Trump hits another rough patch—which he pretty much created for
himself. Thursday starts off well when the president tweets the good news!
According to a Quinnipiac poll almost every man, woman and child in America
loves the job he’s doing.
Other numbers from the same poll quickly give the lie to his
delusional assessment.
And speaking of lying, Trump makes racist comments—gets condemned
around the world —and then lies about it.
1/11: President Trump’s morning gets
off to a good start. He uses his valuable time as leader of the free world to get
some important tweeting done.
At 6:33 he gets busy slamming Hillary. Ten
minutes later he cites positive news from a Quinnipiac poll: “…66% of people
feel the economy is ‘Excellent or Good.’ That is the highest number ever
recorded by this poll.” In other words, two out of every three Americans love Trump.
Alas, the Tweeter-in-Chief either lacks the
attention span to study the entire poll; or he’s just being devious in what he
tries to pass off as truth. You can study the numbers yourself if you don’t
see my point. A few additional observations from the poll:
By a 57-40 percent margin, American voters
say Trump is “not fit to be president.”
Sixteen percent of voters give the president
an “A” for his first year in office! Yeah, Trump! Unfortunately, 39 percent
give him an “F.”
Nearly 2/3rd’s of voters (64 %)
say he is “not honest.”
Even Trump can’t possibly believe a 36
percent approval rating in the Quinnipiac poll is good news—or his 59 percent
disapproval rating.
In what may be the cruelest cut of all, by a
49-40 percent margin, voters credit President Obama for the healthy state of
the economy and not President Trump.
At any rate, the president’s second big task
for a Thursday is to binge on Fox and
Friends. A segment he watches gets him all riled up. (It doesn’t take
much.) Not long after, he tweets: “‘House votes on controversial FISA ACT
today.’ This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the
discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign
by the previous administration and others?”
This is almost exactly what the president
just heard on Fox and Friends. Thank
god he wasn’t watching the Cartoon
Network.
No way of knowing how that might have
reshaped American foreign policy.
For obvious reasons, this tweet is seen to
mean the president suddenly wants FISA renewal defeated. This is surprising news
because the night before the White House issued a statement supporting renewal.
Lawmakers and intelligence leaders who support passage spend the next two hours
trying to make sure they still have votes to pass the bill.
Someone finally takes Trump by the elbow,
leads him to the Oval Office and explains very slowly, using little words, what
it is FISA does. At 9:14 a.m. the president sounds the Twitter version of an
“all clear.” He tweets again. Now he loves the bill. “We need it! Get smart!”
White House staffers, including the much
aggrieved Sarah Huckabee Sanders, are forced to spend the rest of the day
insisting the President of the United States actually does know what he’s doing
when it comes to policy.
The day only gets worse. In an
afternoon meeting with members of both political parties, discussion turns to
renewal of DACA and comprehensive immigration reform. Senators Lindsay Graham
and Dick Durbin suggest extending protections to various immigrant groups,
including people from El Salvador, Haiti and several African countries. The
president gets frustrated and lets his feelings boil up, as he so often does. “Why
are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he asks at
one point. “Why do we need more Haitians?” he wonders, hearing they’d be
protected under the bipartisan deal. “Take them out!”
Norwegians are fine!
The White House does not initially deny the report.
Bonus Trump: Just before midnight,
Trump polishes off a bad day by tweeting about why he can’t go to Great Britain.
He was scheduled to show up for the dedication of a new U.S. embassy in London.
Now he can’t go. It’s Obama’s fault. Obama
made a bad real estate deal.
It turns out later the deal was worked out
during the George W. Bush presidency. Also, Trump is a coward. He knows he’s
going to run into massive anti-Trump protests if he shows up.
He can’t handle that. So he’ll stay home and
tweet.
1/12: A new day dawns. A brand new
cover story is ready. Trump denies on Twitter that he used the term “shithole.”
Yes, he admits, the language he used was “tough.” He says the “shithole” story
is made up. Also, he never insulted Haitians. “I have a wonderful relationship
with Haitians,” he claims. All he wants to do is kick 60,000 of them out of
this country. Other than that….
The new cover story takes a major hit when
Senator Durbin says, no, Trump did use the term “shithole” and more
than once. “I cannot imagine that in the history
of that hallowed room [the Oval Office],” Durbin tells reporters, “where the
president of the United States goes to work every day, there has ever been a
conversation quite like that. It was vile, it was hateful, it was racist.”
Two Republican lawmakers in
the room issue a non-denial denial. Uh. Who, us? We don’t remember
what Trump said.
Senator Graham then issues
a lengthy statement which all but says, “Durbin is telling the truth. Trump is a
liar.”
Here are the key lines: “Following comments by the President [during the meeting on
immigration], I said my piece directly to him yesterday. The President and all those attending the meeting know what I
said [emphasis added] and how I feel. I’ve always believed that America is
an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals….Diversity has always been
our strength, not our weakness. In reforming immigration we cannot lose these
American Ideals.”
It doesn’t help Trump’s case when Senator Tim
Scott, South Carolina’s other Republican senator, tells reporters, Graham confirmed Trump’s shithole comments. Scott
calls the president’s response “incredibly disappointing.”
1/13: What can the president do? He
can’t apologize (see: 1/12). It’s not
in his repertoire to admit a mistake. He’ll have to ride this “shithole”
controversy out. Trump tries to tweet his way out of a hole. Not that hole.
Sorry. Twice he tweet-blames Democrats for destroying the chance to save DACA.
On the world stage, however, reaction is almost
universally negative. The African Union, representing 55 nations, says the
president’s comments were “clearly racist.” The Union statement continues: “The African Union
Mission condemns the comments in the strongest term and demands a retraction of
the comment as well as an apology not only to Africans, but to all people of
African descent around the globe.” The Vatican calls Trump’s words, “particularly
harsh and offensive.” Rupert Colville, United Nations human rights spokesman, tells
reporters, “There is no other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss
entire countries and continents as ‘shitholes,’ whose entire populations, who
are not white, are therefore not welcome.” A former president of Haiti says
Trump has shown his “ignorance.” The leader of South Africa’s opposition party tweets,
“The hatred of
Obama’s roots now extends to an entire continent.” A European lawmaker suggests
Trump “had forgotten to engage his brain before talking.”
Even Republican leaders feel some compulsion to
say something. House Speaker Paul
Ryan looks like he’s sucking a pickle when asked for a reaction. Showing that
famous Paul Ryan spine, he suggests Trump’s words were “unfortunate” and
“unhelpful.” Yes, I believe most Americans agree. Racist comments are
“unhelpful.” Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele says the president
is a racist. “At this
point, the evidence is incontrovertible.” Republican Senator Jeff Flake, a regular critic of the
president, tells reporters, “The words used by the President, as related to me directly following the meeting by those
in attendance [my emphasis] were not ‘tough,’ they were abhorrent and
repulsive.”
Republican Congresswoman Mia Love, herself of
Haitian-American descent, says Trump’s remarks were “unkind,
divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values.” She adds, “This
behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation.”
Trump should apologize.
Even Norwegians are not impressed. Says one
veteran journalist, Trump’s comments fall “into a pattern of nativist and very
unpleasant language from a poorly qualified president, if not worse…. [He] seems
to relish in derogatory remarks about others and praise for himself.”
Lord, don’t we know it in America. There is nothing the Tweeter-in-Chief
loves more, not even Melania or cheeseburgers, than hearing praise of himself.
And that includes the praise he hears when he praises himself.
Even the fact that the president has promised to sell a fleet
of F-52’s to Norway doesn’t help. This may have something to do with the awkward
fact that, outside of the video game Call
of Duty: Advanced Warfare, no F-52’s in reality exist.
Bonus Trump: Defending the
president gets harder every day; but right-wingers give it a shot. Jesse
Watters, on Fox News, offers up the “argument” that if it was true Trump said
what he did it was okay because “this is how the
forgotten men and women of America talk at the bar.” Watters continues, “If
you’re in a bar, and you’re in Wisconsin, and you’re thinking they’re bringing
in a bunch of Haiti people or El Salvadorians [sic] or people from Niger, this
is how some people talk.”
That is true. I have been in bars and heard
all kinds of people talk shit. For example, I always talk about how I hate the Pittsburgh
Steelers.
My thoughts on football, however, do not
shape the way the world looks at the United States.
Also, the guys who talk like Trump about
people from “Niger,” which I think is an interesting country for Watters to
mention, sometimes tend to dress like this on their days off work.
Meanwhile, on his radio show, right-wing nut job Alex Jones explains his latest conspiracy theory. Someone is covertly
drugging Trump.
The president isn’t really an idiot. The Deep State folks are slipping noxious
substances into his Diet Cokes.
Even More Bonus
Trump: The Wall Street Journal,
citing new evidence, reports again that in
October 2016 a lawyer for Trump paid a porn star $130,000 for silence. The Journal explains that payment was made
through a client-trust account handled through the City National Bank of Los
Angeles.
In return the porn star (stage name: Stormy Daniels) agreed not to tell
her story about a consensual sexual relationship she had with Trump in 2006.
(This was just around the time Melania
was pregnant with her first child.)
Michael Cohen, Trump’s self-styled “fix-it man,” tells the Journal that Trump vehemently denies having
had a relationship with Stormy. Cohen does not deny the existence of the
payment.
1/14 (Day 360): Critics of the
president spend the day bringing up examples of good people who came from “shithole”
countries. (Did you know Trump once claimed his ancestors came from Sweden, not
Germany? Apparently, in The Art of the
Deal, he did. Some cite the example set by Emmanuel Mensah, an immigrant
from Ghana, and a member of the Army National Guard, who died recently after
rescuing four people from a burning building and died going after a fifth. A
photo of Alix Idrache, from his graduation ceremony at West Point, and a
Haitian immigrant himself, goes viral.
 |
| Idrache was one of the top students in his class. |
Idrache himself captures the essence of what has always made the United
States great when he posts an explanation of the scene on the school’s Instagram
page.
Three things
came to mind and led to those tears. The first is where I started. I am from
Haiti and never did I imagine that such honor would be one day bestowed on me.
The second is where I am. Men and women who have preserved the very essence of
the human condition stood in that position and took the same oath...
The third is my
future. Shortly after leave, I will report to Ft. Rucker to start flight
school. Knowing that one day I will be a pilot is humbling beyond words. I
could not help but be flooded with emotions knowing that I will be leading these
men and women who are willing to give their all to preserve what we value as
the American way of life. To me, that is the greatest honor. Once again, thank
you.
Speaking of immigration—and DACA—and service
to country—it would be remiss to leave this out: plenty of DACA individuals
have enlisted in the U.S.
military. Even Fox News has to admit, “President Trump’s decision to end an Obama-era
program shielding illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children has left
hundreds of military service members [emphasis
added] facing an uncertain future.
Finally, let’s end with this. It’s a photo of all the members of President Trump’s direct family line who have served this country in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea or anywhere else during World War II. It’s a picture of all the Trump's who have dodged enemy fire to keep America great:
 |
| Norwegians in a snowstorm? (Above.) There have been no Trump's in the U.S. military. |
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