January 19, 2018: Trump Ends First Year in Office with Government Closed for Business

 

1/19/18: On this, the 365^th day of the star-crossed Trump presidency, the maestro of malfeasance does not issue a single tweet all day. This despite having tweeted 2,608 times since taking office. Has President Trump ever touched on the topic of a government shutdown before? 

Let’s try a quick search of his Twitter archive. He has. On August 9, 2013, he speaks his mind for the first time – and, again, you can’t argue with CAPS: “FACT – the reason why Americans have to worry about a government shutdown is because Obama refuses to pass a budget.” 

A series of thirteen related tweets followed by the end of October 2013. From Citizen Trump we learned that the shutdown was the fault of Democrats. Still, shutdowns weren’t that bad. “There have been 17 shutdowns since 1976,” Trump tweeted, “14 under Reagan and Bush with Democrat Congresses who wanted more spending.”

 

He does not mention the s-word (well, that s-word) again for several years. On May 2, 2017, however, he again tweets: “either [sic] elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the rules now to 51%. Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” 

As usual, Mr. Trump is blaming everyone else.

January 20, 2018: Year Two of the Trump Administration Begins with Government Shut Down

 

1/20/18:  Trump begins the second year of his reign with  his government shuttered. Luckily, he still has a functioning iPhone. This means he can still issue his all-important tweets. 

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“People have seen a year that’s incredible, that’s been filled with nothing but the best for our country, America…” 

Eric Trump

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Mostly he tweets about how terrible Democrats are (ten posts since the witching hour shutdown on January 19). A second favorite topic is tweeting links to Fox News and praise of himself (seven). Two links to son Eric’s feed include effusive and unbiased praise for Dad.

“People have seen a year that’s incredible, that’s been filled with nothing but the best for our country, America…” Eric insists. 

Eric is happy because – so far – Special Counsel Mueller has not called on him to testify in the Russian investigation.

January 21, 2018: Sen. Duckworth Has a Message for Cadet Bone Spurs

 

1/21/18: As breakfast time approaches in Washington D.C., Trump can take solace knowing all Americans and all peoples round the globe love him. 

He knows this to be true because he binge-watches Fox News. Did you realize that Brad Blakeman gave the president excellent marks for his first year on the throne? Well, the president believes we all should know. “Thank you to Brad Blakeman on @FoxNews for grading year one of my presidency with an ‘A’ - and likewise to Doug Schoen for the very good grade and statements,” he tweets. 

 

“A message for Cadet Bone Spurs.” 

Year Two begins with Congress unable to pass a budget. There are warnings that the deficit for 2018 may surpass $1 trillion. The U.S. Treasury reports it will borrow $441 billion during the first quarter of this year. This kind of deficit spending used to bother GOP “fiscal hawks.” 

Now Paul Ryan pecks for corn and clucks like a hen. 

Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States has suffered grievously in a year under Trump. To be more precise: It has reached the lowest level ever recorded. According to Gallup, respect for America was 48 percent during President Obama’s final year in office. Under Trump it stands at 30 percent. 

Respect has fallen by at least 10 percentage points in countries normally our allies. These include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and South Korea. And approval fell by 40 points in Norway. That’s the place where the president says all the best potential immigrants live! (See: 1/11/18.)

 

With the government shut down, all the White House toadies are making the cable news rounds, blaming Democrats. According to Kellyanne Conway, Democrats hate the U.S. military. 

Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois hits back. (Duckworth lost both legs in 2004, when the helicopter she was piloting was shot down near Taji, Iraq.) In a speech on the Senate floor, she responds to the president’s claims that Democrats hate the military: 

I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five deferment draft-dodger. And I have a message for Cadet Bone Spurs: If you cared about our military, you’d stop baiting Kim Jong-un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops and millions of innocent civilians in danger.

 

Now we wait. Will Trump offer up some furious tweet-insult in response? Perhaps he’ll howl: “Duckworth is no hero. I like people who don’t get shot down and lose both legs.” The man has no class. 

You know he might.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth

January 6-7, 2019: Government Shutdown Continues, Bored President Keeps Tweeting

 

1/6/19: The U.S. government remains closed. Trump is bored and needs something to do with his free time. 

He could work out and get in shape. 

Or he could just lounge around in pajamas, like a 239-pound lump. So, that’s what he does. (See: 2/3/19.)

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1/7/19: Trump’s first tweet of the day comes at 7:56 a.m. Even by Trump standards, this one is nuts: 

 

“Many have become crazed lunatics.” 

With all of the success that our Country is having, including the just released jobs numbers which are off the charts, the Fake News & totally dishonest Media concerning me and my presidency has never been worse. Many have become crazed lunatics who have given up on the TRUTH!...

 

Thirteen minutes expire. (Does this man have nothing better to do?) At 8:09 he continues his thought: 

...The Fake News will knowingly lie and demean in order [sic] make the tremendous success of the Trump Administration, and me, look as bad as possible. They use non-existent sources & write stories that are total fiction. Our Country is doing so well, yet this is a sad day in America! 

 

This from the man who said recently imaginary former presidents told him they wish they had built the wall. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of border walls, the former prime minister of Canada, Kim Campbell, calls Trump a “mother**ker.” 

Ms. Campbell has already labeled Trump a “sexual predator.” And the Canadians are our allies!

January 23-24, 2019: Government Shutdown Continues - Greenland Melting Alarms Scientists

 

1/23-24/19: Sometimes there’s so much horrible news involving and revolving around President Trump, you can have a hard time knowing which stories to address first. 

 

Trump Temper Tantrum Shutdown: Days 33/34. 

We’ve now survived Days 33/34 of the Trump Tantrum Shutdown and still no resolution in sight. 

That means 800,000 federal workers are not being paid, even though half have been ordered to report for work, making it the no-pay-but-report-to-work-anyway-Trump-Temper-Tantrum-Shutdown, which could go on for years. 

Who said “years?” 

Trump.

 

And the damage spreads. The F.B.I. Agents Association warns the Agency’s ability to protect the nation from terrorists, MS-13 gang members and other nefarious types – such as pals of the president – has been impaired. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association is suing the Trump administration, warning of increasing safety concerns. The national parks are closed – although Trump doesn’t care because he’s never going to drag his lard butt out to a national park unless you tell him there’ll be strippers dressed up as park rangers. Trump has ordered 36,000 IRS workers to return to the office, but not to be paid, so he won’t look like a moron and tax refunds will go out on time.

 

* 

ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT, Trump is taking several well-deserved lumps because he congers up foreign policy via tweets. We have defeated ISIS he tweeted recently. A suicide bomber promptly killed four Americans in Syria. Lawmakers were so rattled by news that Twitter Thumbs might pull the U.S. out of NATO, the House of Representatives voted to strip him of the power to do so. The vote was 357-22. Sixty members of Trump’s own party decided to duck and cover rather than vote against him and didn’t vote at all. Only 22 Republicans offered support. That included Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, a man we know is nuts. 

Speaking of threats to America, is there anything else happening that we need to worry about? 

Well, good news, of a sort. Trump and Kim Jong-un are scheduled to meet again next month. It could be our “favorite President,” as he styles himself, will simply declare the problem of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal solved and jet off to Mar-a-Lago for a rest. Getting Kim to “give up all his nukes,” Trump will tell reporters, was hard work!! But he will claim he did. 

Meanwhile, the North appears to be expanding its long-range missile bases. Trump may say he loves Kim, and Kim loves him, but so far Kim is cheating on Don the way Don cheats on wives. 

 

Oceans rise 0.03 inches per year. 

As if North Korea isn’t bad enough, scientists have released another ominous report outlining the growing threat of climate change. The ice cap atop Greenland, they warn, began melting seventeen years ago. Between 2002 and 2016 the cap lost an average of 280 billion tons of ice per year. 

If you’re a Trump fan, or the Science-Moron-in-Chief himself, you can read one sentence in the report and shrug off the rest. The melting so far has raised the level of the oceans “0.03 inches per year.” 

So, we’re not going to “drown” in that extra half inch rise since 2002. 

It’s the cumulative danger that has scientists sounding alarm. The ice, says Professor Michael Bevis, lead author of the report, is melting four times faster than a decade ago. “The only thing we can do is adapt and mitigate further global warming – it’s too late for there to be no effect. We are watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point [emphasis added unless otherwise noted].”

 

If you were the President of the United States, and not a dolt, you could read the report and note that if all the ice atop Greenland melted the oceans would rise 216 feet. You could read reports highlighting the problem of vanishing glaciers across the Himalayas and the long term threat to Southwest Asia’s water supplies. You could read about increased melting in Antarctica. You could read about 400,000 glaciers worldwide, including Iceland, and what happens if they melt. If you weren’t tweeting all the time, you might Google, “NASA climate change,” or “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate change,” instead. You could study the report released two weeks ago by the Department of Defense, outlining future damage to U.S. military installations round the globe, as a result of rising temperatures. 

To do that, you’d have to have a level of intellectual curiosity that President Trump sadly lacks.

Greenland melting alarms scientists.

February 1, 2019: President Trump and His "Team of Vipers"

 

February 1, 2019: After two grueling months, trapped in the White House by his own obstinacy, due to a partial government shutdown which he ordered, the president heads to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. 

According to The New York Times, quoting one loyal Trump supporter, the president has been suffering. 

“You would have to be insensitive not to be touched by how he has stayed there working,” said Toni Holt Kramer, the founder of Trumpettes USA, a booster group that is planning to welcome him. “I think people will have tears in their eyes because they’re so grateful that he’s come back to his home away from home.”

 

(See: 2/5/19.) 

Yeah. John McCain? Imprisoned for more than five years, and tortured routinely. Not a hero. 

Trump? He binged on TV and enjoyed room service whenever he wanted in the White House for…weeks.

 

*

A NEW BOOK, just out, and written by former White House aide Chris Sims, bears the title Team of Vipers. 

The President of the United States hears about the book and labels Sims “a mess,” says he was nothing more than a “gofer,” and warns that his aide signed a non-disclosure agreement, typically used by businesses to keep critics silent. See for example: Sexual harassment, Fox News, Bill O’Reilly; sexual harassment, Fox News, Roger Ailes; porn star sex and payoffs, Citizen Donald J. Trump. 

No previous president has ever tried to force staffers to sign non-disclosure agreements and it’s not clear they’d be legal. 

You know. Because. History, and such.

 

“As far as I know, it’s never been tried in the White House,” Russell Riley, the co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center tells Time. “I’ve never heard of it. I’ve done oral histories back to the Jimmy Carter presidency.” 

Other books that this president has tried to block include Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House and Fire and Fury: Inside the White House. Someone should explain to Trump fans why this is dangerous; but they’d probably ignore the warning and insist this is all “Fake News.” 

Logic not being their strongest suit. (See: 2/22/19.) 

As for Sims, he writes in part, 

I suspect that posterity will look back on this bizarre time in history like we were living on the pages of a Dickens novel. Lincoln famously had his Team of Rivals. Trump had his Team of Vipers. We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people. 

Donald J. Trump. Team of Vipers. 

It figures. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (10/29/21): When I check reviews much later, they prove interesting. Sims says near the end of his book, “I’m proud to have worked for the president of the United States. And in spite of the frustrations and misgivings laid out in this book, I’m proud that the president I served was Donald Trump.” He admits that he includes himself as one of the “vipers.” He tells a reporter for The New Yorker, “And I think a lot of what I saw in there came from a very selfish place, and one of the criticisms I have of myself is that I didn’t have a servant’s heart a lot of the time while I was there. And that’s a criticism I would apply to a lot of people there.” 

Sims agrees that the culture of any workplace comes from the top down, but also says that he doesn’t think Trump has “a racist bone in his body,” while agreeing that the president’s comments often sound “racially insensitive.” 

When the reviewer for The New Yorker presses him on what Sims thinks the meaning of “birtherism” was, he responds, “I don’t know.”

 

Prodded repeatedly to answer, Sims repeatedly says he doesn’t understand the point of the questions. Finally, he admits, “So I think that’s, like, a great example of a time where he does not step up to the plate and take on these race issues in an appropriate way, a helpful way for the country. No doubt that that was terrible. I don’t know what else you want me to say about it.” 

Eventually, Sims admits that at times he was “a coward” and might have been wise to quit. And this was long before the Black Lives Matter days, when racially insensitive comments constantly spilled from President Trump’s lips. 

Birtherism? Yeah. That, too, was racism of the worst sort.

The Trump Stupidity Index Reaches a New High.

“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” 

Mark Twain

1/4-5/19: Our topic for the weekend is “The Trump Stupidity Index” which seems to reach new lows daily. 

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“They all know it. Some of them told me.” 

President Trump

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I am striving to keep posts shorter this year, but when it comes to presidential stupidity there is always much to discuss. Stupidity spills from Trump’s lips like pig manure from a North Carolina industrial farm inundated by hurricane flood waters. 

(Yeah, that happened for real.) 

Probably Trump’s stupidest comment this week came during a contentious meeting with Democratic leaders, regarding funding for the Great Wall of Trump. When Dems made it clear they weren’t interested in spending $5 billion plus on the president’s pet project, Trump said he was willing to keep the government shutdown going “a very long period – months, or even years.” 

You wondered why he didn’t say “eons.”

 

This epic burst of stupidity followed hard on the heels of other impressively stupid comments, as in, Trump saying he would be “proud” to own the shutdown. Then you had Trump tweeting, “The Democrats now own the shutdown.” Then Trump changing his mind like a four-year-old deciding what socks he wants to wear. The president finally kicked the Stupidity Index up a notch, telling reporters he didn’t care what they called the shutdown, Trump Shutdown, the Tooth Fairy Shutdown, he could care less. “It’s just words,” he grumbled. 

He went on to defend his decision to shut down the government by claiming that everyone except drug dealers, gang members and human traffickers wanted him to build the Great Wall of Trump. He told reporters this “should’ve been done by all of the presidents that preceded me.” 

“They all know it,” Trump insisted, “some of them told me.”  

Since “some” is plural and the only living former presidents are Obama, Bush 43, Clinton and Carter, everyone listening to the president figured – with mathematical certainty – that he was lying again. 

(As a former American history teacher, I started wondering if James K. Polk had visited Mr. Trump in a dream.)

 

The Stupidity Index went up several more notches when a CNN reporter asked the president if he still believed Mexico was going to pay for the wall. Trump said Mexico was already paying, because of the great trade deals he has worked out. (Well, then, let’s just open the government back up, if Mexico is paying, and call it a Trump win.) The CNN reporter wondered if he hadn’t failed on the promise to build a “concrete wall.” First, Trump said he never said he was going to build a “concrete wall.” (He did.) Then he rambled on for a full minute about how a wall made of steel slats would be more “beautiful” and, “frankly, stronger.” 

Did you know you can’t see through a “12-inch” thick concrete wall, he asked? (One suspects the reporter did.) 

Another pesky media type asked Mr. Trump if he was at all concerned about the 800,000 federal workers going without pay. What about their financial safety net? Trump claimed that most furloughed workers loved the concept of the Great Wall of Trump. If it was made of concrete (not that it would be) tens of thousands of them would probably visit the border, stick a hand or foot in the wet concrete and use a stick to write their names, or maybe, “Trump is the Best!” 

“The safety net,” for furloughed federal workers, he continued, “is going to be having a strong border because we’re going to be safe.” 

Friday, hundreds of Transportation Safety Administration employees were so happy to hear about this new safety net, and so thrilled to be working without pay, they decided to call in sick. 

 

“We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement.” 

The Stupidity Index shot up again when Trump told reporters watching, and a stunned cabinet, that Russia was right to invade Afghanistan in 1979. “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan,” he explained, “was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there,” he said. 

This was news, for sure, to U.S. military leaders, NATO allies, random Afghans, and even the Russians. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal roasted the president. His remarks, the Journal said, were “absurd” and “reprehensible.” 

“Right to be there?” the editors fumed. “We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement of history by an American President. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with three divisions in December 1979 to prop up a fellow communist government.” Both the Carter and Reagan administrations began supplying weapons to the Afghans in a fight to drive the invaders out. 

Trump’s additional statements, mocking the contribution of NATO allies to our fight after 9/11, proved not only incredibly stupid but grotesque. “They tell me a hundred times, ‘Oh, we sent you soldiers. We sent you soldiers,’” Trump whined. He insisted NATO allies had to kick in more dough. 

Let’s be blunt. Trump was epically stupid when it came to the history of the Russian invasion. 

He was mathematically stupid when he ignored the contribution of NATO partners (130,000 troops sent to Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks). 

He was morally stupid, when it came to current affairs, ignoring the over-arching fact that 16,000 NATO troops were putting their lives on the line, beside our own forces, in Afghanistan, now. 

He was grotesquely stupid when he discounted the sacrifices of NATO troops. Thousands have been wounded or maimed in Afghanistan and 1,141 have lost their lives there since a day, seventeen years ago, when the United States was attacked, and our allies rallied to our defense.

 

In a rambling 95-minute cabinet meeting, the president went on to explain why he no longer needed advice from all the great generals he originally hired, “his generals,” as he once called them. That was before they were convicted of felonies (Flynn), fired (H.R. McMaster), pushed out (Kelly), or resigned in disgust (Mattis). Trump insisted he knew more about the military than anyone else. 

“I think I would have been a good general, but who knows,” he said. 

This is reminiscent of the time the president claimed he’d have been a hero if he had been present when a former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School, killing or wounding 34. “I really believe I’d run in there,” he told an audience, “even if I didn’t have a weapon.” 

(Do we need to point out the fallacy of that comment, considering that both careers – general and hero – would have been halted before they began by Mr. Trump’s crippling bone spurs?)

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I MANAGED TO COVER EVERY DAY OF TRUMP’S FIRST AND ONLY TERM AS PRESIDENT.

IT’S A STORY COMICAL AND DANGEROUS, BY TURNS.

Trump supporters often tell reporters they believe he was hand-picked by God.