DONALD TRUMP: The rise of a buffoon

The nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty comes to my mind when I think of Donald Trump. As the presidential elect, he wants his followers, his party and all other Americans to consider him as their king. I have applied the wording of that particular rhyme to Trump with a slight change in the wording.

Trumpty Dumpty sat on a wall (the one he envisioned at the USA/Mexico border). Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall (in popularity). Many of the king’s citizens and some of the king’s party; (Republicans) don’t want Trumpty Dumpty to lead them again.

Donald Trump is half politician and half buffoon. While playing the role of a politician, he comes across as a circus clown wearing a blonde plume on his head and at the same time, his oral statements makes you wonder which orifice in his body his obnoxious gas is exiting him when he opens his mouth to speak. Imagine if you will, being close to him while he spouts off his inane comments. It would be not unlike being trapped in a small elevator while he farts in the enclosed space.

His voice irritates decent-minded people not unlike the scratching of fingernails on a school blackboard. He is a boil on the skin of mankind and a blemish on his gender and oozing pus on his Party. His brain must be made of crazy glue that has hardened beyond any hope of being malleable again. Being part buffoon, he strikes out against almost everyone within his reach if he is angry at them—which appears to be most of the time.  

Perhaps I may not have made myself clear. I do not have any respect for Trump. One thing he is not—SMART.  It appears that the word DUMB is a better way to describe him however, I offer other examples of that word; dummy, dumbest, dopey, clownish, moronic, imbecilic, idiotic, clueless and outright stupid. As you read on in my three articles of this buffoon, these definitions will seem quite appropriate.

Trump is completely unaware that sounds that exit between the space between human teeth and the tongue by someone running for office; should not appear as insults to those who are within hearing distance—be it by a close encounter or on TV or radio. Further; this buffoon should not present his stupid rants on Twitter or Facebook which will remain there forever. His presidential team finally got wise and told him not to use Twitter anymore. To quote a German adage—too smart; too late.

Some people will say that he isn’t dumb, because his grotesque insult shtick is working. Who else gets huge newspaper spreads and TV coverage composed solely of his words exiting his mouth? That is because when we listen to a fool’s rantings, we feel superior to that fool in which the great majority of us are. Despite his outrageous rants, Trump has a huge following and as a result, he became the Republican nominee. That doesn’t say too much for those who voted for him to be their nominee for the presidency. However of late, many of his supporters began fleeing from this man. How nice. Their brain cells were slowly becoming fully operational again.

I try very hard not to insult people on my blog and I block people if they even submit a comment via my blog as though they’re itching for a fight. But then I’m writing my views in my blog to give my readers my opinion on interesting issues. Alas, it is difficult to not insult a buffoon.

Trump claimed to have 5.92 million followers not including the journalists tracking his every word, and that meant to his reckoning that the so-called 5.91 million followers wanted to see him as the president of the United States. Why were they so willing to accept such a stupid man as their national leader?  The answer is obvious. They wanted the Republicans to be the leading party in the Senate and the House of Representatives and they believe that Trump is the man that would lead them there. 

Trump’s hatred of so many people

Trump is an abusive racist who dislikes almost everyone he meets. Specifically, Trump dislikes journalists however he hates a great many other people living in the United States such as Musl1ms already in the US and Muslims refugees (which he calls terrorists) black people (which he calls criminals), Latinos (which he also calls criminals and rapists), immigrants (he says there are too many), unclean women (he says are pigs and sluts), and Hillary Clinton (whom he repeatedly called a liar and a crook). As this presidential candidate stomped through the field of hatred, he blew slurs around like they were dandelion seeds spreading around the neighbourhood. He was spreading hatred throughout the United States as lavishly as one plasters butter on a hot corn cob.

It’s possible to shrug off some of his collective offensive slurs as everyone gets them once and a while but what about Trump’s personal insults?  He appears to ordinary people who are not slurping up this man’s drool; as a nervous wreck, a real nut job, a low-class snob, a major sleaze, sloppy, a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain, and a wild dog biting at the heels of decent people.

Why does Trump hate American business? Why does he hate Macy’s, his T-Mobile cellphone provider, a book on William McKinley, Major League Baseball and the Brandon Dunes Golf Resort all equally? And what did the presidential lectern in the Oval Office ever do to him? He doesn’t like it. He said, “It’s not good.” If he was elected as the president, would he have the words embossed with gold and have his face as the center piece?

behind on the floor by a homeless man in a subway station. Donald Trump is simply put; bladder pee.

Have you looked at the faces of his followers? They were relentlessly sentimental and a hopeful group who were always presenting to the public their sardonic smiles. They actually believed that Trump was their saviour.

Compare their smiles with the ones you can see in old photographs where Adolf Hitler was passing by citizens standing on German streets. They had the same kinds of smiles then that the general public nowadays saw when they looked at the faces of Trump’s followers.  

Trump’s promises

The mood of the citizens in Germany in the 1930s was dark since the country had been hit especially hard by a global economic depression. The underlying theme of Hitler was "Making Germany Great Again," a message that directly contributed to Hitler's rise to power and to the terrible war that followed. Ronald Regan while running for President said, “Let’s make America great again.” Contrary to Hitler’s eventual failings, Regan was successful.

With Trump as the president of the United States, that nation and everywhere else in this world will recede back to the dark ages after Trump unleashes his nuclear bombs on other countries where the leaders of those counties tell him that they don’t like him. Anyone wandering through the United State would then see the landscape looking like that of the Somme after the First World War—treeless, muddy and heaped with corpses, Even then, Trump would blow his Trumpet and announce, “I will make America great again.”

Meanwhile Americans don’t like negativity and it doesn’t put them in a good mood when Trump says that America sucks so bad it’s almost beyond rescue.  I did not see how Trump’s vision of a great America could possibly match the one offered by that bloated, red-faced, rage-generating presidential elect.

Americans are for the most part, feisty and positively great.  Many Americans of voting age who even have some semblance of a functioning brain had recognized Trump as Vlad the Impaler. He not only wanted to impale the Mexicans and Muslims, he wanted to impale everyone else except his followers while they were still drooling all over him and believed that he would make for them a great America. They didn’t look far enough ahead to see the treeless landscape he would have created for them had he been elected as their president.

Trump will now be a law of himself

Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton at the Second Presidential Debate. “If I am president, you’d be in jail.”  He was doing more than just threatening his opponent. He was actually telling Americans that he would strip power from the legal institutions that normally enforces the law and instead, he would assume the authority of those institutions all by himself.

Did you know that was what Adolf Hitler did when he was elected as the Chancellor of Germany? He had the final say on the courts and the police. No one was safe in Germany. Now that Trump has been elected as the president of the United States, the Americans might end up with a president not unlike as Rodrigo Duterte, the new president of the Philippines who gave his support for a violent approach to curbing crime with the use of police death squads.

Political scientists who study troubled democracies abroad say that this is a tactic that is typical of elected leaders who pull down their legal systems during their rule such as the late former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe who just as the fascist leaders of 1930s Europe did when they were in power. This sort of behaviour on Trump’s part is eerily familiar with what had been going on in the above mentioned countries.

Today’s United States, unlike the countries in those cases I just mentioned, have strong institutions and norms that prevent any president from going that far. But Trump’s threat to jail his opponent for her deletion of thousands of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State, would chip away at the rights and freedoms that makes American democracy so resilient.

Trump’s comment was  a threat to the rule of law, a threat to the stability of American law institutions and a threat to justice for everyone in the United States that are so necessary for democracy to function.

Trump’s insidious remark can be interpreted as a threat not only to Clinton, but also to the police agencies, prosecutors and judges that normally apply the law. By suggesting that he alone could determine her fate by appointing a special prosecutor on a case that the FBI has already dismissed and predetermining the outcome, is undisputable evidence that  Trump seems to disregard those law institutions as being unnecessary.

Trump’s threat is his dream of absolute personalization of power in which dictators consolidate authority under their authority alone that is not unlike what is happening in in “Zimbabwe, Togo, Ethiopia, Egypt etc. where there are explicit threats to imprison opponents.

The closest parallel to Trump’s suggestion was Chávez, who came to power in 1999 by arguing that elites had corrupted Venezuela’s democracy. Rather than strengthening law institutions, he took their power for himself and persecuted opponents, all while riding a wave of popular support by their followers who refuse to see that danger growing amom them.

These kinds of attacks on political opponents can undermine the whole concept of democratic elections, where whoever wins the election for the presidency will then rule at the expense of the dictator’s opponent’s freedom. That same thing happened in Burma. The army imprisoned a popular candidate for office. Fortunately, she was eventually released from years of house arrest and became that country’s new president. The same thing occurred in South Africa.

It is unnerving to realize the full degree to which Trump’s threat to his opponent echoed authoritarian leaders in the countries that I previously mentioned in this article.  It is kind of freaky when you think of it.

There’s a great deal that Trump could do with his executive power when he is the next America president. However, Trump would unlikely be successful in jailing Clinton, much less consolidating power in the manner of the late Chávez of Venezuela or Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. But even invoking their concept of justice in countries ruled by dictators can have real consequences.

Trump’s two arguments about justice are intertwined because he believes that American institutions cannot be trusted and for that reason, extralegal action is justified as what has happened in other countries. This attitude on the part of a dictator can lead to violence. Trump supporters would then see that the government of the United States as being too corrupt to enforce order, so Trump’s minions would take it upon themselves to enforce their brand of justice, to wit; convictions without trials and death sentences without convictions.

Trump, in threatening to jail his rival, was not just echoing authoritarians like Chávez or President Vladimir Putin of Russia. He was also promising to take what is often considered one of the first steps by which a democracy becomes a more of an authoritarian dictatorship.

It kind of reminds me of Bangladesh by referring to the country’s history of political violence and instability. Thailand and Egypt are like this, too. You have this real belief that whoever wins the election will go after the loser.

Even if such a leader succeed by using the state to punish his or her rivals, that can quickly spiral out of control thereby turning politics into a zero-sum game for control over the institutions of law and order.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans said that a Trump presidency, in which he would be controller of the law, would make them 'anxious.' I believe that the remaining 30 percent after accepting a Trump presidency; would finally get smart and they too would promptly slip into Canada as refugees.  

Trump has already encouraged supporters at his rallies to violently eject protesters. He went even further in suggesting that gun rights advocates might even take matters into their own hands to stop Clinton (if elected as president) from appointing judges they do not like. Advocating the murder of a human being even circuitously is a crime.

I believe that the U.S. democracy is strong enough to prevent such a sudden transformation of justice in the USA but I am concerned that that many American citizens will take this for granted.

“Democratic institutions, like all institutions, can corrode and erode over time. “Even if Trump couldn’t become like Hitler, much less Mussolini, he could do damage so that the next person that comes along has even more leeway to bring justice to an all-time low.

Trump even pissed off members of his own Party

The Wall Street Journal stated that the Republican National Committee had decided to move its money away from Trump and spend it instead on Republican congressional candidates. It was a decision that amounted to the party conceding defeat in the presidential race.

And more than 20 Republican governors, senators and congress people across the country, who had previously stood by Trump despite 16 months of gaffes, incendiary statements and outright bigotry, either said they would not vote for him or called on him to drop out of the race.

The defectors included 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, the Arizona senator, who said Trump’s “boasts about sexual assaults make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.” Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice wrote on Facebook: “Enough! Donald Trump should not be president. He should withdraw.”

Most of the party’s elected officials did not rescind their support. But the mass political divorce 30 days before the election day was unprecedented, especially given the prominence of the participants. Among them were senators from New Hampshire, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and the Senate’s third-ranking Republican member, South Dakota’s John Thune, who wrote on Twitter: “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately.”

Mackowiak, a Trump critic, said the party was now on a “death march.” Trump’s minimum support, he said, might now be 30 or 32 per cent, a disastrous showing that would allow the Democrats to win back not only the Senate but also the House of Representatives.

Mackowiak said that if Clinton even has some chance of winning Texas and other states where she didn’t put any money into TV ads and where she trailed by seven points in a previous poll, she might then actually win the election. He also said, “The problem is, Donald Trump doesn’t care about the Republican Party.”

Trump while believing that he had a reasonable chance of becoming the next president of the United States, preached hatred. He is unfit to hold the office because of his stupefying ignorance of decency. His pattern of reckless behavior inspired a retching feeling requiring his listeners who are decent, to grab the nearest vomit bag.

The words of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s domestic political Republican opponents left them eager to take him down in the rancorous home stretch of an almost incomprehensibly acidic American election.

Washington’s closest allies in Europe who while gazing across the Atlantic, have broken with decades of precedent that called for studious silence and subsequently openly taken sides in a U.S. presidential election.

Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton had their second presidential debate in St. Louis.  There were 33 false claims for Trump and five false claims for Clinton which is a near-identical margin to the first debate two weeks prior when Trump made 34 false claims and Clinton made only four.

Donald Trump`s false statements

1. Falsely said, “In San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment of the two people that killed 14 and wounded many, many people…Muslims have to report the problems when they see them.” (Nobody saw bombs in the home of the terrorists.)

2. Falsely said, “I've gotten to see some of the most vicious commercials I've ever seen of Michelle Obama talking about you, Hillary.” (There are no Michelle Obama attack ads against Clinton.)

3. Falsely said, “We have the slowest growth since 1929. (Americans are vastly better off than they were 8 years ago.)

4. Falsely said, “ICE just endorsed me. They've never endorsed a presidential candidate before.” (Trump was not endorsed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the government, but instead by a union of its employees.)

5. Falsely said, “She Clinton) is raising everybody’s taxes, massively.” (Clinton’s tax hikes are for very wealthy people only. According to the Tax Policy Center nearly all of (Clinton’s) tax increases would fall on the top 1 per cent; the bottom 95 per cent of taxpayers would see little or no change in their taxes.)

6. Falsely accused Clinton of laughing at a 12-year-old rape victim: “Her client she represented got him off and she's seen laughing at the girl who was raped.” (Clinton laughed at various points of a 1980s interview about the case – but never at the victim. For example, she said that her client had passed a polygraph lie test, and she added, with a laugh, “which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”)

7. Falsely said of the “birther” controversy: “You know very well, your campaign Sidney Blumenthal … he's the one that got this started along with your campaign manager and they were on television just two weeks ago, she was, saying exactly that.” (There is no evidence that Blumenthal or Clinton’s campaign manager started the conspiracy theory that Trump promoted for years; Further her campaign manager did not add support for Trump’s assertion on TV.)

8. Falsely said, “She *Clinton) wants to go to a single-payer plan, which would be a disaster. Somewhat similar to Canada.” (Clinton is not calling for a single-payer system like Canada’s; she wants to add a “public option” to the current system, but she would not transform the system.)

9. Falsely said Bill Clinton “paid an $850,000 fine to one of the women, Paula Jones who is also here tonight.” (Clinton paid a $25,000 fine to Arkansas authorities, but his $850,000 payment to Jones was a settlement, not a fine.)

10. Falsely said, “Hundreds of thousands of people coming in from Syria when we know nothing about them. “ (The U.S. has accepted about 12,500 Syrian refugees. And the refugees are subjected to an extensive vetting process.) I might add that 25,000 Syrian refugees were accepted into Canada and not one of them has committed a terrorist act in Canada or elsewhere.

11. Falsely said, “Last year, we had almost $800 billion trade deficit. Other words, trading with other countries. We had an $800 billion deficit.” (The trade deficit last year was $532 billion. It was $746 billion when trade in services, at which the U.S. excels, is excluded from the count.)

12. Falsely said, “Just today policeman were shot — two, killed.” (Two officers were shot and killed the day before the debate, not that day.)

13. Falsely said, “I will tell you we are cutting (taxes) big league for the middle-class.” (The vast majority of Trump’s tax cuts go to the rich, and some analyses suggest the middle-class will actually pay more taxes. The Tax Foundation found that the middle quintile of earners would get an income boost of 1.3 per cent.)

14. Falsely said, “I was against the war in Iraq.” (Trump expressed support for the war before the invasion. His claim has been repeatedly debunked.)

15. Falsely said, “Our taxes are so high. Just about the highest in the world.” (The U.S. has below-average taxes for the industrialized world. It is among the highest with regard to corporate taxes alone, but Trump did not specify that fact.)

16. Falsely said about his tweet about Alicia Machado: “No, there wasn’t ‘’check out a sex tape.’” (That is precisely what Trump wrote, Check out sex tape.”)

17. Falsely said, “Chicago; you take a look at Washington, D.C.  We have an increase in murder within our cities.” (Murder is down in D.C. this year. There were 106 homicides as of October. 7, compared to 120 at the same time last year.)

18. Falsely said of Clinton, “She made $250 million by being in office. She used the power of her office to make a lot of money.” (Forbes magazine wrote that it was $230 million in combined income for the Clintons between 2001 and 2014, but the majority of that was income Bill Clinton earned after he left office. “Hillary didn’t bring in the sort of money herself since it was husband who did until 2013, when she left her post as Secretary of State.)

19. Falsely said he (Trump) was “pretty much self-funding” his campaign. (This was not true even early in the primaries, but especially not later since Trump had accepted tens of millions in donations from others.)

20. Falsely said, of Libya, “ISIS has a good chunk of their oil. I'm sure you probably have heard that.” (ISIS has not done so. “They wanted to disrupt it, destroy it, not to run it," energy analyst Matthew Bey told CNBC in September.)

21. Falsely claimed Clinton is pledging to leave the carried interest tax loophole untouched: “Very interesting why she's leaving carried interest.” (Clinton is even vowing to get rid of the loophole by executive action if elected.)

22. Falsely alleged that Clinton went through a “very expensive process” to “acid wash” or “bleach” her deleted emails. (The emails were deleted with a free software program, called BleachBit.)

23. Falsely said of the Iran deal: “It's a one-sided transaction where we're giving back $150 billion to a terrorist state.” (the Associated Press said, “The deal allowed Iran to get access to its own money that was frozen in foreign bank accounts, estimated at about $100 billion. The U.S. didn’t give Iran $150 billion.”)

24. Falsely said, “Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia. And the reason they blame Russia because they think they're trying to tarnish me with Russia.” (There was hacking. The U.S. intelligence community later accused Russia of responsibility, as independent cybersecurity experts did previously. There was no evidence they did so to tarnish Trump.)

25. Falsely said, “Just take a look at Russia, and look at what they did this week where I agree, she wasn't there but possibly she's consulted. We sign a peace treaty. Everyone's excited.” (There was no “peace treaty” about Syria, nor any agreement this week. The U.S. and Russia agreed to a temporary ceasefire in September.)

26. Falsely said, “…some horrible things like Obamacare, where your health insurance and health care is going up by numbers that are astronomical, 68 per cent, 59 per cent, 71 per cent.” (It is a major exaggeration to suggest that most people will see such increases. While a small number of Obamacare plans may spike this much, the vast majority will not. Estimates of various kinds put the increase at 5 per cent to 25 per cent. And non-Obamacare premiums are rising slower than they did under George W. Bush.)

27. Falsely said, “Her and Obama, whether you like it or not, the way they got out of Iraq, the vacuum they've left, that's why ISIS formed in the first place.” (ISIS was formed long before Obama’s troop withdrawal; it even started using the name “Islamic State” during the Bush presidency.)

28. Falsely said, of the Benghazi attack, “Ambassador Stevens sent 600 requests for help. And the only one she talked to was Sidney Blumenthal who is her friend and not a good guy by the way.” (The Washington Post, which looked deeply into the “600 requests” claim, found that “few if any” of the messages were from Stevens himself, and that many of the 600 were identified as “concerns,” not “requests,” which have different meanings in bureaucratic parlance. The requests did not go directly to Clinton, and not all of them were denied. As for Blumenthal, the New York Times wrote, “It is manifestly untrue to suggest, as Mr. Trump did, that he (Blumenthal) was only person she listened to on Benghazi.”)

29. Falsely said of his hotel development in a historic building (the Old Post Office near the White House);  “The United States government, because of my balance sheet, which they actually know very well, chose me to do the Old Post Office…one of the primary area things, in fact, perhaps the primary thing was balance sheet.” (Trump did not win the project primarily because the government approved of his balance sheet. It was also concerned about numerous news stories from the time of his failures which made their decision final.)

30. Falsely said “jobs are essentially nonexistent” in the “inner cities.” (Millions of people living in urban cores are employed; many inner cities are thriving.)

31. Falsely said, “African- Americans now are 45 per cent poverty in the inner cities.” (It has never been clear how Trump defines “inner cities” – he appears to use the phrase synonymously with “black neighbourhood” – but he appeared to be mangling the statistic he usually uses in his speeches: “45 per cent of black children under the age of six live in poverty.” Overall black poverty is 24 per cent; it is well under 45 per cent even in several cities with a significant black poverty challenge, such as Memphis (35 per cent).

32. Falsely said, “The Canadians, when they need a big operation, they come into the United States in many cases, because their system is so slow." (Though some Canadians go to the U.S. for operations, Trump’s “the Canadians” and “in many cases” make this such an inaccurate generalization as to be false. Scarce data suggest a tiny percentage of Canadians go to any other country for any kind of care: 1 per cent in 2014, according to an estimate in a study by the conservative Fraser Institute, and some experts think the Fraser number is too high.)

33. Falsely claimed that Clinton could have changed the tax code “years ago” had she tried to do so: “She’s a United States senator.” (Clinton was correct that her powers on such issues were very limited with a Republican president in office.)

34. Falsely said, “The number of murders in our country is the highest it’s been in 45 years. They don’t tell you that.” (The increase in murders between 2014 and 2015 was 11 per cent which was the highest in 45 years. But the number of murders was even lower than it was 45 years ago even with more than 100 million more people living in the US)

35. Falsely said, “Remember when, in Massachusetts, I got almost 50 per cent of the vote with 11 people. I got 49.7 per cent of the vote.” (Trump got 49.3 per cent of the vote. Though the names of more than 11 people were on the ballot, he is wrong to suggest he got 50 per cent actually running against 10 others — there were only five still running at the time of the Massachusetts primary.)

36. Falsely said of hacked Clinton-campaign emails: “They show how the Clinton campaign gets the questions for the debates and the answers for the debates prior to the debate. And we still beat her easily in that debate.” (The question Clinton appears to have been provided was for a town hall during the Democratic primary, not a debate against him.)

37. Falsely said that the U.S. trade deficit is “massive and getting bigger.” (“Massive” is subjective, but it is objectively false that the deficit is increasing. As of early October, it was down $4.3 billion (U.S.), or 1.3 per cent, from the same period in 2015.)

38 Falsely said of Syrian refugees, “We have no idea who they are, where they come from.” (Refugees to the U.S. are subjected to an extensive screening process.)

39. Falsely said of New Hampshire, “It shows we’re up 1 or 2 points here.” (It is not clear what “it” is, but Clinton leads in every major New Hampshire poll, and by 4 points on average.)

40. Falsely said “By ‘open borders,’ she (Clinton) means totally unlimited immigration flowing into our country.” (Clinton supports limits on immigration.)

41. Falsely said, “Hillary’s plan includes an open border with the Middle East, meaning generations of radicalism within our shores.” (Clinton is not advocating unrestricted immigration or refugee intake from the Middle East.)

42. Falsely said of his endorsements, “Both the Border Patrol agents and ICE have just done it. ICE did it last week.” (A union of Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees did it, the government entity itself did not endorsed him. The Union did so three weeks ago, not last week.)

43. Falsely said of one of his sexual assault accusers, Summer Zervos: “Today, the cousin of one of these people, very close to her, wrote a letter that what she said was a lie.” (The cousin’s letter did not go so far as to say the accusation was a lie. It said Zervos had previously spoken highly of Trump, and concluded, “I can only imagine that Summer’s actions today are nothing more than an attempt to regain the spotlight at Mr. Trump’s expense.” There is no evidence the cousin is close with Zervos.)

44. Falsely said of the assault allegations, “Many of them already proven so false.” (Trump’s campaign and other defenders have offered contrary accounts, but none of the assault claims have been definitively proven to be false.)

45. Falsely said on Twitter, “The failing NYTimes reporters don’t even call us anymore, they just write whatever they want to write, making up sources along the way!” (The New York Times contacts Trump’s campaign for comment on all of its stories about his behaviour.)

46. Falsely said “Crooked Hillary is lifting your taxes way up,” and “Hillary will raise taxes, and raise your taxes by a lot.” (This claim would only be true if addressed to an audience of very rich people. The Tax Policy Center says most residents below the top 1 per cent will receive minor tax cuts under Clinton’s plan, while the top 1 per cent will be hit with an average increase of $118,000.)

47. Falsely said of his tax plan, “We will lower taxes massively on all Americans.  Our biggest reductions will be for the working and middle class.” (Independent experts say the overwhelming majority of his cuts will go to the rich. Half will go to the top 1 per cent, according to the Tax Policy Center, and some middle-class families will pay even more than they do now. Most families below the top 20 per cent of earners are expected to reap income gains of less than 1 per cent.)

48. Falsely said of Clinton, “She made 13 iPhones disappear, some with a hammer.”(Clinton used BlackBerrys, not iPhones.)

49. Falsely said, “The WikiLeaks documents show that the Clinton campaign was colluding directly with the Department of State and Justice on the investigation of her emails and her illegal server.” (The hacked emails released by WikiLeaks do not show any evidence of collusion over the investigation. A Clinton spokesman who formerly worked for the Justice Department said only that it had informed him of an impending legal hearing on a freedom of information lawsuit over her emails—a hearing that was public information.)

50. Falsely said of Iraq, Clinton and Obama, “The way they got out was disgraceful — and ISIS formed.” (Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, was formed long before the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011; it started using the name Islamic State of Iraq in 2006, under George W. Bush. While it added Syria to its name in 2013, that was not the formation of a new group.)

51. Falsely said, “To be deported from this country, you gotta be bad. Because we don’t deport.” (While Obama has primarily focused on deporting people with convictions, it is false to say the U.S. doesn’t deport under his administration. He has deported more people than any previous president by deporting more than 2.5 million in all.)

52. Falsely said after by making a gesture of handing out one dollar bills, that “Corruption was the reason more than 800 people slated for deportation were granted citizenship. (Homeland Security’s inspector general actually found the mistakes, attributed it to bureaucratic errors.)

53. Falsely said, “Our veterans, in many cases, are not treated as well — remember this, they’re not treated as well as illegal immigrants.” (The campaign’s justifications for this statement are outlandish. The Associated Press, Politifact and Washington Post have all found it to be false. The Post has called it “ridiculous.”)

54. Falsely said that interest rates have been kept low because Obama wants them that way: “It’s horrible that he’s been able to get away with this.” (There is no evidence at all that Obama’s preferences have had any impact on the Federal Reserve’s rate decisions.)

55.  Falsely said, “Over the last few years, this administration has been steadily dismantling the federal criminal justice system. Tens of thousands of drug dealers have been released from prison early, including many illegal immigrants.” (Obama has issued 775 commutations in all. Not even all of those have gone to drug dealers.)

56. Falsely said, “We’re actually the highest-taxed major country anywhere in the world, by far.” (The U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate of any major country, but with regard to all taxes, it is among the lowest-taxed.)

57. Falsely said, “Our economy is practically not growing at all in the United States. Just about zero.”(The economy is growing steadily, though not rapidly. Second-quarter 2016 growth was 1.4 per cent. There has been growth every year since 2009.)

58.  Falsely said, “If you remember, Hillary Clinton, when we brought killers, drug dealers, gang members back to countries and intelligently the countries said ‘we’re not taking them, we don’t want them, we’re not taking them,’ she said ‘Oh, bring them back.’” (This is a gross characterization of the situation and Clinton’s role. Twenty-three countries often refuse to take back illegal immigrants convicted of crimes in America. Under a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision, American authorities cannot hold these people indefinitely for deportation, so they are released back into soviety. They are not flown to their home countries and rejected, and Clinton did not personally decide to take them back. Both the Obama and Bush administrations have refused to retaliate against the refusing countries, like withholding visas.)

59. Falsely said, “In San Bernardino, many people saw the bombs all over the apartment of the two people that killed 14 and wounded many, many people, Muslims have to report the problems when they see them.” (Nobody saw bombs in the home of the terrorists.)

60. Falsely accused Clinton of laughing at a 12-year-old rape victim: “Her client she represented got him off and she's seen laughing at the girl who was raped.” (Clinton laughed at various points of a 1980s interview about the case – but never at the victim. For example, she said that her client had passed a polygraph lie test, and she added, with a laugh, “which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.”)

61. Falsely said, “I've gotten to see some of the most vicious commercials I've ever seen of Michelle Obama talking about you, Hillary.” (There were no Michelle Obama attack ads against Clinton.)

When Trump as the president of the United States makes his State of the Union speech, how much of it will be the truth? Will some of his statements be outright lies and others be uninformed statements?

Hillary Clinton`s false statements

1. Falsely said, of the Khan family, “Donald insulted and attacked them for weeks over their religion.” (Trump’s personal attack on the Khans lasted about a week, not “weeks,” and the specific insult to their religion in particular lasted even less time.)

2. Falsely said, "We are now, for the first time ever, energy independent." (The Associated Press wrote; “For the first time in decades the United States gets more energy domestically than it imports, but it is not yet energy independent, as the country continues to rely on oil imports from the Mideast and elsewhere.”)

3. Falsely said, of Trump’s talk of her emails, “Everything he just said is absolutely false.” (Trump made at least some correct statements, including that 33,000 emails were deleted.)

4. Falsely said, “Since the Great Recession the gains have all gone to the top.” (Wrote the New York Times: “Not anymore. Median household income rose sharply last year for the first time since the Great Recession, rendering Mrs. Clinton's comments out of date.”)

5. Falsely said, “Eight million kids, every year, have health insurance because when I was first lady, I worked with Democrats and Republicans to create the children's health insurance program.” (This is an overstatement of her role in the effort, especially the part about working with Republicans; the Washington Post found that she played a significant behind-the-scenes role pushing for the bill with her husband’s administration, but did not personally work across the aisle on it.)

Trump said, “First of all, she was there as secretary of state with the so-called line in the sand.” Clinton responded, “No, I wasn't. I was gone.” Both of them could be considered correct or incorrect. Trump is right that Clinton was still Secretary of State when Obama drew a “red line” against the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons, in 2012. But Clinton was right that she was out of office when Syria actually crossed the line, in 2013.

Well, there you have it. If you were the editor of a newspaper and Donald Trump came to you and said that he would like to be a newspaper reporter with your newspaper, would you hire him?

Sixty years ago, I was the copy editor of one of Canada’s largest newspapers. Later, I was the associate editor of a magazine and the editor of another magazine. In the 1970s, I was a national syndicated newspaper columnist for a very large Canadian newspaper and the producer and host of a television talk show.

I have been retired since 2006 and in that year, I began writing articles in my blog three times a week in which the shortest article is eleven hundred words and the longest article is seventy-two hundred words. I have always taken great care to get my facts right before I let them be published. After having written well over a million published words, I have only had one complaint about getting a particular fact wrong. When I learned of that mistake, I immediately corrected it

In pursuing the truth; diligent verification is critical. I take great care to ensure that statements of fact placed in my written statements in the written news media and my oral remarks on my TV show and later in my blog and my books have been correct.  I expect the same from politicians. Alas, a great many politicians like Donald Trump are inclined to sway their followers and their constituents from the truth and make up the facts as they go along. It is most unfortunate that there are millions upon millions of gullible people in our countries who accept what falsehoods they are fed by such politicians.    

Now that Donald Trump is soon to be the United States president, how can anyone, be they citizens of the US, officials in both the US federal government and officials in the state governments and politicians in Congress and State legislatures and the same in other countries make the presumption that Trump is telling them the truth every time he opens his mouth and speak? 

Did you know that the NRA endorsed Donald Trump for president of the United States? I guess that reaffirms their approval for absolute zero background checks.

Speaking of background checks, why wasn`t this political turd vetted by the Republican Party before they chose him to be their nominee for the presidency. They should have not waited to do so in order to avoid any last-minute vetting of their prospective candidate.  Of course by the time they got smart, it was too late to discover that their candidate turned out to be a disaster in the making. Their inaction was as stupid as sailing across the sea in a boat without checking to see if there is a large hole in the hull.

My next article is titled; DONALD TRUMP: The sexist misogynist (part 2)