Donald Trump is an ass. He always has been. He always will be. He is also an ass whose early and arguably most influential mentor was Roy Cohn. If we spend more time focusing on Joe and Mika and stupid wrestling videos than we do about deliverables to Russia and healthcare, we’re fucked.
I spent a good portion of my weekend watching the Joe McCarthy congressional hearings. They happened before I was born, but I heard of them growing up. What I heard growing up was that Joe McCarthy had gone after a whole lot of professors, journalists, and entertainers, labeling them as communists and successfully ruining a lot of their lives before congress finally stopped him.
That’s pretty much the bulk of what I knew. Joe McCarthy was bad. He did a lot of damage but America is strong and finally prevailed. I was born after that all went down, and my understanding was that the McCarthy lesson had been learned.
But it hasn’t. One of Joe McCarthy’s legal team was Roy Cohn. Roy featured prominently in the hearings. He and McCarthy both were masters of distraction and obfuscation and insult and outrageousness. Guess who was Donald Trump’s mentor for more than 10 years early in Trump’s career? That’s right, Roy Cohn.
I honestly didn’t know all that much about the McCarthy hearings before this weekend. Now I’ve watched some of them and it’s bone chilling.
Trump is taking us to a place we don’t want to go and we have to stop him. It doesn’t matter what’s in his head. What matters is what he’s doing. He definitely knows how to distract us from important things by being a bully. Roy Kohn taught him how to do that.
Please participate in the resistance in ways that make sense to you. Make calls, write letters, go to protests, post what you do here, post on YouTube. Be creative.
As you do, please think about the policy things that are important like the decimation of the State Department, the withdrawal from the Paris agreement, the aggressive detainment and deportation of heads of families who have been good community members, the threat to all of us to be able to get affordable health care, the denial of women’s right to be in charge of their own bodies, the bills that are getting passed on the state level that allow one group to force feed their radical religious beliefs in our schools.
In the end, these are the things that affect our lives. Whether Joe and Mika like Donald or vice versa doesn’t matter, and neither does the WWE. Don’t get sucked up into what Donald wants you sucked up in. We’ve got a big week coming. We can’t afford to waste time on being shocked.