Quote of the week: “Person Woman Man Camera TV, Person Woman Man Camera TV, Person Woman Man Camera TV, Person Woman Man Camera TV…” – The President of the United States, boasting of his cognitive prowess to anyone who would stand still for a moment.
Week#184 of the Trump Era begins with a typical news story for these times, a Washington Post investigative piece by reporter David Farenhold detailing how Trump’s reelection campaign treasury is being used as a piggy bank by President Trump, with $380,000 paid to to Trump’s private business, The Trump Organization, in 43 separate payments in just 2 days. The Trump Organization says the 2 days in question were part of a weeklong “donor retreat,” in early March at Mar-A-Lago, just 2 more days when Trump fleeces the American people by transferring both tax dollars and campaign donations into his insatiable maw.
To say nothing of the fact that March was the time when any other President would have been working furiously to combat a budding pandemic that threatened to overwhelm the country without decisive action and a strong national plan. To his credit, Trump finally did take bold action on a national level and acted swiftly in recent days. After sitting on his hands for months while Americans died in the tens of thousands and the economy collapsed, Trump was Johnny on the Spot with sending combat troops to attack unarmed civilian protestors in American cities.
On Friday Trump’s swift action paid dividends in Portland, Oregon as his hastily-assembled army of anonymous Federal “soldiers,” conscripted from the ranks of border patrol agents, prison guards and low-level Federal security guards dressed in full battle gear, with no training in crowd control and no clear chain of command, began viciously attacking, and in many cases (!) kidnapping American citizens in unmarked vans on the streets. This was Trump’s idea of restoring law and order after 2 months of mass protests all across America against racist murders by police; encouraging the police to be more brutal and having his troops be the aggressors, with unarmed civilians and the Bill of Rights as their targets.
Trump was feeling so happy with himself he decided to sit down for an interview with the only journalist employed by Fox News, Chris Wallace, where Trump promised to answer “hard questions,” confident that Fox News would allow him to lie his way out of giving real answers or to simply babble one of his usual disjointed tangents and creepy boasting until the point was lost, as they have always done for him. To say the interview went south would be an understatement, as Mr. Wallace decided instead to run the interview on the level and hold Trump’s feet to the fire on a number of topics. It would air on Prime Time on Sunday night, and wind up being a triumph alright, not for Trump, but instead for the nation’s comedians and political analysts, whose job descriptions have increasingly overlapped as Trump has all but erased the line between farce and reality.
Then Trump got some very bad news late on Friday when Civil Rights icon and legislative giant John Lewis died, and Trump loudly mourned the loss of something very dear to him, his headlines. The outpouring of love for the fallen Representative Lewis dominated media coverage, for a courageous life well spent in service of others, and his unswerving dedication to voting rights and equality. Those kind of unselfish and on-the-level people annoy the crap out of Trump in life, and their widely mourned deaths only serve as a reminder to the nation, and to Trump himself, of everything he is not and can never be.
And speaking of things he is not and can never be, we learned on Saturday that Trump had the official White House portraits of Presidents William Clinton and George Bush moved out of sight to a seldom-used room in the White House, while still refusing to hang Barack Obama’s official portrait anywhere in the White House to serve as one more reminder of who he will never be; a brilliant and capable man well-loved by his countrymen.
As if to prove why he will never be considered even mildly competent, he blocked the CDC director from testifying before Congress about his piss-poor pandemic response and decided to cut funding for Covid-19 testing, stubbornly clinging to his oft-repeated assertion that (!) testing for Covid-19 is the main source of Covid-19 infections, sort of like claiming that hurricanes and blizzards are caused by the weather reporters who won’t shut up about the danger they pose.
Trump made this announcement on the same day that 85 babies under a year old tested positive for Covid-19 in a single Texas County, leaving us to wonder if that was the more frightening development, or the fact that we have a President who thinks these babies would be healthy if not for the evil scientists who tested them into grave danger.
No word on who the President thinks invented MIS-C just to make him look bad, the Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome in children that has infected hundreds of small children nationwide and compromises their neural network, immune system, mobility and almost every internal organ, or whether of not he thinks those children would be just fine if some radical leftwing liberal doctors hadn’t gone ahead and tested them for Covid-19.
The Pentagon also had a Saturday announcement, that it is banning displays of the Confederate flag at all American military installations, refuting Trump’s assertion that it is “the flag of the South,” when there are no flags of the North, of the East or of the West, save for the Stars and Stripes.
On Sunday, we heard that the Inspector General of the State Department was investigating a whistleblower complaint against secretary of State Mike Pompeo for “questionable activities,” a broad brush statement that could very well include Trump’s firing of the former State Department Inspector General for sniffing around Trump’s and Pompeo’s crimes.
Before his formal interview with Wallace, Trump treated Fox News to his now world-famous new Mantra, “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” endless repeating it and and boasting that he had “aced” a cognitive test, the same cognitive test that Koko the sign language-reading gorilla has passed years before. This is a test only given to people suspected of experiencing dementia (and apparently, to gorilla prodigies), so boasting of acing a test designed to see if he could be trusted to leave his home without getting lost before he reaches the corner isn’t exactly a Presidential Hall of Fame achievement. On that note, he went golfing with Senator Lindsey Graham at one of his golf resorts, racking up more money from Uncle Sam.
Then came the stunning Chris Wallace interview, the equivalent of Trump getting his pants pulled down to reveal a pair of stained Scooby Do underpants. To be fair to Trump, he did mange to squeeze in a tremendous amount of dumbass lies and false boasts while leading Wallace down several blind alleys of meaningless gibberish to avoid answering questions, but Mr Wallace did maneuver President Pinocchio into getting caught in several whoppers and making multiple stunningly idiotic statements.
He led off with condoning his own mask-free behavior that experts agree has needlessly cost tens of thousands of American lives, contradicting every singe scientific expert with this self-contradicting statement about masks and why he won’t make them mandatory nationwide: “No, I want people to have a certain freedom, and I don’t believe in that, no. I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wear a mask everything disappears. Dr. Fauci said don’t wear a mask, our Surgeon General, terrific guy, said don’t wear a mask. Everybody was saying don’t wear a mask. All of a sudden everybody’s got to wear a mask, and as you know, masks cause problems too, with that being said, I’m a believer in masks. I think masks are good.”
Of course Trump knew that Mr Wallace did not have the time to remind him that, early in the pandemic, very little was known about the highly-contagious airborne nature of this new virus, and there was a severe shortage of surgical masks that were prioritized for the medical community, or that science changes its message immediately when new facts are learned (a foreign concept to Trump), or that Trump has repeatedly said that wearing a mask would “make me look ridiculous,” as if this frivolous oaf needed any help in that department.
Mr. Wallace did demolish Trump on his claims that Joe Biden was in favor of defunding police departments (he is not) and that we have (!) “the best fatality rate” concerning the Cocid-19 virus (we are the 8th worst out of nearly 200 countries and territories), both times Trump getting schooled when he demanded a printout of the facts from his Press Secretary to back up his claims, and both times the facts were not on his side. Small wonder he hates facts and knowledge, which always seem to have a liberal bias.
Nonetheless, Trump again made this ridiculous claim: “It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right, because I’ve been right probably more than anybody else,” and then called Dr Anthony Fauci an alarmist and repeated that every scientist alive is wrong and he is right, the equivalent of George Washington calling Paul Revere an alarmist and declaring that the British Army will just disappear when the weather warms up.
Then he waxed eloquent about the Confederate flag and Southerners in general with “They love their flag, it represents the South,” and threatened to veto this year’s entire military budget if it includes a provision to rename military installations that are named after Confederates who fought against our military, a long-overdue move favored by our top military brass.
Then he brought up his Mickey Mouse cognition test again, as if it was a successful application to MENSA. When Cris Wallace said he had taken the test himself and found it quite simple, Trump doubled down on the lies about “getting extra points” for remembering 5 simple words in the right order, then claimed“ They get very hard, the last five questions.” There is no information available if these last 5 questions stumped the Sign Language Gorilla or not.
When Wallace asked him pointblank if he would dispute the results of November’s election were he to lose, Trump said perhaps he woud, saying he would not trust election results that featured so many mail-in ballots, ignoring that his election in 2016 featured over 30 million mail-in ballots, and the fact that every single study of voting by mail found the system to be efficient and trustworthy. When asked to respond to Trump’s threat not to accept the election results, the Biden campaign blandly dismissed it with “The America people will decide the elections, and the US Government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers from the White House.”
Monday found the whole world freaking out over Trump’s insane ineptitude on display in the Chris Wallace interview, and the phrase “Person Woman Man Camera TV” going viral worldwide, not only among humorists, but showing up on T-Shirts, coffee mugs and on the lips of every opposition politician and every news commentator, despite it being far less catchy than “Make America Great Again.”
Then Trump’s new Chief of Staff Mark Meadows responded to numerous reports that Barr’s anonymous army in Portland was initiating violence, kidnapping civilians and violating the Bill of Rights by doubling down on the threats to peaceful protest by saying “Attorney General Barr is weighing in on that with acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, and you’ll see something rolled out this week, as we start to go in and make sure that the communities, whether it’s Chicago or Portland or Milwaukee or someplace across the heartland of the country—we need to make sure their communities are safe.” Translation: “Duck!”
Then Trump announced he was going to restart his daily Covid-19 briefings the following day, because he “missed the ratings” and “we have a great time slot,” in case anyone thought he suddenly got religion and decided to actually lead the nation. America breathessly awaits his next “drink bleach” moment while we surf YouTube for interviews with Dr Fauci to get the truth about the virus.
On Tuesday, top congressional Democrats warned in a cryptic letter they released on Monday that a foreign power was using disinformation to try to interfere in the presidential election and the activities of Congress, and demanded a prompt briefing by the F.B.I. to warn every member of Congress. They contend that the Russian-linked information is being funneled to a committee headed by Senator Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who is running a phony investigation of Joe Biden and his son, sorting of putting a damper on Trump’s Sunday assertion that “Russia was a hoax and The Mueller Report was a scam.”
Republicans among the Pentagon civilian personnel and members of the military responded to his threat to veto their budget over the issues of honoring treasonous Confederates by saying “We’re the party of Lincoln, the party of emancipation; we’re not the party of Jim Crow. We should be on the right side of this issue.”
And speaking of government agencies unwilling to be accomplices to Trump’s crimes, the Centers for Disease Control asserted that the number of Covid-19 infections is far higher than has been reported, saying “The number of people infected with the coronavirus in different parts of the United States has been anywhere from 2 to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions.” Thanks, murderous toady governors!
If the thought absently crosses one’s mind that George Orwell was a piker, that is more than understandable when Trump took to podium for the reboot of his White House Covid-19 Press Briefings, reclaiming his precious TV ratings and reasserting his grip on the title Most Insane World Leader Since Caligula, this time as a solo act, with Trump doing all the talking and fielding all the questions from the press, without all that pesky spotlight-sharing with scientists and members of his Cabinet that cluttered up the first incarnation of this Reality Show that was abruptly cancelled after Bleachgate.
In what was more a campaign appearance than a press briefing, Trump claimed it was mostly expendable people dying, old people and those younger Americans with underlying health conditions that would probably have given them no more than several more decades of life.
He did, however, finally admit to the American people that “the virus will get worse before it gets better” and (finally!) endorsed the wearing of masks by every citizen in every State of the Union, and to underscore his new love affair with surgical masks, he lied and said he had been wearing a mask all along “when appropriate.” The fact is that he was seen wearing a mask only twice during the entire pandemic, and then only briefly for Photo Ops. When questioned by a reporter why he no longer shared these briefings with scientists and doctors, Trump lied yet again by saying he consulted with them beforehand and, true to his TV rating-oriented mind, claimed this was “a more streamlined format.”
Indeed it was extra streamlined by removing the clutter of facts and hard data that scientists are so fond of bringing to the table and boring the President to such distraction that he is forced to make up crazy things like ingesting disinfectants and sticking UV lights into one’s body cavities just to goose the ratings.
We also learned on Tuesday that the Department of Justice indicted 2 computer hackers, Chinese nationals Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi, for the crime of spying on American pharmaceutical companies to steal their latest research on Coronavirus and vaccines, but we heard not a discouraging word about Russian hackers engaged in the same activities, since presumably they get granted the same clemency as the Russian hackers who stole the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, and are instead elevated to invisible hoax status. Move along now, nothing to see here!
Also on Tuesday, we learned that former Ambassador the the UK Robert “Woody” Johnson, had asked the British government on Trump’s behalf in 2018 to move the British Open golf tournament to Trump’s money-losing Turnbury golf club in Scotland, something Mr Johnson was warned not to do by his Chief of Mission, Lewis Lukens. Lukens told Johnson this was against the law and an insanely blatant abuse of power as well and a breach of diplomatic protocol.
Lukens’ reward for standing up for the rule of law? Getting fired and called a traitor by Johnson, who went ahead with the request, which resulted in a formal complaint to the State Department by the British government and a swift end to Johnson’s brief diplomatic career, just as Lukens warned him. This resulted in the State Department’s Inspector General investigating Johnson’s crime, with the IG report somehow winding up being tagged as (!) Classified and, along with Pompeo’s own ethics trouble with his IG’s Office, sheds some light on Pompeo asking Trump to fire said Inspector General, Steve Linick on May 15th.
On Wednesday, in retaliation for the attempted hacking of Big Pharma, Trump ordered the Chinese Consulate in Houston to close within 72 hours, while China vowed retaliation in kind, while one Big Pharma company, Pfizer got $2 billion vaccine contract to provide a vaccine by the end of the year.
Which gave Trump something real (for a change) to brag about at that day’s Coronavirus briefing, before it (as usual) devolved into a surreal lying fest as he falsely claimed that “kids don’t transmit coronavirus” and that the US Covid case surge is due to protests and (!) Mexican migrant workers, backed off his mask remarks of the previous day, then promised that nursing home personnel were now to be tested “at the highest level,” leaving us to speculate how many levels of testing exist, and if our own tests were at a high or low level.
The he revisited one of his Greatest Craycray Hits in response to a question about Black people being infected with Covid-19 at a much higher rate than the rest of the country by ignoring the question and claiming he’s done more for Black Americans than anyone else “with the possible exception of Lincoln.” No, not “to” them, but for them, as puzzling an assertion as can be imagined when you consider that he has called Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization (it is neither terrorist nor is it an organization) and is expanding his plans to send combat troops against peaceful protestors marching on behalf of Black Americans.
And speaking of sending troops to American cities, their commander, Attorney General William Barr declared the “the response to the Floyd killing is very extreme” as he outlined plans for “a surge of US troops” to other US cities, calling it “Operation Legend,” with only those cities who have Democratic mayors qualifying for this brand new complimentary government service.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a veto-proof defense bill, 86 -14, leaving in place the provision for removing the names of Confederates from military bases, forcing Trump to either accept the inevitable or have his first veto overturned, and the President who claims he is the military’s biggest supporter said he doesn’t care when their commanders think, he will keep these Confederate leaders’ names hallowed, perhaps with an eye towards his own future when it comes time to naming public facilities after traitorous scumbags.
Dropping all pretense that his Coronavirus briefings were not shadow campaign speeches, Trump led off Thursday’s presser by announcing that his planned extravaganza of a nominating convention in Jacksonville Florida was now cancelled, due to all the people inconveniently dropping dead from Covid-19 in Florida as that State surpassed New York for the most Coronavirus cases in the country and the week drew to a close with 145,000 dead Americans, saying with a straight face “I have to protect the America people, that’s what I have done, that’s what I’m all about.”
Then he blathered on about the “Jynah virus,” more false claims about the virus and testing, and the “radical left mobs” that were forcing him to send more troops to more of our cities, as Governor after Governor and Mayor after Mayor told him to shove his ragtag mercenary army up his ass and keep their troublemaking asses off our streets. Or words to that effect.
It seems that a good portion of these shock troops are private contractors (mercenaries) hired by the Department of Homeland Security to guard Federal facilities, the kind of people Erik Prince hires to terrorize and murder civilians in foreign lands, sort of explaining the brutal aggression in Portland by Barr’s Army.
Naturally, the Week could not end without Trump getting slapped back to reality by at least one judge, and in this case, two of them. A Federal Judge in New York ruled that Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen was retuned to prison illegally, in order only to violate his Constitutional Rights by preventing him from finishing a tell-all book about his career of doing the dirty work for Trump that got him sent to prison in the first place, with the judge ripping the government a new one for inserting a clause specifically preventing him from writing a book and joining the President’s niece Mary Trump on the Best Seller list.
Then a judge in Portland Oregon issued an order barring Federal troops from arresting, harming or moving reporters away from their positions. When asked by a reporter why only cities with Democratic mayors were being targeted for attack by Barr’s shock troops, Trump began stammering and spluttering crazy lies and slander against his fellow Americans, and for some strange reason challenged Joe Biden to take the same cognition test as he took. So as we endure another week of infection, death, insanity, tyranny, economic chaos and prodigious pathological lying, one can only say Person Woman Man Camera TV.