Getting Sick of Trump? You’re Not the Only One.

Don’t get me wrong. I was living in New York in 1989 when Donald Trump published that disgusting, full-page ad calling for a resumption of the death penalty after five black teenagers allegedly assaulted and raped a white girl in Central Park.

The defendants were exonerated and released from jail fourteen years later, but Trump not only didn’t apologize for helping to whip the city into a frenzy when the crime occurred, but he also criticized the city for paying reparations to these five wrongfully incarcerated individuals who should never have been in jail at all.

That episode convinced me that Trump was a hard-core shitass, and nothing he has done or said since that time has made me feel that my view of him is anything other than completely correct.

On the other hand, when he announced his Presidential candidacy in 2015, other than people around the country who were followers of his reality TV show, he was basically an unknown quantity to everyone else.

Well, maybe not quite completely unknown, because in 2011, during Obama’s first administration, Trump began promoting the ‘birther’ conspiracy to the effect that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, a story which first began circulating among — ready? — the Clinton gang when Hillary was barely standing on her feet at the tail-end of the 2008 primary campaign.

In fact, even though Obama released a copy of his official Hawaii birth certificate in 2011, along with a birth announcement in the local media, the alt-right conspiracy mill continued to grind away about Obama’s ‘foreign’ birth and it was Trump who patted himself on the back for making enough noise to force Obama to release the document and finally put the issue to bed.

That was then, this is now. And if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will join a fairly small and select group who lost Presidential elections twice, and an even smaller group who headed a major party Presidential ticket three or more times.

The last two-time loser was Adlai Stevenson who got beaten by Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956. Just before those two contests, Thomas Dewey lost to FDR in 1944 and to Truman in 1948. You then have to go back to 1844 to find the next two-time loser, which was Henry Clay who…