Did it surprise anyone to find out that Trump’s resorts hired undocumented immigrants? The man is a notorious corner cutter who doesn’t like to pay people a fair wage. Of course he was going to have undocumented workers! But the beauty of the situation, of course, blossoms out far past just errant employment. Indeed, the best part of the story was some of the stories of the women who have come forward to blow the whistle on it. Because you know people on Trump’s side would want to make the case that he was unaware and appalled, but that becomes harder to validate when you find out how close he literally was to the situation. One of them recounted cleaning his room and doing his laundry, including (the poor woman) having to iron his boxer shorts. The woman who told this story spoke no English and performed tasks directly for Trump. More so, she also claimed the management helped to obtain fraudulent documents to help avoid detection. So the big take away is that illegal immigrants are the blight of the nation, unless they’re ironing Donald Trump’s boxer shorts.
Do you remember when “only the best and brightest” were going to be working at Donald Trump’s side as President? I know a lot of us kind of took that as a bad joke at first, but now a days, it’s like an ironic catchphrase we use as the executive branch implodes on itself. And now with John Kelly very publicly departing as Trump comes under more and more scrutiny, it seems like Trump is having a hard time even presenting the image of having a wealth of qualified candidates chomping at the bit to fill the seat. What’s worse, his number one pick, and indeed the guy who was offered the job, Nick Ayers (currently Mike Pence’s chief-of-staff) basically said “thanks but no thanks!” and is himself getting ready to depart the White House as the walls come tumbling down. Whoever Trump ends up choosing, they’re going to have to live under the stigma of knowing full well they weren’t his first choice. And I imagine that alone might keep a few people from taking the job. Whoever ends up in that position will likely have to deal with mounting legal threats and reputational woes that transcend their time in the White House, so I really have to wonder who is desperate enough to actually say yes.
A few things I need to get out of the way. CNN isn’t fake news. But for that matter, Fox News isn’t either. Don’t get me wrong. Fox News is heavily slanted, and some of it’s “journalists” (Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham, etc.) manipulate facts and data to support unrealistic conclusions, but it’s not “fake” news. Both networks have actual journalists, and (usually) report on the important stories of the day. But both networks have their slant. Fox News’ is arguably steeper, going extremely conservative, while CNN can boast a bit more balance, and is better about retracting false or misleading stories. But they both DO report the actual news (mostly). So how are they capable of covering the exact same story and drawing the exact opposite conclusion? It’s ludicrous and can be totally infuriating. I like to think that I’m a moderate that leans left. It’s an admittedly pretty dramatic lean, but I don’t think my political views don’t stray too far away from the center. And as such I want to find as many perspectives on the news as I can find. But when I hear CNN and Fox News explain to me the exact same story with drastically different outcomes, I realize why it’s so easy for Trump to lie about the media and get away with it.
Remember when Trump railed on people for invoking the 5th Amendment right against self incrimination when it had to do with Hillary Clinton? It was a maneuver that only criminals and mob members did? Why invoke it if you have nothing to hide? Right Donald? So of course he sticks to his guns when that pendulum of self preservation swings back his way!
Of course not!
When Roger Stone plead the 5th in regards to the investigation into Trump’s potential collusion with a hostile foreign power, you can bet your but that not only was he in favor of the 5th Amendment, but he went on Twitter to declare the man a national hero!
Donald Trump’s attitude towards Kim Jong Un is starting to get remarkably unsettling. It was unusual when he defended the behavior and overall personality of Kim. It was gross to hear him say that they “fell in love”, and it’s downright disturbing that he’s passing notes through the South Korean president with a message that says he’s ready to “fulfil his wishes”. That’s…a weird thing to say to anyone, much less a hostile foreign power. I mean, what’s next between those two? How much weirder will it get when they meet again? It get’s more worrying still when you consider that Kim isn’t fulfilling any of his promises. He’s still moving forward with his nuclear programs, still firing off test missiles. So what exactly is the win here? That Trump has a new boy crush? It feels like everyone is losing out here…
The G20 summit happened over the weekend, the international economic convention between member nations, and if you asked Donald Trump, he was the shining master of amazing, all closing deals, kickin’ butt and taking names. In fact, for those that did ask Donald Trump, that’s basically exactly as he characterized it. What that mostly means for the rest of us, is that Trump didn’t royally screw anything up, avoided any major snafus (I mean, you still had fun little moments like him saying “Get me out of here!” to an aid over a hot mic, after shaking hands with the leader of Argentina), and was treated like the annoying kid that all the other kids humored so they wouldn’t get yelled at by their parents. That’s not to say Trump didn’t get anything done. He apparently got the new NAFTA deal signed, and pretended to reach ceasefire in our trade war with China, but make no mistake. These aren’t great victories, especially the landmark, remembered for all time kind of wins that Trump is claiming they are. They are steps toward backtracking some of the biggest mistakes Trump made out of the gate. And honestly, I would be far more impressed with his performance at the G20 if he would’ve been able to admit that his victories are only victories insofar as he was cleaning up problems that he made in the first place. Regardless, one thing is for certain, Donald Trump isn’t the admired cool kid of the world stage that he pretends to be, and we all know it.
The last week has felt like we’re finally starting to see what momentum in this long, contentious Russian Investigation really looks like. Within 2 days, 4 Trump cronies (Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen) have been called out by Mueller for lying to investigators and/or Congress. Of those 4 cronies, 3 of them have joint defense agreements with Trump, meaning their lawyers are being given slight latitude in communicating with each other. Now, in the days following Trump’s submission of written answers to Mueller’s questions regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election (though apparently questions regarding obstruction of justice were not allowed), Mueller seems have his ducks in a row, and is finally starting to make moves. And now we see if Mueller is really playing chess against a bunch of checkers players.
So, Donald Trump is once again threatening to go to war with the Democrats should they seek to investigate him come January, which is for 1: Super shady (I mean, how guilty does someone look when you threaten retaliation for just looking around and asking questions), and for 2: Weird. I say weird because he’s threatening to declassify damaging information about the Dems, but if he has such damaging information, why wouldn’t he just go ahead and declassify it? I mean, he takes every opportunity to call the Dems criminals and monsters who want to destroy the country, if he had actual evidence to support that allegation or just something to make them look as bad as he wants them to look, I’d think he’d jump at the opportunity to make it public. There isn’t a person alive who could convince me that he’s just being discreet, or that Trump weighs broader implications of such an action, because of COURSE HE DOESN’T. He keeps trying to find ways to accuse his political rivals of treason! Trump doesn’t want balance, he wants an uncontested narrative. So yeah, not convinced he has some bombshell documents that will dismantle the Democrats. The fact that Democrats don’t seem even remotely unsettled, unlike Trump, who seems near constantly unsettled, also speaks to that hypothesis.
Conservatives like to talk about all the things they’re at war with. They’re warring over Christmas because they don’t like people saying Happy Holidays to cater to every denomination that has a holiday around the Winter Solstice. They’re warring over rainbows, because it’s just so dang unfair that the gays somehow stole it (even though there is no reason whatsoever that anyone for any reason can’t utilize rainbows as a design for any reason they want). And yet they don’t make a peep over an actual ideological war that Americans every day have to deal with: The War on Truth. I mean, I imagine that it’s largely because Conservatives are the ones benefitting from it. I mean, the “War on Christmas” and the “War for Rainbows” is largely a symptom of the War on Truth. Nailing the cause is a bit more difficult, but I’m willing to bet a good place to start is this idea of “feelings over facts”. Intellectualism and Data being proudly dismissed in favor of what feels better. It doesn’t “feel” great to think that our evolving civilization will end up being responsible for it’s own extinction because of the way we’ve altered the earth’s climate. But it’s the truth. It doesn’t “feel” great that the wealthy, white men have created a culture that disadvantages anyone who isn’t exactly all 3 of those things. But again, it’s true. And the thing is, the people who prefer to trust their feelings (those undefinable, but always correct gut instincts) over provable, observable logic, are proud of that stance. They are proud to dismiss what is true in favor of what is comfortable. And let me tell you, that doesn’t make America great. It makes us fools. When our President can proudly declare “I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,” then we have a real problem. I don’t know if that is the root of the problem, but it’s somewhere close.
Mind the Exit 