One Busy Week

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
In the early nineteenth century Frank Gilbreth developed the Therbligs, an alphabet of human motions, with which he could visualize every operation that needed to be performed in industrial workplaces and train a workforce that at the time was mostly illiterate and didn’t speak English.  Something similar is going on with Trump.  His advisors have to visualize all the information they want to convey to him, because the president is too lazy to read.  In July Trump’s military advisors produced a slide that showed the decline in the number of US nuclear warheads since the height of the cold war.   When Trump saw the slide in a situation room meeting he was very upset, and told the attendees that he wanted to have at least ten times as many nuclear bombs at his disposal as he had now.  It had to be explained to him that the reductions were the result of treaties the US had entered into over time, and that carpet-bombing North Korea with nukes was not really an option.  For full disclosure Trump was also told that the world can be destroyed only once.  After the president left the meeting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson famously called him a fucking moron, for those still in the room to hear.

The news of Trump’s total lack of understanding of the size and the use of the nuclear arsenal broke just before a week in which the question whether he is too crazy for his job was frequently asked.  Senator Corker said in an interview that Defense Secretary Mattis, Chief of Staff Kelly and Tillerson kept the US from descending into chaos by engaging in a daily struggle to contain the president, and that if it wasn’t for them Trump could easily start WWIII.  When the president subsequently disparaged Corker with a series of tweets the senator was prepared, and responded how sad it is that the White House has become an adult day care center ‘where somebody has missed their shift.’ To create a distraction Trump sent his lapdog Pence to a football game in Indianapolis with the assignment to leave if only one player would not stand for the national anthem, something that was certain to happen.  Pence left the stadium within five minutes, at a $1 million cost to the US taxpayers.  Somewhat surprisingly Steve Bannon entered the conversation, stating that Trump had only a 30% chance to finish his first term because cabinet members might invoke the 25th amendment.

If it was Bannon’s intention to get Trump back to the level of insanity he had reached before Kelly kicked the Chief Strategist out of the White House he was successful.  Trump declared that Puerto Rico was already a mess before hurricane Maria hit, that financial aid would be provided in the form of loans, not grants, and that FEMA and the military could not stay on the island forever.  Images of Puerto Ricans clearing their own roads were deliberately cut out of a  propaganda video, with FEMA taking credit for the clean-up.

Now on a roll, Trump, who had apparently forgotten that he took an oath to defend the Constitution, including the first amendment, called the production of ‘fake news’ by the media ‘disgusting’ and said that ‘somebody’ should look into it and that licenses possibly should be revoked.  Unsurprisingly the president did not know that only stations, not broadcasting corporations, are licensed.

Capping off a busy week, today Trump signed an executive order further undermining Obamacare by eliminating subsidies that guarantee affordable premiums, making healthcare unreachable for at least one million low income Americans, and decertified the Iran deal while Iran is in compliance, turning the US into an unreliable international outcast and passing that problem on to congress.

 
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