2016 Sept 22^nd

We will soon be having a new campaign chair for Trump in an Ohio county. Kathy Miller, a former county chair, has declared that there was no racism in America before Obama became president. That was too much for even Kellyanne Conway to play duck ’n’ dodge against, so bye, bye Ms. Miller.

Trump has advocated “stop and frisk” programs to reduce the violence now present in many communities. No, wait just a minute; the backlash from this racist comment has made him declare that he meant such action to apply only to Chicago. Suggesting a racist “solution” for Chicago will not lose him black votes, which he won’t get anyway, and might nudge a few undecided bigots in his direction. Stop and frisk has a background in NYC of which he is obviously ignorant. Courts  ordered that procedure stopped.

This Trumpian comedy is now supported by Donald Trump Jr. who, not so long ago, suggested that if his people had engaged in some action similar to Clinton’s “they would be getting the gas chambers ready.” Junior hasn’t learned that the mention of gas chambers in a political context is not only politically incorrect, it is also bone stupid.

Junior has some revisionist comments to compliment daddy’s revisionist decision to announce that President Obama was born in the United States after all. Trump has to couple that change from his long held “birtherism,” with the lie that birtherism was really started by Hillary Clinton. (The Clinton campaign in 2007-8 considered presenting the fact that Obama had spent his youth out of the country as evidence that he had not developed typical American values.  They didn’t use that tack. They never claimed that he wasn’t born in this country. That was just another Trump lie.)

Junior’s latest revisionist claim involves daddy’s tax returns; up until now the reason those returns haven’t been released to the public, according to Trump, was because Trump was being audited. When the audit was finished he said he would release the returns. This became an increasingly tough sell once the IRS declared that there was absolutely no reason why a tax return currently being audited couldn’t be shared with anyone. Then Junior tells us that their tax and political advisors had told them not to release those tax returns at all.

Now Junior punts again; at this point he claims that daddy’s tax returns are so enormous, 22 thousand pages, that no one would want to plow through them. I think that is just wishful thinking. The final take here is that no one will see Trump’s tax returns. His devoted fans don’t care,  but there aren’t enough of them for him to win the election and his returns and his other skullduggeries aren’t going to attract the fence sitters.