(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

At the beginning of Trump’s week Roy Moore was the problem.  White House representatives could not say that they believed the women accusing Moore of active pedophilia, because they would immediately get the question if the women accusing Trump of sexual assault shouldn’t also be believed.  So a lot of smokescreens were set up, for instance that Moore’s past behavior had been litigated because the voters in Alabama had elected him, and the fact that Trump had not campaigned for Moore was presented as proof of at least passive disapproval.  Only Ivanka Trump issued a statement that could be interpreted as critical of Moore.  But apparently Steve Bannon tried to convince Trump that Moore’s voice is needed to pass a tax bill, ignoring the Republican establishment’s conviction that if Moore is elected he’ll be a ball and chain on the leg of every Republican running for office in 2018, as well as a royal pain in Mitch McConnell’s ass.  In the end Bannon prevailed.  Kellyanne Conway, violating the Hatch Act, in effect declared that a pedophile is better than a Democrat, and Trump emphasized that Moore has denied all allegations.

With regards to the tax bill the attitude of both Republicans in Congress and the White House is that passing something, anything, even a very unpopular bill, is better than not passing one.  So at a time when social and economic inequality is at a longtime high in the US the country faces a redistribution of wealth on behalf of corporations and the richest Americans at the expense of the middle class.  The lopsidedness of the GOP tax plan is only matched by its viciousness.  Citizens of ‘blue’ states are punished for voting Democratic, and for inexplicable reasons graduate students are being targeted by taking away their tuition deduction,  which will force many of them to break off their studies.  After all, who needs doctors and engineers?  One of the selling points of the plan, most forcefully brought forward by Gary Cohn, is that tax cuts for corporations will result in job creation.  Cohn, however, got a cold shower when he asked an audience of CEOs for a raise of hands by those who expected to invest in jobs as a result of the tax cuts and saw only a few.  Even more bizarre is the assumption that the tax cuts will result in an average $4,000 raise for workers.

With all this going on the president somehow found the time to engage in a number of digital altercations via his Twitter account.  Of the NFL he demanded a suspension of football player Marshawn Lynch for kneeling during the national anthem, he blasted LaVar Ball, the father of a college basketball player who had been detained in China, for not showing enough gratitude after his son’s release, and he predicted that Senator Flake, spelled Flake(y), would vote against the tax bill.

Towards the end of the week Trump got bad news concerning his current and his former National Security Advisor.  According to multiple sources McMaster called Trump an ‘idiot’ and a ‘dope,’ echoing Tillerson’s ‘fucking moron,’ and Mike Flynn’s lawyers stopped communicating with Trump’s defense team, a strong indication that Flynn is now collaborating with Mueller.

And then there were the expulsions.  Trump considered it time that 59,000 Haitians, admitted after a devastating earthquake, go back to homes that don’t exist anymore, and the latest rumor is that he wants Ivanka and Jared to quit their White House jobs and move back to New York City.

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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Before Donald Trump went out of town he promised that America’s standing in the world would reach a new height during his trip to Asia, which by the way was the longest ever taken by a US President, as he didn’t stop reminding us.  During Veterans Day weekend he sided with Putin against his own intelligence services, telling the press pool that he believes Putin when he says that Russia didn’t interfere in the American elections and is very hurt by the accusation, rather than believing the ‘political hacks’ that had been appointed by Obama.  When someone alerted him that the CIA, FBI and NSA would also be very hurt Trump walked his original statement back, now saying that Putin believes himself and the US intelligence services believe something else.  It was a good illustration of Trump’s attitude towards the truth.  Subsequently the president called Kim Jong-un ‘short and fat,’ in response to the North Korean leader calling him ‘old,’ but he declared that they could still be friends. When this schoolyard brawl was over Trump walked the biggest red carpets ever seen in Japan, China, South-Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Back in the US the president gave a speech about his trip that was supposed to contain a ‘major announcement.’  As it turned out, the announcement was that Trump had made a lot of friends, and the speech will mostly be remembered for his inability to locate a water bottle. There were no new trade agreements, no promises from either China or Russia to put more pressure on North Korea, and the South Asian countries were left fending for themselves in a region now completely dominated by China. Meanwhile at home Trump’s former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn had landed deeper in the mud when it was revealed that for $15 million he had been willing to kidnap a Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gülen, the number one enemy of president Erdogan, and smuggle him out of the country, increasing the chance that Flynn will start ‘singing’ to Mueller. In 2016 Don Jr. had maintained contacts with Wikileaks, which now came to light, and Jared Kushner had failed to report his contacts about a Russian ‘backdoor channel,’ adding to a long list of events and communications the president’s son-in-law had failed to remember when he filled out the forms to report them.

Desperate to give Trump more to show for than the reversal of an Obama policy that prohibited the import of elephant heads by wild game hunters, something Don Jr. and Eric Trump are dying to do, the House passed a bill containing major tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-rich, pretending that it is a tax cut for the middle class and that the trickle-down effect will produce both salary raises and jobs.  The Senate is still working on its own version of a similar bill.

If a Reconciliation Committee can somehow merge the two bills into one, the US population will be stuck with policies that give millionaires thousands of dollars in tax cuts while people earning up to $75,000 will pay more.  There will immediately be significant cuts in Medicaid and Medicare funding and 13 million Americans will lose their health care, but the Trump family stands to make $1 billion.

And then there is the pedophile and US Senate candidate Roy Moore. Trump has not yet spoken out about Moore, but he has tweeted critically about a picture showing Al Franken pretending to assault a female colleague in 2006.  In doing so the Pussygrabber-in-Chief has reached the pinnacle of hypocrisy.

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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Those who thought that with Trump in Asia for twelve days things would slow down a bit in DC had it wrong.  There was a slew of news that ranged from the bad to the bizarre for the president.  It turned out that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who can easily perform as Yoda at a Star Wars convention and is not the billionaire he claims to be, has not completely divested himself, but is still involved in a company that does regular business with Putin’s son in law.  Before the House Intelligence Committee Carter Page gave a performance that would have qualified as stand-up comedy but for the fact that he was sitting down.  It revealed multiple contacts with Russian dignitaries in 2016 about which he had reported back to the Trump campaign.  Trump’s former bodyman Keith Schiller testified before the same committee that in 2013, when Trump was in Moscow for the Miss Universe Pageant, a Russian associate offered to send five women up to Trump’s room.  Schiller declined the offer but couldn’t tell if Trump had hosted nightly visitors anyway, making the least believable part of the Steele dossier a lot more plausible.

In Virginia and New Jersey Democratic candidates for Governor soundly defeated their GOP opponents, with in Virginia a surprising margin of victory and unexpected success in down ballot races.  It was obvious that these elections had been a referendum on the president’s performance, and that Trumpism had been rejected by a new coalition that brought especially young and female voters to the polls.  The Maine electorate voted for expanding Medicare, and the enrollment in Obamacare that the Trump administration had tried to sabotage by cutting almost all funding for outreach exceeded even the most optimistic expectations.  During the week we were also painfully reminded of Trump’s darkest side:  the president had personally pushed CIA Director Pompeo to investigate the theory that the Democrats had hacked themselves, thus abusing US intelligence resources to absolve the Russians, and there were strong indications that via the Department of Justice Trump was trying to get revenge on CNN for what he perceived as ‘fake news,’ by making CNN’s sale a condition of the merger of AT&T and Time Warner.

Meanwhile in Asia Trump first played golf with the Japanese prime minister, then peddled one of his golf courses in a speech to the South Korean parliament, and finally declared in China that he no longer blames that country for taking advantage of the US, possibly remembering that he himself is taking advantage of China by having his neckties and Ivanka’s pumps produced there.  He now blamed previous US administrations and complimented the Chinese with their smarts.

Back in the US Republicans in Congress with help from the White House produced a tax bill that raises taxes for the working poor and cuts taxes for the non-working stinking rich.  According to Paul Ryan’s convoluted logic passing anything, even a bill that a large majority of Americans rejects, is better than passing nothing, and there will be a high price to pay for that mistake.

The upcoming election for Jeff Sessions’s former senate seat in Alabama became a lot more interesting when the news broke that holy man Roy Moore, the GOP candidate, has a history of pedophile adventures, although this disclosure may go the way of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.

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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

The first Trump associates to land in Mueller’s web were Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos.  Against Manafort the Special Counsel had built a solid money laundering case that could land him in jail for 20 years.  Considering that Manafort  is 70 years old he is looking at what effectively would be a life sentence, so the chance that he’ll start ‘singing’ to Mueller is considerable, especially since an ankle bracelet will keep him from fleeing the country, in spite of his three passports.  It turned out that Papadopoulos had already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was collaborating with the investigation.  According to the White House his role in the campaign had been minimal and only consisted of once proposing a meeting between Trump and Putin, an idea that was rejected by Jeff Sessions, but a consequence of this information becoming available was that Sessions was caught for the fourth time having told a lie while under oath.  Not surprisingly it was obvious that Trump had been lying to the press as well.  As Papadopoulos’s first victim his handler Sam Clovis had to withdraw his candidacy for a position with the US Department of Agriculture.

Apparently Trump was freaking out after the arrests, not in the least because Papadopoulos might have been wired for months and provided Mueller with a trove of incriminating intelligence, and took it out on Jared Kushner, whose advice to fire Comey led to the appointment of the Special Counsel.  The rumors got so bad that Trump had to call the New York Times and tell the reporter on duty that he wasn’t angry with anybody and had never been happier in the White House.  The call was probably suggested by Chief of Staff John Kelly, who had gotten himself in hot water by calling Robert E. Lee an honorable man and declaring that the Civil War was caused by an inability on both sides to compromise.   After his attack on Congresswoman Wilson, for which he never apologized, this was the second exercise in racism by Kelly, and it created the impression that he and the president have more in common than anybody suspected.   In the meantime Trump continued to campaign against Hillary Clinton by accusing her of collusion with the Russians, a bizarre allegation considering that the Kremlin did everything it could to make her lose the election.

The terrorist attack in New York City gave Trump a chance to show the world his darkest and most ignorant side.  He immediately started tweeting that the suspect should be incarcerated at Gitmo, which is not allowed because he is already on American soil, and demanded the death penalty, creating a tainted jury pool that will make the prosecution much more difficult.  In his infinite wisdom Trump called the American criminal justice system a ‘joke’ and ‘a laughing stock.’

The revelation in Donna Brazile’s new book that the Democratic National Committee was deeply in Hillary Clinton’s pocket during the primaries and severely disadvantaged Bernie Sanders gave Trump new ammunition to demand an investigation of his former opponent, although it is pretty obvious that, however immoral the DNC may have operated, no crimes have been committed.

In an attempt to have at least one achievement in his first year in office Trump is pushing Republicans in Congress hard to pass a ‘tax reform’ package that amounts to a large give-away to US corporations.  If they fail, he could become the least accomplished US President ever.

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