First 100 Days #4

 

It would seem that Trump is determined to prove his campaign statement that “America is broken,” is true, but in order to do that he, himself, must break everything that is working. To that end he has nominated to his cabinet, a number of men and women who are singularly incompetent or who have already proven that they think at odds with the purpose of the office in which Trump wants them to serve. I am speaking specifically of Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Tom Price, Rick Perry, Ben Carson and the now departed Andrew Puzder. They range from the grossly incompetent at what they have been selected to do; i.e. Perry & Carson to diametrically opposed to the purpose of the office in which Trump wants them to serve; i.e. Puzder, Sessions and DeVos.

These eight nominations are so controversial and so at odds with the jobs Trump wants them to serve in, that it would seem to be a deliberate attack on this government’s structure.

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Steve Miller, the White House aide who along with Steve Bannon, decided that they were more powerful than the confluence of opinion with the other government agencies and issued the Muslim Ban on their own, was on This Week for the first time and projected exactly the hubristic insolence that was expected of him. His statements were bullish and antagonistic, his manner disturbingly superior, his refusal to answer direct questions reminiscent of all those in the current White House, his grasp of facts tentative and his association with the truth non-extent. He was certainly combative toward the judiciary, which cannot but cause problems for his boss in his current fight with the courts, but most of all it was the dead eyes, which fascinated me. This man would have the absolute look of a sociopathic serial killer if he didn’t actually look so much like a wimp.

This guy is smart and well spoken if you believe that the machine gun approach to public speaking is acceptable. The problem is, he, like most of this administration makes statements without even considering their veracity or the effect they may have on the rest of the world. The only criterion for statements by this White House is can they prove a point that the speaker wants to make at any particular moment. Yes, Miller is scary because he has Trump’s ear, but in any other circumstance he would he just another liar with a fast talking con man’s style.

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Molly Ball made a great point on Face the Nation, when she enumerated all the stuff that Trump has seemed to do in the first couple of weeks that has stamped him as an action president. She’s right, he has made a lot of noise, but she’s also right when she points out that most of what he’s done is either symbolic or is aimed at getting campaign promises out of the way, just so he can claim he fulfilled them.

So let’s start from the beginning. First he brought up the wall, giving it the go ahead and coming down hard on his promise that Mexico would pay for it. Yeah, sure! The President of Mexico immediately promised that Trump could take a long walk off a short pier and hung up on him. Ball doesn’t point out that the plan to tax imports, which Trump seems to think will be Mexico paying for the wall, is actually the American consumer paying for the wall, but why should reality creep into anything Trump does. The fact is, nothing will be done with the wall until congress votes to finance it and that is a long way offf.

In the same vein, Trump signed an order to remove and replace Obamacare. This is even more symbolic than the wall because the Republican congress already realizes that to end Obamacare without having a replacement, thereby dumping 18 million people off health care, would get them drawn and quartered on the front lawn of the Capitol. So, another case of fulfilling a campaign promise, without actually getting anything done.

Then came the anti-Muslim ban which caused a crescendo of negative noise, noise that could have been avoided if Trump had simply said that they were imposing a limited parameter security measure that would affect only a limited number of people from a small number of countries. Instead he announced an overall Muslim ban that actually affected only a little over a hundred people but sounded like an enormous anti-Muslim program. It resulted in huge noise, something the egomaniac lives for. Unfortunately it created a nasty backlash, which has flooded into the courts and promises to keep the media in stories for the foreseeable future. He has now fulfilled another campaign promise without actually doing anything. This is how it all works. This is what we are going to see for the next four years; forty pounds of horseshit and one ounce of protein.

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A number of my readers have chided me about calling Trump voters dumb. I know it’s not PC but in order to come to legitimate conclusions one must be in possession of facts and the Trump voters to their eternal consternation seem to be too ignorant to absorb real facts. To wit:

*39% of Trump voters think the stock market failed during the Obama administration when it actually went from 7949.09 to 19,614.91 an enormous gain.

*67% of Trump voters think we lost jobs during the Obama administration when unemployment actually went from 7.8% to 4.6% as we gained 14 million jobs.

*40% of Trump voters believe that he won the popular election, which he lost by almost 3 million votes

*60% believe that millions voted illegally in California

*70% of Trump voters believe that George Soros paid for anti-Trump protestors, which he did not.

29% of Trump voters believe that California votes should not be included in the election results.

Besides those numbers, hundreds of thousands of Trump voters believe that there are still jobs out there in manufacturing that Trump will create for them. They believe that there are still jobs in coal mining, an industry that has shrunk to less than 75,000 jobs in the entire country and which would be down to zero if the greedy pigs at Duke energy, Peabody and any number of other collapsing coal giants could figure out how to robotize what’s left of a failing industry.

Then there are the greedy doctors who understood that Trump was wrong for the country but who thought he would immediately dump Obamacare so they could afford a second yacht. Good luck to them, or should I just point to the bad luck they deserve?

*****

Trump loves to claim that he’s very pro-Jewish, that he had many Jewish friends in the real estate business, that his daughter is married to a Jew and has converted, but his chief advisor in the White House is raving anti-Semite, Steve Bannon, who makes no bones about his hatred of Jews. Now a new anti-Semite has popped up as a deputy assistant to the President. His name is Sebastian Gorka and he was pictured recently in an edition of Daily Kos sitting next to Trump on an airing of Hannity, proudly wearing the order of Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian version of the Masonic Lodge or the Knights of Columbus but with one big difference. From 1920 to 1944 it was a group of Nazi collaborators that helped with the extermination of over 450,000 Hungarian Jews. It seems that Gorka’s grandfather was an officer of the group and his father a member and now Gorka is proud to wear its emblem.

Brietbart News, where Gorka was once an editor, has attacked this story as false news but we all know how truthful Brietbart News, has always been and their denunciation of the story is almost an imprimatur of its truth. In any case it’s probably a dumb move for the Prez to have such a clown as an advisor considering how a lot of his campaign money came from rich Jews who thought he was going to be very pro-Israel.

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The Wall Street Journal has gone from being hostile to Trump in his campaign for the Presidency to kissing his ass big time. Thursday’s headline story, “Spies Keep Intelligence From Trump.” Is complete bullshit! If you read the story you will see that it is thinly sourced and even those thin sources don’t have anything of substance to say. In fact the intelligence community claims it has never withheld any relevant information from the President. However, considering, however, his penchant for not recognizing or speaking the truth it would not be out of line to do so.

Trump’s big complaint about the intelligence community, is basically about leaks. Funny about that; he loved leaks when Hillary was running against him and Comey was starting them. He loved WikiLeaks before he was in the White House. Now he condemns the whole process.

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It’s always fun when the guys you don’t like do something really dumb. Trump just did this when he allowed, the mouse that roars, Sean Spicer to announce that he had a “campaign” rally this weekend in Florida. A “campaign” rally? That means the 2020 campaign has officially started as of this past weekend. That also means, according to Mitch McConnell, that no new supreme court justices can be considered until after the election. To quote old prune face: “once the political season is underway, and it is, action on Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over.” So, no new Supreme Court action until after the 2020 election! Thanks Mitch. You can’t fix stupid.

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John Dickerson interviewed Devin Nunes ® Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and it became very clear that that committee isn’t going to delve too deeply into Mike Flynn’s contacts with the Russians, not as long as Republican Nunes sits as the committee chair. Nunes is more interested in finding the leakers than he is in finding out whether or not Flynn had any real contact with Putin’s spies or if he betrayed our country.

*****

Maybe the most disturbing aspect of Trump is his constant and abusive treatment of the media. Sure there are media outlets that are not functioning truthfully. There are some left leaning outlets that have attacked Trump just as there were Right leaning outlets that attacked Obama. That is always going to happen but most of the press is somewhat balanced and more important we need the press. The first chapter in the dictator’s handbook is about crushing the press. Every dictator in history has done this and it’s obvious that if Trump is to achieve his ambitions he will have to suppress the free press, the judiciary and eventually congress. Then it’s Heil Donald!

Of course the big worry is: does all this noise prove that he really is mad as a hatter or is it just the biggest smoke screen in history, a camouflage for what he and his coterie of racist, white supremacists are really doing. While we watch the clown show is he really stealing our courts, trashing our schools, destroying the environment for the benefit of big oil and leading us into war with any number of foreign powers?

*****

Trump’s bizarre press conference, in which nothing of substance was discussed and in which Trump lied over and over again, was illustrative of what a mess this Presidency is. Nothing was more vivid than his exchange with April Ryan, long time, black, White House correspondent. In the exchange it became clear that Trump didn’t know what the CBC or Congressional Black Caucus was and that he had no idea that Ryan wasn’t the person to set up a meeting with them. This guy is President! He should have some knowledge of who is in the government, and how it works. He fought for this job for a year and a half, plenty of time to cram but he’s obviously too lazy or too ignorant to do what has to be done. Too bad for the country!

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Of course the biggest crock, the line that got the most laughs across the country was his announcement that he had inherited a mess when he stepped into the oval office. Let’s take a look at that one gigantic lie. Right now, at the beginning of Trump’s administration, we are at record low unemployment, we have gained over 15 million jobs over the last six years, the auto industry is as stable as it deserves to be, the stock market sets new records almost every day, we have added 20 million people to the healthcare system and we are as much at peace around the world as we have been in seventy years.

Now let’s look at the other side. Obama came into office just as the economy had crashed plunging he nation into financial chaos. Jobs were being lost at a rate of 800,000 per month. The auto industry was on the brink of collapse and we were actively fighting two wars that were not only illegal but weren’t being paid for.

So Trump is looking at some kind of mess? If he is, it’s a mess he has caused in only one month. The incoming President has nominated what is probably the most inept group of cabinet ministers in history. He has appointed clowns like Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, Reince Priebus, Mike Flynn and in a nod to nepotism, his son-in-law to run the White House. On top of that he is in the view of reasonable people, certifiably insane.

Outside of the Security group of Tillerson, Kelly and Mathis, his cabinet appointments bear more resemblance to the clown car at the circus than they do to any kind of functional government operation. Sure he inherited a mess but it’s called his family and friends.