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Donald Trump Is Gonna Get Us Killed
by Michael Moore

A week has gone by since Donald Trump admitted he's only been to "two or three" of his daily presidential national security briefings. There have been 36 of them since the day he secured enough electoral college votes to be appointed president next Monday when the Electoral College meets.

Most would agree the #1 job of the leader of any country is to keep its people safe. There is no more important meeting every day for the President than the one where he learns what the day's potential threats are to the country. That Trump would find it too cumbersome or too annoying to have to sit through 20 minutes of listening to his top intelligence people tell him who's trying to kill us today, simply boggles the mind.

Of course, our minds have been so boggled so many times in the past year by this foolish man no one seems that surprised or concerned. He can get up at 5 in the morning and send angry, childish tweets about how he's being portrayed on SNL ("Not funny! Unwatchable!&quot , or belittling the local elected union leader in Indiana, but he doesn't have time to hear about the threats to our national security.

So, my fellow Americans, when the next terrorist attack happens -- and it will happen, we all know that -- and after the tragedy is over, amidst the death and destruction that might have been prevented, you will see Donald Trump acting quickly to blame everyone but himself. He will suspend constitutional rights. He will round up anyone he deems a threat. He will declare war, and his Republican Congress will back him.

And no one will remember that he wasn't paying attention to the growing threat. Wasn't attending the daily national security briefings. Was playing golf instead or meeting with celebrities or staying up til 3am tweeting about how unfair CNN is. He said he didn't need to be briefed. "You know, I think I'm smart. I don't need to hear the same thing over and over each day for eight years." That's what he told Fox News on December 11th when asked why he wasn't attending the security briefings. Don't forget that date and his hubris as we bury the dead next year.

We had a president like him before. He, too, lost the popular vote, a majority of Americans saying they didn't want him in the Oval Office. But his governor/brother and his ex-CIA chief/dad's appointees to the Supreme Court put an end to that, and he was installed as Commander-in-Chief. On August 6, 2001, he was on a month-long vacation at his ranch in Texas. That morning, the White House Counsel handed him his daily national security briefing. He glanced at it, set it aside and then went fishing for the rest of the day. Below is the photo of that moment which I showed the world in "Fahrenheit 9/11". The headline on the security briefing reads: BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE INSIDE U.S. On the top page it tells how bin Laden will do this: with planes. George W. Bush didn't leave the ranch to go back to work for the next four weeks. In the fifth week, bin Laden attacked the US with planes on September 11th.

It's one thing to have a president who was asleep at the wheel. But, my friends, it's a whole other thing to now have a president-elect who REFUSES TO EVEN GET BEHIND THE WHEEL! This utter neglect of duty, a daily snub at the people who work to protect us, the first Commander-in-Chief to literally be AWOL and announcing proudly he isn't going to change -- this, I assure you, is going to get a lot of innocent people killed.

To you, Mr. Trump, I say this: When this next terrorist attack takes place, it is YOU who will be charged by the American people with a gross dereliction of duty. It was YOUR job to pay attention, to protect the country. But you were too busy tweeting and defending Putin and appointing cabinet members to dismantle the government. You didn't have time for the daily national security briefing. Don't think we're going to let you use a modern-day burning of the Reichstag as your excuse to eliminate our civil liberties and our democracy.

We will remember that while the plot to kill Americans was being hatched, your time was consumed by whom you saw as the real threat to America: Alec Baldwin in a wig.

Trump’s business empire touches at least 18 countries, presenting leaders around the globe with a tempting avenue to win favor with the next president and Trump with a way to use the power of the presidency to help his businesses.

What these investments are, though, isn’t always clear. Since brand licensing is such a big part of Trump’s business, it’s obvious when he’s lent the Trump name to real estate developments in other countries. Trump himself hasn’t been transparent about what all of his international holdings entail. A week after the election, for example, Trump dissolved four of his companies named after the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, but the Trump Organization’s general counsel didn’t elaborate on why those corporations were created in the first place.

There’s no guarantee of a quid-pro-quo between foreign governments and the new Trump administration. Smoothing the path for a Trump-branded property abroad or booking a room at a Trump hotel might not mean Trump will do anything in return. But the mere possibility has ensured that governments will try — as they already are. And as long as they do, Trump will profit off that hope.

I was on the Jersey Turnpike when I saw it. I was driving my family to New York for Thanksgiving and there, along the shittiest stretch of road in the shittiest state in America, I saw the Williams-Sonoma fulfillment center: a vast hangar that seemed to stretch a mile long, with shipping containers lined up along the side, like piglets feeding on a series of artisanal teats. It was located in a town called Cranbury because of course it fucking was. It made me wonder if Williams-Sonoma chose the town of Cranbury specifically for the whimsy of it, or if they CREATED the town and christened it Cranbury just so that it could match their mission statement of bringing holiday cheer and $75 baskets of glazed figs to the world.

And I won’t lie, it was kind of nice to see the fulfillment center, to see just where the (imported, dry-aged Portuguese) sausage (with white wine and fennel) is made. This has not been a pleasant year. Everyone good died. America is now a bad sitcom flash forward episode. And I got a camera up my dick. So it was nice to see all those trucks lined up in Cranbury, each one getting its marching orders to drive out to some pristine house on some pristine cul-de-sac in some pristine suburb. Call it Peppermintbarkville—a place that the rest of the world cannot touch, where even a nuclear holocaust could not intrude upon the bestowing of gold napkin rings and cheese assortments. Life as we know may end, but the Williams-Sonoma catalog, and the army of little Ina Gartens who have seemingly unlimited cash to spend on its wares, will endure. They shall adorn their houses in the finest garlands and pass around only the choicest amuse bouches, and everything will be PERFECT even as the world burns a mile away. OH, IT’LL BE SO GRAND THAT YOU’LL WANNA PUKE.

So come with me now. Let’s forget about our troubles, crack open this year’s W-S Christmas catalog, and lose ourselves in a tartan wonderland. Will there be mug toppers? Oh, you better fucking believe there will be mug toppers. To the catalog…

No, that’s not a typo in our headline. We’re not referring to euphemism, which is when you use a more polite word in place of a curse word. But after Donald Trump’s latest embarrassing outburst, we may need a few of those around here. Now that Carrier has announced it’s moving hundreds of jobs to Mexico almost immediately after Trump handed the company a massive tax break for keeping jobs in the U.S., Trump is trying to explain it away by insisting that his original claim was merely a “euphenism.” What the hell is that?

“But that was a euphenism,” said Donald Trump while trying to explain how the Carrier deal went so horribly wrong for him and for American workers and for the taxpayers who just footed the bill for his failed stunt. In the video below you can hear that he clearly said “euphenism,” an imaginary word we have to keep teaching to our spell checker. We checked with the Merriam Webster dictionary and confirmed that no such word exists.

Even if Trump was attempting to use the word euphemism, it still made no sense in the context in which he used it. He was trying to explain why his bold claims about saving Carrier jobs during the campaign and in recent days have turned out to be a grossly exaggerated claim (source: PolitiFact) that he knew he could never pull off. That’s not what a euphemism is at all. Most people would simply call it a broken promise or a lie. Watch Donald Trump make up the imaginary word “euphenism” in the very brief video below:

Police arrested a gunman armed with an assault weapon at a Washington, D.C. restaurant named in a fake pro-Trump news story that spread online.

The Washington Post said no shots were fired and no one was injured at Comet Ping Pong, a Northwest Washington pizza restaurant with ping pong tables that are popular with families.

A phony online news story that circulated days before the Nov. 8 election said that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and a top campaign aide were running a child sex ring out of the back room at Comet Ping Pong.

The story was one of many canards floated by pro-Trump propaganda mills. Not a word of it was true, but the restaurant’s employees and their families have been receiving death threats and other forms of harassment since the phony story circulated, which is known in right-wing conspiracy circles as “#Pizzagate.”