Trump started Week #91 with a big win for himself (which always means a big loss for America) when it became apparent on Friday that his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had enough votes in the Senate to be confirmed after an unprecedented spectacle of a confirmation hearing the week before, with accusations of sexual assault and severe alcohol abuse against Kavanaugh flying thick and fast, and Kavanaugh himself doing his level best to prove himself unworthy of being a Supreme Court Justice when he tried to refute the charges against him by a acting crazy, delivering a conspiracy theory-soaked diatribe against almost half the Senate.
Crazy, however, is the calling card of the Trump Administration, and crazy was rewarded with the narrowest confirmation vote of a Supreme Court Justice in American history on Saturday afternoon.
It turns out the extra FBI investigation ordered by Trump was conducted strictly for cosmetic reasons to placate Kavanaugh’s detractors, was severely limited in scope, and micromanaged by the White House, interviewing only 9 of 40 people who volunteered to testify and finishing up in only half its allotted time. This half-baked investigation was a scandal in itself and another black eye for Attorney General Jeff Sessions for allowing Trump to use the United States Justice Department as his personal political tool.
Sessions’ reward for misplaced loyalty and compromising the Justice Department? Having Trump interview his own assistant to replace him in the very near future. This victory cleared the way for Trump to get back to doing his work as president, which is, so far as anyone can tell, making up insane lies, attending political rallies, undermining the institutions of the American government and making vicious attacks on his fellow Americans.
On Sunday Trump decided to defend his disastrous trade war by claiming the price of soybeans is up when it was in fact falling, and on Monday claimed that attacks on police are on the rise the past 3 years, also not true.
Undaunted, he kept digging deeper, claiming at a gathering of national law enforcement personnel that violent crime was on the rise before he became president, ignoring the steady decrease of violent crime for the past several decades, and calling for a return to the Stop & Frisk policy, a tool for incarcerating minorities that court after court has rejected as discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Discriminatory and unconstitutional, however, is another of Trump’s calling cards that he uses to entertain the imbecilic White Trash who attend his rallies, but creates nothing but uncomfortable silence when repeated in normal company. Calls for “a speedy death penalty” and giving military equipment to police forces were not applauded wildly by the men and women sworn to uphold the laws of the United States. To his dismay, that would be all of the laws, not just the ones Trump likes.
Calling Kavanaugh’s opponents (US Senators, The American Bar Association, the nation’s law professors and most Americans) “evil” also failed to get the standing ovation he has come to expect from his fanatical base when repeated in a gathering of sane and responsible individuals.
On Tuesday Trump had no such impediments as he attended yet another political rally filled with his bonehead supporters, when he called Democrats an “angry mob” whose plan to expand Medicare to cover them and their children would “ruin healthcare,” and they cheered wildly at being excluded from this life-giving plan, since making smart people mad is far more important to Deplorables than their own (or their children’s) health and wellbeing.
And speaking of sane and responsible, it appears that the porn star who is dogging his trail has the edge on Trump in that department when on Monday Stormy Daniels expressed remorse over body shaming President Trump in her tell-all book about their love affair, saying she apologizes for doing what he does to women, and feels bad about her lapse in judgement.
Then another woman rained on Trump’s victory parade on Tuesday when United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley unexpectedly resigned, a move made even more surprising by the fact that she did not leave in disgrace or controversy like every other ex-Trump official. In a surreal White House meeting, Trump and Haley made nice with one another, with Haley even calling Trump’s vacuous son-in-law Jared Kushner a “hidden genius.” Incredibly well-hidden, a lot of people are saying…
Then it was right back to the theme of the week; crazy, when Trump speculated that his daughter Ivanka Kushner (the unhidden non-genius) would be a great UN Ambassador, an opinion not even shared by Ivanka, who immediately turned down the position before it was formally offered, as did another former Trump advisor, Dina Powell, who prefers to stay at Goldman Sachs making big dough after experiencing firsthand the craycray of all things Trump. The President then doubled down on his Ivanka speculation, saying he would be accused of nepotism (well, no shit!) but insisting (!) “there is no one more competent in the world” for the UN job than a second-rate designer of women’s fashion accessories made in Chinese sweatshops.
Moving on then, a fast-developing and very powerful Hurricane Michael threatened the Florida Panhandle and several other Southern States, and the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 830 points, perhaps spurred by Ford Motors laying off 24,000 workers due to the damage done by Trump’s tariffs, prompting Trump to take immediate action. By attending another political rally, where he blamed the bad economic news on the Federal Reserve Bank, stating “The Fed is going crazy” (there’s that word again!).
Then he launched into another loud condemnation of the Me Too Movement, viciously mocking sexual assault victims and claiming the men who assaulted them were the real victims, an opinion shared by no one but perpetrators of sexual assault and those who seek to protect them.
And speaking of delusion, he had his crowd and played them like a fiddle as he launched into his old reliable “No Collusion” mantra, adding “There WAS collusion… between Hillary, the Democrats and Russia! There was a lot of collusion with them and lots of other people,” and was rewarded with lusty chants of “Lock her up!”
Then Hurricane Michael destroyed several towns and flooded the South with more rainfall than has been seen since 1992, moving Trump to claim another “record,” saying his rainfall was “greater than any other in history.” History (and the Monsoons) might beg to differ, but be that as it may, Trump said not to worry about the extensive carnage wrought by Hurricane Michael, promising to fix it all ASAP, saying “Well, it’s going to go fast. We’re going to make it go fast.”
No one had the heart to tell him that he cannot command the tides, or to remind him that there is still an incredible amount of work to be done repairing the lingering destruction from “his” previous storms in Puerto Rico and Houston, or that throwing rolls of paper towels at flood victims was not in anyone’s best interest.
Meanwhile, another person was convicted by Robert Mueller, an obscure fellow named Richard Pineo, a man who sold fake online identities that facilitated the international money laundering that opened the door for Russian mob money to flow into the Trump campaign. Pinedo was given a lenient sentence in exchange for cooperating with the prosecution by testifying against the bigger fish in the Russian Collusion investigation, including formerly anonymous Russian donors as well as a Lebanese-American convicted child molester named George Nader, the man who wrote a $2.5 million check to fellow sex offender and Trump fundraiser (and a man who has repeatedly pled No Contest to financial crimes), Elliot Broidy, in order to influence the United States to oppose the Qatari government on behalf of Saudi Arabia, and to topple Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (who was not a huge fan of the Saudis). Anyone seen Rex in Washington lately?
And speaking of the Saudis, Trump is trying to give them a pass on the kidnapping, torture and dismemberment of a Saudi journalist living in the USA who has been a critic of the Saudi regime, Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi. It seems Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi embassy in Turkey and never seen again, but is survived by audio and video tapes of his interrogation, torture and murder. Trump’s rationale for excusing this heinous act was the $110 billion in arms sales to the Saudis (another huge lie), and probably admiration for doing to a journalist what he would like done to many reporters from the Washington Post.
The week ended on an especially crazy Thursday, with First Lady Melania Trump, fresh off her Indiana Jones Fashion Show Tour in Africa, claiming she is (!!) “the most bullied person in the world,” making us wonder what Doctor Christine Ford (or Hillary Clinton) thinks of that statement, and prompting her interviewer to nearly swallow his microphone in disbelief as he stammered “You think YOU are the most bullied person in the world?”
But enough about the Trump marriage, now we move into the Oval office meeting on Thursday when Trump hosted All-Time football great Jim Brown and famous rapper and Legend In His Own Mind, Kanye West. This truly was a historic meeting of disturbed minds, as Trump finally met someone just as delusional and insane himself, and the country was treated to West calling himself “a crazy motherfucker” in the Oval Office and spouting all manner of gibberish, with Jim Brown looking like he’d rather be sitting in a dentist chair getting a root canal without anesthetics rather than in the Oval Office with these Twin Towers of monstrous ego and insanity.
Afterward President Trump could only dazedly say “well, that was special” before it was revealed that he would be finally be answering questions from Robert Mueller. Not in person and under oath like he was “100% eager to do,” but only carefully selected questions submitted in writing, meaning that his lawyers will be filling out those answers.
And with the Dow in continuing free fall (over 1400 points in 2 days), Trump found a lie he would stick with (for now), saying this was “a correction we’ve been waiting for” (this was not true by any stretch of the imagination).
And the week ended with Trump once again obsessing, not about the death and destruction wrought by Hurricane Michael or the rising economic distress of American workers, but about his crowd sizes, claiming there were 3 times the amount of people at his last rally than actually attended. Some might say the crowd was small, but not freakishly so, and toad-stool like. But that would be wrong to crowd shame a sitting president.