Quote of The Week: “I’m fucked!”
~ Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States, referring to the appointment by the Justice Department of former FBI Director and Federal Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III as Special Counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf.
Turns out that wasn’t the end of Trump’s Presidency that he thought it was, thanks to his motley cadre of scoundrels and sycophants, but the Mueller Report may yet be Trump’s downfall. Not for lack of uber-cynical gamesmanship by his new Attorney General (and Michael Cohen’s replacement as Trump’s fixer) William Barr as he played out the Mueller Report into a 27-day drama designed to give Trump a month’s head start in claiming complete exoneration and forcing Americans to play catchup ball in getting the truth out, the operating theory being that America’s notoriously short attention span would render the eventual release of the Mueller Report moot, just another tidbit of old news from which we have long since moved on.
Turns out that was not the case either, pretty much showing us where we stick any expectations we have of this current administration. You know, the sort of bland assumptions Americans usually have about their government, that our leaders have their best interests at heart, are trying their best to govern equitably, and are not selling us out to Russia. You know, the usual. But that guy isn’t the President anymore, and we’re trapped by our own laws into having a criminal president dismantling the results of 243 years of struggle and progress. Nope, America had not forgotten about the Mueller Report, and was not about to “move on” from high crimes and higher treason that was finally revealed on the last day of Week #118, Thursday, April 19, 2019.
But first, let’s look at the week leading up to the historic day, beginning on Friday when small fish lobbyist Sam Patten (the poor man’s Manafort) got sentenced to probation for failing to register as a foreign agent, getting no jail time due to his “extensive cooperation with the Special Counsel.”
Trump decided to stay in Washington for a change over the weekend, instead doing his golfing at Trump National Golf Course in Virginia on Saturday, then spent the rest of the weekend threatening to dump released prisoners from his Refugee Gulag on small vulnerable communities he deemed “sanctuary cities,” those municipalities that stand in defiance of his wishes that every locality treats refugees like dogshit to be scraped off one’s shoes. Threatening to use minorities as chess pieces to be moved at his whim didn’t do much to endear him to the people in those towns who refuse to abuse minorities.
And speaking of abusing minorities, one of them was singled out by Trump for especially poor treatment that culminated in her being on the receiving end of numerous death threats from Trump supporters. It seems that freshman Congressman Ilhan Omar dared mention the deplorable treatment of Muslims in America as a result of the mindless blaming of all Muslims for 9/11, too often accused by their fellow Americans of being terrorists themselves, in itself an innocuous reading of the sad reality of Muslim Americans for almost 2 decades.
America’s racists, encouraged by their cheerleader President, went ballistic at the potential loss of their favorite bogeymen, Muslims. Hell, these people are still pissed off that they can’t demean Ni**ers in public anymore, they’re not about to let go of Camel Jockey and Towel Head without a fight. It never occurred to Trump or his hellhounds to weigh the simple message that Representative Omar delivered, that human rights are guaranteed to every American of every color and every creed, and all Muslims are no more terrorists than all Catholics are on board with molesting Altar Boys.
But that’s way too much brain-busting thinking for such souls, however, and requires a level of self-refection on one’s humanity (or complete lack thereof) that is beyond their reach, so Trump gleefully put Ms. Omar’s life in jeopardy by Tweeting a videotape of her face projected onto the burning Twin Towers, letting his base know it’s still cool to keep on hating Muslims and calling them terrorists, and they were so relieved that many of them issued death threats to a sitting Member of Congress to celebrate, because dammit, it’s okay with their president!
And we know it’s okay with their president became he refused to delete the savage Tweet or to apologize for his rash jeopardization of her life because Ilhan Omar (!) “has a way about her that is very dangerous to this country.” (translation: “open fire on that brown-faced Towel Head terrorist!”)
On Sunday the world got the horrific news that the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was burning, and Trump distinguished himself when he consoled the French people by giving them firefighting advice that would have collapsed the entire structure. To his credit, though, the World’s Foremost Expert on Everything at least did not castigate France for failing to rake the Cathedral regularly.
Monday was Tax Day, April 15th, when taxpayers form long lines in every Post Office to get their tax returns Post-dated on time in order to comply with the law of the land, and the day Trump’s lawyers petitioned the IRS to hide his tax returns from Congress by defying a Congressional subpoena to release them to a House Committee, a crime.
We also learned that the Chinese National who got past every security checkpoint at Mar A Lago except for the desk clerk was a Chinese spy armed with multiple computer eavesdropping devices as well as malware designed to disable computer systems. Her name is Yujing Zhang, and her cover story was attending an event run by another Chinese-born woman named named Cindy Yang (which had been cancelled, tipping off the desk clerk who tipped off the Secret Service), a naturalized American citizen who runs a Presidential Access Service out of Mar A Lago, selling access to Trump and his family to wealthy Chinese businessmen and government officials, and is herself suspected of having high connections in China’s government.
This highly suspicious news went all but unnoticed amid the hoopla concerning Barr’s announcement that he would be releasing the Mueller Report in all its redacted glory on Thursday. So frenzied was the nation in anticipation that even the all-but-forgotten Michelle Bachman chimed in, living up to her reputation as one of our most bizarre public figures by saying “Donald Trump is our most Biblical President.” Sure he is, if you want to count locust plagues, Sodom and Gomorrah or lakes of Hellfire.
And speaking of Hellfire, Trump vetoed a law passed by Congress that would have ended US involvement in Saudis Arabia’s genocidal war on neighboring Yemen, where thousand of civilians have been slain for the crime of practicing the wrong brand of Islam. You remember the Saudis, the bone-saw killers of journalists and the dissident decapitators that Trump so loves, and who are exempt from Muslim-bashing by Trump (even though 17 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals) because there is a sea of petroleum under their sand and their extended royal family has spent half a billion dollars on Trump’s condos and hotels.
The Saudis also gave Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner something to do, semi-justifying his nebulously undefined White House “senior advisor” job and controversial Top Secret security clearance. And speaking of all things Kushner (I know, I know, a real snooze, but bear with me here), we learned that Trump did in fact offer the job of President of the World Bank to his daughter Ivanka Trump Kushner, who declined the honor, perhaps feeling she needed a little more seasoning taking up space in the White House before tackling one of the most complex and nuanced jobs on Earth.
Then for no reason at all he brought up the troublesome Boeing 737 Max jet (troublesome as in having killed 346 people in 2 recent plane crashes due to faulty software), claiming he could fix the problem by “rebranding” it, boasting that the fact that he became President proves he “knows a lot about branding,” a bit of unintentional self-revelation telling us that he thinks of the Presidency of The United States as little more than a marketing tool.
Trump also decided to screw Cubans for no reason at all except that they are Latino and the fact that the object of his obsessive jealousy, Barack Obama, had recently normalized relations with Cuba, putting to rest the last holdover of the Cold War and ending almost 60 years of hostility between our 2 nations. Hostility, however is one of Trump’s calling cards, so he decided to eliminate the Statute of Limitations on civil law suits to make it easier for former Cuban Padrones and American Robber Barons to sue Cuba for the former fiefdoms they lost following Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, most of them being the living personification of why that revolution occurred in the first place, tyrants and carpetbaggers lording it over the hungry and illiterate peons making up 90% of Cuba’s population at the time. You know, Trump’s kind of people.
In keeping with this racist theme, the Justice Department announced it would be locking up refuges indefinitely simply because Willian Barr says that can, and changing the longstanding rules about applying for asylum in order to make it nearly impossible for refugees from Latin countries to gain admission to anywhere in the USA but a prison cell. Then they changed the name of their Children’s Concentration Camps to (!) “tent cities,” as if that made it a fun experience for kidnapped children. Just like camping out, boys and girls! (except of course for the armed guards, barbed wire and sexual predators.)
Jittery about Thursday’s release of The Mueller Report, Wednesday found Trump in full free-association freakout mode, all about invisible walls, imaginary international spies, shrieking about his innocence, false approval ratings and nonexistent achievements, which would be hilarious if the guy was president of a network or a sports team or something, anything other than being in charge of our government.
His former BFF Kim Jong Un was no help at all when North Korea fired a new test missile of the sort that Trump swore would never happen again, then compounded his treachery by announcing he was meeting with Vladimir Putin in the near future, pretty much exposing Trump’s North Korea sideshow as faux tough guy posturing and the public relations fraud it was from the start.
And finally, speaking of Vladimir Putin and all things Russian, the historic day finally arrived when William Barr released the Mueller Report, but only after giving one more bizarre press conference denying its contents and lying shamelessly like a true Trumpian Attorney General, absolving Trump from any crime by claiming that his (!!) frustration and anger understandably led him to commit all the crimes described in the report, but they were not really crimes because Trump was (A) an angry president, and (B) his subordinates routinely refused his orders to commit even worse crimes. Well okaythen!
Trump’s entire presidency was on the line with the Mueller Report, so it was crucial to William Barr and the President to deny its contents and claim victory and total exoneration early, loudly and often, a strategy that worked only on those people who would still be loyal to Trump if he was proven to be a cannibal.
The rest of America, unfortunately for Trump, likes to read and decide for themselves, and before the day was halfway over the report in all its redacted glory was disseminated throughout the land in its entirety, and it said the exact opposite of what Trump and Company have been claiming for the past month. Far from laying this issue to rest, it has now become even more explosive and continues to be a huge scandal as people read deeper and deeper into the report, which is in plain truth a very damning narrative of a legal document, describing systematic lawbreaking by the President and his staff in almost everything they do and say.
The fact that the White House legal staff was briefed by the Attorney General well in advance of Congress did not seem to help the Trump Administration dodge the slings and arrows of criminal accusations from every one who can (or is willing to) read. Their strategy mirrored Trump’s own modus operandi; deny reality and lie your ass off, which works wonders with the stupid, but not so much with the literate.
Week #118 ended with national shouting matches replacing national dialogue, Congress demanding interviews with both Robert Mueller and William Barr, and the President crowing like a rooster over a report he is proud to say he has not even read, but is certain exonerates him.
And so we plunge deeper into alternate reality, high crimes in high places, national unrest, death threats to members of Congress, expanded Concentration Camps and our president calling most of the American people haters and losers, while the rest of the world watches in shock and horror as our rivals rush to fill the vacuum of a globally diminished America. Other that than though, everything is just fine, and we still have as our president the smartest and most perfect human being of all time, if you can overlook the anger and frustration that forced him to be a criminal.