The Pinnacle of Hypocrisy
(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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