Note: This was an unfinished blog post that was trite and out of date before I finished it.

“Every time a stupid politician says something stupid, you don’t have to reply to him, because it is nonsense to shoo every barking dog away!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

The Free Dictionary defines “dog and pony show” as a display, demonstration, or exhibition of something one is selling. (As a circus act where trained dogs leap onto and off trained ponies.)” America was offered up one of the most egregious displays of this idiom when the Republicans held their convention to nominate Donald Trump for a second term for the presidency. Breathtaking in its skew of reality, presentation of endless lies, totally devoid of understanding irony (Ivanka Trump: “I recognize that my father’s communication style is not to everyone’s taste, but the results speak for themselves) and so much more there isn’t space to catalog it all.

I’ve been doing some serious thinking about what all this means to America. The one question I keep asking myself is “How did America sink so low to support a grifter and con man for president of the United States?” Regardless of the answer, I would bet there are a lot of lifelong Republicans who voted the party line in 2016 who are having second thoughts today. With America recording its six millionth case of Covid-19, and many, many deaths to come, how can anyone still support Trump. It boggles the mind. CNN broadcast this little piece of wisdom about Trump’s acceptance speech in the White House Rose Garden as reported by Crooks and Liars:

WOLF BLITZER: Jim Acosta, first to you. What do you hear about the lack of social distancing. 2,000 people sitting very close and most of them were not wearing masks.

JIM ACOSTA: That’s right, wolf. We heard a lot of gaslighting and we experienced maybe some super-spreading. I talked about all these people, hundreds of people sitting side by side in the audience, not wearing masks and a Senior White House official brushed off concerns about lack of social distancing.

This quote might blow you away. “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.” C&L (my emphasis)

Well, yeah, but do we have to? If this quote is the official White House stance one the pandemic, a lot of things are understandable, not sane, but understandable. It makes sense really. Trump’s lack of initiative on getting out ahead of the pandemic, his refusal to advocate and take personal measures to protect himself and others can be explained away through the quote above. Again, the only word I can come up with to explain it is mind boggling.

The only comic relief in all of this is how Trump seems to sliding off the deep end and the results would be hilarious if the stakes weren’t so high. Recently, he opined how a plane headed for Washington was populated with men in black headed to the nation’s capital to do nefarious deeds. He later changed his story saying the men were leaving Washington headed to parts unknown. It’s hard to say if these shadowy thugs completed their mission in D.C. before they left or not.

Honestly, I can’t figure Trump out. He continues to do the thing that is least likely to give him even a chance to win reelection. In the last few days, actually since the thugs on a plane conspiracy, he has racked up some real doozies. His disdain and lack of support for our men and women in the armed services has gone viral. He continues to push for the opening of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling companies. His campaign has unleashed an attack on Joe Biden for going to church and visiting the gravesite of his son. Hilariously, he said he never attacked John McCain and called him a loser for being captured in Vietnam despite video tapes showing him doing so. His administration is pushing for an untested vaccine for the Covid virus despite warning from the professionals who should know better. He . . . oh why bother. The man is a walking contradiction without a rudder or a cognitive scintilla of brainpower to make right decisions.

Yet, he continues to shaft the country by raking in untold amounts of cash to his Trump properties at the expense of the American public. His golf trips alone could keep a small third world dictator in power for years. This Forbes article spells out just how much Trump’s golfing cost us as of 2019, and the projected cost of four more years if he is reelected.

While all of Trump’s properties have benefitted from his presidency, no place has benefitted more than Trump’s International Hotel in Washington, DC . In an exhaustive article on the swill and the swine that belly up to the hotel’s many bars, Mother Jones revealed that for someone who claims to be a financial genius his common sense and business acumen were certainly lacking considering the deal he signed onto with the General Services Administration (GSA).

When the GSA solicited bids for the property in 2011, Trump offered the agency a higher rent payment than any of his rivals, according to one of those competitors. And his company pledged $200 million to renovate the Old Post Office, $170 million of which was lent by the good folks at Deutsche Bank. . .

Trump committed to pay the GSA $250,000 a month over a 60-year lease, with possible rent increases pegged to the Consumer Price Index. And if undisclosed revenue thresholds were met, the GSA would receive additional payments from Trump, starting at 3 percent of the profits for the first 10 years of the lease and increasing by 0.5 percentage points for five decades thereafter.

The GSA has said the projected room rate for all bidders on the project averaged $626 a night. But to recoup its massive investment, the Trump Organization needed to charge at least $750 a night on average, industry experts calculated, according to the Washington Post.

Mother Jones

After signing the deal, industry consensus was that the hotel could not turn a profit because of the high rental price of the rooms.

The problem Trump faced in October of 2016 (a month before the election) was that he had six loans totalling $479 million coming due over the next four years.