(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA) 

In the beginning of the week Trump took a victory lap because the Democrats blinked and ended the government shutdown over DACA almost before it began.  It was clear that they were losing the messaging war, being accused of putting the interests of illegal immigrants before the US military, in spite of the fact that 87% of the population wants the Dreamers to stay in the US and that Mitch McConnell shot down Claire McCaskill’s motion to keep the military paid during the shutdown.  The Democrats had to give up their leverage on the budget but the administration is not out of the woods.  Every day there is no solution for DACA the day comes closer that Dreamers will be deported to uncertain futures in countries they have never known, which will be a disgusting sight that Republicans with a minimal brain and conscience will want to avoid, but that the Freedom Caucus and White House staffers like Stephen Miller appear to be shooting for.  The White House’s latest proposal, a path to citizenship for the Dreamers in exchange for the wall and an end to chain migration and the VISA lottery, has already been rejected by the Democrats, who will remind voters that the DACA problem was created by the president and nobody else.

If Trump, who is unable to look farther ahead than the next episode of ‘Fox and Friends,’ may have felt that he did well with DACA, on the Mueller front not so much.  The news trickled out that Michael Flynn never told anybody that he was interviewed by the FBI in his White House office, and also that Jeff Sessions has recently been interviewed by Mueller.  That information, combined with Mueller’s earlier interviewing James Comey, led many pundits to the conclusion that the Special Counsel is primarily focusing on obstruction of justice, in particular the firing of Comey after Trump asked him to let go of Flynn a day after Flynn had been fired for lying to the FBI.  But it didn’t stop there.  It turned out that Trump called Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI Director after Comey’s firing, into his office to ask him who he had voted for in the presidential election, a totally unacceptable test of loyalty, after which Trump publicly attacked McCabe numerous times, making him, in his own words, a ‘star’ of his speeches.  And then the news broke that Trump had tried to fire Mueller one month after his appointment, but failed to do so because the White House Counsel threatened to resign.

In the meantime Devin Nunes, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was running around with a memo he had written himself that would reveal the existence of a ‘secret society’ in the FBI of anti-Trump conspirators.  Initially nobody was allowed to see the memo, but gradually it became obvious that it is based on lovers’ banter between two FBI employees and also mentions Mueller, Comey and McCabe.  Even Jeff Sessions’s Department of Justice told Nunes to cut the crap.

Before it became known that Trump had already once tried to fire Mueller he declared in a Q&A with reporters that he was looking forward to being interviewed by the Special Counsel.  He would do so under oath, an empty promise because lying to the FBI is a crime whether under oath or not.  The whole offer was soon withdrawn by one of Trump’s lawyers, clearly afraid that Trump would commit perjury.

In the same Q&A, when asked about obstruction of justice, Trump said ‘you fight back, and that’s what they call it.’ That may play well with his base, but not with Mueller, who now knows that Trump tried to fire him, but gained some job security knowing that Trump is less likely to try again.

 
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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

While Trump was playing golf on Martin Luther King Day and even once raked a bunker by way of social service, the White House was preparing a defense for his ‘shithole’ remark.  The story became that Trump didn’t say shithole but ‘shithouse,’ supposedly a real estate term for a building with suspect plumbing, so Trump was just falling back on his earlier life and had no racist intentions whatsoever.  The latter was confirmed by his son Eric, who told Fox News that the only color his father sees is green.  Unfortunately the new lie had not been coordinated with the senators Perdue and Cotton, who last week declared that they had not heard the president say shithole, and who now remembered that they had not heard him say anything that even resembled shithole.  The Homeland Security Secretary did them one better by telling a senate committee that she didn’t know Norwegians are predominantly white, which is surprising for someone with the name Kirstjen Nielsen.  It goes to show how contagious lying is in the era of Trump, who proved to still be the absolute master of the craft by telling reporters that he’s the least racist person they’ll ever interview, a statement that was followed by a painful silence.

After his physical exam Trump’s doctor declared him in excellent health, even though he is an overweight 71 years old man with an LDL of 143 who doesn’t exercise and eats lots of junkfood, but from then on his week went south.  The White House had to effectively impose a gag order on Steve Bannon to keep him from testifying for a House committee, but Bannon made it clear that he would tell Robert Mueller everything he knows.  Obviously Trump has much more to fear from Mueller than from the House, especially since the FBI is following leads out of Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson’s House testimony about how Russian money ended up in the Trump organization and if it involved money laundering.  Another avenue that’s being explored is if Russian money was channeled to the Trump campaign via the NRA, and with all that already in Mueller’s view it doesn’t help that Don Jr., who in the past has talked about all the money Trump was making from transactions with Russians, had meetings with a Russian Mafioso who runs a bank and is close to Putin.  It seems more than likely that Moscow has enough dirt on Trump to blackmail him until his presidency is over, which is clearly the United States’ primary security risk.

In the meantime Trump created complete chaos in Washington.  With a Saturday morning budget deadline looming he has taken just about every possible position on the issues at stake, such as DACA and CHIP, confusing both Republicans and Democrats and making bi-partisan solutions all but impossible.  With Republicans in control of the House, the US Senate and the White House, even Trump cannot expect Democrats to be blamed for a government shutdown, as much as he likes to suggest otherwise.

On his signature item, the wall on the southern border, Trump felt that he had to dress down John Kelly, who had told House members that during the campaign Trump was ‘uninformed’ and that his ideas were still evolving.   In strong public statements Trump emphasized that he still wanted a wall of at least 700 miles, for which Congress would have to provide the funding because it won’t come from Mexico.

As I write this Trump is meeting with Chuck Schumer to see if a shutdown can still be prevented, so that he can leave DC for a $100,000/plate party at Mar-a-Lago.  There he may have to answer his wife’s questions about his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels four months after Melania gave birth to Barron.

 
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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

The thrust of Michael Wolff’s book is that Trump is mentally too unstable and on top of that too dumb for the presidency. Since the book came out Trump has been trying to disprove its central thesis, first by sending the re-incarnation of Roy Cohn, Stephen Miller, to CNN, where he made a complete ass of himself by attacking Jake Tapper, and then by taking things in his own tiny hands. At an impromptu press conference in Camp David Trump called himself ‘like, really smart’ and a ‘stable genius.’ Before this could properly sink in Axios got hold of Trump’s real, not his official schedule, which shows that he spends the mornings watching television and tweeting, with the occasional phone call, and doesn’t get to the Oval Office until 11 am, leaving before 6 pm for more television. So now the story was that Trump is not only dumb and unstable, but also monumentally lazy, and he decided to do something about it. With a partly televised bipartisan meeting in the White House about immigration Trump tried to demonstrate that he is not only hard-working but also on top of things.
Unfortunately for him he succeeded in taking completely contradictory positions within a very short period of time, showing that he had absolutely no clue what was at stake. In the end, to emphasize how much he is in charge, Trump simply said that he would sign anything Congress would put in front of him.

Trump’s next blunder came when Fox News, the only broadcaster he trusts, did a number on him. One of the anchors of ‘Fox and Friends,’ his favorite show, questioned why Trump would sign a renewal of the FISA act, ‘because it was the program that had allowed Obama to spy on Trump during the campaign.’ Those words had the effect on Trump like a red flag on a bull, and within ten minutes he tweeted that FISA should not be renewed. Trump had forgotten, or probably never knew, that last week his administration had put out a statement that FISA should be renewed, and Paul Ryan had to spend half an hour on the phone with him to explain that FISA is about foreign, not domestic surveillance. Trump corrected himself with another tweet that ended with ‘Get smart,’ as if he was talking to himself. Having thus demonstrated that he gets most, if not all of his information from Fox News, Trump returned to the issue of immigration when he met in the Oval Office with a bipartisan group of senators, who had agreed on a comprehensive plan that would contain protections for the DACA population but also for immigrants from Haiti and some African countries. Trump refused to accept the plan and asked why the US should be so hospitable to immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries, instead of promoting immigration from a country like Norway.

The previous day Trump had hosted the Norwegian Prime Minister, but again he demonstrated his complete ignorance about something he was talking about. Norway is the wealthiest country in the world, thanks to oil and natural gas revenues, and most Norwegians probably consider the US a shithole, because of income inequality, the high poverty rate, homelessness, the lack of a safety net and the crumbling infrastructure.

While Trump was digging himself deeper in the manure his former Senior Strategist Steve Bannon lost his job at Breitbart under pressure of its main financiers, the Mercer family. Nobody has fallen harder the last couple of months than Bannon, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person, but although he lost his ‘weapons’ Bannon can still spell trouble for Trump when he testifies for the House Intelligence Committee next week.

Trump’s shithole remark hit particularly hard in Miami, which has a large Haitian community that was promised by Trump during the campaign that he would be their ‘champion.’ Yet it should not have shocked anybody who has followed Trump since he and his KKK father had to settle because they refused to rent apartments to black Americans.

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