What is the cumulative effect of someone—anyone—telling 10,000 lies? The answer apparently depends upon this closely-related question: How contaminated are the minds of his or her listeners? In even simpler terms: How brainwashed are his listeners? In just 27 months, Donald Trump has been fact-checked and found to have uttered more than 10,000 lies to America and to the world—in speeches, and in TV blurbs, many of them written for him to deliver from his teleprompter. How numb is his brain? How disgusting is his breath? His mouth alone is a veritable cesspool of verbal garbage. His lying lips could strip an orchard of cherry blossom trees bare to the bark! Wake up, America! Wake up and see the obvious! This guy reeks from his bulging bottom to his overflowing spit-toon.

According to our Constitution a president may be impeached for “treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Set the Mueller Report aside for a moment. How many times can one person sell out his country for a few pieces of silver?  How many lies does it take to surpass the “misdemeanor” threshold for impeachment? He is now adding 23 lies to his total every day.

Our intelligence service experts have known for a very long time that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections. Putin and his henchmen apparently spewed their lies throughout the landscape within 10 or so of the “swing” states that gave Trump his scant victory. This tiny electoral nudge was enough to overcome a 2.8 million national vote deficit. Holy shit balls! That shows us how fragile our electoral system really is to tampering, and how ready, willing, and able the Russians are to contaminate it. It also tells us definitively that our electoral system needs to be replaced with the “one person, one vote” national system. Such a system rests on this premise: The candidate who wins the national vote wins the presidency. That is the system in place around the globe in all the enlightened nations. Gerrymandering cannot affect it. The 50,000 votes that pushed Trump to victory via the rigged electoral system would have vanished without a whimper. It’s time for us to come out of the Dark Age and join the rest of the world in the light of day. We need the national vote to replace the electoral system.

The urgency of the moment is this:  Trump and his cohorts in Congress are doing nothing to prevent a repeat of the 2016 fiasco. And why should they? They have the  best rigged system in the world working for them that money can buy. All they need to do is concentrate on those 10 or 12 swing states, backed by money from the Koch brothers and other billionaires, then pollute the airwaves with a ton of lies, and watch while the Russians double down in just the right places to seal the deal and pull off another victory.

Then the crap will hit the fan 10-fold. Trump could fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court with another right-wing ideologue. And there goes health care, Medicaid, Medicare, public education, Social Security, Food Stamps, aid for dependent children, the handicapped, and the elderly. That’s just the way Putin wants it. And Kim Jong Un. And premier Jiabao of China. By the way, has anyone else noticed how they all cozy up to Trump, and vice versa? It’s as if they were all sleeping in the same bed together.

With the passage of the 2018 Tax Bill, the Russian-aided Republicans locked into place our dual inequalities of wealth and income for a long time to come. Both are getting worse. Untaxed wealth is now on a clear course to widen its stranglehold on the bottom 90 percent of residents by a factor that is 32 times worse than today just 50 years down the road. The math is simple: Growth rate = 1.072^50 = 32. This means that the $100 trillion in wealth holdings by the top 10 percent will become $3.2 quadrillion by 2069. The outlook: 90 percent of Americans living in poverty—with no aid—while there exists permanent dynasties of ultra-wealthy families who never lifted a finger nor felt the sting of battle in stealing it all from us.

Need I repeat that elections have consequences? Putin, Kim Jong, and Jiabao all know it. And they are master manipulators. Trump is their lying puppet and their blithering, wallowing bed fellow.

Here are those key swing states from 2016: Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina. We will need lots of “boots on the ground” going door-to-door, and a massive get-out-the-vote campaign to counteract the propaganda efforts of Trump, his rich and ideological cohorts, and those dastardly dictators from across the oceans who want to bury us.

Inquiring minds want to know: What kind of world are we leaving for our children? Where, when, and how are we doing our best? What will we do for 2019 and beyond? The answers to those questions require clear heads and brave hearts. More likely than not, they also await all who would dare to approach Heaven’s door who never took a chance on justice, but went along in life just for the ride. I’m not a preacher; I’m a prognosticator, an advocate for common sense, and a survivor in the bottom 90 percent.