Compassion, tolerance, and kindness aren't options...especially in a would-be President
A toxic narcissist like Donald Trump shouldn't manage a Dairy Queen, much less be President of the United States
They all said the way to a man’s heart was through his asshole.
Edmund White, Our Young Man
Often we have to remind our minds that the job of asshole is already taken.
Scott Stabile
I have a special place in held for those who publicly ridicule others because of a personal tic or challenge. So when I learned that Donald Trump had ridiculed President Joe Biden for his stutter, something the President has fought for years, I wanted to kick Orange Jesus’ pasty white ass myself.
There should be no place in this world for displays of such utter classlessness. Then again, Trump has never been accused of possessing an abundance of class. As an obese ambulatory sack of shit, the man’s in no place to ridicule others- not when he’s such a target-rich environment in his own right.
Donald Trump ridiculed President Biden over the economy, immigration, and foreign policy before turning to personal mockery during an Iowa event on Friday night.
A few hours after Biden had given a sweeping denunciation of Trump, calling him a sore loser and a threat to American democracy, the former president made fun of Biden’s childhood speaking impediment.
“Did you see him? He was stuttering through the whole thing,” Trump said to a chuckling crowd on Friday in Sioux Center, Iowa. “He’s saying I’m a threat to democracy.”
“’He’s a threat to d-d-democracy,’” he continued, pretending to stutter. “Couldn’t read the word.”
The remark was not true; Biden said the word “democracy” 29 times in his speech, never stuttering over it. Trump’s comment also marked a particularly crass form of politics that he has exhibited throughout his career that places politeness and human decency at the center of the 2024 presidential election.
The worst part of Trump’s diatribe was that he was lying about the entire thing. Biden never stuttered. He never even had a problem enunciating “democracy,” and Trump lied about it because he thought he could score some cheap political points.
But that’s just the type of asshole Orange Jesus is- crass, ugly, hateful, disrespectful, and thoroughly dishonest.
Through his mean-spirited display, though, Trump displayed what a low-class person he is, and how thoroughly unfit he is to serve as President. His lack of compassion and consideration for the trials and challenges others may face is the sort of thing that should make it clear he’s not qualified to spend four years in the White House.
Biden’s stutter is something that he has talked about openly, referencing it as something he attempted to overcome. He has used it to connect with others who stutter, and he has also spoken about being made fun of for it as having given him a window into how to deal with bullies.
After a nun at his school gave him a hard time — referring to him as “Mr. Bu-Bu-Bu-bu-Biden” — his mother drove to the school and confronted her. “If you ever speak to my son like that again, I’ll come back and rip that bonnet off your head,” she said, according to Biden’s memoir. “Do you understand me?”
He was called “Dash” and “Joe Impedimenta” by some of his classmates because of the way he stumbled over his words. As a high school freshman, he was exempted from a public speaking presentation because of his stutter.
He detailed his battle with stuttering in an article in the Atlantic and he has talked about the shame and deep humiliation — and how he would rehearse conversations ahead of time so he could say the correct phrases — but also how it gave him lifelong insights.
“In our family … we’re never allowed to make fun of anyone, no matter how mean they were to us if they had something they couldn’t overcome,” Biden said in a recent interview with Conan O’Brien where he talked about his stutter.
“If you think about it, the only handicap everybody thinks they can still laugh at is stuttering,” Biden said at a campaign fundraiser in October. “It taught me a lot. It taught me a lot, to have a lot of tolerance for people.”
Joe Biden used the pain and humiliation he endured as a learning experience. It taught him the importance of compassion, tolerance, and patience. It made him realize that all of us have mountains we must climb; some are larger and more challenging than others, but we all face tests.
Biden used his experience to learn patience and tolerance. He understood what it was like to face a tremendous, daunting challenge and to work to overcome it. He knows what it’s like to continually struggle with it. He understands that it never really goes away, that it’s always with him, and the key is staying on top of it, day in and day out.
I can relate to the President’s experience to a large degree. I spent my entire childhood, through high school, college, and two marriages, thinking I was stupid. I couldn’t organize my thoughts like others, I couldn’t keep up in conversations, debates, or arguments. I could read a page in a book and have no idea as to what I’d just read.
Even though I’d taken two IQ tests and scored highly on both, schoolwork was difficult for me. My grades were good, but I had to work much harder than anyone else to keep them up. College was at times a nightmare because I realized at the beginning of my freshman year that I had no idea how to study.
It was extremely difficult to keep my grades up in college, not because I wasn’t smart enough, but because I couldn’t keep things straight. I couldn’t get the hang of studying, so I’d go into every test hoping I’d stuffed enough information into my brain by rote memorization that I could pass.
After college I encountered an entirely new set of problems. I could never seem to get my career off the ground, because it was difficult for me to work in a professional situation. Projects, deadlines- they all seem close to impossible to stay on top of. I never seemed to be able to find a situation that allowed me to be comfortable.
Because of this, I’ve spent my entire career chronically underemployed. I’m not going to mention the top salary I’ve made, because I’m frankly embarrassed by how low it is. Most kids coming out of college make more at their first job than the highest salary I’ve ever made.
It wasn’t until my late 40s that I began to understand why. It wasn’t until I was 55 that I was officially diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). My biggest challenge is organization; I can’t organize things, nor can I keep information straight for more than a very short period of time. Engaging in an argument, a debate, or any discussion that requires me to keep my facts in order is a supreme challenge…one that I invariably and inevitably lose.
One of the odd things about ADD is it often comes bundled with an ability to hyperfocus, which I can do when I’m writing. I can crank out 3,000- 4,000 in a couple of hours without too much difficulty because I can focus intensely on the task at hand. And I can focus anywhere, no matter what distractions might be around me. I’ve written in restaurants, coffee shops, airports, train stations, and other large, loud, very public spaces. I don’t need a specific, quiet environment to write because of my ability to hyperfocus and block out distraction.
There are pros and cons to ADD, and there are still times when I feel incredibly f*****g stupid. In fact, it happens quite often, but I have to remind myself that my brain is wired differently. I can’t process input like most people. So, yeah, I get people who stutter…and people who laugh at them piss me off because I’ve been on the receiving end of that ridicule far too often.
“Yesterday President Biden had the courage to say what Donald Trump won’t: that America rejects political violence and ‘is still a country that believes in decency, dignity, honesty, honor, truth,'” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Biden’s campaign. “Donald Trump continues to prove that he stands against all of those things. Mocking Americans with challenges only does violence to Donald Trump’s own dignity, and the American people stand as one against it.”
Fuck Donald Trump. He’s a classless, self-absorbed asshole devoid of compassion and kindness. I don’t believe in Hell, but if Hell were real, I’d have him hanging by his testicles for eternity over a tank of boiling tar. No one would be laughing, because I don’t believe in finding joy in the suffering of others, but neither would I be sympathetic to his plight.
After all, this isn’t Trump’s first rodeo when it comes to being a dick. I suspect we can all remember when he mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski:
Good Lord, what a flaming asshole. Fuck him AND those in the crowd who laugh at him mocking a disabled reporter. That’s about as low as it gets…but it’s not out of character for Donald Trump. And it’s not as if Trump is anywhere near a perfect human specimen.
Joe Biden has more class, dignity, and courage in his thumbnail than Orange Jesus has in his entire body. I hope that someday he will experience someone mocking him and be unable to respond, that all he will be able to do is sit mutely while those around laugh derisively at his misfortune.
That would be a fitting bit of karma, no?
(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)
I once did 4,000 words in one day. I was so wired by the end of it that I had to call my friend Toni to come sit out on the porch with me while I tried to decompress. After she died, I discovered she had written about it in her journal. These days I can understand (though I still cannot forgive) the savagery of school children who will sniff out any sign of weakness in another and then attack that point and that person without mercy. But from a nominal adult, it evokes a special kind of disgust from me.