America First

      As I've stated recently, Trump's three campaigns for president are loaded with inflection points. They are thickly studded with deal breakers that would spell doom for any other candidate for president. Joe Biden's own bid for president in 1988 was immediately derailed with allegations of plagiarism. Gary Hart's candidacy was ended with news of an affair. Same thing with John Edwards. In fact his own affair ended his entire political career.

     That same year, 1988, Michael Dukakis' bid for the presidency was torpedoed because he got into a tank. George HW Bush's scummy Willie Horton ad didn't help any. That failed bid essentially ended Dukakis' political career, as well.

     Back then, that's all it took. It was the heyday for political scumbag tricksters like Lee Atwater. A little rumor, well-placed news article alleging some middling moral or ethical turpitude and you could call it a day.

     With Donald Trump, there have been so many missed opportunities to end his campaigns that it's laughable to even expect there will be an inflection point that will get him out of our lives forever. At this point, Trump could literally shoot someone on 5th Avenue and this race would still be neck and neck.

     Because when you lead a cult consisting of 70,000,000 people, all is forgiven and you can literally do no wrong. And there are almost too many of these deal-breaking inflection points to count over the last nine years.The first one arguably was in July 2015, just weeks after he rode down that escalator, to savage Sen. John McCain's war service. "I like guys that weren't captured," said the five time draft dodger. It should've ended right there.

     Then he mocked a disabled reporter. Asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails. I haven't even gotten into 2020. It's literally insane that the GOP's nominee in 2020 was a guy who was already impeached once but there we were.

     There have been plenty of inflection points galore in this election cycle, God knows, especially as Trump's dementia progresses. And then Bob Woodward provided us with another bombshell. In his upcoming book, War, Woodward tells us that Trump had given Vladimir Putin COVID testing kits at a time when we had had precious few. 

     Naturally, Trump snarled at Woodward and called the allegations fake news. But the problem is the Kremlin itself had supported Woodward's account and admitted that Trump did indeed send them to Russia. But, as usual, the press got it wrong. These weren't mere testing kits like the swabs you still have in your medicine chest at home.

     These were molecular point-of-care test machines that hospitals desperately needed at the time to rapidly detect infections at the onset of the pandemic. And not only that, they were sent for Putin's personal use. Specifically, the ones he'd sent to Russia were the Abbott Labs test machines that quickly acquired a reputation for giving false positives and negatives, which is the only funny part of this story.

     Of course, this was done with the usual hugger mugger secrecy because that's the way Putin wanted it. The Russian dictator tried to couch it in terms designed to show concern for Trump but the reality was, Putin didn't want to be exposed as being the dictator of a country that was so primitive it didn't even have testing technology for the deadliest pandemic in a century.

     Of course, if we were still living on Rachel Maddow's Earth One, this alone would place indelible mockery on Trump's dog-eared motto of America First (that was first used by the KKK, don't forget). But we no longer live on Earth One. We live on Earth Two.