A Useful Fucking Moron
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Trump didn’t play golf last weekend, and that was the second sign that his problems were getting to him after he canned the plan to host the next G7 meeting at his Doral resort in Miami. Mick Mulvaney explained that Doral had been chosen because the president still considers himself a ‘hospitality guy’ and simply wanted to offer his guests the best possible experience. There was no profit motive, Trump would have done it for free if only that was allowed, and it made him lash out at the ‘phony’ emoluments clause in the Constitution, claiming that George Washington had a business desk in the Oval Office but not providing evidence that Washington did business with foreign countries. Trump’s declaration that he is losing between 2 and 5 billion dollars because of his presidency was greeted with skepticism by experts who are convinced that Trump doesn’t even have $1 billion to lose. Mulvaney and Mike Pompeo were sent out to the Sunday shows to argue that there was no quid pro quo with Ukraine, in Mick Mulvaney’s case to walk back his earlier admission, and they did so poorly that the president must have tasted the carpet in the Oval Office.
Trump’s gofers’ lies came crashing down when Ambassador Bill Taylor testified that military aid to Ukraine had been held back because Trump wanted president Zelensky to first publicly announce that Joe Biden and the role of Ukraine in the 2016 elections were under investigation. Pompeo had been stupid enough to give a conscientious civil servant instead of a crook a front row seat to the shakedown, and the Ambassador had diligently been taking notes. If the whistleblower’s letter was the smoking gun Taylor’s testimony was the bullet, and even Mitch McConnell felt compelled to contradict Trump’s statement that the Senate Leader considered his phone call with Zelensky ‘perfect.’ As the impeachment investigation carries on it’s becoming obvious that ‘Abuse of Power’ will be the first article of impeachment, and after the president called the proceedings ‘a lynching’ while Taylor was testifying, the next day over thirty deplorable GOP House members forced themselves into the investigative committee’s Capitol workspace, having cleared their obstructive action with Trump and only showing that they have run out of arguments to defend him.
Meanwhile Putin met with Erdogan and the two autocrats divvied northeastern Syria up between their troops, with some room for Assad but none for the Kurds. Trump had no problem with this arrangement, because according to him the US ‘never agreed to protect the Kurds’ and ‘we took the oil.’ The president declared that Syria, Turkey and ‘all forms of the Kurds’ have been fighting over blood stained sand for ages and lifted all sanctions on Turkey, while in DC the Special Envoy on Syria testified that at least 100 ISIS fighters escaped since the US withdrew its troops.
While Russia benefitted from Trump’s weakening of Ukraine’s defenses against the invasion by its proxies, Russia, Iran, ISIS and Syria benefit from the president’s policies in the Middle East. Trump’s primary motive in his decision making is apparently to please strongmen like Putin and Erdogan, but also Kim Jong-un and even the Taliban, who are holding out for a better deal than they have been offered so far. All these miscreants have his number and can call anytime.
In New York City, in a case involving his tax returns, Trump’s lawyers argued that the president cannot be investigated and that therefore Trump could indeed shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without consequences until after his presidency. And at an event in Pittsburg the president surprised his audience with the news that ‘we’re building a wall in Colorado,’ a state that isn’t on the southern border.
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