The San Diego Comic Convention has come and gone, and all the new movie and tv previews are hitting the internet. And I felt like when I was watching the previews for shows like the Walking Dead and Titans…that fiction was feeling less strange than reality. Honestly, if it turned out that there actually ARE Lizard People are running the government and that Donald Trump was one, or that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have been turning Congress into an undead, zombie horde, echo chamber of yes men, that would be less surprising than ANYTHING I saw in the Aquaman trailer. If 5 years ago, I pitched the actual events of the Trump presidency to AMC as their new Breaking Bad, I’d be a wealthy man right now.
Oh Donald. Donald, Donald, Donald! It is truly a bold move to come out and suggest that the Russians would be meddling in our midterms, but they would be interfering on behalf of the Democrats. I mean, honestly, it’s hilariously stupid, and I have to imagine that even your base will have to do some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to follow you on that logic, but I know they’ll get there. They manage to follow you no matter where you go. But this one has the sort of Donald Trump flair that we’ve come to know and hate. It’s truly a “You” move. Suggesting that Russia for some reason wants you and yours out of the picture is delightfully stupid. Putin has said, very vocally, only days ago, how happy he is to have you doing what you’re doing. You say you’re the toughest President on Russia, but the reality is you watch the government around you be tough on Russia, and complain that they’re destroying your budding relationship with a monster. But keep trying to make your sell. I mean, it’s actually even kind of devious on your part. If, by some magical miracle, the Dems have their blue wave, and knock it out of the park during midterms, you’ve started early in building your conspiracy!
Trump is angrily calling out yet another fascist regime with Nuclear capabilities and threatening them with hellfire. This week it was an angry all caps tweet telling Iran not threaten the US or else! One wonders if that’s part of his plan when dealing in these situations. I mean, this fire and brimstone approach was how he started with North Korea, and look how that turned out! And by that, I mean how Trump wants you to think it turned out, because he wants you to think it was an unqualified victory as opposed to the total mess that more accurately reflects reality. Who knows, with any luck, 6 months from now, Trump will be calling Rouhani a total sweetheart and assuring us all that their increase in weapons production does not mean he screwed up negotiations!
I admittedly don’t know much about French President Emmanuel Macron, but he pulled a great line on Trump and even if It turns out he kicks babies for fun, I’ll still find myself having a bit of admiration for the guy. You see, by all accounts, while Trump was asking Macron to help convince the EU to the trading table as opposed to retaliatory tariffs against the US, Macron validated those actions by regurgitating the Art of the Deal back at Trump, which…I mean it’s the classiest, most elegant burn I could ever imagine. I don’t know that I could have ever thought to do that, and I have to wonder how Trump responded to that. Because I honestly don’t know how that confrontation ended, which is the real tragedy.
The frustrating thing about Donald Trump’s base at this point is that there is literally nothing he can do or say that they won’t either try to explain away or rationalize about why it’s not so bad. Trump’s base is now pro-Putin, where even 3 years ago, such an idea would have been disgusting to them. Trump gets to be racist, screw over our farmers and factories, roll back regulations to protect the environment and people, and any negative reaction to that gets relegated to liberals overreacting or misunderstanding the issue and fake news. The deep level of entrenchment is worrying and makes you wonder how they found themselves there. How much of it is out of spite? Are those of us who wholesale condemned those who voted for Trump in the first place responsible for this behavior? Even in part? I don’t know the answer, but it certainly makes me think about what it takes to put someone in that place. Could it happen on the opposite side of the spectrum somewhere down the line?
So I’ve been really trying to process how Trump plays to this Russia backlash. Obviously it’s a big deal when even some of his most ardent supporters are really turned off by his rhetoric. And publicly siding with Russia regarding the election meddling was kind of a shocker. GOP stalwarts were essentially calling his behavior treasonous. It was bad. So when he walked back his statements the next day only by suggesting that when he said “would” instead of “wouldn’t” when saying he didn’t know why it would be Russia who interfered, it was a total slip of the tongue…well I expected such a blatant lie not to work as well as it did. I mean it wasn’t just one switch up of “would” and “wouldn’t”. He went on several diatribes on Monday, both in his initial statement, in his Hannity Interview and his Tucker Carlson interview, shoring up the position that he didn’t have faith in his intelligence community, that he thinks Putin is great, and that Putin’s word holds more water. The idea that he could simply claim this was a slip of the tongue issue is a lie, for no other reason than that it literally contradicts 24 hours of statements to the contrary. Yet, GOP congressmen, apologist pundits, and generally everyone who had this moment of clarity regarding who Trump is, immediately seemed to say “That makes sense” and went back to calling the liberals a bunch of liars distorting the truth. And the world around us all collectively sighed…
Trump isn’t feeling the love in England right now. In fact, according to him, he downright feels unwelcome there. Who would have figured that? But as it turns out, even Trump can take a hint if you throw enough protestors and a literal blimp of him as a giant whining baby at him. Overall, it was a pretty rough weekend for Trump, with the hacker indictments directly mentioning him as inciting the DNC hack, dog whistling White Supremacists across Europe, and just tons of uncomfortable encounters with leadership, and I expect he was planning of things slowing down once he arrived at his resort in Scotland. After all, the people of Scotland totally love Trump, right?
Two days before his summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump declared that the mainstream media would fake news the heck out of his meeting. He assured everyone that he would not be treated fairly. It was a good thing you could get the real, fair and balanced word on the situation from Fox News. If you wanted the real inside dope on Helsinki, Fox News wouldn’t steer you wrong. So what did Fox News have to say regarding Trump’s meeting? Abby Huntsman, one of the hosts of Fox and Friends, Trump’s favorite show, said that he was “throwing his own people under the bus”. Brian Kilmeade, another host of the show said his rhetoric was “ridiculous”. In fact, all across the network, Fox News was breaking ranks to voice their dissent, that is until you get to Prime Time editorial shows. Sean Hannity was sure to try and spin this the best way he could, by bringing Trump on to clarify the things he said, but even Hannity could hide his obvious discomfort at some of the things Trump was saying that night. Trump may have tried to backtrack on his positions the next day, but you can’t stuff that monster back in it’s box.
So Donald Trump thinks he’s the best thing since the Beatles, but everyone knows this. It’s basically his slogan to the world. He’s the best, he’s a genius, a man among men and every woman’s dream. And he wants everyone else to share in on that enthusiasm he has for himself. In an interview he gave during his time in the UK, Trump proclaimed himself the most popular Republican of all time, more popular than even Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself. Now there are a few things wrong in that statement, which should make you feel better if find yourself screaming in anger at your computer screen. First off, no one knows what he’s basing that statement on. There was a recent poll that suggested that among about 88% Republicans, he’s pretty popular right now. But that certainly doesn’t make him the most popular Republican in history. In fact, most Republican presidents since the age of polling began have been as popular and more during their time. Secondly, and this is a big one, Abraham Lincoln didn’t live in an era of polling. We have no numbers at all to indicate what the consensus of him was during his time, and I can assure you, during our time? He’s basically considered a superhero. There is an actual blockbuster film centered on the premise of Lincoln being a superhero monster hunter. The fact is, I feel fairly confident that there is only one group of people in Trump’s “base” that would consider him more popular than Lincoln, and I have to wonder, is that where he’s getting his information?
Mind the Exit 