I can’t get past the 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms Trump has at Mar-a-Lago. Reading the Search and Seizure warrant, coming to the description in Attachment A of his residence, I am stunned that any human being needs a home with 58 bedrooms, let alone 33 bathrooms! Though the White House has only 16 guest bedrooms it has a total of 132 bedrooms (presumably for staff and FBI Secret Service), and Queen Elizabeth’s Buckingham Palace has a mere 52 bedrooms (not counting staff’s 188) and France’s President Macron’s sumptuous Elysee Palace, completed in 1722, does not appear to have as many bedrooms as the Donald’s mere citizen home. Clearly Trump aimed to compete with royalty even in retirement–oh, that’s right!, he still thinks he’s President! I almost forgot! Guess he needs, at least, to keep up appearances until he can get back in the White House. Though of course if Bannon, Trump’s partner in crime, has his way, the FBI will be eliminated by then, so many of those 132 bedrooms will go empty.
I can only imagine how many homeless immigrants could happily fill up those unused White House bedrooms–or even Trump’s humble-home 58 bedrooms!
Inequities abound in America.
Like the distinction between truth and lies. I recently heard that Breitbart is feeding our military personnel misinformation (a euphemism for LIES) to encourage the breakdown of our democratic institutions. Names of FBI officers have been listed on various wild websites to encourage retaliation against them for simply doing their jobs well. Judges and attorney generals, too, have had their lives threatened.
People ignorant of facts are attempting to take over The United States of America. Are we living in late 1930s Germany? When will stormtroopers march down our streets? How soon will Jews, Muslims, Gays, Blacks, Abortion Rights women, and anyone the Right doesn’t like be taken out? What will a white Christian Nationalist Right-wing government look like? Can those who want truth find room in such a nation?
What happened to truth as the guiding light in our choices and actions? I remember even as a little girl in Sunday school learning the Bible verse: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Truth was a model to live by. Lies were evil to be overcome.
But today lies are rampant, spouted as if truth. People dissatisfied with their lives cling to lies because they sound like how they feel. Lies talk their same angry language. Lies rile up their annoyance at those they see as elites–people who know more, have more, appear more entitled. Those riled form a kinship with each other, devolving conspiracies, creating a welcoming tribe of like-minded disgruntled, vapidly ignorant human beings. They love having an enemy–actual truth–to knock about. They prefer to live in a la-la-land of untruths of their own making.
What is difficult to understand is why a billionaire autocrat with 58 bedrooms is their god. Their cult-like worship of Donald J. Trump is not just bizarre but dangerous. He would drive all the lemmings off the cliff. Yet Evangelicals, who claim in one breath to adore the uniquely divine man who said “love one another,” in the next breath hate everyone not like them and worship the Golden Liar.
Unhinged Fringe, mixed media, 30″ x 23″, framed, $775 by Gwendolyn Evans
Artwork: Unhinged Fringe, mixed media, 30″ x 23″, framed, $775 A very recent piece that captures exactly what the title indicates.