June 28, 2019: President Trump Disgraces Himself on the World Stage

 

6/28/19: Once again, President Trump steps onto the world stage and disgraces himself, this time repeatedly. At the G-20 Summit in Osaka he sits down for breakfast with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and helps burnish the prince’s image. Trump describes MBS him as “a friend of mine.” Speaking to a group of Saudi men seated across the table, Trump describes the prince as a man who has “opened up things…especially what you’ve done for women.” 

Our president has been watching what is happening in Saudi Arabia. It’s a “revolution,” but “in a very positive way.”

Trump gets along well with murderous leaders.

 

“I want to thank you,” the president continues, as reporters and TV crews look on. “You’ve done a really spectacular job,” he tells bin Salman. And, oh, the meetings they’ve had! “They’ve been terrific!” Saudi Arabia – boy, the president says – they buy U.S. military equipment, “the best in the world,” and those purchases, he claims, “create a million jobs” in the U.S.A. 

There are only a few problems with Trump’s take: 

1.     Saudi women may not apply for passports without permission from male relatives. 

2.     Child marriages and arranged marriages are the rule. 

3.     Husbands can unilaterally divorce wives. 

4.     A woman was recently stoned to death for adultery. 

5.     The Crown Prince has instituted a crackdown on “dissidents, human rights activists, and independent clerics [emphasis added],” often accusing critics of treason. 

6.     Jamal Khashoggi, a fierce critic of MBS, a permanent resident of the United States, with children who are U.S. citizens, was brutally murdered by Saudi agents last year. 

7.     Trump makes jobs numbers up. In March 2018 he claimed Saudi arms sales would create 40,000 jobs in the U.S. That didn’t impress. He upped his claim to 450,000, to 500,000, then 600,000. 

8.     Finally, he decided a round million sounded right. 

 

“You don’t have the problem in Russia.” 

The disgrace only grows worse. During a photo opportunity with Putin, Trump looks at the reporters filling the room and jokingly says to the murderous Russian autocrat, “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it. You don’t have the problem in Russia. We have it; you don’t have it.” 

“Yes, yes, we have it,” Putin responded. “The same.” 

Only, they don’t. In Russia, critics get bludgeoned, strangled, stabbed, gassed, hanged, gunned down, thrown off balconies, poisoned, and tortured and killed while in police custody.

 

Soon after, a reporter asks Trump if he has told the Russian Killer not to interfere in the next U.S. election. Trump has already said he’d be willing to take foreign help in 2020. He laughs off the question. 

Here’s how the Associated Press describes the scene: 

“Of course,” the president replied.

 

Then he turned to Putin and facetiously said, “Don’t meddle in the election.” He playfully repeated the request while pointing at Putin, who laughed. 

For a handy refresher, here’s what the Mueller Report says:

  

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC notes that Europe has experienced five “500-year” summers since 2003. Now 2019 may make six. In other words, the continent’s six hottest summers in five centuries, have all come in the last fifteen years. 

New heat records have been set this month in France, Germany, Poland, and Spain, with temperatures easily topping 100° F across a continent where air conditioning is rare. 

According to scientists, melting Arctic ice and a general warming in the far northern regions are affecting jet stream currents that have always moved cooler polar air across the Northern Hemisphere. 

These extreme heat events are all connected to a slower jet stream that locks weather systems into place, says Michael Mann of Penn State University. Mann co-authored a study last year that linked the slowdown in the jet stream – the band of high-altitude winds that sweep around the globe from west to east – to last summer’s unprecedented droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and flooding events across the entire Northern Hemisphere. And it is likely behind India’s weak monsoon rains and the widespread flooding in the U.S. Midwest this year.

 

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THE DALI LAMA sums up his opinion of President Trump, telling BBC News, he thinks the man lacks a “moral compass.”