Rudy Giuliani: “Truth isn’t truth.”– The Trumpian Bubble, or Alternate Reality According to Donald– and how he will destroy the economy and the country if he isn’t stopped

As we know, Donald Trump believes that his inaugural crowd was the biggest in history, much bigger than that of Barack Obama.  Donald’s election victory over Hillary Clinton was also “a huge win”, not just in the Electoral College, but in the popular vote as well– when we count the number of illegal aliens (3-5 million) who voted.  There are many other ways in which Donald’s reality differs from that of the common man, far too many to list in a brief blog post.

The difficulty we are having with Donald’s presidency is that we don’t understand Donald’s reality.  In his version of the truth, trade wars are “good” and “easy to win”– they have no effect on the economy.  Donald is blissfully unaware of the catastrophic effects that his tariffs and sanctions will have on the economies of Turkey and Iran, with knock-on effects all over Europe and the Mideast.  Restrictions on trade due to tariffs may just be the trigger needed to prick our current economic “bubble” (which is not so much a bubble as as a sphere of expedited commerce due to minimizing barriers to international trade and a relative reduction in war) and plunge us into another recession.  The downturn need not be enough to reach Great Recession levels in the United States, but there are many other national economies that are struggling, and some are already in free fall (Venezuela, for example). . . The downturn need only be enough to reach Donald’s 40% and convince them that they have made a mistake.  Tariffs are very likely to be the only mechanism available to throw the Republicans out of office, because according to Donald’s version of reality, being the president, he can do no wrong.

There is an existential aspect to this November’s elections, in that if the Democratic party doesn’t get a majority in the House, there will be no impeachment vote, and reality as we (the liberal left, so to speak) know it will come to an end.  If the Democratic party is successful in November, then the Democratic reality will triumph.

At this time, it is convenient to introduce terms that apply to the two most popular versions of reality presently existent, that will become obvious as the terms are introduced.  The first version is the Republican or Trumpist type of reality, noted in the first sentence of my blog post.  The second version is the Democratic or Sanders version, which can also be described as a weak version of physical reality; this will be explained below.  You can see at once that there are two clear and opposing realities that are shared by significant percentages of the US population.  Perhaps thirty to forty percent of adults believe in the Republican version, and roughly fifty percent believe in the Democratic version.  The Democratic faction tends to lose elections because its voters don’t vote as faithfully and their factions have been gerrymandered into significant losses despite strong actual majorities.  In some states, gerrymandering by Republican-majority state legislatures has loaded the dice against Democratic communities.  The result: a minority Republican vote gets a majority of seats in the state legislature.

The Democratic version of reality: as I said, a weak version of physical reality.  There is a superficial layer of calm rationality which can tolerate mild disagreements.  However, reality is hindered by the presence of hallucinations, such as the one about five inter-racial teenagers who supposedly raped and beat a jogger in Central Park back in the crime-ridden New York Nineties.  Donald Trump immediately got on the publicity junket of the time, a full-page ad in a newspaper, to call for dire penalties for the suspects, not waiting for a trial.  As it happened, they were convicted but exonerated when another man, a multiple offender, confessed to committing the crime.  Even after the confession, Donald insisted the five were guilty.

In the intersection between physical reality and Democratic reality, there is a shared region in which the Central Park Five were, if not completely innocent based on the evidence presented in their first trial, at least deserving of better justice than they received at their first trial (at which they were found guilty.)

In any case and to my great dismay, the objective or “hard” physical reality that excludes the Central Park Five from involvement in the brutalization of the young woman jogger also includes the presence of Donald Trump as President of the United States starting January 20, 2017.

So there are at least two viciously antipathetic parties with not only different world-views, but different realities.  In our universe, left-wing people on Twitter have been attacked and threatened five times as much as right-wing people.  In their universe, a right-wing university professor was threatened today; everything else is old and thus not newsworthy.  In our universe, 2.9 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Donald Trump.  In their universe, seventy thousand people in the right states created a narrow Electoral College majority.  Despite ancient precedent as to the role of the Electoral College (essentially an anti-democratic body which was charged with using its considered judgement as to whether an elected candidate was morally and mentally fit for the office– but which was never used in this fashion, fortunately for Mr. Trump.) the Electoral College victory stood and a minority-majority President was inaugurated.  In our universe, he immediately began to violate the Emoluments clause of the Constitution.  In Trump’s universe, he gave away the profits to worthy government departments, so it was perfectly all right.  He had the contract for the hotel, which forbade government office holders from participation, rewritten so that it allowed a certain government office holder to act as an owner in this particular case.  He announced that he was giving away the income from the hotel to worthy government departments.

In our universe, Trump accepted help from Russian parties, specifically to disseminate negative information about his opponent (Hillary) that he could use in his campaign that the Russians had to offer.  Unfortunately, none of the people who gave testimony about the meeting mentioned the negative information– it was, unaccountably, all about adoption of Russian babies in the US.  Perhaps word came from on high that asked the Russians to disseminate the information independently, under an anti-government imprint (Wikileaks, who was co-opted to spread the hacked emails that seemed salacious or suspicious), so the Republicans could say they had nothing to do with it.

In Trump’s universe, Natalya only came to whinge about American families not being able to adopt Russian babies and how this policy (applied in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act) could be reversed if certain people were freed from sanctions imposed by the act (originally applied because the individuals were accused of torturing imprisoned lawyer Magnitsky to death) simply by Trump writing an executive order.  In Trump’s universe, and here is a place where the two universes intersect, Natalya was told “we’ll discuss that if and when Trump wins the election.”

I could go on with these alternate realities, but surely you understand that Trump promised more than he could deliver when he implied that he would write executive orders freeing Russians from sanctions– that has been politically impossible for some time.  In this universe, the one where causes and effects coincide, Trump is not directly useful to Putin.  He is only indirectly effective in the sense that he is diverting our attention away from normal operations and toward arguments over policy and personnel, almost literally tearing this country apart, regardless of whether the Democratic party wins the coming elections or not..  So if Donald expects any more help from Vladimir, he needs to have something to offer that Vlad can’t get anywhere else.