Trump

I don’t like writing or thinking about this person. I actively avoid using his name until there is simply no alternative. But since the week of May 22-26, 2017 has shown me that Russia and and the United States House of Representatives have begun the process of formally–though subtly–distancing themselves from the President of the United States,

I am very happy to say that the time has come for me to get this article off my plate.

That being said, I consider Donald Trump to be the least dangerous and most boring player on the 2016-20 election cycle stage. To my mind, he is utterly predictable¹.

Trump is quite comfortable in his mind that there was not, is not, and will not be collusion between himself and Russia. He genuinely believes this and that is what gives him such an improbable plausibility when he says there has been no collusion².

Trump is a classic unwitting asset, but with a twist. He knows he is an asset to the Russians, but he completely fails to understand in what manner or to what extent. He has always been handled in a way to ensure that he believes that his value to the Russians is more like an apolitical, mutually advantageous business partnership where the final goal is mutual monetary profit. And he does believe this even though he is surrounded by, literally swimming in, evidence to the contrary.  He does not in any way believe he is “owned” by the Russians³.

Nor does he believe that his relationship with the Russians poses any threat to the security of the United States⁴.

The thing that has never been reported, as far as I know, and which, I think, accounts for a large part of of the “creating allure by confusion” tactic Trump continuously uses, is that he, more than any other president that I am aware of, simply has nothing to personally gain or lose by remaining in–or leaving–office⁵.

Trump has not–and never has had–the slightest intention of making American great again. He has–as he has since the beginning of his aspiration to the office–every intention of becoming known as the president who made America great again⁶.

This means that whatever he does that does seem to make America great (Again) will have first been bled dry as a promotion of Trump the Maker of a Great America (Again) making America great (again)⁷.

There are several things that are keeping the United States on a more or less even keel as we deal with the sociopolitical malignancy revealed by Trump’s presidency. Some of these occur in support of the United States democracy. Some don’t. So far, the balance of forces has resulted in a level of stability that is much greater than it very easily could have been.

1.  The efforts of the career government employees who hold close the oath they took to preserve and protect the United States Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic⁸

2.  Leaks. They make every rational person a bit nervous as they terrify the nefarious ones. But they have been among the rank and file of the forces moderating the continuing frenetic drive of this administration to make America great again by breakfast tomorrow morning⁹.

3.  The Republican voting majority in the United States Senate and House of Representatives. The behaviors sliming (As in slime oozing from a clogged sewer) out of these chambers is indisputably the single greatest current source of global shame, embarrassment, and sociopolitical danger to the United States.

This is because these chambers are the greatest potential source of adult influence and adult supervision over the affairs of the United States and virtually everyone who has the capability of bringing such adult oversight lacks either the courage, the principles, the integrity, or the personal honor, or any combination of these hallmark characteristics of adulthood, to do anything more than what everyone else in his or her party is doing¹⁰.

The United States Congress are chickens who have–for at least four presidential election cycles that I know of–voluntarily allowed their collected heads to be chopped off so they may function as clones of their leaders. This is the seminal act of congressional cowardice from which–in the years to come–all other legislative acts of cowardice and their associated democratic atrocities will proceed.

4.  The single most influential and final deciding factor in the historical fiasco represented by this circus barker called Trump and his carpetbagger family and friends is the willingness of the American people, particularly the American electorate, to embrace their job in our little experiment in democracy and keep cast their baleful eyes upon those who would assume responsibility for our nation. It is to accept that Americans may have representation, even advocates, in Congress, and good ones at that, but that no American has friends there.

The Federal Government, the Administrative and Legislative branches in particular, and with painfully meager exceptions, are beshat with political detritus masquerading in failing makeup as honorable men and women and with the only thing in their beings that passes for an agenda is the desire to keep their respective positions after the next election tally.

That they should hold such office while being virtually devoid of courage, integrity, honor, or, apparently, even a viable intelligence makes these well-paid government hobos the very definition of, “Gutless Wonders.”

If America is to truly become great again, it will be because there were sufficient people now, and in the next year or three, that stood up and brought their government to heel. Will the Fed be truly and completely brought to heel? Probably not. But I do feel much more confident that the United States government will never again be kidnapped and held hostage, even if only for a little while, to be sent into service as a kind of psychological golem against our allies throughout the world and those in NATO in particular.

I think I can be confident of that.

1. No, I cannot tell you whether he will rant-tweet tomorrow or not. What I know is how susceptible he is to flattery and embarrassment. I know that what most people call a goal is, for him, most akin to a daydream. What is, for normal people, a strategy to achieve a goal is more akin to racing through a house of mirrors. There is no road map. There is only a perceived path that may offer immediate passage for some distance or it may not. If he bumps into an obstacle, he will rely on his reflexes to deal with it. Whatever he does, it will be with the mindset of a grotesquely overconfident pseudo-hero.

   Trump is very much like the “old teens” that we have all seen at one time or another. These are people who have been either unwilling, unable, or both, to simply grow up and deal with life as people of mature, deliberate rationality and have clung instead to adolescent, impulsive rationalization as the manner by which they will navigate their path to success.

   What is so unusual in Trump is that he has been able to retain this emotional state so late in life without withdrawing from the world–apparently even to a small degree–in frustration, fear, embarrassment, failure, or shame. He does not seem to have been in a position–think of digging the proverbial hole–to be forced to grow up. I think there has simply always been enough money to avoid the fundamental realities of adulthood.

   He presidency is an incarnation of the presidency of George W. Bush but without the hesitation and indecision and absent the moderating and controlling influences of parents, or persons like Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. He is everything George W. wished he could have been without Karl Rove. Trump is the complete package. He is a teenage autocrat with the life experience, wisdom, and knowledge of a septuagenarian. His single greatest accomplishment is that he has been able to remain in a state of arrested development so much longer than the typical person whose has embraced arrested development as a way of life.

   He is absolutely not “the one who had the courage to say what no one else had the courage to say.” He is the one who had gaucherie to voice all of the negative feelings that every rational person has experienced at some time or another, but that no rational person would actually say or stand by as a matter of policy because rational people know that such ephemeral feelings are little more than a fickle, foul, excitable gas resulting from some emotional indigestion and have no place in the policy decisions of rational people operating in a matter/energy-based universe subject to positive-displacement time.

   The great and lasting shame of America is that the promotion of these bigoted/narcissistic mental/spiritual bilge liquids found sufficient acceptance among American voters to give a rapidly aging, rapidly weakening man-child who deals almost exclusively in hysteria domain in the White House.

   He will live out his life as a well-financed rebel, comfortable in his mind that he is completely independent and beholden to no one. He last thought will be, “No one ever told me what to do”. He is absolutely, mortally terrified–most likely with valid reason–of the Russians but he believes that he successfully hides his true self and intentions from them and that he will never be found out by them or his fellow American Citizens. This is the nature of the fog with which he surrounds himself so that he can say to himself in his shrouded privacy that he has betrayed no one, especially himself or his family.

   It is this most likely deliberately induced fear of the Russians that makes Trump seem actually more comfortable with the Russians than his fellow citizens and compatriots. It allows him a sense of clarity of purpose without forcing him to confront his betrayals–which is always an attractive alternative to the fogbound and which players of the fogbound understand far more intimately than I do.

   In his own way, he has lived, and is living, the life of Dallas’ J.R. Ewing, an accolade that I can only hope is as dubious to everyone else as it is to me.

2. He can do this card trick because the Trump campaign did not originally reach out to the Russians. The Russians co-opted the campaign at about the same time the Mercer family did. And Trump regarded the entry of both of these players as a windfall for the campaign. Any “collusion” has been rationalized by Trump and company by saying that the Russians/Mercers were going to do these things anyway, so anything Trump and company said to them would be little more than a comment on a course of action over which the campaign had little to no control.

   If I am going to be honest, I have to say the above-mentioned New Yorker article set me back a bit. If you read it with a bent toward seeing forests instead of trees, it seems the Mercers and their agents have followed a strategy eerily similar to the strategy that has so far seemed to have been attributed exclusively to the Russians. There also seems to be a shared hatred of Ms Clinton and a shared interest in manipulating the mindset of voters in a less than straightforward manner. I am not now nearly as certain it was a only a Russian effort to subvert the election. I have to entertain the notion that the lion’s share of the collusion we all sense may actually have more roots in the relationship between the Mercers, et. al., and Russia that it does in Trump’s relationship with Russia.

3. It has become crystal clear, of course, in the last week or so, that nothing could be further from the truth. The issue of collusion and ownership was answered with absolute, complete, and undeniable clarity on May 10, 2017 when the President hosted Russian diplomats in the Oval Office, an event from which he banned the American Press but to which he welcomed the Russian Press.

   I hope the meaning of the photos released by TAS is as clear to others as it is to me: “We can get the President of the United States behind closed doors in the Oval Office whenever we want.” I also hope the photos show others just as clearly that Trump is a “good ol’ boy” understanding very well that he is swimming in waters much over his head and filled with grinning sharks who wait particularly for good ol’ boys who think they can swim in deep water.

   The most interesting thing to me about the photos is how quickly the they appeared to the general public. It seems very much at odds with the image of Putin as the vastly mature, insightful, patient, and deliberate world player. Any photos such as these would be much more powerful and persuasive if they were alluded to but kept invisible. The impact of only one being released would have been much greater because no one would have thought for a moment that there were not others.

   Overall, as far as the effect of these photos is directed at the United States, it seems as though the Russians lit a cigarette with a flame thrower. With the influence the Russians seem to actually have over the future of the United States, it would seem a recklessly arrogant and boastful thing to do and, if it is not recklessly boastful, it would seem to suggest strongly the Russians believe, rightly or wrongly, that they hold much more sway over the future of the United States than the American public are being led to believe.

   But then there is the world stage where the photos may have been intended to demoralize the members of NATO who continue to lean in along Russia’s western regions. Perhaps the Kremlin’s calculations placed more value on an immediate release, particularly if the American media could be reasonably expected to speak at narcissistic length about the impact of the photos on the United States without ever mentioning the possible impact of the photos on NATO–and other–countries presumably still allied with the United States.

   This would be especially poignant almost immediately prior to the G8 Summit, the members of which, as I understand things, are all NATO countries and from which, as I understand things, Russia has been excluded for some years.

   All in all, the appearance of these Russian diplomats in the Oval Office and isolated from the American Press almost immediately prior to the G8 is a brilliantly effective and efficient blow to the moral of all NATO members. And it almost certainly has eroded, at least somewhat, the resolve of at least some of the member nations–for which the question of their NATO membership may have always been an open one–to remain in support of NATO as the American-consecrated Russian Oval Office photo-op has taken to the world stage via the Russian press and by its appearance shocked new life into the old adage, “Better a wise enemy than a stupid friend.”

   At the end of the day, the only thing that could be more astonishing than the event itself would be the willingness among American officials to assume that somehow there was no collusion. And it would seem the simple professionalism of any person responsible for any level of the security of the United States Federal Government would demand the assumption that the security of privileged information within the Oval Office, perhaps, by extension, the entire White House or beyond, has been catastrophically compromised.

   If anything has become clear to me since November 8, 2016, it is the simple necessity to suspend belief, in even the most minute degree, in order to accept what is being said by the Office of the President is more than sufficient reason to sound the alarm far and wide that the United States of America is, intentionally or not, under dire threat.

4. This also could not be further from the truth. The potential threat to the safety and security of the United States and its citizens represented by the general naivete and the political ignorance and innocence of its president while operating without adult American supervision is inestimable.

5. His has no ideologically-driven desire to be in office. He has no interest in preserving the health of the United States. In fact, he seems to be willing to pursue damaging the nation’s health at every opportunity. The only thing he seems to delight in talking about more than how fortunate the United States is to have him is talking about how his whims have been thwarted by his detractors but also by supporters who have failed to support him ardently and faithfully enough.

   He simply has no personal stake in the office he holds. He now has virtually the same number of incomprehensible supporters who would, in all likelihood, actually vote for him if he did actually shoot someone on 5th Avenue. If he left office, he would return to the same life of notoriety as a frenetic, presumed billionaire and with the same idolizing support and with a whole slew of new stories about classified “stuff” for social gatherings and perhaps television.

   He can literally walk away from the job on any day with almost precisely what he had on the day he first entered into the job. He is a Kim Kardashian–or a Marie Antoinette or a Little Lord Fauntleroy–with virtually unlimited power and with the presidency on his mantel as a more or less fabricated trophy among many, many other more or less fabricated trophies. He simply has nothing to lose…of any value to him.

6. This is the reinforcing rod embedded in the foundation motto of his presidency and it is the most influential force driving Trump through the work-a-day business of being the President, as well as the most dangerous and damaging if it is out of alignment with the actual current fiscal, social, political, and international state of the union, which it wildly and most assuredly is.

7. I am really striving for the words that can describe the vacuum of Trump’s self-promotion that is sweeping America clean of honor and spirit as the world watches. I think I must always fail.

8. This is one of the things that I am watching most keenly. As far as I can tell, Trump has directed ordinance to be launched against sovereign nations on at least 1, 2, 3 occasions without a declaration of war issued by Congress. On the world stage, he taking potshots at other countries whenever the spirit moves him, sometimes with appalling results on an appalling scale. And with what should be a completely unsurprising twist. Or like this one. Or this.

   Characterize it in any way you like, but the net result is that whatever it is that is constraining America’s military involvement in world politics from devolving into world war, it is not the Constitution of the United States. Our most sacred political document has been blatantly ignored for decades on the particular point of war.

   Let’s be clear. If one nation acts militarily within the borders of another nation without the permission of the sovereign government of that nation, the first nation’s actions are an act of war upon the second nation, yes? If yes, and if the first nation is the United States, then the United States is engaging in acts of war upon other nations without a declaration of war from Congress as provided for in her Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11). This means the United States is engaging in acts of war capriciously.

   The thing is, there is no safety net, no back-up plan, no fallback strategy, no alternative rule or guide. On the scale of world politics and within this context as well as the context of her own constitution, the United States has been killing thousands upon thousands of people for decades just because she feels like it. Once more, when an entity the size of the United States within a political universe the size of Planet Earth goes off the reservation regarding her own constitution, whatever she does, she is doing because she feels like it. I don’t know about you, but it is impossible for me to see a good ending to this behavior.

   For a nation of laws that presumes to strive and hope for a world made up of nations of laws, anything that is done outside, or in disregard of the law–in particular, her own constitution–is a whim, nothing more. Nothing can be said further without rationalizing what should never be rationalized. I have to wonder just how much atrocity of this nature the American soul and spirit can tolerate before they warp hopelessly out of shape.

9. There is a new tone that has crept into the narrative made up of the steady stream (Some might say torrent) of leaks. Malcolm Nance was the first I heard to say that reports of Russian chortling among themselves about their induction of Trump as an asset are “too clean”, or too good to be true.

   There have been others where the information began too seem implausible simply because it was so abundant and apparently accurate such as the reporting of the conversations that took place among Trump and the Russian ambassadors on that May 10. That the conversations were published apparently casually and faithfully suggest either the greatest carelessness or the greatest deliberation. The idea that we could have been so fortuitously privy to such damaging conversations begins to strain credulity.

   And, once more, it all seems simply too improbable until you once again look at these most recent leaks as perhaps part of a multi-faceted psychological assault on NATO where, I think, the demoralizing effect of parading to the world our compromised president seems to be, in my mind, a fairly plausible explanation for the latest leaks about Trump and Russia.

   Yes, our president is an asset of the Russian government. The American electorate, voting within the purview of our electoral college, put this asset of the Russian government into the Oval Office. We asked for this.

10. Please consider: The legislative branch of the Federal Government is made up of 535 members with salaries and allowances averaging  two to three million dollars per year per legislator, each of which may have as many as 25 staffers (or more?) to help with the monumental workload. And all of these people, infrastructure, and expenses are deemed necessary to support two–count them–two political points of view, also known as party lines, each ordained in the wisdom of its adoptive legislative leaders to be–at one and the same time–the antithesis of the other as well as the irrefutably best possible ideological foundation for the laws and policies that shape the lives of every citizen in the nation.

    In a fucking pig’s eye.

    This is the unabashed–I think deliberate–and unrestrained disdain of the foundation, hell, axiomatic tenant of separation of powers upon which the freedom of every American and, by extension, every person on this earth depends.

    There are nations, cultures, and governments of almost every imaginable kind across our planet. And, among all these various norms and institutions, there is every imaginable nefarious degree of corruption, duplicity, as well as economic, political, social, and military misdeed if not outright atrocity. Nowhere in all of this imperfection is there a greater or more complete and mature example of the abject abandonment of sworn duty and responsibility than what is currently presented by the totality of the United States Congress.

    There has been lots of curious, speculative, and accusatory noise about what is wrong with our United States Congress.

    This general dereliction of oath, duty, responsibility, and personal honor by its members is what is wrong with our United States Congress.