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.

Bitching and Whining Won’t Keep Kevin O’Leary Off Parliament Hill - The $15 (Canadian) Solution

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, let us Canadians try to not lose on a replay.

We’ve been here before (Rob Ford), we’ve watched the impending travesty in the U.S. with Trump, and for less than the cost of rodent repellant, you can nip this new pest in the bud.

Kevin O’Leary can join the race for leadership of the Conservatives, but there’s no guarantee he will win. And you can participate in making that failure a reality.

Join the Conservative party for one year for $15 and do it before March 28. Then vote against him on May 27th. I just joined this morning.

This guy isn’t remotely interested in being the Prime Minister of Canada. Anything along those lines is transcendent bullshit. He’s just another ego-in-search-of-a bigger-soapbox in a soulless parade of vanity and ambition. Give him the leadership of the Conservatives and you’ll be able to see the Canadian version of Trump’s political Ponzi scheme play out in front of you.

In today’s Globe and Mail [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/kevin-oleary-joins-race-for-conservative-leadership/article33653654/ ], it states plainly that even if he does win the leadership, he may even continue appearing in his state-side reality TV show. This kind of audacity worked in the US because 92,671,979 voters were a combination of disbelieving and, frankly, too lazy to get off their asses and get to a voting booth.

If you need more backstory, Arlene Dickinson handily nails him in her interview this morning: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kevin-o-leary-conservative-run-arlene-dickinson-opinion-1.3942349

Can this be any more obvious?

Hoping O’Leary goes away won’t stop him.

Complaining about O’Leary won’t stop him.

Doing nothing won’t stop him.

Here are the details of the easy, affordable solution.

Step 1: Go to: https://donate.conservative.ca/membership

Step 2: Join the Conservative Party for 1 year BEFORE MARCH 28, 2017.

Step 3; The PCs will mail you a ballot for their May 27 leadership election.

Step 4: Vote strategically against Kevin O’Leary.

Here’s all it takes to qualify (which can be translated into being nothing more than Canadian, carbon-based and having a street address):

• I am a Canadian Citizen or a Permanent resident of Canada.
• I actively support the founding principles of the CPC.
• I am at least 14 years of age.
• I do not hold membership in another federal political party. 

You won’t have to travel to vote. In fact, you won’t even have to leave you own home. It’s easier than voting in a regular election.

It’s that simple.

It’s that easy.

It’s that important.

It Can’t Happen Here- Can It? And in the flick of a hand, it can.

There was something (there were many things, but this was different) that happened at the 48:02-minute point in Trump’s January 11^th press conference that troubled me. It was very small, very quick and very disturbing. With his eyes closed in self-benediction, Trump flicked his hand in a contemptuous dismissal of reporter Jim Acosta of CNN (later taking a question from a different CNN reporter).

QUESTION: Mr. President-elect, since you are attacking our news organization...

TRUMP: Not you.

[hand flick]

QUESTION: Can you give us a chance?

TRUMP: Your organization is terrible.

QUESTION: You are attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance to ask a question, sir? Sir, can you...

TRUMP: Quiet.

QUESTION: Mr. President-elect, can you say...

TRUMP: He’s asking a question, don’t be rude. Don’t be rude.

QUESTION: Can you give us a question since you’re attacking us? Can you give us a question?

TRUMP: Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question. I’m not going to give you a question.

QUESTION: Can you state...

TRUMP: You are fake news. Go ahead.

QUESTION: Sir, can you state categorically that nobody — no, Mr. President-elect, that’s not appropriate.

TRUMP: Go ahead.

That simple hand flick happened too early in the game for the President-Elect. It telegraphed condescension, derision, and a willingness to publicly humiliate. It reeked of personal more than professional payback as if he wanted to say, “You’re fired” but realized he doesn’t have the jurisdiction. It was a bully move.

For the next few days, freedom of the press is still protected by the First Amendment in the US. If it was up to Kellyanne Conway, who's inclined to make threatening statements such as 'Trump's critics should be very careful about what they say', the First Amendment might not always stay that way.

Should Trump, the 70-year-old millennial, attempt to outlaw criticism, there is historical precedent for it being something fast and drastic, but my guess is that it will most likely be a slow, progressive choke. All the signs are there. Right after the election, Trump refused to allow journalists to travel with him for his first meeting with Obama. Before his press conference last week, Trump reportedly asked his legal team if it is permissible to expel or restrict CNN and BuzzFeed News from the White House press corps. Evidently, that didn’t work, but at the press conference, he wouldn’t take their questions.  On January 15, the incoming White House press secretary repeated suggestions that Trump will deny reporters the traditional levels of White House access.

In 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30^th. It took him five days to start restricting the press and banning political meetings and marches. On February 28^th, the Reichstag was set ablaze – just the crisis he needed to enact his first decree: The Reichstag Fire Decree, otherwise known as Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State. That decree permitted restrictions on freedom of the press.

Preposterous in this day and age? Most definitively not. Up here in Canada the Good, it already happened. Stephen Harper was elected Prime Minister in 2006, promising openness and accountability, and then set land speed records in placing a stranglehold on the “Ottawa media elite.” MPs stopped returning phone calls from the media, cabinet ministers regularly refused to comment, security guards on Parliament Hill were ordered to keep reporters from hanging around near the cabinet room where they traditionally would wait for cabinet meetings to finish.

In Turkey, insulting the president is a crime punishable by up to four years in jail, but the law has rarely been invoked. Since Erdoğan became president in 2014, 1,800 cases have been opened. In December, Ece Heper, a dual Canadian-Turkish citizen was arrested in the city of kars in northeastern Turkey and charged with allegedly insulting the president in comments posted on Facebook. In one post, Heper accused Erdoğan of jailing journalists who suggested there is evidence Turkey is supporting Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL. 

Erdoğan has stated he doesn't care if people call him a dictator. That is something Trump will never do, in so many words, but he appears to have no problem behaving like one.

Old Year- New Year Reckonings

This column is being posted within the one-week period of the beginning of 2017 so these thoughts are still valid. After that, all bets are off.

2016 is over. It is a joyous thought shared by many, so I was a bit confused by the mid-December article from Vice.com which advised no one in particular that 2016 should not to be blamed. Vice then went on to provide a multitude of reasons why it was a completely shit year, each event occurring unrelated to each other thereby discrediting any cumulative significance. It was a minor nihilistic wank with a soupçon of absurdism. Blaming 2016 for everything bad that happened, according to them, is ‘weird’.

I disagree. I also sincerely doubt anyone actually visualized 2016 was a sentient creature intent on devouring all that was good. That said, anthropomorphizing a ‘year’ as bad and being glad to see the end of it, well why not?

Attributing powers to inanimate objects or dates (Friday the 13th immediately comes to mind) is a perfectly viable, albeit not scientifically substantiated, inclination. Urban primitive that I am (I know I’m appropriating the name of the former Toronto tattoo parlour of note, but I’m wearing some of their work, so I feel somewhat ok with this), I do it all the time with success. I set up small shrines in my office, stopping short of sacrificing woodland animals. I have little hand-crafted inner city Inuksuks that give me great comfort. Voodoo dolls are a little inelegant for my tastes if only because they lack the necessary aesthetics. And what is a dork shelf if not an alter venerating icons with deep meaning.

The act of doing so has a psychological name: superstitious behavior. It comes as naturally to humans as breathing. BF Skinner pointed this out in 1947 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology when animals (actually, it was pigeons) developed behaviours in an effort to control a specific outcome as a result of accidental juxtapositions between their overt behaviors and the presentation of rewards.  Sports fans, a subspecies of H. sapiens sapiens prone to any behaviours that make their teams win, know this works which is why Bud Light recently released an ad campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67gUGnYca3Q) with the tagline “It’s only weird if it doesn’t work.” 

I had difficulty understanding 2016. By that I mean that one sees life going in a particular way, factoring in family, friends, health, personal goals, career, good luck and bad luck, an understanding of your field of work, your community and the world in general. I’d absorb every new bit of news and move on, but after a while (like, April), it turned into an endurance test and by mid-summer, a chore. "When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness. a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all," Margaret Atwood wrote in Alias Grace. Sarah Polley used this passage as a preface for her documentary, Stories We Tell. You can’t understand the narrative of chaos without the bookends.

Taking the flying debris of celebrity deaths (for each, I did the inevitable age check), the irrationality of the US election and how to cope with it, adding in whatever personal traumas transpired, and wrapping them up in a tidy package to dispose of on December 31^st feels like the only sane thing to do. It offers the illusion of control and renewal and at this point, I’ll buy into the illusion because it’s better than the alternative.

The other way to go is to assess the emotions clinically. Calendar events like anniversaries or birthdays (particularly 0-year birthdays which feel more important that the in-between years) are milestones that you have made it thus far without self-combusting or ending up in prison. These are scattered throughout the year whereas Christmas and the New Year happen for us all at the same time, inspiring the end of the year accounting, the great reckoning and the urge to make resolutions about moving forward.

Given that year-end holidays are not the happiest time of the year- despite how much we’re told they should be- the generally held opinion that suicide rates spike at Christmas is false, but depression abounds. Armchair therapists speculate on the reasons one could be legitimately depressed, yet not one of them stands as a defining explanation. It could be the weather because there nothing like a wrist-slitter of a grey, damp, windy cold day in late December in Canada, but how does that explain depression in sunny California? The death or absence of a loved one during the holidays is absolutely sad, but sometimes it is the living who cause as much pain. The angst of being able to afford the best gifts for your family can be matched by the [first world] anguish of receiving gifts that signal that you are completely misunderstood by those who should know you best. There is the joy of hating the social isolation of New Year’s Eve, the holiday no one can ignore, not even for religious reasons. It’s made worse because everyone asks about what you did at midnight. The reasons go on, but never get you anywhere, except to reassure you that you aren’t the only one who loathes the season and wishes the calendar would just leap from December 19 to January 2^nd.

The fun continues into the new year. The first Monday in January is known as Divorce Day to lawyers. Yup, there are herds of people who wait until immediately after the holidays to break the bad news that they are departing a marriage. They do this so they can, ostensibly, preserve the illusion of family, but come onnnnnn, how much fun does that make the holidays.

January 18, the culmination of the depressing 30 day period that leads up to it, is called Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year - and the (rubber science) formula is: [W+(D-d)]xTQ/MxNA – where W is weather, D is debt, d monthly salary, T time since Christmas, Q time since failure of attempt to give something up, M low motivational level and NA the need to take action.  Of course this was devised by a publicist (a travel publicist, thankyouverymuch) in an effort to promote mid-winter vacations.

The very good news is that this depression is both predictable and short-lived. People forget that part and think it will go on forever - but it doesn’t. If it does, the issues are something entirely different and there are drugs for that.

For me, there is something about the end of the year that twists me around and makes me take account of the 12 months that came before. If I do not like what I see, I have to answer to myself for the results. If there are problems I can do something about, they become my resolutions. If not, I embrace my inner pigeon, shake my fist at the gods and blame the year.

By the time you finish reading this, the depressing stage of the year will almost be over and the most you’ll have to deal with are the sore muscles you have developed by sticking to your new exercise regime.

Bring it on, 2017. I can handle you.