Daily Kos Recommended: Justin Trudeau turns down Trump's invite to bathe in our COVID filth

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• These revelations from Mary Trump’s new memoir help explain why Uncle Donald sued to silence her
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• Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump has a new tell-all book that Donald Trump is attempting to block. He is attempting to block the book’s publication because Mary Trump does not like her uncle and the tell-all book is filled with nothing but bones from a grotesque man’s closet. The book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, is described by the publisher as “revelatory,” though to whom Donald Trump is a pathetic weakling of a person, who is cruel, narcissistic, and incompetent is revelatory remains to be seen.

  Needless to say, there is something not exactly satisfying or reassuring about knowing that no, you are not wrong, the president of the United States is exactly the kind of rich kid failure of a human being you think he is. This is no small thing as there are times that this man’s incompetence and cruelty seems so banal that one wonders if they aren’t just in some poorly written spoof film. But, sadly, we are not. As we reach the end of Trump’s first term in office and find ourselves living as extras in a bad 1990s action film, Mary Trump’s book gives some details of her uncle’s lack of integrity and offers up some dark things to laugh/cry about.

  The book’s release date is set for July 14, but The New York Times was able to get its hands on the memoir a little earlier. Mary Trump, who is estranged from her uncle and reportedly signed a nondisclosure agreement in connection with a settlement over her grandfather’s (Fred Trump) will seems to be ready to drag out a lot of skeletons from the Trump family walk-in closet, nondisclosure agreement or not.

  Here’s a fun one: Trump cheated on his SATs in order to get into the prestigious University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. I mean, we all sort of assumed that if Trump somehow had high marks—standardized testing or otherwise—it was related to money. One of Trump’s former professors at Wharton, William T. Kelley said that “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” Listen, I’m not a fan of standardized testing. I think SATs and the like are poor ways of showing little more than how well one can handle a standardized test. That being said, I also believe bragging about one’s excellence based on things you haven’t done to be a terrible trait.

  Mary Trump dishes on the Fred Trump-driven family ethos of “cheating as a way of life,” and looking at the rest of humanity as monetary pieces. There are stories of Trump and his family sending off the wayward alcohol-addicted son, Donald’s older brother Fred Jr., to the hospital alone on the night he died from a heart attack. Fred Jr., Mary’s father, died at the age of 42. Trump’s niece clearly feels that her grandfather’s anger toward her father over not choosing the family business led in part to his demise as well as a lack of care when he needed it most. In fact, Mary writes that Donald went to the movies the night of his older brother’s death.

  

  Of course, the true nature of those relationships is hard to know or judge, but what can be judged in Mary’s opinion is Donald’s ability to be successful with his father, Fred, who if you don’t know was a terror of a human being by most every account. According to Mary Trump, Donald’s success was simply based on the fact that he was mediocre enough, and sociopathic enough to fit into his father’s  plans. "The only reason Donald escaped the same fate is that his personality served his father's purpose. That's what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance.”

  Mary Trump, who is an actual clinical psychologist, also explains that while her uncle has all of the clinical traits of someone with narcissist personality disorder, he is even more troubled than that, and a comprehensive breakdown of his mental health landscape would be virtually impossible to achieve. Needless to say, Mary Trump writes what we all know to be true, without money and a corrupt and rigged system, someone like Donald Trump would likely be in a situation that required lots of professional and government-aided help: “Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”

  The most important issue facing Donald is that his entire life has been a fake news myth-making endeavor. He’s been a terrible businessman, a terrible “ladies man,” a crap parent, a boring talk show host, and now a truly incompetent and dangerous world leader. What Mary Trump’s book does more than anything is remind Trump of his mediocrity, and it hits Trump in the place that hurts him the most—the public’s imagination.

  The most important issue facing the United States—if not the world—is also contained in this tell-all tome: we live in a world that not only is not a meritocracy, but it is designed to allow terrible people to rise into outrageous positions of power, with little to no oversight and zero justice. It is a story of our country’s well-known, but not spoken about, caste system, created by income inequality and our current economic and health crisis is the proof-positive of how few people for which this system works. When the going gets tough, the rich and people like Trump buy their way forward at the expense of hundreds, thousands, and millions of other people’s lives.
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• Pentagon considers Confederate flag ban, setting the stage for an epic Donald Trump tantrum
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• Mississippi took an image of the Confederate battle flag off its state flag. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. The Marine Corps ordered the Confederate flag be removed from its public and work spaces, and the Navy is moving toward doing the same. The Defense Department overall, though? Ehhh … it’s starting to think about maybe possibly banning the flag of a traitor nation at some point.

  An unnamed official “said the draft policy being considered at the Pentagon’s highest levels would build on recent moves by military services to bar Confederate symbols on facilities they control and, if approved, would represent the first Defense Department-wide prohibition of such iconography,” The Washington Post reports.

  Donald Trump will not be happy, and Defense Department leaders know that. Trump has railed against NASCAR for its Confederate flag ban, and he has railed against moves to rename military bases that currently bear the names of Confederate leaders. Trump has even threatened to veto a defense authorization bill over the issue.

  That’s how much Donald Trump loves this symbol of racism and slavery.

  “For more than a century, the flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against Black Americans after the Civil War and during the civil rights movement, as segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of discriminatory Jim Crow laws, and in the continuance of a false narrative of white racial superiority,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lecia Brooks wrote last month. “Our public entities, especially our military assets, should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people.”

  The ban the Pentagon is considering would not apply to the inside of barracks rooms or to things like bumper stickers on personal vehicles. Just the public, official spaces of the United States military.
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• Mary Trump book: Donald had a proxy take his SATs for him
  
• COVID-19 infections rising so rapidly 'we cannot even do contact tracing anymore'
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• One of the few effective tools we have for slowing the spread of COVID-19 has been rendered ineffective in the southern states now experiencing record coronavirus infections. Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine told CNN host Anderson Cooper on Monday that the cases in those states "are rising so rapidly that we cannot even do contact tracing anymore. I don't see how it's possible to even do that."

  COVID-19 infections are so now so prevalent in many areas, in other words, we simply can't determine where the infections are coming from or who else needs to be warned. In Arizona, around a fourth of all COVID-19 tests performed are coming back positive—a tell-tale symptom of rationed testing in which only the most obviously sick are receiving tests, and the wider public is not being tested at all. These states are now reaching uncontrolled and uncontrollable pandemic levels; we haven't yet seen for certain whether death counts will soar as they did in New York during the first wave of the pandemic, but there is absolutely no evidence suggesting they will not.
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ICYMI: Here are the top stories of the week so far:

• Trump accidentally tells the truth about his dumpster fire of a presidency
  
• Cartoon: Trump Tower
  
• COVID-19 rages, Trump melts down, and Congress takes a two-week break
  

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