(Door Hugo kijne te Hoboken USA)

At a Ku Klux Klan rally in May 1927 in Queens Fred Trump, then 21 years old, was arrested.  Although he was not charged and it is not clear if he was a clan member, he was definitely a sympathizer.  By all accounts Fred Trump had major influence on his son Donald, who has often called his father his role model.  In 1973 father and son Trump had to settle a lawsuit because they refused to rent apartments to black tenants, whose applications were marked with a C for ‘colored’ and summarily denied.  In 1989 five young black men were wrongfully convicted of raping a female jogger in Central Park.  Donald Trump led the charge against them and took out a full-page advertisement demanding that they be given the death penalty.  After the miscarriage of justice had been exposed and the ‘Central Park Five’ were exonerated and received repairs, Trump was overheard saying: “Now they are rich rapists.” The ‘birtherism’ movement Trump started was a shameful attempt to delegitimize the first black US President, and Trump’s only real agenda is to erase each of Barack Obama’s accomplishments.

There can be no doubt that by upbringing and shown public behavior, which includes calling Mexicans ‘rapists,’ attacking an American judge for his Mexican heritage, and urging his followers to ‘rough up’ Black Lives Matter activists, Trump is a racist.  It explains his first comments about the events in Charlottesville, when he refused to blame the fascists who initiated the riot and stated that there were many culprits, left and right.  Two days later he was forced to change his position and condemn the ‘alt-right,’ but he did that with the spontaneity and conviction of a hostage video.  For a pathological narcissist like Trump even the appearance of having made a mistake and corrected himself was unbearable, so the next day he reversed course again, doubling down on his first statement and declaring that there were also ‘fine people’ among the Nazis, maybe thinking of his father.  And although racism and narcissism are the primary sources of Trump’s behavior, his Chief Strategist Steve Bannon added a strategic component:  It’s what a large part of the Republican base wants to see and hear.

In the total chaos that followed his first and third statements Trump went farther off the rails by comparing Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, conveniently disregarding that the latter built a nation and the former betrayed it.  Steve Bannon in the meantime undermined the president’s rhetoric towards North Korea by saying in a spontaneous interview with a left leaning journal that the US has no military options.

Although this was one of the few occasions when Bannon spoke the truth, today he lost his job as Chief Strategist.  So far Trump has been fearful of what Bannon can do to him from outside of the White House, but the conflicts and confusion the former Breitbart CEO so enjoyed caused paralysis in the executive branch, and Chief of Staff John Kelly apparently decided that enough was enough.

Taking one rat off the ship doesn’t make it stop sinking.  Business leaders have turned their backs on Trump and Senator Corker has questioned Trump’s ‘stability and competence,’ which comes close to 25^th Amendment language.  On top of that, without Steve Bannon Trump may lose his base.

 
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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
The dog days of August are normally a time when politics disappears from the front pages and the main excitement is provided by the weather forecast and sports.  Records are broken in humidity levels and temperatures, facilitated by global warming, and baseball teams gear up for their run towards the post-season while golfers and tennis players get ready for their final major.  I had hoped that there would be an opportunity to reflect on the ‘achievements’ of the Trump administration, which, in spite of its inability to pass health care legislation that would have hurt millions of Americans, has been able to wreak havoc in many other areas.  The EPA has reversed pretty much every environmental protection measure implemented under Obama, affirmative action in college admissions is again challenged in the Supreme Court, Wall Street is being deregulated, setting the US up for the next financial crisis, the Secretary of the Interior is reviewing if the country really needs this many national parks, funding for the National Institutes of Health is cut by $5 billion, and ICE is raging among illegal immigrants.

This is only a modest selection, but there is no room to expand it here because Trump brought politics back with wild rhetoric directed at Kim Jong-un.  After a leaked report from the DIA that North Korea has succeeded in miniaturizing a nuclear warhead to fit it on an ICBM – the same assessment the agency produced four years ago and that turned out to be incorrect – the US President surprised even his military advisors with the threat that North Korea would experience never before seen ‘fire and fury,’ doubling down the next day by announcing that US arms are ‘locked and loaded,’ just in case North Korea would threaten any US territory or ally.  There are four competing explanations for Trump’s sudden outburst, two of a domestic nature, one international and one psycho-pathological.  The first is that Trump’s popularity in the polls is going down and that the messaging is really meant to shore up his base, the second is the ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario, the idea that the Mueller investigation will have to back off from a president who is engaged in an international conflict that may very well result in a nuclear war.

The international explanation is that diplomacy and sanctions have failed to make North-Korea abandon its nuclear and long-range missile programs, and that Trump is therefore simply trying something new and can reverse course anytime.  The psycho-pathological narrative, finally, is that Trump experiences the world as a reality show in which he is an action hero who fights evil with all the tools available to him, knowing that his side always wins, as they do in comic books.

The four explanations are not mutually exclusive, although the first three are more or less rational and the fourth is not.  What makes this last explanation extra feasible, however, is the fact that Trump has now expanded his threats to Venezuela, and the visible delight with which he keeps repeating the words ‘military option,’ changing from a bullfrog into a nuclear knight in fluorescing armor.

In spite of his focus on South East Asia Trump also found the time to thank Putin for expelling US embassy personnel and attacking the man he needs most in DC, Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.  Rationality is not his strong suit, which once more supports the fourth explanation.

 
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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

This week Steve Schmidt compared Trump with a little boy who has cupcake all over his face but tells his parents he hasn’t touched the pastry.  The lies coming out of the Trump camp, some told before this week but now uncovered, followed one another almost too fast to be debunked.  Telephone conversations Trump claimed to have had with the leader of the Boy Scouts and the Mexican president never took place.  Instead of knowing nothing about the ‘adoption memo’ from his son Don Jr. it turns out that Trump wrote it.  Almost two weeks after the meeting of Don Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner with representatives of the Kremlin was revealed, Trump declared that nobody in his campaign saw any Russians, conveniently also forgetting Flynn’s and Session’s meetings with the Russian ambassador. And in spite of hefty denials by the White House there were strong indications that Trump had pushed Fox News to go public with the falsehood that Seth Rich, a tragically murdered DNC employee, had provided files to Wikileaks, which would absolve the Russian hackers.

Although Rich could not defend himself anymore Fox News had to apologize for the story, but Trump never apologized for and preferred to deny calling the White House ‘a dump,’ in spite of the testimony of multiple members of his Bedminster, NJ golf club.  It was a reminder of his sexist remarks about Carly Fiorina’s face during the campaign, which he later retracted by calling her beautiful, as he did with the White House now.  However, Trump never denied having encouraged law enforcement agents to treat suspects with less care, which resulted in a letter from the Head of the DEA urging his people to ignore the president, and his administration succeeded in starting one bizarre investigation and presenting one solution in search of a problem.  The investigation into whether white applicants are being discriminated against by US universities prompted Bill Maher to joke that when he walks around at Harvard or Yale he always wonders where the white students are, and new rules for legal immigration would have disturbing effects on the US economy.

Fortunately those rules, presented by Roy Cohn look-alike Stephen Miller, don’t stand a chance passing Congress, and it appears that Republicans are slowly manning up against Trump, by passing sanctions against Russia with a veto-proof majority and legislation that makes it almost impossible for the president to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who has assembled an all-star team of financial crime specialists and prosecutors that must keep Trump awake at night.

In the White House four-star Marine General John Kelly established some order by firing foulmouth Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on his first day on the job, but it’s still uncertain if he’ll be able to discipline Kushner and Steve Bannon, let alone the president himself.  Ivanka Trump’s message that she’ll work ‘alongside’ but not for Kelly is a bad omen.

Yesterday Trump left the White House for a vacation at his New Jersey golf course that will bring his number of vacation days to three times Obama’s number during his first six months in office.  Ironically the only major legislation Trump signed so far imposes new sanctions on Russia.