Every fall, which corresponds with Rosh Hashanah, we Jews take an assessment of our lives and of the world around us. We ask ourselves “Who Will Live? Who Will Die?” and what will be the manner of our death.

This September, 2017, it’s appropriate to pause and assess the erratic and dangerous behavior of the individual in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal in world history, and how it effects the lives of billions of human beings.

In the past week, as Robert Mueller has aggressively stepped up his investigation vs. The Garbage Pail-in Chief and his Garbage Flies (aka, Manafort, Flynn, Donald Trump, Jr., et al), the Deranged Dotard Donald has further provoked his fellow lunatic leading North Korea as “Rocketman.”

He has threatened Nuclear annihilation of a member nation of the UN from the podium of the General Assembly — a first in the 70 year history of the United Nations.

He has again trashed a true American Patriot, John McCain, who actually fought in a US War, rather than imagining that he did by going to military school and dressing in a prep-school uniform.

He has called an NFL player quietly exercising his Constitutionally protected Right to Free Expression a “Son-of-a-bitch,” and has dis-invited the World Champion Golden State Warriors to the White House, despite the fact that the great Steph Curry and his teammates said they want no part of the flaming racist who thinks WHITE HOUSE should be taken to mean “WHITE SUPREMACISTS” House.

So a few facts to place things in perspective:

1. As the legal & investigative straight-jacket tightens around him, Deranged Dotard Donald is flailing out at everyone, despite the fact that he controls more nuclear missiles than anyone in the history of the earth;

2. Deranged Dotard Donald has defended the Confederate Flag and its monuments to racism which are direct insults to the American Flag, and to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have fought for freedom against facism and murderous fanaticism over the centuries, and to tens of millions of Black Americans to whom the Confederate Flag symbolized hatred, slavery and death.

3. Deranged Dotard Donald has no problem defending the “SEIG HEIL” salute or the Swastika — direct insults to my father, my wife’s uncle and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought or died battling the Nazi’s and Anti-Semites in World War II. Trump’s defense of the Nazis and Anti-Semites of today is a knee to the groin of all Veterans of foreign wars, of all Jews and to the memories of the millions annihilated by hate.

4. Deranged Dotard Donald has never gotten over his rejection by NFL owners to become one of them, and purchase an NFL team. Trump’s rejection lead him to run to the failed USFL, another expensive & flamboyant TRUMP Failure, which of course, he still blames on the NFL owners.

5. The TRUMPS have always acted out their hatred of Black people. The father, Fred Trump, was arrested at an anti-Black, anti-Jew, anti-Italian, anti-Immigrant KKK Rally in Queens, NY, 90 Years ago. Both Fred & Donald were nailed by the Federal Government for discriminating against Blacks in their housing complexes — built with Federal funds. Deranged Dotard Donald hates Mexicans (including Mexican Judges), and he especially cannot stomach Black people with more money than he actually has, like Barack Obama, Steph Curry, Stevie Wonder and LeBron James.

Some food for thought as we start the Jewish New Year and take stock of our lives.

I was not going to write of memories, still too painful to bear, of 9/11.

I was just going to post the picture taken by Carol of me and our son Matt, when he is 5 years old, and we are standing on the deck of the Ferry to the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers are benignly winking at us in the background. I wasn’t going to say any more.

Then my son, asked me to fill in some of his remembrances of that terrible time, and it brought so much rushing back, not counting the eight years I worked in Two WTC, sleeping over in my office during snowstorms. The most tortuous night terrors I still have are of the days after, with the rubble of the Towers still simmering, bodies melted inside, when Carol and I walked 70 blocks from our Uptown apartment, to get near the mass gravesite and pay our respects.

Stupidly, we stopped at St. Vincent’s Hospital on W. 14th Street, to see the thousands of 8 ½ x 11 “Missing” photos of peoples lovers and children lost in the attack; an entire wall of the hospital, now gone, covered with humanity, incinerated. Young faces smiled out at me from the photos, and in each bright smile, I saw my son’s face, and cried uncontrollably at the thought of losing him, and the unimaginable losses of the parents who lost their children, smiling at them forever, from the walls of St. Vincent’s Hospital, or from the deepest recesses of their hearts.

Then, I read the White House’s website this morning, on the 16th Anniversary of the tragedy, and saw the news reports of Trump presiding over a Memorial Service, and my unending grief turned to unbridled anger.

In 2001, Donald Trump, New York businessman, took advantage of the deaths of the nearly 3,000 human beings he calls upon us to remember today, by sucking $150,000 out of a 9/11 Emergency Relief Fund meant for small businesses that suffered in the immediate aftermath of the attack. The Trump Organization was neither a small business, nor suffered from the 9/11 attack.

He never apologized, never gave the money back, never offered to pay for the school costs, or mental-health counseling costs of the chlldren of those damned to death in the Twin Towers that day. Trump used that unfathomable tragedy to his own personal benefit in his typically grotesque way, by profiting from the hardships of others.

A human being, with the faintest heartbeat, would have paid that money back and redoubled his efforts to comfort the families of those forever lost to us in the attack on 9/11. I am angry when I look at Trump’s smug face, and am reminded of the photos of all the young, beautiful faces, full of life — photos that ripped my heart out 16 years ago. I think of their faces — bright lives I can never forget — and my fury at Trump’s inhumanity, is made even deeper by my despair, which knows no end.