The theme of Week #55 of The Trump Era is the President of The United States earning praise for not making a complete ass of himself while making his first State of The Union Address.
If that seems very sad and bizarre, well… don’t forget that Trump began the week by delivering a crude speech promoting Nationalism and blatant self-interest to an international gathering dedicated to Globalism and international cooperation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
His speech before heads of state and international business leaders was a crass and tone-deaf reworking of his Greatest Jingoist Hits left over from his campaign, and did nothing but cement his place on the World Stage as a disturbed and preening laughingstock, a leader under serious criminal investigation whose First Lady refused to accompany him on an important trip because he paid a porn star $130,000 to keep their love affair quiet.
Then he gave an interview to Piers Morgan for British TV where he repeated a bunch of crazy lies about Global Warming, saying, amongst other insane things, (!) “There is a cooling, and there’s a heating,” then making such outlandish claims about ice caps and world temperatures that countless climate scientists and psychiatrists alike were compelled to call him an insane liar, prompting the rest of us to entreat these men and women of science “tell us something we don’t already know!”
Hanging over all this was of course, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion for stealing the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, as it has been for almost the entire Trump Era, which is why it was no surprise to anyone that Trump ordered his aides to slander the FBI and the Department of Justice as early as last Summer, a campaign that is being reactivated with a vengeance as Mueller turns up the heat on Donald Junior, Trump’s personal Assistant Hope Hicks (who vowed Junior’s emails on Russian collusion “Would never get out.” Guess again, Bo Peep.) and a number of others in Trump’s inner circle including the president himself, who (naturally) reneged on his word that would be glad to be interviewed under oath by Mueller.
One of Trump’s chosen scapegoats, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, resigned from the Bureau, and his Republican Congress (The Enabler Brigade) joined in Trump’s quest to ruin the reputation of the worlds’s most effective law enforcement agency by announcing their own “investigation” (desperate witch hunt designed to mask their own craven complicity) into the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Trump’s demands of personal loyalty (in violation of the Constitution and every government official’s oath of office) were revealed alongside the news that his close associate and foreign policy adviser Carter Page has been suspected of being a Russian Agent for over a year before he was hired by Trump’s campaign, caught on tape incriminating himself during routine surveillance of Russian intelligence operatives by their American counterparts.
Trump desperately needed another distraction, and his talent for creating red herrings came in the surprising form of staying true to the script for his State of the Union speech and not going haywire with his trademark off the cuff abusive remarks.
While his unprecedented hour and a half of self control was a keen disappointment to his loyal base of vulgar lunatics, Trump led his own applause all night, and all the dogwhistle sound bytes were included for his beloved poorly educated: the flag, religious liberty (Christian hegemony), the wall, ”beautiful (!) clean coal,” veteran pandering, immigration equals gangs, murder and drugs, reviving the Bush Era term “illegal combatants” (fuck the Geneva Convention) to justify keeping Guantanamo prison open (illegal detention and torture, anyone?), abandoning the immigration traditions that define this nation of immigrants, and telling a whole bunch of easily debunked lies.
He tried to upstage Democrats by mangling simple arithmetic when he claimed to offer a path to citizenship for “3 times the amount of Dreamers” that Democrats were seeking to protect (actually a drop over twice the number, 1.8 million to 800,000), but that unreliable offer is subject to Trump’s fickle whims and tied to coercion of Congress to fund his grand obsession, a border wall in an age of air travel, something almost no one other than Donald J. Trump and his most hardcore acolytes think is a good or even workable idea.
Meanwhile, Trump’s not-so-deep-cover plant in The United States House Permanent Select Committee in Intelligence, Devin Nunes, is releasing a memo that he wrote that will allegedly exonerate Trump, so Trump naturally is eager to have this Classified Memo released over the objections of his own Justice Department and the FBI, who are worried about some of the Classified Information included in the memo costing the lives of American Intelligence human assets in foreign countries, effectively destroying a number of American spy networks overseas.
But with Donalds Senior and Junior both facing potential charges of Conspiracy Against the United Sates, the lives of those who helped America abroad and the reputation of America’s Justice Department and Intelligence Agencies are considered unavoidable collateral damage, and a small price to pay.
Unfortunately, on the eve of the Magic Memo being released on Day 1 of Week #56, White House sources are expressing regrets that Nunes’ memo is “a big dud” as far as clearing the president and framing others for his crimes. And so we enter Week 56 wondering what it all means, the usual state of affairs in Trump’s America.