Notes on a Presidency Gone Amok

The Comey firing has certainly become the bullet that may bring the Trump Presidency down. The stupidity of doing it while Comey’s FBI was investigating the Trump administration for involvement with the Russian hack of our elections was bad enough but the inept execution of the process was beyond belief. Now, after the President has contradicted himself on various occasions and everyone associated with Trump’s dumb move has been proven to be a liar, we are left with a government in which no sane man can have confidence. Sara Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, Rod Rosenstein, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence and most importantly Donald Trump, have all propagated huge provable lies. In fact when they now make a statement, the call on the administration is not whether or not they are lying but if they are ever telling the truth.

Even if Trump has had nothing personally to do with Russian interference in our electoral process, his current actions of firing the man leading that investigation have to be considered obstruction of justice, a felony.

Trump’s obvious love of dictators, his enabling of the likes of Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdagon, the Filipino butcher Duterte, and that crazy little fat boy in North Korea, all point to his own leaning away from the restraints of an American Presidency and toward the freedoms of foreign dictatorships. Neither Trump, nor it seems any of his sycophants or lackeys have any real slant on the real duties and responsibilities of the Presidency.

If there is anything that comes out of this current chaos, it is that there is a cover-up going on. What exactly s being covered up isn’t obvious yet. It may be Trump’s personal or financial involvement with the Russians. It may be his involvement or knowledge of the Russian interference in our elections. It may be the fact of sanctioned Russian money invested in Trump projects. It may be something else but there is definitely a cover-up in play and it has led everyone in the White House to lie in furtherance of its goals. In the event of Trump vacating his office, one of the biggest problems that will have to be faced is that his natural successor has now involved himself almost as deeply as the rest of the administration in the lies that have come forth, in an attempt to make the cover-up work. In his interview yesterday, Mike Pence lied from beginning to end about why and how Comey was fired. He is no longer a viable alternative for the American people.

So, politicians lie, you say. What else is new? Nothing, but there is a difference between a politician telling a gray area lie and the President of the United States lying about everything that crosses his lips. The real problem will present itself when some international incident or act of terrorism brings the country to the point where it must believe the President as he leads it into war or something that approaches war. When George Bush told the country that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was planning to use them against us, we believed him. Now we know he was lying or a least uninformed. But compared to Trump, Bush was a lily-white truth teller. So when he said what he said we believed him and backed him up. That can never happen with Trump, mainly because he has established the fact that he lies about everything and there’s no way that the American citizenry can ever believe him about anything. So what happens if there is a situation where he claims that North Korea is ready to bomb us? Do we go along with it or do we abandon him and refuse to act. Either way the result will be chaos and that cannot be allowed to happen.

*****

This weekend the American public was treated to the spectacle of the President threatening the former Director of the FBI about a conversation they may or may not have had at the White House. It’s not that we should have been surprised. After all, Donald Trump had a well-documented history of being a bully and a thug in his business dealings before he infected the White House.

The question becomes did Trump tape conversations in the White House? A number of former business associates have revealed that Trump made it a habit to tape phone conversations in his business dealings before he ascended to the Presidency.

Never in the history of the Presidency is there evidence of a President threatening a private citizen which is what Comey is now. Is this guy crazy?

*****

It has been widely disseminated that the Trump base has staunchly stayed with him despite his lack of production and his bizarre and non-functional actions since he took the Presidency. They have stood by him by almost 96% despite dishonesty, dysfunction and disgusting behavior. Now he has committed treason. That’s right treason. If anyone except the President revealed classified secrets to the Russians they would already be in jail. That’s where Chelsea Manning went. That’s where she’s been for the last seven years. That’s where we have been trying to send Edward Snowden, ever since his revelations, not of classified secrets but of American misdeeds that should have been addressed were released to the public. Now we have our Idiot-in-Chief boasting to Russians officials about how much he knows and how far he is into what makes the world work. Of course his boasts are what’s making the world not work. I repeat. If anyone else had done what the idiot Trump did he or she would already be in a cell. Of course there’s a caveat; the President must be doing it to gain an advantage, not to show what a big deal he is. Of course many of that same 96% didn’t believe Nixon should have been pursued for Watergate. Actually he wasn’t. He was pursued for lying to Congress but that’s splitting hairs. What the 96% must realize is that what Trump has done, and is doing is a far cry from a petty burglary aimed at finding embarrassing information about the other party. What Trump has done is to interfere with the judicial process. That’s a felony. He did it most likely to stop an investigation that could lead to proving that he colluded with the Russians to rig our election. That’s obstruction of justice, a felony. These aren’t political games which is all Watergate essentially was. These are high crimes and misdemeanors, which are what people get hanged for.

The information that has been followed up and released now tells us that it is an Israeli agent who first uncovered what Trump saw fit to boast to the Russians. Do the Republican leaders, particularly Ryan and McConnell, have o view the spectacle of an Israeli agent being decapitated by ISIS before they get off their cowardly butts and indict? Do the 96% of rabid Trump supporters need to see such an atrocity before they realize that they are backing a dangerously crippled dog?

The Republicans in Congress are trying to hold the whole mess together in hopes that they can push their idiotic agendas forward but the only piece of legislation they have been able to push anywhere is their universally scorned healthcare bill. They would be better servedto hook up with he dysfunctional Democrats that remain in Congress and try to organize an attack on the feckless Trump in hopes that a seriously unenlightened public will once again screw up and not vote them all out in 2018.

*****

So the Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein has appointed Robert Muller as Special Counsel to investigate the Russians involvement in our elections and the possible involvement of this administration in that process. Yes, this is good, better than we expected but the general reaction of the pundits who think, “now be well with the world” is so over the top as to be ludicrous. Donald Trump, a lying, egomaniacal sociopath is still President. Nothing has changed. The government has still arrived at a complete halt. No legislation moves forward. Nothing is being done to create jobs, fix the healthcare system, educate our kids or fix a badly damaged tax system.

Sure Muller is a good choice but he has over a year’s worth of work to do. With Trump given that much time to screw-up, we are far from out of the woods. Trump whines over and over that no President in history has been treated worse or more unfairly. Well, maybe he has been treated worse than most Presidents but it cannot be denied that he earned it. He is a man who cannot tell the truth, who sees every question, no matter how diverse the subject the subject, only through the lens of how it reflects on him. His ego is such that he cannot conceive of ever being wrong, so when he makes a mistake or does something stupid or venal he turns it around to a point where he can blame someone else for the result. He demands loyalty but regularly throws his associates and underlings under any bus that happens to be in the neighborhood.

Sure the special prosecutor is a step forward but we aren’t anywhere near out of the woods and as stated above even if we get rid of Trump we are still stuck with his replacement. That will be as bad or worse no matter how far down the list we go.

*****

Vice President Mike Pence has been very good at his job so far. He has been loyal to Trump, he has tried to protect Trump, he has been the patsy for Trump but it has now come to the point where he has to try and protect himself from Trump. Sure, he’d be a horrible President but that’s not what this blog is about. What it’s about is that Pence has gone out and fronted for the President in a least four instances, occasions on which he made statements in defense of our almost indefensible President and then had his knees shot out from under him by the White House. Its time Pence started watching his own back because it is quite clear that no one in the White House is looking out for him.

It’s interesting that Trump would be stabbing his guy in the back because if you read the 25th Amendment you will see that Pence can easily lead a push that would sweep Trump out of office almost any time he can get a few of his fellow Republicans to side with him. Don’t tale my word for it. Go take a serious look at the 25th Amendment. I say take a serious look because it is so badly written that you actually have to study it to make any sense out of it but once you do it is pretty amazing how easy it is to get rid of a President who acts the way Trump has so far in his term of office. Pence would be a fool not to study this piece of legislation very seriously and to do it before Trump sells him out completely.