There’s no defining quote of the week from Donald Trump in Week #130, unless you want to count “random words in search of a sentence,” that came out of the president’s mouth.
Trump began his week on Friday by threatening to write an executive order to insert the controversial citizenship question into the 2020 Census Form that he and his administration had agreed to drop (only after the courts ordered them to do so), after having blown any chance to have it included by publicly opening his yap and stating the question would be used for the redrawing of Congressional Districts, which is simply an admission that the information would be used for blatant gerrymandering to insure Republican legislative majorities even in States where Republican voters are outnumbered.
Fresh off his rainy and underwhelming Trumpapalooza on July 4th in Washington, featuring rusty tanks, performing jets and a fireworks display entertaining a smallish rain-soaked crowd (that appeared to be 10 times its size to Trump) and a VIP lounge of D-List celebrities set up in the Lincoln Memorial, he stayed for the long holiday weekend at his New Jersey golf resort, Tweeting insane drivel, playing golf, ignoring two earthquakes in California, and explaining away his impression that George Washington had to fight the Royal Air Force as well as the British Army and Navy during the American Revolution (127 years before the Wright Brothers made history at Kitty Hawk and 164 years before the RAF earned military immortality in the Battle of Britain for those keeping score at home) by blaming a (!) misinformed teleprompter on this stunning gaffe.
Few of us have to ponder the question “What if I gave myself a party and nobody cared?” Trump had 3 days of “no public schedule” on his hands to bask in the “glory” of his 4th of July fiasco, when he made our shared National Day all about him, to revise his crowd size upward in his mind, and declare accurate descriptions of a lackluster event to be fake news. Or at least he tried to, but no one not named Trump or Pence gave him a positive review, the weather was very unfair to him, and his beloved TV ratings were terrible.
The biggest news of the week came on Sunday, when the tale of high profile sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein hit the media, a revolting story that involved President Trump on several levels, including his willing and knowing participation in Epstein’s underage sex parties, a series of allegations Trump thought people forgot about by now, but fresh Federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein changed all that, and so did the lenient sentence recommendation Epstein received from Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta while he was Attorney General of Florida.
Indeed, both Acosta and Trump went into Spin Overdrive to explain away Acosta’s “non-prosecutorial agreement” in Florida while keeping this information from Epstein’s underage victims, allowing Epstein to plead guilty to one count of soliciting sex from an underage prostitute, serving only 13 months in prison and being required to register as a sex offender with the authorities in his hometown for life. Trouble is, Epstein is a billionaire with multiple homes who danced around the law and resumed his predatory pedophile ways immediately upon his release.
As far as Trump’s personal involvement with Epstein and his underage sex parties, there is well documented proof of their long friendship and of Trump’s frequent presence at his parties, and numerous allegations that Trump had sexual relation with girls he knew to be underage, and also that he raped a 15 year-old and threatened her family with harm if she reported the rape.
To hear Trump tell it, none of this is true (even the numerous photographs of the two of them together and Trump saying repeatedly what a great guy Epstein is), except the part where he threw Epstein out of Mar A Lago 15 years ago for hitting on a guest’s underage daughter, and now says “I’m not a fan of Epstein.” Apparently raping children is okay with Trump as long as it does not interfere with his hotel business. Once Epstein jeopardized Trump’s wallet, their friendship was over.
What is not over, however, is people’s (and law enforcement’s) curiosity about how just deeply the President of The United States was involved in Epstein’s underage sex parties, and whether or not Epstein has records and/or videotapes of famous men committing sex crimes. Facing the rest of his life in prison if convicted of numerous new serious Federal charges, Epstein just became the most feared man in Washington D.C. since Robert Mueller.
Also on Sunday, another story developed that was very unfair to Trump and a blatant theft of his headlines. It seems the USA Women’s Soccer Team won the World Cup, captained by their MVP Meghan Rapinoe, who got under Trump’s skin in a big way when she declared she was “not going to the fucking White House” if her team won the World Cup. Team USA captured not only the World Cup, but the hearts of America, and got what Trump has publicly coveted, a ticker tape parade in New York City’s Canyon of Heroes on Wednesday, with the engaging and passionate Ms. Rapinoe stealing the show, undoubtedly just to annoy him, and gleefully abetted by the Public Enemies in the media. Not only that, but the size of the crowd the Women’s Team drew was a lot larger than both Trump’s inauguration and his 4th of July party (which just had to be fake news!).
Monday’s distraction from this mess was Trump refusing to deal with the British Ambassador to the USA over a series of leaked text messages from Ambassador Darroch to his superiors in London, very accurately describing Trump and his Administration (hint: they were not complimentary messages). Trump took to Twitter to declare about Sir Kim Darroch “he is not liked or well thought of within the U.S.,” in a country where not one in a thousand of us know who is the British Ambassador in any given year, or if we even need to form an opinion of them.
Of course Trump ignored the resurfacing of yet another rotten apple from his past, that renowned foreign influence peddler, former RNC Chairman and Trump hush money bagman Elliot Broidy, when the FBI announced it was investigating Broidy for violating Campaign Finance Laws, and for money laundering. Trump had no time to waste on this second skeleton to tumble out of his closet this week, he had a huge stack of lies to prepare for his big speech on Monday night.
Yes, the man whose pollution regulation-stripping mania will cost the country an estimated 10,000 lives per year, who called Global Warming ”a Chinese hoax” and pulled America out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change signed by every other country on Earth gave a speech titled (!) “America’s Environmental Leadership,” so riddled with lies and delusions that Fact Checkers were hard pressed to keep up with all the false numbers and insane claims that spewed from the Presidential Mouth. Just one more “even for him!” moment as America becomes more and more acclimated to having a vicious, lying lunatic as our president.
On Tuesday Trump was blocked by the courts from deleting his critics on Twitter, a victory for Free Speech and a miserable state of affairs rolled into one, when a social media platform renowned for the enforced brevity of its messages is declared an Official Presidential Forum. He also indicated that he would soon be firing Alexander Acosta when he said that while he knew nothing about him letting Epstein get away with serious crimes, ”what I do know is that he’s been a really, really great Secretary of Labor. The rest of it, we will have to look at.” Once Trump publicly praises or supports you, that’s your cue to clean out your desk.
Attorney General William Barr got in on the Distraction Act by ordering two members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team not to testify before Congress when their boss does, challenging Congress yet again and further delaying the public from hearing of the extent of Trump’s crimes from those who spent 2 years investigating them.
Speaking of Trump’s Crimes, he won a minor court victory on Wednesday when the smaller of two Emoluments Clause violations cases against him was tossed out by an Appeals Court for being “ill-prepared and not specific enough,’ which sounds like as good a description of Trump as any. More good news for Trump on Wednesday was 5 small Iranian gunboats trying to seize a British oil tanker getting scared off by the British Navy, giving Trump a new opportunity to rattle sabers. War talk always seizes the headlines from scandal, but this time no one was biting and the media coverage remained All Epstein All The Time, and even his standard unhinged Tweet Storm to distract from the Acosta/Epstein scandal didn’t work, and neither did the news that Trump’s Miami Doral golf resort cancelled a fund raiser sponsored by a strip club, The Shadow Cabaret, which was supposed to feature Stripper Caddies at an event raising money for The Miami Allstars, a children’s foundation, which pulled out of the event when they decided (unlike the president and Jeffrey Epstein) that “you can’t mix kids with sex.”
Then the Department of Justice’s own Inspector General found the Steele Dossier “credible” after interviewing Christopher Steele in London for 3 days and examining his sources and his evidence with a fine tooth comb, disappointing both Trump and AG Barr, who were for some reason expecting the Inspector General of the United States Department of Justice to find a way to blame Hillary/Obama for Trump’s crimes. This development delays the IG’s final assessment of the Mueller report as they continue to do their job with integrity and professionalism, the exact opposite of what Trump and Barr were asking them to do. It’s just so hard to find crooked help these days…
Trump countered by promoting his social media event in the White House on Thursday when he invited conservative commentators to a Pity Party to lament that people refuse to make the lunatics among them famous, and that Twitter and Facebook won’t force us to rub virtual elbows with these monsters. Among the invitees were not only established and respected conservative voices, but also demented rodeo clowns like Bill Mitchell, a radio host who has promoted the extremist Q Anon conspiracy theory on Twitter; Carpe Donktum, an anonymous troll who won a contest put on by the fringe media organization Info Wars for an anti-media meme; and Ali Alexander, an activist who attempted to smear Sen. Kamala Harris by saying she is not an “American black,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. The only internet lunatic missing from this meeting of the mendacious was Info Wars’ own Alex Jones, the lunatic’s lunatic and the asshole’s asshole who was too busy getting sued by the parents of dead children that Jones claimed were faking their children’s murders.
Before Trump could begin his Roundup of Undesirables on Thursday, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jerome Nadler issued 12 subpoenas of current and former White House personnel, including First Son-In-Law Jared Kushner and former Attorney General Jeff Session, prompting demands by Trump for a briefing and a review of the court documents on the Epstein case (which Nadler is not investigating) and Trump accepting Labor Secretary Acosta’s “resignation” over the Epstein debacle, about the 20th Trump Cabinet secretary to leave office in disgrace and/or bitter acrimony.
Then former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan broke his silence and revealed that he retired from Congress at such a young age “to get away from the taint of Trump,” who is a man “who knows nothing about the government” among many other things that corroborate the British Ambassador’s estimation of the man, and confirmed our worst fears about our incompetent incumbent; his dishonesty, his pettiness, his astounding lack of common knowledge, and his vicious racism. This of course forced Trump to attack Ryan, taking responsibility for chasing Ryan away and saying “I had to get him out of Congress.”
And speaking of the Roundup of Undesirables, Trump announced that the coming weekend would see 10 American cities targeted for raids by ICE Agents to round up and deport suspected illegal immigrants and their families, and quietly began discharging immigrant members of the Armed Forces who had been promised citizenship for their service, many of them in combat, breaking the word of the US Government to its own soldiers as if they were Trump employees being stiffed for their pay.
The House of Representatives again once again voted to cut off American support of the Saudi genocide in Yemen, and voted to take back the authority to make war that the Constitution says belongs to Congress alone, with an eye towards not only saving Yemeni lives in yet another senseless religious (and oil. Alway follow the money in warfare.) war, but in preventing the Iran War that Trump keeps instigating (which would be over Iran’s vast underground stores of oil, end of reasons).
And so Trump ended this week on Thursday in the company of those he likes best, fawning lunatics who share his delusions about the Victimization of White Conservatives by the big tech firms, which he says suppress conservative voices, even though his Twitter page is the most discussed social media account on Earth and countless unknown cranks became stars on social media. This was pushback against Twitter and Facebook cracking down on Nazis and White Supremacists, twin pillars of Trump’s Deplorable base. Trump praised these assembled whackos and deviants lavishly, and finally find came up with a quote of the week: “The crap you think of is unbelievable.”
Sure is.
Oh yeah, there’s one more, something you would think no one needs to be reminded about: “You can’t mix kids with sex.”