During the last month, do to the fruition of a grouping of international events, President Donald Trump had a number of opportunities to display courage and to give us several examples of what real policy is like. He failed on every occasion.
Like any true bully, Trump only functions when facing someone that he believes does not have as much power as he does, so he denigrates our allies who are lesser military powers, but when he deals with our enemies, who though sometimes stronger than our allies are still inferior to us, he becomes consumed by the power of their personalities as he did in Singapore and Helsinki.
In Singapore he met with Kim Jung Un, with plenty of time to debate and settle issues that had to do with nuclear proliferation. He came out of the meeting with all kinds who grandiose statements about what they had accomplished. But it seems that he had never asked Kim any of the important questions like, what was the plan on the disposal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, or what kind of timetable would be established re the disposal of those nuclear weapons or even, did Kim have any objections to getting rid of his nuclear weapons?
Two weeks after bragging to the world about what a magnificent job he’d done in saving us from a nuclear holocaust, Trump ate every word without mustard or mayo. It seems that everything he had said; everything he bragged about; was without any kind of significant basis. Kim never had any intention getting disposing of his nuclear weapons. Trump had never, for all of his noise about making a great deal, nailed down any of the significant points that were necessary to make such deal. The art of the deal, it seems, is knowing what to bullshit to spread around, after you fucked the whole thing up.
And then it was on to Helsinki, a disgraceful performance in which Vladimir Putin made him look like a complete fool in front of the whole world. Why was it so easy for Putin to make Trump into his butt boy? Is the rumor true? Does Putin really have something on Trump, something so embarrassing that even Trump shies away from its revelation? There are, of course miniseries on this concept, the most widely accepted being the golden showers scenario so widely proliferated by the press. I tend to think that the real answer lies in another, much stronger, direction. The motivating factor in every decision Trump has made since he emerged from the slime of the NYC building business has been his ego. This report feels the answer to Putin’s dominance over Trump lies directly in Trump’s ego. And the force has been most alive in Trump’s ego from the day he was elected has been his margin of victory or if you count popular votes of defeat.
From his refusal to even consider the fact that the Russians might have helped him win the election, to the ludicrous miscounting of people arriving for his inauguration as opposed to those attending the women’s march, Trump has shown us, with no room for doubt, that his ego triumphs over all. This margin of victory is such a sensitive area and one cannot overestimate how much importance Trump gives to it. This commentator feels that this is the area in which Putin has a firm grasp on Trump’s short hairs. The revelation that Putin’s hacking was actually responsible for his election is what terrifies Trump the most. And of course if Putin confessed that he actually did hack the election for Trump and apologize and swear that he’ll never do it again, that would destroy Trump. His ego just couldn’t take it. Putin appeared to do just that when he admitted that he favored Trump in the election but this writer’s reading of the situation didn’t show Putin admitting to hacking That should have let Trump off the hook but I was so close that the fat orange went into a tailspin and blubbered his way idiotically through he rest of the interview.
If you don’t want to accept the obvious problems Trump has with his ego, there is one more glaring possibility as to why Putin has him in his pocket. That’s the investigation into the Trump organization’s laundering money in their dealings with Russia prior to the election. This is a huge area of vulnerability for Trump that has, thus far, not been thoroughly investigated because the House GOP closed down the investigation when things got too hot. Now the only possibility of digging into this is by Mueller or the State Southern District AD’s office. It’s important because if it is true, it’s a criminal activity and it has been going on for years. It’s also important because it’s in the purview of the Southern District Court of New York, a State rather than a federal jurisdiction which leaves Trump much more vulnerable.
So the question becomes, if Trump isn’t being blackmailed by Putin, what are his motivations for all the Russia friendly moves he’s made in our foreign policy, moves that have weakened us and strengthened Russia. He’s pulled out of the TPP, he’s damaged our relationship with NATO and called the EU a “foe”. He has attacked our own intelligence services and he imposed harsh tariffs on our closest allies. These are all steps that couldn’t be more in line with Putin’s desires. The GOP is quick to jump in with the idea that he has been the strongest President in memory in his treatment of Russia but the only reason the sanctions happened was because congress passed them with a big enough majority to prevent a Presidential veto.
As if the above aren’t bad enough, this week in Helsinki Trump was willing to trade an ex-Ambassador to Russia for the potential to interrogate indicted Russian agents. What kind of warped degenerate would do such a thing? The only thing that seems to have stopped him was the tidal wave of outrage that came even from his own people. Once again proving by his reversal that he is nothing but a craven coward.
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The great dealmaker! One of the things that got Donald Trump elected was his ability to present himself as a great dealmaker. He was going to make deals that would make America great again. So how’s he doing?
Well, he was going to make a deal with Mexico to pay for the wall. Sure he was. He was going to make deals with Canada that would help our economy. We’re now in a trade war with Canada. He was going to have deals on tariffs and we’re now in the middle of a tariff war. He was going to have a nuclear deal with North Korea. Don’t hold your breath. He was going to have a deal with Russia involving Ukraine. Yeah, we’re giving it to Putin for his birthday. He was going to have deals with Democrats. What deals? Which Democrats? Yes his name is on a book called The Art f the Dealjust like it’s on hotels and office buildings all over the world, only someone else built them, just like someone else wrote the book.
Just like everything else about Trump it’s a con.
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The question was asked Sunday on Face the Nation; as to what impact the alleged tapes between Trump and Michael Cohen will have on what is going on in Washington now. The answer is probably nothing unless they can somehow relate to campaign finance laws. If they ever did, nobody really cares anymore about what Trump does or did with women. Trump is an accepted pig based on his own admission on the “Hollywood tapes” and nothing he can do from here on out will shock or horrify us. His base doesn’t care about adultery or even pedophilia, as proven by Roy Moore, the asshole from Alabama. The Christian Right has given up all claims to anything even remotely associated with the moral values of Jesus Christ. They cared only that Trump appeared to them as a strong man they could rely on to save their jobs. Trump has proven to be craven rather than strong even as his economic policies will destroy as many jobs as possible over the next few years.
Those who support Trump just don’t care about his moral failings and those who oppose him have already accepted that he is a moral degenerate. The only possible value these tapes have to anyone but Michael Avenatti is if they will prove some kind of campaign finance violation that can be pursued in State court.
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There has been a great deal of chest beating over Trump’s attempts to play nice with both Kim Jung Un and Vladimir Putin. Those objections come from two principle sources; those who think that Trump is so overmatched that he is making a fool of our nation and those who think that we should never have any kind of relationship with any adversary that doesn’t include the barrel of a gun.
For the benefit of this column I am dismissing the later group because they are never looking for an intelligent solution to any problem. They are made up of a combination of war profiteers and hardliners who prefer to live in a world of’; “them against us,” where the possibilities for peace are always blocked by hard heads and harder hearts. Add to those two groups a certain percentage of Trump’s 35%, a group so definitively stupid that they just don’t get “it” regardless of whatever “it” is.
On the other side of the equation we have those who were embarrassed and offended by Trump’s pathetic performance both in Singapore and more especially in Helsinki. Their objections were not about the fact of the meeting but how outgunned, intellectually and strategically; we were simply because of Trump’s insistence that he go up against Putin alone. Many of this group looks favorably on the concept of meeting with your enemy periodically in hopes of bettering a heretofore-ugly relationship. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact it’s a good idea but these meetings must be planned, policy decisions worked out, agendas agreed upon in order to have a basis for progress. Helsinki, at Trump’s request had none of this and it was the equivalent of sending a man with a knife into a gunfight.
Look, there is a basis for Putin’s aggressive behavior of the last few years. It’s all based on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the way it affected Russia, the way it turned that country into a “B” power with a strong military but a terrible economy. Unable to pull up the economy Putin has used his military to infringe on other nations, using those moves to make his people think that he has found the secret to rejuvenating Russia’s power base. We can’t abide that and if we want to keep the world balance where it is, we won’t. But Trump has to understand how the game is played and stop catering to Putin.
Part of the problem here is Trump’s affinity for dictators. No matter how badly he speaks of our allies he never has a bad word to say about criminal dictators like Erdogan of Turkey, Duterte of the Philippines, Netanyahu of Israel, Kim Jung Un of North Korea or Putin himself. These are all “strong men” and Trump,, pathetic and cowardly as he is, wants always to think of himself as a strong man.
Yes, meetings between adversaries can be very advantageous, but never when one of the parties is as intellectually limited and egotistically crippled as Donald Trump. The only way such a meeting could be advantageous to us would be for Trump to appoint Pompeo or Mattis to stand in for him and do the negotiations. This will never happen. Even if Trump were by some miracle to come to the conclusion that he is not the intellectual or foreign policy manen equal to Putin his ego would never allow him to admit such facts to himself let alone the public. Right now it is to the benefit of the United States to have some kind of domestic catastrophe that will drag Trump and his limited attention span back here and out of the international realam.