Trump Malfeasance

It’s now pretty clear that Russia interfered with our election. What’s also clear is that they wanted to get caught. They wanted us to know that they could do whatever they wanted and we wouldn’t be able to stop them. They have admitted this on Russian TV. They make fun of us, stating that Trump will do nothing. Why? Why are they so sure that Trump won’t order us to knock them out, crash their whole cyber system? Don’t forget that Trump is the one they wanted in office. They got this and now they are taking advantage of it. Trump has never moved to implement the sanctions voted almost unanimously by congress against Russia. Right now he is doing nothing to act against the Russian attack on our elections, even though it’s now common knowledge that it is a fact. Worse, he appears to be doing nothing to keep it from happening again in 2018 or 2020. Why? What do the Russians have on him? It’s pretty clear that we have a President that is either indebted to or being bribed by, the Russians. Trump is the Manchurian Candidate. As such, he has installed people like Jared Kushner who cannot get a security clearance because of his associations with the Russians and other bad actors. Now that Kushner has been stopped from getting his security clearance, he needs to be replaced. Unfortunately that hasn’t happened yet. In any normal government he would have already been gone but this is not a normal American government. This is a compromised government, a government that before it took office floundered about attacking everyone else as being security risks. We now have over one hundred thirty members of the White House staff that can’t get a clearance and we have a government that’s completely compromised. It would be like having Goebbels as vice-president during WWII.

So all this noise about Kushner is really just a symptom of everything that’s wrong with the Trump administration. Okay, maybe not everything. There is so much wrong that it boggles the mind, but there are a couple of crippling, non-Kushner problems that Donald Trump also dragged along on the trip from Trump Tower to his new home in Washington, DC.

Trump came to DC with the assumption that he was the smartest person in any room he occupied and that was all he needed to be the president. He had run a small family business where his word was law, where he brooked no opposition and where his natural criminal tendencies played to success on the job. Certain realities seem to have never occurred to Trump. The millions that he used to drive his business ventures would be useless in the White House. The money he made by stiffing those who worked for him was going to be a detriment as President and he would not be able to simply file for some kind of political bankruptcy when he screwed up a deal with one of our allies.

Trump was used to always being right because he held the power of good paying jobs over everyone who worked for him. Before the White House, there was no one out there to call bullshit on his lies. Now there was the media who didn’t seem to care that he was President, so all but Fox News and Right Wing Talk Radio quickly became the enemy. Trump has thought and said many times, that being clever was enough to run a successful country. During the elections he constantly ran his mouth about how he was a great dealmaker and how he would fix everything the first day.

To anyone with any understanding of government, he looked like a fool. Within days of his election he was proven to be a fool. Trump entered the White House intent on proving to everyone that he was the smartest guy on the planet when he was just he luckiest. A perfect storm of a bad opponent, naively ignorant voters and a large segment of the population who were completely disgusted with business as usual in the capital, coalesced with serious Russian interference to put the worst possible candidate in office. Trump followed his ego and took it to be a mandate.

Trump’s background has shown clearly that as a cheap crook and con man he had learned to trust no one but himself, and he brought that aspect of his background to the White House. So instead of looking for the most functional and experienced person for each position he had to fill, and there were thousands, Trump always chose someone he felt he could trust; as opposed to t someone who knew how to do the job. This created a billowing cloud of ignorance and incompetence to surround and smother the administration.

In one important respect, governing a country is pretty much like any other job. Experience counts. Intelligence counts. They count big but Trump ignored that, preferring to fill the White House with cronies rather than functioning, experienced, people who knew how to run the government. After carrying on abut how Hillary had compromised our national security and leading cheers by his swamp rat mob of “Lock her up,” Trump preceded to ignore anything even approaching functional national security by hiring a bunch of sleazy self-promoters who were involved in grubby deals with everyone from Saudi Arabia to Russia, putting all of them, it turns out, in a position to undermine the security of the country.

This rogues gallery of fiscal pimps included but was not limited to Paul, Manafort, Mike Flynn, Gary Cohn, Steve Mnuchin and even his son-in-law Jared Kushner. To make matters worse, most of these characters couldn’t pass through the FBI process that allows government workers to get a security clearance. There are currently over 130 such miscreants working in the White House, Jared Kushner being the most notable.

Kushner, Trump’s boyish sidekick, like most of the others in positions in the administration, seems to have inherited his post through a personal association with Trump, rather than by any qualifications he may have had. Regardless Trump put Kushner in charge of just about anything he didn’t want to run himself. With absolutely no experience, no background, Kushner became in charge of our foreign policy, the mid-east peace process, our infrastructure and just about everything else that fell off Trump’s desk.

So how is that working out so far? Well, after a little more than a year in office, our crumbling infrastructure shows nothing in the works that would indicate it will ever be fixed. At Kushner’s bidding, Trump has announced we will recognize that Jerusalem will henceforth be the capital of Israel, just about solidifying the fact that there will be no Mid-East peace, at least for the foreseeable future. And how is our other foreign policy going?

Well, Trump did actually pick Rex Tillerson, for Secretary of State. Tillerson, former CEO of Exon, a businessman, like Trump but one with far more experience in international deal making but like most of Trump’s appointments, with little to no government experience and worse, with a history of deal making with Russia, seems, currently, to be completely out of the loop. Of course when he appointed Tillerson, Trump didn’t bother to staff his department so what used to be a huge government agency employing well over a thousand workers managing our foreign policy all over the world, currently has Tillerson running around refilling his own toilet paper containers. Which leaves a lot of work for Jared, who doesn’t know how to do it. It has recently been revealed by our Intelligence Services that four nations, that are ostensibly our allies, have conspired on how to manipulate Kushner in their dealings with him. They are Saudi Arabia, Israel, China and Mexico.

That these nations even think that this is possible only goes back to the fact that neither Kushner nor anyone in the administration understands the protocols that must be maintained in international dealings if we are to have any success at all. Trump doesn’t take briefings seriously. Kushner will, because of his failure to get a security clearance, no longer be able to take them for him. T seems almost no one in this administration is in a position to know what the hell is going on in any of the areas of government that must be maintained for us to be a functional nation. The only conclusion that can be drawn is; in Trump’s future we will be stumbling blindly about in shark infested international waters.

Yesterday, in the middle of all this crippling dysfunction, Trump went nuts, suddenly calling for all kinds of gun restrictions that even the Democrats hadn’t asked for; going so gar as to demand that guns be illegally taken from their owners before due process was executed. It’s really time the fat one read the constitution. He has been operating out of ignorance far too long. But that’s only part of the problem. The real problem is; no matter what he says, no one can take it seriously. Trump has lied and changed his position so often in the last two years that his statements carry absolutely no weight whatsoever. This was pointed out by Heidi Przybyla on Morning Joe and it caused Noah Rothman, a conservative hack who writes for Commentary, to get all his feathers ruffled and launch an attack against her; stating that if we don’t believe the President it leaves us vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. It’s really time for Rothman to get his head out of his ass. We don’t believe the President. We can’t because he has proven over and over to be nothing but a serial liar. Not only doesn’t Trump understand the truth, he doesn’t even have a concept of what it is. The idea of truth, as most intelligent people understand it, has no place in Trump’s twisted mind. Rothman is a fool. If Scarborough needs another conservative on his morning panel he would be better served to have someone with some intelligence and a broader worldview.

The Democrats, in fact all logical thinking people not motivated by greed, would love to think Trump was serious yesterday regarding gun laws, but history tells us it was just another of his insane rants and in fact his babbling about ignoring gun owners constitutional rights just proves that. Trump doesn’t really know what he wants. He has no morals or values to direct him, so he just flounders around depending on flawed instincts to guide his non-functional blunders. Does he really want tighter gun restrictions? Who knows! Maybe h did, for the few seconds needed to make those statements but that means nothing. He took over thirty million bucks from the NRA. He speaks of them as great guys and his friends. Does he really want to slap them in the face? Maybe. There is really no way to tell. We are not dealing with a rational man and thirty percent of the population just doesn’t care. This country isn’t in trouble by accident. We earned it when we elected a man we already knew was a lying sociopath to the Presidency.

But being a lying sociopath doesn’t mean that Trump has stopped thinking about that which motivates him most – money! And that’s even if it isn’t his money. Everyone went nuts this week when Trump, almost in the middle of another thought, announced that he was going to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. Half of us who heard the announcement thought he had gone completely off the deep end and the other half figured that he’d never do it. But if we had paid attention to a little noticed move of the previous week we may have thought differently.

Carl Icahn is a billionaire investor and a very close friend of Donald Trump. Icahn is such a good buddy of Trump’s that last year the Donald appointed him to his staff as a “Special Advisor.” Icahn had to resign that post last August when The New Yorker published a story about how he was using his position in the White House to protect his business interests. Well, that’s not all Icahn has been up to. It seems that on February 12^th of this year Carl Icahn sold off $31.3 million worth of shares in Manitowoc Co. Inc. a major manufacturer of serious industrial cranes. And guess what the principal ingredient of those is. Steel! Fancy that. So ten days later when Trump started babbling about a 25% tariff on steel, and the market went into the toilet, Carl Icahn had made himself a hell of a move. What’s that? What is it you’re saying? You think it smells like insider trading. You think maybe Trump slipped a little info into his good buddy’s ear? Well if that isn’t what happened I’m gonna sell you two bridges for the price of one. That’s right, I’m gonna throw in the Queensboro just for the hell of it.

That’s stunning, what’s completely unbelievable, is that these two clowns could have the hubris to try to pull off something like this with two congressional committees and Bob Mueller breathing down the necks of Trump and anyone dumb enough to speak to him. I’m not sure what the penalty is for insider trading but if this pair doesn’t spend a couple of years in the can just for this, there is no God!