Offended By The Gadarene Swine Republicans? Is America About To Be Taught A Lesson For Tolerating Toxic Garbage In Our Midst?

Who knew what an advocate of an anti-trust agenda Trump is! He's now threatening to use political power against the owner of the Washington Post-- and using a distorted version of Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren terminology to do it-- for daring to investigate him during the campaign. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is, according to Trump, using the Washington Post as a political tool to keep his taxes low. "The whole system is rigged," he told Sean Hannity. "He’s using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he’s using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust... Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise... He's using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don't tax Amazon like they should be taxed. We can't let him get away with it."

Apparently, Trump is trying to prepare the voters for some story Post reporters must have on him. I don't think, though, it's the one about how Trump masquerades as aides on the phone so he can sing his own praises in the third person. That's funny, but unlikely to cause the bloviating asshole to feel any embarrassment-- and unlikely to rattle the cages of the losers who support him.

The voice is instantly familiar; the tone, confident, even cocky; the cadence, distinctly Trumpian. The man on the phone vigorously defending Donald Trump says he’s a media spokesman named John Miller, but then he says, “I’m sort of new here,” and “I’m somebody that he knows and I think somebody that he trusts and likes” and even “I’m going to do this a little, part-time, and then, yeah, go on with my life.”

A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron”-- public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself-- who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides.

In 1991, Sue Carswell, a reporter at People magazine, called Trump’s office seeking an interview with the developer. She had just been assigned to cover the soap opera surrounding the end of Trump’s 12-year marriage to Ivana, his budding relationship with the model Marla Maples and his rumored affairs with any number of celebrities who regularly appeared on the gossip pages of the New York newspapers.

Within five minutes, Carswell got a return call from Trump’s publicist, a man named John Miller, who immediately jumped into a startlingly frank and detailed explanation of why Trump dumped Maples for the Italian model Carla Bruni. “He really didn’t want to make a commitment,” Miller said. “He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.”

Miller turned out to be a remarkably forthcoming source-- a spokesman with rare insight into the private thoughts and feelings of his client. “Have you met him?” Miller asked the reporter. “He’s a good guy, and he’s not going to hurt anybody... He treated his wife well and... he will treat Marla well.”

...“Actresses,” Miller said in the call to Carswell, “just call to see if they can go out with him and things.” Madonna “wanted to go out with him.” And Trump’s alter ego boasted that in addition to living with Maples, Trump had “three other girlfriends.”

Miller was consistent about referring to Trump as “he,” but at one point, when asked how important Bruni was in Trump’s busy love life, the spokesman said, “I think it’s somebody that-- you know, she’s beautiful. I saw her once, quickly, and beautiful...” and then he quickly pivoted back into talking about Trump-- then a 44-year-old father of three-- in the third person.

In 1990, Trump testified in a court case that “I believe on occasion I used that name.” He did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Well... technically he didn't respond, but he did run to Hannity and attack and threaten the owner of the reporter's newspaper. Then yesterday-- contradicting his sworn court testimony-- he was on NBC denying he had been passing himself off as Miller. "I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and then you can imagine that, and this sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams-- doesn’t sound like me... It was not me on the phone. And it doesn't sound like me on the phone, I will tell you that. It was not me on the phone," he lied. Remember, Trump has made an art of manipulating the press and firmly believes that all press, good or bad, helps his brand (his business).

Carswell this week recalled that she immediately recognized something familiar in the Queens accent of Trump’s new publicist. She thought, “It’s so weird that Donald hired someone who sounds just like him.” After the 20-minute interview, she walked down the hall to play the tape to co-workers, who identified Trump’s voice. Carswell then called Cindy Adams, the longtime New York Post gossip columnist who had been close to Trump since the early 1970s. Adams immediately identified the voice as Trump’s.

“Oh, that’s Donald,” Carswell recalled Adams saying. “What is he doing?”

Then Carswell played the tape for Maples, who confirmed it was Trump and burst into tears as she heard Miller deny that a ring Trump gave her implied any intent to marry her.

Carswell, now a reporter-researcher at Vanity Fair, said the tape cuts off mid-interview, leaving out the part in which Miller said that actress Kim Basinger had been trying to date Trump. Hearing the tape for the first time in decades, Carswell said, “This was so farcical, that he pretended to be his own publicist. Here was this so-called billion-dollar real estate mogul, and he can’t hire his own publicist. It also said something about the control he wanted to keep of the news cycle flowing with this story, and I can’t believe he thought he’d get away with it.”

...“One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better,” Trump wrote in his bestseller The Art of the Deal. “The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”

Trump did not describe using false identities to promote his brand, but he did write about why he strays from the strict truth: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration-- and a very effective form of promotion.”

...After Carswell’s story appeared-- headlined “Trump Says Goodbye Marla, Hello Carla . . . And a Mysterious PR Man Who Sounds Just Like Donald Calls to Spread the Story”-- Trump invited the reporter out for a night on the town with him and Maples. Carswell says Maples persuaded Trump to issue the invitation as an apology for tricking her. A few weeks later, when People ran a story about Trump and Maples getting engaged, Trump was quoted saying that the John Miller call was a “joke gone awry.”

So far the joke looks like it will be on naive Republican primary voters.

Now even evangelical leaders on catching on the calibre of Trump's character and are warning their congregations that Trump's power play is a threat to "the fundamental integrity of Christian faith and the well-being of society itself" and "a moral threat" to society and to the country. This is from evangelical faith leaders:

The ascendancy of a demagogic candidate and his message, with the angry constituency he is fueling, is a threat to both the values of our faith and the health of our democracy. Donald Trump directly promotes racial and religious bigotry, disrespects the dignity of women, harms civil public discourse, offends moral decency, and seeks to manipulate religion. This is no longer politics as usual, but rather a moral and theological crisis, and thus we are compelled to speak out as faith leaders. This statement is absolutely no tacit endorsement of other candidates, many of whom use the same racial politics often in more subtle ways. But while Donald Trump certainly did not start these long-standing American racial sins, he is bringing our nation’s worst instincts to the political surface, making overt what is often covert, explicit what is often implicit.

Trump’s highly visible and vulgar racial and religious demagoguery presents a danger but also an opportunity-- to publicly expose and resist the worst of American values. By confronting a message so contrary to our Christian values, our religious voices can help provide a powerful way to put our true faith and our better American values forward in the midst of national moral confusion and crisis.

...Donald Trump, a celebrity from the worlds of real estate and reality television, is manipulating this anger for his own political advantage-- at the expense of the common good. Trump is shamelessly using racial resentment, fear, and hatred-- always dangerously present in our society-- to fuel a movement against “the other,” targeting other races, women, cultures, ethnicities, nations, creeds, and a whole global religion.

How many conservatives feel very much like Clinton-hater, PJ O'Rourke, who endorsed Hillary this week as the second worst thing thing that could happen to America.

I endorse her. And all her pomps. And all her empty promises.

Better the devil you know than the Lord of the Flies on his own 757. Flying to and fro in the earth, with gold-plated seatbelt buckles, talking nativist, isolationist, mercantilist, bigoted, rude, and vulgar crap.

...Better to root up the garden of free enterprise with the Democratic pigs than run off a protectionist cliff with the Gadarene swine Republicans.

Ever since Athens in the 5th century B.C. the great enemy of democracy has been the demagogue. But-- O tempora! O mores!-- now we’ve got a firebrand soap box orator who cannot so much as put a coherent sentence together. He likes to “talk bigly.”

Here’s to you, Hillary, for saving your best bloviation for your highly paid speeches to shady bankers. I would, if I could, pay Trump more to shut up.

Hillary, you are the crone in crony capitalism. I endorse you.

I choose Goldman Sachs’s milch cow over the cretin bull siring his herds of mini-Minotaurs-- half-men, half-bullshit-- laying waste to the country.

Better a Marie Antoinette of the left saying, “Let them eat fruit and fiber,” than a Know Nothing who would be Robespierre if he could spell it.

Let me tell you why Hillary is a great presidential candidate-- by comparison.

Don’t rush me here...

Did I mention that she’s the second-worst thing that could happen to America?

She’s a better real-estate developer than Donald Trump.

Trump Taj Mahal Casino, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts went bankrupt. Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt. “Restructured” being the Trump way of saying he didn’t pay it. The $39.2 million that it cost taxpayers to investigate Hillary’s Whitewater scam is nothing by comparison.

She doesn’t cheat at golf.

True, Hillary screwed up during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. As opposed to Donald Trump, who would have sent his supporters to boo and hiss the Islamic extremist attackers and then ask the police to take the extremists away.

Yes, unless Bernie wins the nomination-- you can help him at the thermometer below-- this is going to be the ultimate lesser-of-two-evils election.