Trump’s most memorable quote in Week 104 was something most of the country is itching to say to him: “Bye-bye!”
Trump opened Week # 104 of the Trump Era by declaring that his shutdown “could last months, even years,” then threatening to declare a National State of Emergency to build his wall, which Trump himself has turned into an albatross around his neck, all at once his only measure of achievement (he literally has no other plans for his presidency) and an absurd folly even he admits it is “ A Medieval solution. It’s true, because it worked then, and it works even better now.”
Even a cursory glance at the history of walls tells us that walls almost never worked against determined people, whether in defense of borders, towns, castles or The Alamo. Curious how Mike Pence or any of the other Evangelicals in Trump’s orbit never brought up the Walls of Jericho…
Sunday saw Trump’s one brief moment of clarity for the week when he admitted he has to deal with Democratic leadership to end his shutdown. You know, the people he spent the past two years viciously attacking and now he wonders why they won’t roll over and play dead? Yeah, those people, the only ones left in Washington who know exactly how running the government in a democracy is done. People like Speaker Pelosi, who got right down to the business of enacting legislation the day she was sworn in, and Senator Chuck Schumer, The Senate Minority Leader who is enlisting alienated Republicans to defy Trump’s dingbat whims and quasi-legal decisions.
On Monday Trump hunkered down with his Cabinet at Camp David just to look like he was doing something besides posturing (he wasn’t), where he lied about about former presidents telling him they wanted to build a wall too, which prompted all 4 living ex-presidents to point out the obvious and say (and I’m paraphrasing here), that Trump is full of shit and his wall is an imbecilic and childish obsession.
He also claimed that he received “thousand of calls supporting the wall” from ordinary citizens when in fact the “Comments Line” on the White House switchboard was also shut down three weeks ago. Do that many people have the president’s private number or was he waxing nostalgic for the Good Old Days when we had a functioning government with responsible adults in charge and he could personally monitor his constituents’ tape messages?
Hard to say with this guy. We are way past the point of declaring we’ve seen his worst, or that things cannot possibly get any more chaotic. We’ve all eaten too many of those words too many times as Trump has proven to be and endless fountain of catastrophes, lies and bonehead moves, as if Homer Simpson were president (another fellow whose skin color does not occur in nature).
Seeing his precious wall slipping away, Trump had a brainstorm (that he would later blame on others), to address the nation on Tuesday night about “the great humanitarian snd national security crisis on our Southern Border.” The networks reluctantly accommodated him and we were treated to 9 minutes of a very wooden and subdued Robo-Trump, snorting his way through a teleprompter speech written by Steven Miller and containing about 50 lies, a very Trumpian 5-1/2 lies per minute.
This Oval Office address was presaged by a barrage of emails to the Trump faithful urging them to donate their hard earned to raise $500,000 for the wall Trump swore Mexico would pay for and now no one wants to fund, making his Oval Office address no more than an infomercial, but the reality is that these donations will go towards Trump’s reelection campaign for 2020, wasting no opportunity to shear his sheep until they look like one of these creepy hairless house cats.
On Wednesday Trump decided to cut off FEMA funding for fighting wildfires in California (as illegal as it is cruel, and it won’t happen), then floated the idea of looting FEMA for wall funding.
Speaking of walls, Trump is desperately trying to build another wall, this one a legal wall between himself and Robert Mueller, and hired 17 new lawyers to deal with the growing evidence accusing Trump and his closest associates, including the latest bombshell revelation that Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort shared the campaign’s polling data with Russian agents for the purposes of subverting the 2016 election, pretty much the textbook definition of the Russian Collusion Trump denies 20 times a day.
One group with whom we can be certain Trump never colludes are Democrats, what with them being Americans who don’t buy his $50 million condos, play golf at his resorts or rent entire floors in his hotels, on top of being opposed to everything he stands for. Trump can understand someone being an enemy, but not someone refusing to put money in his pocket, that’s just wrong as wrong gets in his eyes.
Never one to pass up the chance to take a swipe at his favorite “enemies of the people,” Trump decided that the American free press was “in league with the Democrats.” At a White House meeting with Democratic leadership to negotiate an end to the shutdown on Wednesday, Trump slammed the table and stormed out of the room with a terse “bye-bye” when he was informed that Democrats would not fund his insane 2,000 mile-long monument to himself, not under any circumstances.
Later that day, his nominee for Attorney General William Barr had an interesting exchange with Republican Senators in preliminary meetings before his confirmation vote, when the Senators confidently assured the American people that “Barr won’t touch the Mueller probe,” probably making Trump curse his jinx with Attorneys General who refuse to subvert justice for their boss, never a huge fan of lawyers who take their oath as Officers of The Court seriously (see: Michael Cohen).
What makes Barr still a viable option, however, is his history of being a Pardon-Happy Attorney General under George Bush The Elder, when he had Bush sign off on pardons for Reagan’s fairly extensive Rogue’s Gallery of felons, pimps and bagmen. At this point, a little prison insurance is prudent.
Since his Oval Office address fell so flat (and was witheringly fact-checked and criticized), Trump naturally blamed his subordinates, who he said “talked me into it,” so he he followed it up with an equally bad an ineffective idea, visiting the Southern Border and attempting to enflame the American people with crazy lies and accusations yet again, and repeating his threats to declare a National Emergency and siphon funds from Disaster Relief to pay for the wall, or “Steel Barrier” if you will.
No doubt the victims of the next natural disaster will be comforted to know that at least an influx of Mexicans won’t be added to the floods and fires they have to endure without FEMA assistance, unless of course they are the thousands of rescue personnel the Mexican government sent to New Orleans, Houston and other stricken US cities to aid them in their time of distress.
Coincidentally, on this same day Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was giving a speech in Egypt, the crux of which was a complete rejection of Barack Obama’s message and policies, an unprecedented attack by the Secretary of State on a former American president while on foreign soil, a statement reminiscent of the representative of the leader of a coup rather than the new emissary of a reliable ally, signaling to the world that the country they once knew well is no more, and the new regime is dismantling all it once stood for.
The various Communist revolutions and their resulting brutal regimes spring to mind. Commander Bone Spurs has led no such Revolution or assumed any omnipotent powers, however, like so many of the dictators he so admires, and will be removed by the same mechanism that installed him, The United States Constitution, either by impeachment or electoral means, the ordinary way or in dramatic fashion, that remains to be seen.
And speaking of drama and of lawyers who don’t take their oaths very seriously, it was announced on Thursday that Michael Cohen has one more bit of testimony in him before reporting to prison for 3 years, testifying before the House of Representatives about his work over the years for Donald Trump, the Trump Organization and the Trump Campaign, both as Trump’s personal attorney, fixer and bagman, as well as his appointed senior executive and trusted adviser.
White House sources say that Trump hit the ceiling when he heard this, in full temper tantrum (once again we revisit our old standby “even for him!”), throwing things across the room, bellowing at whoever was handy and wearing out the F-word, seeing all his carefully planned fear-mongering and gaslighting wiped out by this one piece of news, that the Democrats are giving Cohen Carte Blanche to spill the beans on who-knows-what kind of dirty laundry. On National TV and certain to get great ratings, no less!
If ever he needed a National Emergency, now is the time, so Trump ended the week in dramatic Shakespearian trepidation like some fat old Hamlet, stretching “to be or not to be” into “maybe, probably, definitely, could be, it’s very possible, perhaps yes and very likely” about his (non)decision to declare a National Emergency in order to divert military funds to his build his vanity castle on America’s southern border.
Congress and most legal experts agree it would be illegal to declare a National Emergency for a non-emergency, and could potentially implicate Federal employees in his crimes, but the guy who knew more than his generals apparently knows more than his lawyers too, declaring “I absolutely have the power to do this.” (translation: “I want absolute power.”)
Leaving us with a burning question for how he will resolve Trump’s latest Reality TV Show cliffhanger in Week 105: “What if he gave a national emergency party and nobody came?”
Or perhaps we will get an answer to this question Trump himself posed earlier in the week: “How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps (!) the greatest election of all time, done nothing wrong (no Collusion with Russia [okay, 21 times a day!], it was the Dems that Colluded), had the most successful first two years of any president, and is the most popular Republican in party history 93%?”
The answer to that is “as soon as humanly possible.” That fact that we are a nation of laws is sometimes as much a weakness as a strength, and the wheels of justice turn as slowly for Trump as they do for any one if us. But they do move.
So far, no one in his inner circle has had the nerve to tell Trump that his whole presidency has been one long National State of Emergency, and that his resignation is about the most attractive option for America right now. Unfortunately, his moments of clarity are too few and far between to hope for a soft landing, and this could get worse before it gets better.
