I learned something. Indeed, I think my whole evaluation of a situation has been fairly well upended. Melania Trump has power. Actual power. Donald listens to her and she has the ability in that relationship to put her foot down. And that is probably my own fault. It might have been foolish of me to think she was just a prop in that relationship, but I feel like the information we’d had up until now had really led us all to believe that Melania was a toothless figurehead. Everything, from her cyberbullying initiative, to her all of her “duties” as first lady, have all felt very out of the way. Things to give her to keep her occupied but otherwise out of the process, unlike first ladies of the past who had more active roles in the administration. Then Mira Ricardel was ousted. Mira Ricardel is a diehard Trump loyalist who has been actively helping John Bolton initiate foreign policy to Trump’s satisfaction. Ricardel is exactly the kind of person Trump wants in his camp, and I can imagine he’s not happy about losing her. But Melania didn’t want her around, and went public with that knowledge. For Melania to be able to make that call, and then publicly announce that it WAS her call…Well that is one hell of a power play. I won’t be underestimating her again.
Donald Trump loves and respects our troops. Indeed, come football season, he can’t seem to shut up about them. He’s dripping with respect and admiration, but this weekend, when celebrating the end of World War I, it was somewhat of a confusing bit of news when it was reported that Trump refused to visit a scheduled trip to visit the cemetery of American Troops in Paris. Apparently the light drizzle presented just too much of an obstacle for the President of the United States to be expected to overcome. Speak not of the other world leaders who braved the slightly inclement weather to do the very same thing for their respective countries. Because again, it’s not as if the weather was monsoon like conditions, or even a heavy rain. The weather reporting consistently referred to the weather as “a light drizzle.” It’s good to know that our President will stop at nothing to salute and respect our troops, so long as he suffers not even a slight discomfort!
There was a lot of speculation, even before the Midterms, about the fate of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Russia Investigation. Rumors were abound that one way or the other, with or without a “blue wave” at the ballots, Trump would likely feel the pressure to deal with Mueller’s investigation, and likely with Sessions, as it was no secret that Trump for all intents and purposes saw the guy as a traitor. I mean, how dare he do the only responsible thing and recuse himself from an investigation in which he had a conflict of interest?! To be fair, that moment of responsibility was quite a surprise to most people. But with the House now making it clear that their priorities are to take Trump to task for his malfeasance, Trump moved quickly to start trying to put what ducks in a row he could afford. People were awfully surprised that it only took him a day to can Sessions. Frankly, I’m surprised he waited til the next morning. That’s a level of restraint I didn’t know Trump was capable of.
Donald Trump’s phone habits…well it isn’t new news. His penchant for using non-secure cellphones is well documented. The only weird thing is that halfway through his term, this is still a problem. Despite his claims that this story is a total fabrication, we know it isn’t, because his Twitter rants claiming fake news come from HIS IPHONE. But his flippancy over using unsecure lines is ludicrously irresponsible. Seriously. He doesn’t seem to realize that the conversations he has are of national importance, which is weird considering there has never been a person alive with a more inflated sense of self importance. And considering the scares over hacking that have become all too prevalent in today’s political climate, the idea of vulnerable phones in the Oval Office is just unbelievable. And yet here we are.
So, the midterms have come and gone, and the big story, pretty obviously, was flipping of the House of Representatives. The Democrats now hold the majority, which, if we’re honest, was probably the best we could have hoped for. But honestly, for me, the more entertaining news came the morning after. Donald Trump tends to go a little train-wreck-y during press conferences, which is always fun to watch, but this time…It was something a little more. I don’t know how to place it, because Donald Trump doesn’t have normal, human reactions to things. His temper was short, and the totality of his bluster was just lots of shouting about how things were basically totally fine. He really went to town on Jim Acosta, and then called a black, female, journalist from PBS, by the name of Yamiche Alcindor, a racist for asking about the empowering effect to White Supremacists of Trump referring to himself as a nationalist. He talked about war stances and threatened everyone under the sun who might possibly investigate him. He was pretty clearly having a moment of reflection at the worst possible time, and I think he came to some troubling realizations. Also, no one seems to have told Trump that the House basically has carte blanche to ask for any tax returns they want. So yeah. It’s been an interesting week.
Donald Trump is trying really hard to convince people that his border wall is both paid for, and under construction. Now, if you take any cursory look at the facts, than you’d know that it isn’t true. It’s not a difficult thing to disprove. And yet his base doesn’t seem to care. The Huffington Post recently did an article talking to Trump supporters about their belief in Trump’s lies over the border wall. Most of them either believed him regardless of the evidence, choosing rather to believe that Trump is more reliable than reality, or they just didn’t care. They didn’t care that he was lying about the border wall, because it’s the lie they want to hear, and the lie, I suppose, is better than nothing, I guess? I don’t know. Their responses were baffling. It goes to show that in Donald Trump’s war on Truth, he’s made more headway than we seem ready to admit. And when truth ceases to matter, than we are all in a lot of trouble.
I feel like it used to be that a Presidential interview would be kind of boring. I certainly never really felt the need to pour through Obama’s interviews when he was in office. He tended to be consistent in his thinking. Bush was mostly the same. I never expected an interview with him to reveal any major bombshells. But with Donald Trump, we’re now in the era where an interview with the President is going to be full of bizarre off the cuff remarks, backtracks, wild claims, blatant fabrications, and crazy amounts of mud slinging. We’ve all seen Trump say a lot of crazy things. We’ve all read his remarks, but one of the most puzzling for me to read was in his recent Wall Street Journal interview. In it, Trump says, without any specific context, that he hasn’t implemented any tariffs. Like…ANY tariffs… His actual words are “Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere.” He then went on to say “We don’t even have tariffs. I’m using tariffs to negotiate.” So we don’t have them…but we’re using them to negotiate? And by the way, we do have Tariffs. We have them on all imported aluminum, steel, solar panels, washing machines, and almost half a trillion dollars of imports from China. I mean, is he going senile? Is he lying? Because he’s talked about how great tariffs are like a thousand times! Is this just gaslighting? What is going on?
I would never accuse Donald Trump of being a smart man. He’s petulant, impulsive, lacking in foresight and self awareness, and has the temperament of a toddler. And while I would never accuse him of understanding people on a grand level, he does know how to make people talk about the things he wants them to talk about. Controlling the narrative is a very real skill that Donald Trump possesses. It’s not entirely the media’s fault that they tend to get played by Trump. I mean, the man is the President, what he says is by all accounts the “News”, but the media seems ready and willing to continue running in whatever direction Trump points, and Trump is well aware of that. In what has been a catastrophic week of domestic terrorism that Trump and the GOP can credibly be accused of helping incite, it was in Trump’s best interest to get people to talk about something else in the week running up to the midterm elections, and by openly threatening use Presidential powers to attempt to illegally threaten to quash the 14th amendment and birthright citizenship, he effectively changed the conversation. It’s like the Jedi Mind Trick, except gross and sad.
Trump gave an interview to ABC this week, and you better believe I’m going to latch onto the tiniest fragment of it, because it is the embodiment why he is the absolute worst. “I always try to be truthful,” he said. He expanded very little on this statement, and it is a thing that literally made me shout at my computer screen. Because it’s the ultimate lie. It is the lie at the very essence of Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump is a liar. He lies regularly and blatantly. And it’s important to point out that I’m not just talking about things where he could be credibly accused of being dumb or just not knowing all the facts. Donald Trump isn’t just untruthful. HE LIES. To lie requires an intent to deceive, and he lies are the cornerstone of his presidency. He lied when he said he intended to “Drain the swamp”. We know this because he not only didn’t kick out the people in Washington that he claimed were the problem, he brought more in. The exact same, rich, entitled, classist Wall Street scumbags that he claimed he had no interest in serving. He lies about his intentions, the intentions of his opponents, the consequences of his policies, how the world views him and his actions. And the frustrating thing isn’t even that he does it, it’s that there are still an uncomfortable number of people that still believe him. History will not look kindly back at this point in history. It will be asked how someone like him rose to power, how anyone could have believed his lies, and there won’t be a good answer.
I feel like in the age of the #MeToo movement, one thing you’re kind of forced to become sensitive to, just based on it’s sheer prevalence, is when a victim is being blamed for being victimized. The idea that someone is responsible for their own harassment or assault because they didn’t act the right way, or in general be the right way is infuriating. If someone get’s attacked, the person responsible is the person who attacked them. So when Trump rails against the media, decries CNN as the “enemy of the people”, and continues to do so after his supporter send them a bomb, the idea that CNN is somehow responsible for their own misfortune is blatantly obscene. You don’t have to agree with or even like CNN, but if you can somehow decide that they brought a bomb upon themselves, and it wasn’t in any way the result of Trump being unable to take unfavorable opinions, then you and I don’t have much to talk about, because your moral compass is severely misaligned.
Mind the Exit 