(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

It is becoming inevitable to ask yourself every week of Donald Trump’s presidency what the craziest thing is he has done that week, and almost always there are multiple options.  This week Trump produced two lies that are so blatant that according to CNN’s Chris Cillizza he now permanently lives in an alternate universe.  After Mitch McConnell decided not to bring the Graham/Cassidy health care bill up for a vote in the senate, because at least three GOP senators had announced that they were going to vote against, Trump declared at an impromptu Q&A with the press that the votes were there, but that the senate had not been able to vote because one senator was in the hospital.  He announced that a vote would take place at a later time, in January or February, and the only possible explanation for the president’s optimism is that he believes that by that time John McCain will have died and a newly appointed senator from Arizona will turn out to be a yes-vote.  The senator who was supposed to be in the hospital, Cochran, tweeted that he was at home, getting better from a urinary tract infection and going out for a walk.

Trump’s support for the meanest healthcare bill that so far has been produced, about which even Lindsey Graham said that he had no clue what he was doing, was a reminder that he has completely forgotten that he had promised cheaper and better healthcare for all US citizens.  Trump echoed that promise in the announcement of his tax plan, of which he said it was a ‘middle class miracle,’ in spite of the fact that all analyses show that the richest one percent of Americans would benefit disproportionally from the proposed tax cuts, while the lowest tax bracket would go up from ten to twelve percent and very little would change for people with middle incomes, unless they live in states with relatively high state and local taxes like New York and California, in which case their taxes would go up significantly.  Trump emphasized that he would not benefit from the plan, followed by ‘believe me,’ his standard expression when even he knows that he’s lying.  Abolishing the alternative minimum tax could yield him about $1.5 billion, while his children would pocket $4 billion due to the abolishment of the estate tax.

In other areas Trump didn’t fare too well either.  The candidate he supported in the GOP primary for a senate seat in Alabama lost to Roy Moore, who was once removed and once suspended as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of his state for respectively refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments and unconstitutionally enforcing a same-sex marriage ban.  Moore is crazy as a bed bug and may create serious problems for McConnell if he ends up in the senate.

And while Trump was quarreling with the NFL at the beginning of the week over players alledgedly showing disrespect for the American flag and national anthem, American citizens on Puerto Rico were suffering in the aftermath of hurricane Maria.  Congressman John Lewis characterized the federal government’s response as ‘anemic,’ but Trump called it ‘great,’ ‘amazing’ and ‘tremendous.’

Following Trump’s example the acting Secretary of Homeland Security in his administration called Puerto Rico a ‘good news story,’ while the Mayor of San Juan called it a ‘people are dying here’ story.  On Tuesday Trump is going to look for himself, after a weekend of golf, and by that time it will unfortunately be clear that the Mayor was right.

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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Mr. Trump came back to town and addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations.  His speech had all the gloomy hallmarks of a Stephen Miller production, although apparently Steve Bannon also contributed a few sentences from a distance.  Miller, who is existentially hostile to everything good and respectable, is the White House favorite of the Alt Right, and he could be the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, one of Trump’s mentors, were it not for the fact that he was born a year before Cohn died.  Highlight of the speech was the threat to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea, which caused a significant amount of gasping in the assembly, not in the least because it was a deeply offensive insult to a body that was created to keep the peace among nations.  And after her husband embarrassed himself for the whole world to see and hear Melania almost did him one better in a smaller and less public setting, by talking about her campaign against bullying and pleading for better protecting children against violence on the Internet, three days after the president re-tweeted a video that showed him knocking down Hillary Clinton with a golf shot.

In the meantime Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation is picking up speed.  He requested all documents from the White House that are related to FBI Director Comey’s firing, an indication that he’s looking for proof of obstruction of justice by Trump, while simultaneously increasing the pressure on Paul Manafort, who has already been informed by Mueller’s agents that he will be indicted.  In the context of collusion by the Trump campaign with the Kremlin the question is becoming more prominent why Manafort, who is well connected with Russian oligarchs close to Putin, temporarily assumed the leadership of the campaign at a crucial point in time.  Apparently Manafort, who was not getting paid by Trump but is always trying to make a buck, tried to peddle information about the campaign to at least one oligarch, but that cannot have been the only motive for the role he played, and Mueller might want to know if maybe other sponsors rewarded him for his efforts to guide Trump to victory.  The investigation appears to already have uncovered sufficient fraudulent behavior by Manafort to put pressure on him to start ‘singing.’

While Kim Jong-un and Mueller keep Trump awake at night, in Washington the GOP is making one last effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.  The Graham/Cassidy bill is meaner than all previous attempts, and prominent Republicans as well as Donald Trump are lying about it more blatantly than ever before, in particular when they deny the fact that coverage for pre-existing conditions would no longer be guaranteed.  The bill, however, was already on life support, and it is now on its deathbed.

Senate Leader Mitch McConnell can only afford to lose two votes, and Rand Paul and Susan Collins were all but guaranteed to vote against the bill, but this afternoon John McCain, who torpedoed the previous attempt, also declared that he cannot vote for the bill, in spite of his friendship with Graham.  It makes ongoing attempts to bribe Lisa Murkowski with a special arrangement for Alaska futile.

If it wasn’t for the suffering and pain it would cause you would almost want the bill to pass, because Republicans would pay a very high price for its implementation, but eventually this is a desk-murderer’s design that didn’t deserve to see the light of day, let alone become the law of the land.

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

As Major League Baseball is gearing up for the post-season, Donald Trump is throwing screwballs both at Republicans and at Democrats, so that nobody knows which team he’s on anymore.  Initially Trump benefitted from hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which gave him a chance to temporarily almost normalize his presidency by doing the usual compassionate things, such as touring the disaster areas, meeting with victims and handing out food supplies.  Unfortunately for him his vocal cords don’t have a register for empathy, so that every speech sounds like a political attack on someone, and on one occasion Trump – in the company of Senator Rubio – took off the plastic gloves he was wearing because they were ‘too small for his hands,’ but all in all he looked more or less presidential in his windbreaker, with Melania on his side and Pence always one step behind him.  Then, apparently inspired by his new role as national healer and aware that a large majority of the electorate wants Washington to find a solution that would keep the ‘Dreamers’ in the US, Trump took the next step and invited ‘Chuck and Nancy’ for dinner.

Over Peking Duck the president made the deal that he would push for a solution for the DACA population, in exchange for increased border security but without demanding that the Democrats support funding for ‘The Wall.’  When Chuck and Nancy made the agreement public Trump initially got scared from critical reactions on the ultra-right side of US politics, where it was seen as a fundamental betrayal of his campaign promises, and denied that he had agreed to anything, but eventually he conceded that the Dreamers would be allowed to stay in the US and that ‘the wall would come later.’ It earned him the nickname ‘Amnesty Don’ on Breitbart and Ann Coulter’s call for his impeachment, while his ‘wing man,’ Steve Bannon, remained remarkably silent. Trump’s erratic moves of the last two weeks suggest that nothing drives him more than the need for public acclaim, and as New York Times reporter Nick Confessore observed, raise the question whether ‘Trumpism’ is a political program or a personality cult.  NBC’s Katy Tur disclosed in a new book that most Trump supporters ‘trust his judgment,’ even when he betrays them, which would suggest the latter, even though some of them now burn their MAGA hats.

But while Trump basks in the glow of bi-partisanship the Mueller investigation keeps feeding his dark side.  A slew of campaign documents have been requested from the White House, while six staffers are lawyering up because Mueller wants to interview them.  The never ending stream of leaks contained the information that Trump’s personal lawyers had advised him to remove Jared Kushner from his staff because he made him too vulnerable, an advice he obviously ignored.

From the same sources came the news that in May Trump had publicly called Jeff Sessions an ‘idiot,’ because he had recused himself from the Mueller investigation, and demanded his resignation, which ultimately he only didn’t accept because Bannon and Reince Priebus feared that it would be seen as yet another attempt at obstruction of justice, after the firing of James Comey.

In his ’60 Minutes’ interview Bannon called Comey’s firing the biggest mistake in modern political history, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders is doubling down on it by demanding that Comey be investigated for leaking, which can easily be seen as witness intimidation by the White House.

 
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(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

This week Donald Trump performed the mother of all flip-flops.  On Monday he was still operating on the right wing of the GOP, and today nobody knows exactly where his political point of gravity is, but he definitely seems to be chummier with ‘Chuck and Nancy’ than with Mitch and Paul.  The week started with the usual illogical rhetoric and empty threats.  At a time when South Korea is the prime target of North Korea’s nuclear adventurism Trump threatened the country with a trade war, and subsequently he declared that the US would stop trading with all countries that also do business with North Korea.  The latter message appeared to be primarily targeted at China, where Trump produces his oversized neckties and Ivanka her plagiarized shoes, so for that reason alone it was not to be believed and childish, even apart from the fact that the US economy would suffer immensely if Trump would try to follow through.  Having thus created enough confusion for a whole week in one day Trump had a photo-op in Texas, where he put a box in a pickup truck to show solidarity with Harvey’s victims.

DACA was up next.  Trump sent out Jeff Sessions to announce the end of the program, with a six months window for Congress to find a solution for the undocumented young Americans who would be deported to countries where they have never lived.  Apparently alarmed by the almost universal disapproval of his decision Trump tweeted that if Congress could not come up with a solution he would revisit the issue, thus signaling that he had produced another empty threat, albeit one that threw 800,000 lives in disarray.  By that time Trump probably already had some doubts about the GOP agenda, so when he met with Chuck, Nancy, Mitch and Paul to discuss the debt ceiling, funding the government and hurricane relief money the self-proclaimed master deal-maker immediately accepted a proposal from the Democrats for a temporary, three months solution, setting up a brutal year-end fiscal cliff.  The president not only shocked Mitch and Paul, but also his Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who was in the middle of a sentence criticizing Chuck and Nancy’s proposal when Trump overruled him.

Many explanations for Trump’s unexpected ‘deal’ with Chuck and Nancy are circulating.  One is that he wanted to spite Mitch and Paul, who haven’t given him any ‘wins’ yet, another that he didn’t want a fight over budget issues that could derail his plan to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, and a third that he realizes closing down the government in the context of such a fight is not an option at a time when hurricane relief is an absolute priority.  It’s also possible that he’s just lazy.

Certain is that Trump was delighted with the positive coverage the deal received, but his happiness was short lived.  Interrogated by staffers of the Senate Judiciary Committee Don Trump Jr. yesterday tried to lie his way out of the accusation of collusion with the Russians, as he came up with a fifth explanation for the meeting that took place in Trump Tower on June 9^th, 2016.

Incriminating himself, Jr. said that he took the meeting, after a promise that he would receive ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton that he should summarily have reported to the FBI, to assess her ‘fitness’ for the presidency.  Unless his father pardons him he’s looking at five years in a federal penitentiary.

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