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Rachel Grenadier

Mazel tov, Mr. President

I want to take this opportunity to thank our President for presiding over our country with the same zeal and attention he has given to his own properties over the years, which is to say, with zero interest or concern.

I also want to thank him for having advisors in his Administration who are directly feeding the hate-mongering and anti-Semitism which is pervading our society at present. When faced with the opportunity to address the inflammatory rhetoric and demonstrations and counter-demonstrations Americans are now witnessing—even in such cultured, peaceful and ethnically diverse college towns like Charlottesville, Virginia, our President predictably took the low road. His initial tweets about the events taking place here now forgot to mention racism. His seeming surprise that such occurrences would even happen, even as his White House festers with the likes of Sebastian Gorka, the fake Hungarian academic, and Steve Bannon, the foul anti-Semite Breitbart minion, illustrate that Donald Trump has no ability to govern, to draw people together or even unite our country.

Trump’s goading of international pariahs such as Kim Jung Un means he is in sympathy with them and thinks of characters like Vladimir Putin as kindred spirits. Forget for a moment that Kim has VX nerve agents he can load onto an intercontinental missile, even as he works to miniaturize nuclear weapons, our biggest threat to our way of life and democratic ideals is none other than our sitting President. Our Founding Fathers warned their contemporaries against flouting our Constitution and the democracy engendered in its words. It is as if they could foretell the day when a demagogue would arise and create a kleptocracy to match any in Europe in any century.

While the Charlottesville Police Department expected some pushing or shoving of demonstrators on both sides of the debate, they were not prepared to deal with ramming attacks by cars on pedestrians ala Jerusalem or London. They should not have to clean up the mess of a poorly-managed presidency that directly led to the events in the Commonwealth today. Many were injured and one person was killed and this is the new reality of having someone govern who is not even remotely capable of governing. Now, we officially have no leader we can turn to for the right solutions, the calming and soothing words that heal what is wrong with our nation since January. There is no Joe Biden or Barack Obama to correctly assess our ills and offer real solutions with more efficaciousness than Trump’s tweets about being “sad” typed even as he cuts the very programs in law enforcement that address and prevent such violence. He tweeted that there “is no place for this kind of violence in America,” but he neglected to admit that his own White House is exactly the place for race-baiters like Bannon to fill his head with racial animosities and restrictive immigration policies, thereby offering hollow words with no respite from the violence.

Therefore, I would like to congratulate our President for setting a record for the shortest presidency since William Henry Harrison caught a cold and died one month into his term of office. Of course, this assumes Trump actually governed for even one day; however the facts speak for themselves. It is one thing to lie your way into a job. It is quite another to claim that you are effectively carrying out your duties when all the evidence leads to the opposite conclusion.

About the Author
Rachel Grenadier was an olah from the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2003 who returned to the United States in 2015. She really wanted to stay in Israel, but decided that having family members nearby was better for her health than a bunch of devoted, but crazed, Israeli friends who kept telling her hummous would cure her terminal heart condition. She has her B.A. and M.A. from George Mason University in Virginia and is the author of two books: the autobiographical "Israeli Men and Other Disasters" and "Kishon: The Story of Israel's Naval Commandoes and their Fight for Justice". She is now living in Virginia with her three Israeli psychologically-challenged cats and yet, denies being a "hoarder".
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