Once again, we say “Even for him…”
Week #64 began on Friday morning with Trump flying to Florida for a long weekend, and him telling his advisors he wants out of Syria, a position he would hold adamantly until Wednesday, when he reversed himself and said American troops will remain in Syria until ISIS is defeated.
If ISIS as half as tenacious as the Taliban, looks like we have ourselves another endless war on our hands.
Trump did get a reprieve from having to testify in porn star Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit against him when a judge denied Daniels a quick trial, so that legal question will have to wait. Trump’s legal team then sought to submit the suit to private arbitration, but Ms. Daniels attorney refused the offer.
Later in the week Trump denied he had sex with Stormy Daniels, or made the $130,000 hush money payment to her, telling reporters to ask his attorney Michael Cohen why he paid the woman (supposedly out of his own pocket) and had her sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement if there was indeed no affair.
And this is where we are as a nation; the President of The United Sates declaring April to be “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” while a porn star and two other women are suing him, and celebrating being told he is only “a subject” rather than “a target” of the criminal investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is slowly unraveling scores of criminal acts by the Trump Administration.
Moscow ordered the expulsion of 60 U.S. diplomats and the closing of the U.S. consulate in St Petersburg in retaliation for Trump’s expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats and the closing of their Seattle consulate. Later in the week Trump quietly let Russia know they can replace all 60 expelled Russian personnel whenever they like, making the claim that (!) “no one had been tougher on Russia than me,” then confirming the Kremlin’s report that he would soon be meeting with Putin, to the surprise of everyone, even his staff.
In his usual Sunday Tweet Storm, Trump declared that “the DACA deal is dead,” naturally blaming Democrats for his abrupt decision, and just getting warmed up for his subsequent rumination on Mexico and border security.
Then China announced retaliatory tariffs on US Imports in response to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, while Trump launched an all-out war of words against another adversary, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own the Washington Post, which has been exposing Trump Administration crime and corruption since his inauguration.
Even worse, Bezos just became the wealthiest man in the world, a clear indication he was more successful than Trump, and that was the last straw. Trump made up crazy lies about Amazon not paying taxes or collecting State sales taxes, and also costing the US Postal Service “billions of dollars.”
The fact is that Amazon does pay their taxes (he just gave them a huge tax break), collects the required sales taxes, and the Post Office turns a tidy profit delivering their packages. He would later double, triple and quadruple down on these lies, and despite their complete falsity and having been proved wrong by multiple sources, Amazon’s stock lost $60 billion in value in just a few days.
Speaking of harming American interests, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt also made headlines this week, the least publicized of them being the environmentally disastrous repeal of Obama Era fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. The rest of the news about Pruitt centered on his incompetence, his abuses of his office, and the growing chorus of voices calling for his head, among them many members of Congress and almost every Trump advisor.
Naturally Trump responded by praising Pruitt and speculating about making him Attorney General, just to give his current Attorney General and favorite whipping boy Jeff Sessions his weekly wedgie.
The Right Wing Propaganda Machine went into overdrive with Trump endorsing the Sinclair Broadcasting Group turning more than 600 local TV news stations across America into ultraconservative echo chambers working from the same agenda-driven script (pack of lies).
This week also found Trump fixated on the Mexican Border like never before, furious that the budget he just signed (and did not read) had no money for his wall. So he went ballistic, threatened to cut off aid to (!) Honduras, then unveiled his brainstorm of militarizing the Mexican border by lining it with soldiers.
Aside from massing troops at a neighboring country’s border, Trump revived one of his Greatest Hits when his pulled out his trusty “They’re Rapists!” card, this time against some imaginary giant migrant caravan from Central America through Mexico.
Most of these alleged migrants were religious pilgrims repeating an annual Easter ritual that does not reach the US border, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming “We’re seeing rape levels nobody’s never seen before (huge lie)” and raising the specter of “a caravan of thousands of people coming up from Honduras” (only a few hundred are refugees, and Mexico offered them Humanitarian Visas).
And here’s where we come to our “even for him” moment:
Closing out Week #64 on Thursday in West Virginia, nominally to talk about taxes, Trump made a show of throwing away his prepared remarks, then went off on a freeform shiny-eyes crazy rant about armed borders, practically drooling over the hyper-militarized border between North and South Korea, gushing about “32 thousand troops!”
He also called his predecessor “Cheating Obama” (a man lagging behind Trump 17 to 0 in sexual harassment accusations), then resurrected another couple of Golden Oldies when he claimed “in many places, like California, the same person votes many times,” falsely claiming millions voted illegally, then waxed poetic about “clean, beautiful coal” again.
Then he mentioned intellectual property, which is apparently another one of these things Trump thinks no one knows about (they do), like Community Colleges. He also claimed MS13 had taken over towns in (!) Long Island and he “liberated them.” Okaythen!
Then Trump saw China’s $138 billion Trade War Poker raise and upped the ante another $100 billion (of our money), and the stock market dropped once again, its roller coaster performance mimicking the Trump chaos disaster for disaster.
Perhaps Sinclair Broadcasting can make all this seem normal, because I sure can’t. Or maybe it will be Robert Mueller explaining to a grateful nation that he finally has the goods on Trump. We can only hope.