prize. The problem is that a warm condolence from Trump still feels like his little hand sliding into someone’s pants.

But back to the thoughts and prayers. Chief among those expressing this sentiment is Mike Pence, poster boy for the NRA (according to the NRA), whose campaign accepted $30 million in donations from the gun lobby. While Pence is getting all emotional, the NRA has not commented on what happened in Las Vegas. Their last tweet is dated September 29^th in which they promote their Sportsmen’s Association 2017 Firearms Civil Rights Conference.

So, what are these ‘thoughts’ that the politicians are having? Trump’s offer of “We’re here for you” is a handful of sand. We’re here for you with what, exactly? A monument to the victims in Vegas? An annual day of mourning? A free concert? All of that is easy compared to battling the NRA lobby for better laws and forfeiting their funding. Who are we kidding - this is a president and a government that can’t get anything done, so changing gun laws is laughably out of the question. Anyway, why face that unappealing truth when you can just bring along an easy distraction - Melania – in the hopes that she repeats her mid-air wardrobe change to match the type of disaster she is visiting.

These days, sympathy appears to start and stop with a tweet. 140 characters of deep feeling. Pipiatum ergo tristis sum- I tweet, therefore I am sad. To get to the heart of the matter, #thoughtsandprayers delivers the sympathy faster and more efficiently. Throw in a GIF of a flickering candle and some #PrayForVegas merch which implores Twitter readers to ‘send your money to make a difference” (although it is unstated exactly where that money is going except to pay for a t-shirt), and a USA Today article on how prayer can make a difference in these difficult times and you can check that item off your list.

But again, what are these thoughts politicians are having? I’d wager they’re happy to allow the media to distract the public until the subject goes away.

The American model of grief confuses me because it has conflated itself with the American news cycle. The process follows a now-familiar pattern: event (Sunday), news coverage of the event (Monday), charts displaying the comparative stats of American shootings (by date/number of deaths/ background of perpetrator (Monday), news coverage of the politicians expressing their #thoughtsandprayers, news coverage of the perpetrator (Monday), news coverage of the public candlelight sing-alongs/late night show host outrage, and finally close up coverage that is the equivalent of tragedy porn, AKA, the human stories (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday). Pause and repeat for next mass shooting spree.

The only thoughts beyond Twitter is the hand-wringing about political action. Experts will weigh in. Democrats will lament. No action will actually be taken … except for Trump and his golf trophy that he dedicated to the hurricane victims. Maybe he will return to his New Jersey golf club this weekend and win a trophy for Las Vegas.

Trump Needs A Muslim Terrorist Attack – Badly. (Notes from the Fascist-Lined Playbook - The biggest mistake made about Hitler by all the German politicians was they thought they could control him)

Deep in the heart of every anti-Trump American (and non-American) is the belief/hope/prayer that eventually the laws which will kick in and stop Trump. That’s fine – until he starts changing the laws. 

At the rate he is going with his executive orders (not record-setting in number, but certainly in controversy), combined with threats he’s issued via Twitter, it feels like the race is on to the moment he oversteps his authority or the Constitution and puts a crown on his head.

For the moment, the protests, the judiciary, and the media, combined with Trump’s inexperience in politics and his over-attentiveness to his brand, are keeping him in check. All his complaints about the media coverage of terrorist attacks are not just to support his travel ban. He’s got bigger plans. What he needs is a catastrophic game-changing event and he’s salivating for that to happen.

(Laughably, this started as a paragrapgh, but it's easier to read it in bullet points)

*On three different occasions (on MSNBC, Cosmo and TMZ), Trump’s spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway, invoked the manufactured Bowling Green Massacre (and given Trump ends every day reviewing news clips with Sean Spicer, does anyone seriously think Conway did that without his blessing?). 
*Trump upgraded the Egyptian armed with a knife and paint bombs at the Louvre to a “new radical Islamic terrorist.” Questions are being asked about Trump’s and Bannon’s peripheral involvement in the violent part of the Berkeley protest. 
*Fox News, Trump’s puppy dog news outlet, leapt at the possible Islamic connection of the shooter behind the Quebec Mosque Massacre until it was announced he really was a white Trump supporter. [All other news outlets updated or deleted their reports accordingly, but Fox kept their tweet up for a full day until Prime Minister Trudeau directly and publically challenged them. Even then, Fox took two more hours to remove the tweet.] But the more telling tweet came from Spicer on January 30: "It's [the massacre] a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the president is taking steps to be proactive  and not reactive on issues of national security."  
*And on Monday, the Republican White House released a list of 78 attacks (dates and countries only) carried out in the US and abroad by "radical Islamic terrorists" since 2014, claiming they were "mostly" underreported. One of these incidences is "Queensland, Australia, August, 2016." The parents of one victim, Mia Ayliffe-Chung, are outraged that Trump would use their daughter to further his cause, given the accused had no Islamic ties and had never set foot in a mosque.
*This week, Spicer referenced another nonexistent attack, this time in Atlanta. He mentioned this one three times. The Daily Beast asked for clarification on it and got nothing. CNN also asked and also got nothing. Only after the story was picked up on various media outlets, did Spicer offer an explanation, saying 'he meant Orlando.'

It is becoming obvious that Trump’s favourite food isn’t potato chips; it’s violence. When speaking to senior U.S. military commanders and coalition representatives this week, he got up on his hind legs and said, “We are up against an enemy that celebrates death and totally worships destruction.” He babbled on a bit longer, but the irony is spectacular (or as he would say, very, very spectacular).

Trump equally love death and destruction. He’s as specific on how he likes his violence served up as The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon is about his mie krob and chicken satay with extra peanut sauce from Siam Palace. 

Did it take place on US soil?

If not, did it take place in a country we have not banned? 

Can you tell who the perpetrators were?

If no, but their faces were covered and they were not caught like at Berkeley, get really upset anyway.

Are the perpetrators white?

If yes, ignore it completely.

Are the perpetrators Muslim?

If yes, was there more than one attacker?

If no, can we add a lot of modifiers to make it sound like a group?

Did anyone die?

If not, can we say there were lots of innocent people panicking?

Were the victims Muslim?

If not, like the Berlin Christmas Market event, can we just label all of them Christians?

If yes, and the attacker was a Trump supporter, just ignore it.

This is all very amusing except there is purpose to Trump’s salivation over violence. The big attack, when it finally does happen, either on its own or with Trump’s help, will be the catalyst to turn his presidency into a dictatorship. 

And he’s getting ready for it:

January 25: While everyone was focused on Trump’s declaration to build the wall, he hired 5000 new border patrol agents. He did this without a congressional hearing on the matter and any appropriate vote to approve the hiring. No one has argued it.

January 25: Trump drafted a 3-page order to reopen “black site” prisons and undo other restrictions on handling detainees, also restricting access the Red Cross would have to those detainees. On February 4, the Trump administration backed off the executive order draft about “black site” prisons, but the revised version contains parts of the earlier draft including expanding the use of Guantanamo Bay detention centre. 

January 26: Steve Bannon said, “... the media should keep its mouth shut.” I don’t know how the public received those words, but the media know a threat when they hear one. And the First Amendment is far from bullet-proof.

January 29: Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News Sunday during which time she called for commentators to be fired for covering Trump poorly.

January 31- February 4: Trump targets lawyers and judges, laying the groundwork for discrediting them when they disagree with him. After firing acting US Attorney General Sally Yates for not defending his executive order banning travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries, he then attacked Judge James Robarts for "halting a Homeland Security travel ban" and blames [in advance]the judiciary if there is an attack on US soil.

While the public is reacting to the individual headlines and tweets, and making significant headway with boycotts, protests and the upcoming February 17 general strike that’s being proposed, a grander pattern has emerged that bears a frightening similarity to events that came before in Germany, 1933.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. 

February 22: 40,000 SA and SS men are sworn in as auxiliary police.

February 27: The Reichstag was set ablaze. The arsonist was Marinus van der Lubbe,

a lone Communist, but there is much debate surrounding this including Nazi involvement. 

February 28: The Reichstag Fire Decree or the "decree for the protection of people and the state" went into effect. This allowed suspension of civil liberties including habeas corpus, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, the right of association, public assembly, secrecy of correspondence, house searches without court order, and confiscation of property. The decree was used by the Nazis to ban publications not considered "friendly" to the Nazi cause.

March 20, 1933: Dachau, the first German concentration camp opened, located 10 miles northwest of Munich which held mainly Communists, Social Democrats and the first Jewish prisoners, all of whom political opponents of the Nazis.

March 23, 1933: The Enabling Act came into effect, consolidating the Reichstag Fire Decree, and allowed Hitler to enact laws without the participation or involvement of the Reichstag.

The events of 1933 are not exactly the same as 2017, but they are similar enough to be distressing. Maybe it will never come to that. I hope it doesn’t. But the “so called” American president is all dressed and ready to go to the ball. He just needs that one last crucial element, an American public panicked by a specific kind of attack on home turf, to invite him.

Groundhog Day- Trust Your Rodents

Ontario’s Wiarton Willie, Nova Scotia’s Shubenacadie Sam and Quebec’s Fred la marmotte emerged just after 8 a.m. local time popped their heads out into the bright Canadian morning light and saw no shadow. Early Spring!

In the US, PunxsutawneyPhil refused to come out. He did, however, issue a press release noting that the pre-apocalyptic darkness that has settled over his country makes it impossible to even know when day has begun and predicts four years of gloom.

Expected soon is a tweet from Donald Trump dismissing the Canadian groundhogs as fake loser rodents and threatening to “go nuclear” on Phil, a Democratic operative, if he doesn’t stop boycotting the event.

Kellyanne Conway-Trump’s Painting of Dorian Gray

Like Josef Goebbels, but without the whimsy, Kellyanne Conway (Pictured above first at age 44, then 50 and most recently on Jan 27, 2017 at 51) just defended her “Trump revolutionary wear” to the American public with a fashion apologia in The Hollywood Reporter: “Sorry to offend the black-stretch-pants women of America with a little color” (referring to her 

$3600 Woody the Woodpecker ensemble). http://time.com/4640712/kellyanne-conway-trump-revolutionary-wear/

You can dress her up, but you can’t make her likeable.

There are many explanations for this woman, but here’s one the public can watch progress day in and day out for the next four years.

We all know what it is like when your work takes its toll on your face. Just look at the wear and tear on Obama when he became president and when he left the White House.

This is different.

Think Oscar Wilde. Like The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Kellyanne Conway is Trump’s psyche in a living painting, not tucked away in a closet, but on full view on the news.

Conway holds the secret to Trump’s soul and they are inextricably linked. With every toxic new move by Trump, the more haggard she looks.  Do bear in mind that even at 44 years old with 4 kids and working in D.C, there still was a sweetness to her face. Seven months of working with Trump later, you can see her soul leaving her body.

As Wilde put it, “He [Dorian] realizes that he can do whatever he wants and he will still be beautiful; he can ignore the conscience and watch the corruption of his soul as it happens. This will afford him a sort of pleasure, knowing that everyone around him will grow old and he will not; his soul may suffer, but his outward appearance will not.”

All the bounce lighting in the world is not going to wipe away the stain on her soul.

Trump’s Achilles’ Heels - His Wallet and His Ego. Part Two: Trump’s Ego

Lessons Learned From Those of Us Who Know.

Welcome to the new reality. Welcome to four years of upcoming protests.
If you think that any one event will be Trump's downfall, I believe you are mistaken. This is going to be a battle of attrition, a la the Gulliver takedown with a thousand tiny Lilliputian arrows and a lot of rope to tangle up the giant. The David vs Goliath, stone to the forehead strategy doesn’t work. 

We Canadians who live in Toronto had Mayor Rob Ford. Back in those days, I genuinely thought he wouldn’t survive his own mistakes. I also thought the onslaught of parody and satire would take him out, but it didn't. I’d hazard a guess that the pressure contributed to his substance abuse, but his personality likely contributed to that just as much as anything else. For some reason that I still cannot explain, the abuse didn’t slow him down. I certainly saw other candidates crumble under far less pressure and ridicule, but Ford kept marching on.

Savage public ridicule has its place in history with some even succeeding in overthrowing the government. So, take heart. Before the French Revolution, pornographic, vicious pamphlets called libelles helped shape the public uprising. “The avalanche of defamation that overwhelmed [Marie Antoinette] between 1789 and her execution on October 16, 1793 has no parallel in the history of vilification,” wrote historian Robert Darnton.

The parodies about Trump began sweeping in when many thought he didn’t have a prayer of winning. Not only more resilient than the Queen of France, he was enervated by the attention. Two prevailing theories suggest the mockery ignited Trump’s run for the presidency.

The first theory sources from the Comedy Central Roast of Donald Trump that ran in March 2011. Didn’t see it? Comedy Central Canada will be running it all day on Friday, January 20. Liz Shannon Miller of Indiewire thought this event may have galvanized him into or at least towards making the decision to run. His last words certainly indicate it was on his mind. “If I decide to run, you will have the great pleasure of voting for the man who will easily go down as the greatest President in the history of the United States. Me. Donald John Trump. God bless America and good night.” http://www.indiewire.com/2016/09/donald-trump-election-roast-comedy-central-1201729118/

If you want to see Trump’s edits to his rebuttal, click here: http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Trumprebuttal.pdf

The second theory comes from the May 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner when Obama took pot shots at Trump who was sitting, unhappily, in the audience. Three days before that dinner, Trump had ramped up the ‘birther’ conspiracy (something he devised shortly after the Comedy Central Roast to delegitimize the sitting president) to such an extent that the White House released Obama’s long-form birth certificate. The worm did a U-turn and Obama weaponized this material. Then the other Seth – Meyers - went at Trump, calling his presidential aspirations a ‘joke.’ 

It’s interesting to note, (no, actually it is deliciously ironic to note) that the day after that dinner, the news broke that Bin Laden was dead, interrupting “Celebrity Apprentice” in the process.

Trump’s love of revenge is by now well known, so cue ‘Telephone Line’ by Electric Light orchestra and watch Steve Buscemi in Billy Madison. I’m imagining Trump has his own list of ‘People to Kill.’ 

This might be good news because all this backstory leads me to believe that what built Trump’s ego up can eventually wear him down. With every Baldwin impersonation, every Stephen Colbert reading of a Trump tweet in that tinny canary voice, every Luther the Anger Translator video, every Trump hand-flapping accordion video, every nude Trump statue with the truly offensive buttocks, every French public urinal with Trump’s face on it - will stretch his thin skin to the limit. He reflexively takes on every battle and he takes every battle personally. Statistically, the population of Toronto could not provide enough mockery to take out Rob Ford, but the proportionate population of the US might be able to drive Trump to the edge and over.

Let loose the dogs of comedy.

Trump’s Achilles’ Heels - His Wallet and His Ego. Part One: Trump’s Wallet

Trump prides himself on being a ‘ratings machine’, according to his January 6, 2017, tweet after the new “Celebrity Apprentice” came in with pathetic audience numbers. He keeps track. It’s his bio-feedback loop.

His presidential approval ratings came in at a record low of 41%.  He rationalized that those numbers were rigged. He’s promised an “unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout”, predicting 2-3 million attending the inauguration. As of 9 AM today, the expectation is 700,000. An hour before, that estimate went up to 800,00. He’ll make an excuse for that as well.

Good. Now we know how to get his attention by giving him no attention.

Let’s start with the boycotting the inauguration events.

Think of it as your civic duty.

Instead of civil disobedience, call it media disobedience.

Trump measures his success in dollars and cents, but his claims defy verification. His Toronto Trump-branded hotel and condo tower have gone on the block. Hardly a fatal blow, but certainly an annoying itch. Harder, but not impossible, to dispute are audience numbers - although he is more than capable of pulling an Orwellian twist by turning a popular vote loss of 3,000,000 into ‘a massive landslide’ win.

He hates to lose anything so complement your media activism with consumer activism.

Fashion designers began doing just that in late November by declaring they would not dress Melania Trump. Tom Ford was particularly outspoken and sure enough, Trump kicked back on “Fox & Friends”, claiming that Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn had thrown Tom Ford’s clothing out of his Las Vegas hotel - except Tom Ford never had a store at the Wynn Las Vegas (although the hotel does stock Ford’s beauty products).

Before that in October, Shannon Coulter, @shannoncoulter (absolutely no relation to Ann Coulter), co-founder of #GrabYourWallet, started a boycott of companies owned by Ivanka Trump. The list of companies to avoid can be found at https://grabyourwallet.org/Boycott%20These%20Companies.html . Some companies have dropped the lines, others have not. If you like the idea of free speech, then this is nothing more than free spending.

You can protest with your dollars, but you can do the same with someone else’s money.

Nathan Phillips, an earth and environmental science professor, went to the Breitbart News site in late November 2016 and noticed the companies who had their ads there. Specifically, he took note of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment's ad, the school from where he received his own degree. After much communication with Duke, they pulled their ad.

Sleeping Giants, a Twitter group (@slpnp_giants /www.facebook.com/slpnggiants) that formed in late November (the founders have asked to remain anonymous) noticed the same thing as Phillips. Progressive companies were advertising there. With a mandate to stop racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and anti-Semitic news sites by stopping their ad dollars, Sleeping Giants have focused on the Breitbart site. By December 7, 400 companies had promised to pull their ads. When I reached out to Sleeping Giants on January 13, 2017,  they said," 610 companies have pulled their ads from Breitbart including Visa, Audi, Chase, Charles Schwab and Lyft. That's in less than 2 months. We now have 37k+ followers and affiliated efforts in the EU and, more specifically, in Switzerland."

As of this column today, the number is up to 719.

In terms of the effect on Breitbart’s business, they have said nothing, but Sleeping Giants added, “Generally, in programmatic advertising, when the bigger companies drop off, the price for the space goes down, so you can assume that, with over 600 companies leaving, the price they can demand has gone down. As of now [Jan 13], Breitbart has not reached out, however, they have published the handle of one follower, leading to a flurry of abusive tweets, not that they have made a difference.”

Their approach is a light touch of the hand, which is dramatically different than any other protest I've seen. The message Sleeping Giants suggest tweeting inadvertent Breitbart advertisers is gentle, such as:
.@HBO Your ad popped up on Breitbart, a site that promotes racism and sexism. Please consider removing it @slpnp_giants

Include a screengrab of the company's ad on the site in the tweet. It's surprising how often that company will respond with gratitude for letting them know.If successful, and it often is, Sleeping giants responds with a congratulatory confirmation. 

Consumer-fueled activism is doubly rewarding in that not only does it have an impact, but you can be assured that somewhere, Trump’s ego is registering a loss.