Week #68 kicked off with yet another Republican sex-scandal resignation, this time GOP Congressman Patrick Meehan, then Thomas Homan, the man Trump nominated to be the head of Immigration And Customs Enforcement Agency (the increasingly infamous ICE) suddenly retired, Gina Haspel, Trump’s nominee for CIA Director promised Congress that if she is confirmed for the job that, this time, she won’t won’t torture people or make them disappear, and Republican Senator Marco Rubio declared that Trump’s precious tax cut did nothing for ordinary workers.
As the 2018 Midterm elections approach, Republican revisionist history is becoming a cottage industry as they try to distance themselves one by one from “Donald Who?” and his Slash & Burn presidency. Even the uber-cruel Paul Ryan relented and changed his mind about firing the House Chaplain for having the nerve to speak well of the poor, and he’s leaving office this year.
In an effort to balance out the political damage, Trump called for Montana Democratic Senator Jon Tester to resign for “slandering” his Veterans Administration chief nominee, Doctor Ronny Jackson. Turns out that GOP Senators on the same committee that interviewed Jackson said Tester was absolutely right, and that Jackson’s comportment was closer to Dr. Hunter S. Thompson than Marcus Welby. The Pentagon agreed and will reassign Jackson someplace where he can do no harm.
Speaking of Trump’s doctors, his weird Manhattan doctor Harold Bornstein revealed that his offices were raided 2 weeks after the inauguration by Trump administration officials, and all of Trump’s medical records seized. He also confirmed what many suspected, that his very undoctor-like letter gushing about Candidate Trump’s historically excellent health had been dictated by Trump himself.
All this had the president in such a foul mood than he threatened to “shut down the country” in September if there is no funding for his wall in the next budget, then went on a tirade against comedian Michelle Wolf and calling for an end to the Annual White House Correspondents Dinner because the mean lady ridiculed him.
Robert Mueller and Rudy Giuliani would soon give Trump more grounds to fume for very different but related reasons.
Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s other defense lawyers on the Russian Collusion investigation, decided to release to the press on Monday 49 questions that Special Counselor Mueller would like to ask Trump, who it was made known would rather give up cheeseburgers than speak to Mueller under oath, to which Mister Mueller said fine okay but I will subpoena the President to appear before a Grand Jury if I must.
Enter Rudy Giuliani, and here’s where we will need a scorecard to keep up with the lies, the revisions of lies, and the revisions of the revisions of lies.
Giuliani was brought on board Trump’s defense team to “wrap up this Russia thing in a few weeks.” He insisted that any Trump interview under oath would be “limited in scope and length.”
Well, guess what? Trump is in a 2-Front War, with the Russian Collusion investigation closing in on one side, and the exploding Michael Cohen/Stormy Daniels sensation closing the pincers from behind.
Giuliani proceeded to go on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and give away state secrets and heavy ammunition to the Michael Cohen/Stormy Daniels front, which was not the investigation he was hired to handle. Giuliani told a dumbstruck Hannity that Trump indeed knew of the $130,000 hush money payment to the porn star and reimbursed Mr. Cohen by way of a monthly legal retainer, for which Cohen “did no legal work,” quite possibly a felony.
Giuliani went on to describe “funneling money” (a mob term) through Cohen’s law office to blackmailers, glibly explaining how (!) he does the same thing for his clients, opening himself up to criminal investigation as well, gleefully joining Trump under the bus.
In response to the Giuliani Debacle, Trump jumped right in to fix things with alternative explanations, and of course made things even worse, waxing eloquent about how Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are ”very common among celebrities and people of wealth,” leaving us to wonder if life at the top is one long porn star orgy, broken up only by writing hush money checks.
His lawyers stepped in to try to fix his fix, writing one of Trump’s Tweets in quasi-legalese, saying the Ms Daniels NDA is “in full force” and “completely legal,” in truth not helping Trump much more than Giuliani.
Perhaps Trump’s attorneys can be forgiven due to their extensive workload this week, and Trump having to replace the Norman Rockwellian attorney Ty Cobb with regular-looking lawyer Emmet Flood. Keeping them all busy on top of their Herculean efforts on the Russiagate and Stormygate cases was a lawsuit by (got that scorecard handy?) Summer Xervis, yet another Trump sexual abuse accuser, and a judge ruling that the Presidential Profiteering lawsuit against Trump can go forward, putting the kibosh on his claim of “absolute immunity.”
Still stinging from the leaders of North and South Korea not inviting him to their Peace Party, he tried to drum up interest is his anticlimactic meeting with Kim Jong Un by saying he was willing to go to Korea’s Demilitarized Zone to hold talks and to reduce US troop strength in South Korea. A suddenly empowered Kim is now the one setting conditions and making demands, reversing the roles of leader of a super power and Third World supplicant. Trump’s cheerleaders somehow managed to spin his being sidelined during the Korean rapprochement as (!!) Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize moment.
After the government of Brazil denied Trump’s boast that he had reached a tariff deal with them, he “suspended” his new tariffs on aluminum and steel, presumably until he can figure out what’s going on. Who knew trade was so complicated?
US Intelligence agencies also revealed that Russia warmed up for stealing the 2016 American election by creating the Jade Helm hysteria in Texas in 2015 that prompted Governor Greg Abbot to call out the National Guard in response to a phony threat of (!) the invasion of Texas by Federal Troops. Once they saw how easy it was to manipulate fearful and paranoid American conservatives, it was Next Stop, President Trump.
And here we are 68 weeks into The Debacle the Keeps on Debacleing.
• Author’s note: If anyone just woke up from a long coma or suffered an amnesia-inducing blow to the head, and this is the first thing you read when you recover, let me get you up to speed here: Donald Trump is really the president (yes, that Donald Trump and yes, we know it’s crazy), and America is being looted and dismantled by billionaires as the rest of the world makes other plans in the absence a reliable USA. Sad to report, none of this is fiction, this cosmic comedy is for real. I bet that coma’s looking better and better about now…