Week #18 found Washington DC uncharacteristically quiet. Not that Trump calmed down, mind you, he just took his show on the road for his first foreign trip as president, taking with him most of his slimy entourage. Only Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway were left behind to run the country for 8 days, the nation taking some small consolation that at least Trump is being an asshole someplace else for a change.
First stop, Saudi Arabia, where Trump didn’t do anything outrageously stupid the first day, only middling stupid, which counts as one in the Win Column for him. He got a gold necklace from the King, made it through a conciliatory speech about Islam without claiming Mohammed was a great friend of his, then posed for pictures with royalty clutching a weird Glowing Orb right out of Harry Potter at the opening of something called “The Global Center For Combatting Extremist Ideology.” Like all irony, the fact that this center was built by the world’s most prolific promoters and exporters of extremist ideology was lost on Trump, especially once they bought $110 billion worth of American weapons from his son-in-law and forked over a $100 million bribe to his daughter Ivanka’s fake charity.
On Monday Trump prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, claiming to have been the first president to do so, if you don’t count the Black one, one more puzzling lie about something so easily fact-checked.
Monday night, a deadly terror bombing occurred at a pop concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 and wounding scores of children, inspiring Trump to rise to the very zenith of his oratory powers when branded those responsible with the worst name he could imagine; “evil losers.” His supporters didn’t know where to look after that embarrassing display, sort of explaining that strained, faraway look in the eyes of everyone in the Trump circle. Then his administration was blamed by UK leaders for prematurely leaking information to the NY Times about their investigation into the bombers, possibly alerting terrorists they were being sought and compromising the investigation, yet anther security breach by President Blabbermouth.
Before landing in Italy, Trump suffered from exhaustion and needed to take a break. Either that, or he got the flu from several days of Melania’s arctic stares. He recovered sufficiently enough to pose with an infuriated-looking Pope Francis and to make a triumphant return to his Twitter Page in all his tawdry glory.
On Thursday Trump thoroughly embarrassed himself and America at the NATO meeting in Brussels, alienating our alliance partners by making a hostile speech berating member nations over money. Then he capped off his cheap bullying by physically shoving aside other heads of state to put himself in the forefront of their group photograph. The consensus of the gathered leaders was that Trump is truly “Putin’s Boy,” a puppet whose task it is to destroy NATO and is not to be trusted with shared intelligence.
Meanwhile, back in the USSA, the news was horrendous for all things Trump. General Flynn invoked his 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination rather than testify about Russiagate, while the news reported that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is a prime target of the Russian collusion investigations. The “Replace” part of his Repeal & Replace of Obamacare campaign quietly died in the Senate, his slash-and-burn budget infuriated the entire nation, and it was revealed that Trump had compromised the security of 2 (!) nuclear submarines to the homicidal President Duterte of the Philippines several weeks ago. His hand-picked Appeals Court also upheld the cancellation of his Muslim travel ban. The only Republican victory of the week was by some dimwitted Creationist Congressional candidate from Montana, who was arrested on Election Eve for viciously assaulting a reporter in a room full of witnesses.
Trump now heads to Sicily for a meeting of the G7 to begin Week #19, to cap off his World Alienation Tour before returning to Washington to torment America full time once again.