Trump Does His Best Yosemite Sam And Says He Would Blow Iran To ‘Smithereens’
The ongoing Republican race to the bottom continues at a breakneck pace with trump still leading but others gaining ground, including one candidate for governor, another hoping to be North Carolina’s top education official and a southern congressman.
But first, the nation’s worst president ever and master of diplomatic finesse put on his best World Wrestling Federation hat to warn Iran that he would “blow it to smithereens” if Iran is found complicit for assassination attempts against trump.
For anyone younger than trump, who is 78, smithereens is a phrase that is defined as “broken into small pieces” and is most commonly used by the fiery, cartoon character “Yosemite Sam.” Yosemite Sam, the mean-spirited, extremely aggressive, gunslinging outlaw or cowboy with a hair-trigger temper has an intense hatred of rabbits, Bugs Bunny in particular.
The derivation of smithereens is not entirely clear but it likely developed from the Irish word, smidiríní, which means “little bits.” But trump saying he would blow Iran to smidiríní would lose its impact.
In his own words, trump said on Wednesday at a rally in Mint Hill, N.C., “But if I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We’re going to blow it to smithereens. You can’t do that. And there would be no more threats. There would be no more threats.”
Get that Iran, no more threats or Yosemite Sam will blow you to smithereens.
The trump campaign said the fearless leader was reacting to a briefing from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), that apparently focused on a scheme unrelated to two failed domestic assassination attempts against trump and came amid reports suggesting that Iran is conducting an ongoing hack against trump’s campaign.
Trump went on to whine about “Who is our president right now? We really don’t know. But we have two people, not one that only keep looking. And when you do that, when you just look, trouble always ensues. So it’s big trouble for our country.”
“Our enemies are desperate to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House because they know,” Yosemite Sam said.
Coming in a close second in the weekly slimy politician race is Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., who on Wednesday went unhinged with a racist tirade against all Haitians.
“Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP,” Higgins wrote in a now-deleted tweet on X (formerly Twitter). “All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”
He was apparently referring to inauguration day 2025, with the hopes that trump will have his hand on the Bible
Higgins was referring to charges filed by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for immigrants. The group has filed a criminal charge against trump and his vice presidential lackey, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, charging that Haitian immigrants have received death threats after trump said, and Vance repeated, that Haitians are stealing and eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio. Trump and vance’s lies have led to bomb threats, evacuations, and event cancellations in Ohio.
The claims by trump and Vance have been completely debunked as a further unseemly, calculated, political effort to drum up immigrant hatred. The case is being taken under an Ohio statute that allows for private citizens to launch criminal cases.
Anti-Haitian hatred sparked by trump and Vance spilled over to the Jamaican community in Springfield, Mo., this week. In a Facebook post, the Jamaican Patty Co. said an employee was confronted by an angry white woman who thought she was addressing Haitians.
“[W]e received a call from a disgruntled person regarding Haitians filing a lawsuit against the Trump/Vance ticket,” the company said. “Without identifying herself, she aggressively confronted us and mistaken us for Haitians and not Jamaicans.”
The woman hung up before the restaurant could express a stance.
“The audacity of this misinformed person. We hope that this election cycle does not get too ugly. Let us treat people the way we would like to be treated. God help us,” according to a statement from the company.,
Members of the Haitian community in Springfield (Ohio and Missouri) largely have legal status, hold jobs, and have bought homes and opened businesses.
Higgins deleted his post on Wednesday afternoon after colleagues told him he had better remove it. Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, called for Higgins to be censured. Horsford said he asked Higgins to delete the post and that he initially refused to do so.
“It’s vile,” Horsford said. “It’s the type of rhetoric that continues to divide people against each other. We have Haitians and Haitian Americans who are literally under threat.”
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., a trump sycophant and brief candidate for the GOP nomination for president, said he had advised Higgins to remove the post.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., another of the legion of trump bootlickers, said Republicans “believe in redemption” for Higgins.
“He was approached on the floor by colleagues who said that was offensive,” Johnson said. “He said he went to the back and he prayed about it, and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down. I’m sure he probably regrets some of the language he used. But you know, we move forward. We believe in redemption around him.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said the issue was moot because Higgins removed the post. In his best whatabout, hypocritical voice, Scalise complained that Democrats have been equally vile.
“If I need to go through all the tweets from the other side I am happy to,” Scalise said.
Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., who has Haitian ancestry, said on X, the comments were, “One of the most racist and bigoted posts I’ve seen from a fellow member of Congress. And from his official government account at that. Disgusting.”
The claims about Haitians eating pets began with a false posting on Facebook and quickly spread like toxin in right wing media. Smelling blood, trump and Vance spread the rumor in the most noxious terms. Trump repeated the accusation in the debate with his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamal Harris, and has said it a staple of his stump speech.
Vance has admitted to spreading the story while knowing it was untrue. He rationalized that sometimes it makes sense “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”
Higgins sits on the bipartisan taskforce investigating the attempted assassination of trump. He has used racist, threatening language on social media before. In 2020, he posted a picture of armed Black demonstrators on Facebook and said he would “drop any 10 of you where you stand.”
Higgins, 63, was elected to congress in 2016. That March, GOP Gov. Matt Bevin named Higgins a Kentucky Colonel, the highest title of honor bestowed by the Governor of Kentucky.
“It is a recognition of an individual’s noteworthy accomplishments and outstanding service to our community, state, and nation,” said the Kentucky Colonel website.
Higgins, known by some as the “Cajun John Wayne,” is a reserve with the Louisiana Attorney General’s office. He has appeared and spoken at events organized by groups such as the far right militias, Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers, and has claimed to be a “Three Percenter” at speaking engagements.
Higgins is a member of the far right House Freedom Caucus.
The night that trump was indicted on 37 charges in June 2023, Higgins posted to his followers on Twitter (now X) that “President Trump said he has ‘been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.’ This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”
Jeff Sharlet, author of the New York Times bestselling book “The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War,” said the posting was “deep scary” and that “1/50K refers to military scale maps and publicly available U.S. Geological Survey maps of areas mostly surrounding military installations. This isn’t a metaphor. This isn’t slow civil war. This is a congressman calling for the real thing.”
Sharlet said “Know your bridges” is militia speak for closing the bridges down. “Buckle up,” said Sharlet, is a code for “prepare for war.”
Trump was charged with unlawfully retaining government secrets and conspiring to obstruct justice. The indictment alleges that trump was personally involved in packing the documents as he left the White House in 2021, that he bragged about having secret materials and caused his own lawyer to mislead the FBI about what kind of papers he had stored at Mar-a-Lago.
Higgins resigned from the St. Landry Parish sheriff’s office in February 2016 after he was warned against using disrespectful and demeaning language about suspects. He was accused of violating department policy by misusing his badge and uniform for personal profit and gain, and for wearing a uniform in an ad for a security firm. Higgins also was reprimanded for using his badge and uniform on his personal website to support sales of T-shirts and shot glasses for his limited liability corporation.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on November 15, 2023, Higgins repeated an unfounded conspiracy theory that violence at the January 6 protests was caused by FBI agents infiltrating the protests through “ghost buses” and posing as trump supporters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Higgins claimed that the Chinese Communist Party had created the disease as biological warfare.
In August 2021, Higgins, a Protestant who has been married four times, challenged a critic from Alaska to a fist fight. The critic had called Higgins a “traitor” for voting against certifying the 2020 election results. The challenge was accepted but no fight took place.
Next, in a virtual tie for the basement, are two North Carolinians, Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for governor, and Michele Morrow, the Republican Party pick for superintendent of public instruction in the Tarheel State.
Robinson, an African American bigot who calls himself a “black Nazi,” has trump’s endorsement. Morrow, a homeschooler, has advocated executing President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama and posted on social media that she believes actor Jim Carrey harvests and drinks children’s blood. She was endorsed by Robinson.
In a normal state, both candidates would be hogtied and sentenced to political purgatory. But not in North Carolina where GOP primary voters honored Robinson with 663,953 votes or 64.85 percent of the total votes cast. The Democratic candidate, Josh Stein got fewer votes, at 476,459, which was 64.85 percent of the votes cast.
In the 2024 primary election for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Morrow won 457,151 votes or 52.10 percent of the votes cast, narrowly beating the incumbent, Catherine Truitt, who garnered 420,270 or 47.90 percent of the votes. The Democratic candidate is Mo Green, the former deputy superintendent for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
Since the revelations of Robinson’s past surfaced, much of his staff has jumped ship and many top Republicans have retracted support for Robinson. Trump has yet to withdraw his endorsement in a state that is crucial to his victory in November while Robinson remains in the race and claims the stories about him are all lies.
Trump flunkey, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said Robinson should quit the race if he can’t produce facts by the end of the week to discredit the reports.
“We’ve got an election that’s 40 days away. We’ve got to move on and focus on President Trump’s success in North Carolina, legislative races, the Council of State,” said Tillis evidently mostly concerned with the optics and not the reality of Robinson’s lurid comments.
Robinson has had a long, documented history of violence, hatred, bigotry, xenopohobia, homophobia and worse but two recently published stories showed even greater flaws in his background.
The first round of revelations came in a CNN KFile investigation published last week which uncovered a series of inflammatory comments that Robinson posted on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago. The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and his current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor.
Subsequently, a new report by The Bulwark has unearthed even worse comments and painted an even more dire portrait of Robinson trolling on smaller political websites. The Bulwark is a center-right, anti-Trump conservative news and opinion website launched in 2018 by Republicans Sarah Longwell, with the support of Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes.
Some of Robinson’s comments were published on Newsone, a news and opinion website founded in 2008 that focuses on social issues and entertainment for an African-American audience. Some of the more fetid comments include:
“If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton,” Robinson commented in April 2009 on a NewsOne article about the civil rights activist and MSNBC commentator taking part in a police-brutality protest. “Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”
“Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America,” Robinson posted that same month on the same site.
“It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!” he commented on NewsOne a few days later.
The Bulwark noted that the comments were not previously reported because they are no longer accessible on the Internet. The Bulwark accessed them through an archive of old comments made on sites built with the content management system WordPress.
Morrow’s story is every bit as violent and bigoted as she campaigns to run the education department and its $11 billion budget and 2,500 public schools.
Morrow has embraced a host of controversial right-wing positions and debunked conspiracy theories related to public education. The current state superintendent, Catherine Truitt, has refused to endorse Morrow, a fellow Republican.
Morrow was seen at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the insurrection at the Capitol by trump supporters on January 6, 2021 and has repeatedly called for political violence, including the televised execution of Obama and Biden.
In a 2020 social media post, she said she’d support the public execution of Obama, writing, “I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” and “We could make some money back from televising his death.”
In another post later that year, she suggested she’d support the killing of Biden, responding to his suggestion that people remain masked to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by writing, “kill all traitors.”
In other social media posts from 2019 to 2021, Morrow wrote about executing other Democrats for treason, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, R-N.Y. On her personal Twitter (now X) account, Morrow referred to the COVID-19 vaccine as “population control,” and that she supports “death to vaccine mongers like Bill and Melinda Gates.”
Morrow’s campaign website suggested public schools were trying to program children and that “America is and has always been a horrible country run by bad, racist and misogynistic people.”
A nurse who home-schooled her own children, Morrow is a former Christian missionary who ran unsuccessfully for the Wake County, N.C., school board in 2022. In a campaign video, she said that North Carolina preschoolers were being taught that “men can get pregnant” and that lessons about racial equity would make students “hate our country” and “feel shame for the color of their skin.”
“You better believe our teachers will be well-versed in the true history of our great nation,” she said in the video.
Morrow wants critical race theory and diversity and inclusion instruction removed from public school classrooms. Critical race theory, a flashpoint of wokeness for Republicans, is an academic field that posits that racism is systemic throughout the social, political and media institutions.
“We have preschool children being taught that men can get pregnant, and transgender flags being displayed where the American Flag used to hang in elementary school hallways,” she wrote.
For safety but also to ensure that schools are not teaching critical race theory or instructing on transgender issues and other LGBTQ issues, Morrow wants cameras, metal detectors and weapons detection systems installed in all school classrooms and for teachers to carry concealed weapons.
Morrow has called public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers” and said in 2022 that “the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people.” She’s urged North Carolina parents not to send their children to public schools.
Morrow has been fervently against LGBTQ rights and protections and posted that the U.S. should “ban Islam,” and “ban Muslims from elected offices.”
In 2022, she said there was “proof to overturn the (presidential) election results” in several states after the 2020 presidential election. She has repeated various QAnon conspiracy theories, including the claim that Democratic lawmakers and celebrities harvest and drink the blood of children.
Morrow has been allied with the far right group, Moms for Liberty, which has lobbied across the nation for school districts to ban books that depict LGBTQ themes. In 2021, she joined with others who filed nine criminal complaints accusing the school system of distributing obscene and pornographic material.
No updated list of the lowest of the low would be complete without noting former Fox commentator, staunch trump supporter and Russian apologist, Tucker Carlson. Two weeks ago, Carlson hosted a two-hour interview with Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist whom he called “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.”
Cooper has made outrageous and false claims including that the British leader, Sir Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the “chief villain of the Second World War” and that the Holocaust was essentially an accident prompted by widespread indignation on the establishment right. He said the murder of 6 million Jews was “humane” because there was no food to feed the “prisoners of war.”
Billionaire trump supporter Elon Musk, owner of X, retweeted a video of the Cooper interview and wrote, “Very interesting. Worth watching.” Musk later deleted his tweet and admitted he had not watched the entire interview before reposting it.
Carlson’s interview gave a major boost to Cooper who hosts a podcast “Martyr Made,” the top-ranked show on iTunes. The podcast has more than a quarter-million followers on X. Among his followers is vice presidential hopeful, Vance.
In July, Cooper posted two photos. One was of a victorious Adolf Hitler and his high command stalking through Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. The other was of drag performers in the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, who were on the TV broadcast for a few moments. Cooper wrote that the Nazi victory lap photo was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way” to the Olympics photo.
Honorable mention in the sleaze parade goes to two lawmakers.
First, the N.Y. Times reported that Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., put his former mistress and the daughter of his longtime fiancée on his district office payroll. In a statement released shortly after, D’Esposito labeled the story a “partisan ‘hit piece.’”
“My personal life has never interfered with my ability to deliver results for New York’s 4th district, and I have upheld the highest ethical standards of personal conduct,” he said. “Voters deserve better than the Times’ gutter politics.”
The freshman congressman, a retired New York City police detective, is running in one of the most competitive House races in the country.
Next, there’s Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., who is seeking a divorce, after his wife of 36 years accused him of having an affair with a younger woman. The accusation was made in a lengthy message that was circulated among House Republicans.
Green’s race for reelection is not considered competitive.
Green, 60, is a physician and retired Army officer who has served in Congress since 2019. Before his election to Congress, Green was a trump nominee for Army Secretary but later withdrew his name from consideration. He would have succeeded Eric Fanning, the first openly gay service secretary.
Green has been a strong opponent of transgender rights and protections and has claimed erroneously that Muslims don’t believe Jesus “was born from a virgin.”
In June, 2017, Green spoke in an audio, explained his opposition to transgender bathroom rights and Syrian refugees, by citing a Bible verse that he says calls on the government to “crush evil.” In the clip, Green said he was against allowing transgender children to use the bathroom matching their gender identity. He said he wanted to protect women from men he thinks would take advantage of them.
Green cited Romans 13, which calls on Christians to listen to the government. Green added that his reasoning also applies to Syrian refugees.
“The government exists to honor those people who live honorably, who do good things, to reward people who behave well and to crush evil,” Green said. “So that means as a state senator, my responsibility very clearly in Romans 13 is to create an environment where people who do right are rewarded and the people who do wrong are crushed. Evil is crushed.”