Donald Trump went out in front of the American public the other night and made the speech he had to eventually make. This was something of a revelation. He spent an awful lot of time justifiably praising our armed forces, and while they certainly deserve all the praise they can get, having to follow the decisions of now three President’s who don’t know their asses from their elbows when it comes to running a war, it did take away from the meat of the subject at hand.
It was a fascinating speech for Trump because, he admitted that this was not what he wanted to do. Trump spent a lot of time before the election braying about Obama’s wrongheaded policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and now here he was, extending Obama’s Afghan policy during his own administration. It was fairly obvious that this was a decision of the generals who seem to be the only ones to whom Trump will listen. Unfortunately, right now, it seems to be the only viable course to explore. The key to this decision is whether or not the U.S. is able to play any mitigating strategies off it. Do we just sit here, holding the fort or do we try to actually get something done? Trump’s promise not to nation build seems to predict the former but that’s not in any way functional. We’ve been sitting on our asses for 16 years and all we can show for it is a huge waste of money and a lot of dead American kids. So it looks like Trump is promising us more of the same.
The generals seem to have come to a conclusion that allows them not to lose a war but not to win one either. A win really doesn’t look to be anywhere on the horizon. Russia learned about that just before we were foolish enough to follow George Bush into this mess. We should never have invaded Afghanistan. Maybe 911 was planned in Afghanistan and maybe it wasn’t. The pilots, the only ones who seemed to know that they were all going to die, came from Germany. We didn’t invade Germany. The rest of the group came from Saudi Arabia. We didn’t invade Saudi Arabia; in fact Bush flew a planeload of his Saudi oil buddies out of the country in violation of his own no fly policy, a move that started the whole Bush planned it idiocy.
What should we have done? Of course the problem in that part of the world has always been about how to build a nation when there are no honest leaders, just a bunch of tribal crooks looking to line their pockets and do as little as possible. The Taliban had not been our enemies before 911. Maybe instead of invading them we should have talked to them after the towers went down. During the Russian war they had been called the Mujahedeen and we were the ones who armed them and helped them in their fight with the Russians. If Bush hadn’t been such an idiot, if Chaney hadn’t been such a warmonger, we could have used the Taliban, who are possibly the least treacherous tribesmen in that lethal country, to help us wipe out the terrorists. The recognized government surely can’t be considered honest or functional. They are the biggest bunch of crooks on five continents. Yes, we should have tried to enlist the Taliban to help us the way we helped them. Instead the idiots in the Bush administration saw foreigners in robes, assumed that they were dire enemies of America and started the longest war in the history of our nation. For nothing!
Now the problem is what do we do? We all heard Trump and what he had to say but we also know that Trump’s word is worth nothing. If he had any smarts he would turn the whole problem over to the CIA but we all know that Trump hates his intelligence agencies if for no other reason than they have the word intelligence in their titles. What he should do is let the CIA, of which I am not a particularly big fan, send someone over there to connect with the Taliban and work out a plan to wage peace in Afghanistan. The guess here is that many of the terrorist groups, like Iran under Mossedegh would love to be friends, the way they were before we invaded them. We just won’t let them. It would be nice if after 16 years, we could finally triumph over the stupidity of the Bush/Cheney team.
Then the Donald went to Phoenix, to speak in front of one of those rabid mobs he generates. I was willing to bet to bet that he would go right off the rails again! Neither Arizona Senator, nor the Governor nor the Mayor of Phoenix attended the speech. The Mayor had asked him to postpone what promised to be, another pro fascist rant.
Why did I feel so strongly about what Trump would do in Phoenix? Because I know that he is a man who goes for instant gratification, not one who plays the long game. He didn’t look at that crowd and think; how can I use them to put together a coalition that will help me get rid of Obamacare or join me in formatting a great tax policy. Not a chance! He saw those dumb screaming faces and he immediately played to their anger and hatred because that’s what Trump needs to live. Like any would-be dictator, he feeds off the adulation of the masses. He didn’t care that he was killing any chance he had of putting together a coalition of GOP forces to work on upcoming legislation. All he heard was the raucous cheers and they drove him to say something destructive, something that intelligent listeners dismissed, something that made them think of him, yet again, as just another ignorant fool.
He started out attacking an American war hero with brain cancer, went on to insult the Senate majority leader of his party, the man he most needs to get anything done in his hopefully short term Presidency and finished up praising a racist sheriff who is a convicted criminal. It was a hell of a Trumpian night.
When Trump began raving, rambling on, reading an edited version of what he had said after the Charlottesville violence, I had a déjà vu moment of sitting with Howie Solomon, the owner of the Cafe Au GoGo in The Village. I think it was 1966. On stage Lenny Bruce was reading from the transcripts of his trial on obscenity charges and doing it badly. The club was half empty because most of those who came to hear Bruce’s biting satire had been bored to tears by this insane rehash of the trial. The big difference was that Bruce was a pathetic, pre-overdose shell. Trump is beaming, speaking about his favorite subject, himself, but somehow just as frenetic, just as pathetic in his need to be loved and understood. Two very different men, two wildly different audiences, two dramatically contrasting locations but equally as pathetic. Just as I did that night watching Lenny, I had the overwhelming sensation that I was watching a dead man talking. Trump, one night after his acceptable speech on what we were going to do in Afghanistan; here he was crashing and burning in front of his fans. Surely, they didn’t think so. Many cheered on cue, even as many got bored and left, but regardless of how they felt the speech was going, they were watching a man once again, make himself a liar and doing it on national TV. Of course they didn’t understand it, but he didn’t have to lie. He didn’t have to even make this speech. He was on what might be his most winning roll since the beginning of his Presidency but Trump is such a loser, so self-destructive that he just cant help stabbing himself in the back, even when it looks like he might survive.
Standing in the center of the half empty auditorium Trump asked the crowd if they liked Sheriff Joe Arpaio. They cheered wildly, immediately identifying themselves as a bunch of bigots and racists. Then he promised to pardon Arpaio later so as not to cause any controversy and they half-heartedly cheered again. Arpaio is racist slime that was convicted of civil rights violations and contempt of court. This is a pig that was voted out of office because of his fascist actions against Hispanic people of Maricopa County. Only a bigot would pardon such a disgusting creep. And yet Trump’s whole discussion before this was aimed at showing he is not a bigot or racist.
Maybe only Donald Trump actually understands how stupid and bigoted his followers really are. Maybe he’s the only one who does. Watching the crowd of middle-aged fatties behind him jump around and cheer at every insane lie was truly nauseating. I would also call them white but there was one black guy, a crazy madman who has been arrested for murder and stabbing someone in the eye with a stick, carrying a sign that indicated he was one of the blacks for Trump. My wife tells me that she has seen him at many Trump rallies, which would make sense because he is nuttier than a fruitcake and keeps accusing Hilary Clinton of being a member of the KKK. It never hurts to pay some crackpot guy to stand there with a favorable sign. That is true GOP strategy.
The Washington Post has done a ton of research and come up with the figure that Trump lies on an average of 5 times a day, every day he breathes. These are not little white lies like telling his wife he didn’t grab any strange pussy (his term) that day. We’re talking about important lies, lies about policy and the events and actions that lead to policy. No one cares how many people did or didn’t show up for the inauguration or whether he lost the popular election by 3 million or 3 thousand votes but when he lies about crime statistics, or job growth or healthcare figures he is doing his dishonest thing on dangerous ground because those lies affect policy.
The people who voted for Trump accepted by a 62% number that he was a liar. They knew it and they accepted it, so expecting them to denounce him for being a liar is just out of the realm of reality What does that say about them? What does that say about a large segment of the American public that they don’t care their President is a sick liar? These are people who don’t care that there is dishonesty in their government as long as they get what they want. But they are too naïve to understand that if Trump is lying about everything, every day, he will also be lying to them. He has already lied to them, over and over and they are just too ignorant or too uninformed to realize it.
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There has been a lot of talk in GOP circles and on the Right in general about their opponents being the elite. Really? And what about the billionaire class that now infects the Trump administration. You want to tell me that they don’t consider themselves to be elite; that they think of themselves as just ordinary people? Let’s take a look.
“I went to better schools than they did. I was a better student than they are.”
Who do you think said that? Of course, it was our man of the people, President Donald Trump. This is the guy who paints everything but his nose gold, just to show us that he has more money than we do. Or maybe it’s less taste? But this distain for anybody who isn’t rich doesn’t just live in the White House. It trickles down to all members of Trump’s cabinet. Let’s look at Steve Mnuchin our Secretary of the Treasury and his wife coming back from a taxpayer paid vacation. The lovely Mrs. Mnuchin
Tweeted all her fans listing everything she was wearing and naming the designers of each, just so we would all know she was rich. Of course she’s rich. She’s married to Mnuchin. Are we to believe she married him for his looks?
When a mother of three from Oregon responded to Linda Mnuchin’s hash tagged message, Mnuchin went full Marie Antoinette with her Let them eat Gucci putdown. Yes, these are the minions of a President who was elected by common people to take care of their needs. Fat chance! After all, Steve himself, made his bones as the “Foreclosure King,” dumping thousands of poor or struggling homeowners into the streets during the crash that included the mortgage crisis. These are not people who have the good of the common man at heart. These are creeps who spit on those who need help, but they are so stupid that they, like Louie XVI, will not understand how people really see them until they are looking up at the shining blade of a guillotine.