Reality Show
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Apparently right after his inauguration Donald Trump told staffers that they should consider his presidency a reality show with a new episode every day, and it looks like he meant it. He started the week with robocalls on behalf of racist and child molester Roy Moore, and on election day issued a statement that voters in Alabama would do the right thing and elect Moore to the senate. After Moore lost Trump claimed nevertheless that he had been right, because in the primary he had supported another candidate than Moore, sitting senator Strange, and he tried to bury the fact that after the primary he had thrown his full weight behind Moore. With regards to the child molestation charges against Moore the White House had the peculiar position that the Alabama voters should decide about their validity, just like the 2016 election had decided about the sexual assault accusations against Trump. Unfortunately for Trump, in the current #MeToo climate he cannot get away with that. Megyn Kelly interviewed some of his accusers on national television and one hundred Democratic congressmen demanded an investigation. Six senators asked him to resign.
Trump decided to attack one of those senators, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, with a tweet in which he suggested that she had been willing to give him a blow-job in exchange for a campaign contribution. Elizabeth Warren called it ‘slut-shaming,’ and it not only reinforced the president’s reputation as a sexist and a misogynist, but also propelled Gillibrand to the frontrunner’s position for the Democratic nomination in 2020. And she was not the only one who incurred Trump’s wrath. With Robert Mueller focusing on the first eighteen days of his administration and getting closer and closer to the Oval Office Trump decided to join the Fox News/Freedom Caucus chorus calling for an investigation of Mueller and the FBI, stating that the reputation of the FBI has never been worse than at this point in time. Meanwhile Trump continued his bizarre public disagreement with Rex Tillerson, who said that the US would be willing to engage in talks without preconditions with North Korea while the White House declared that talks would be pointless unless North Korea changes its course. Tillerson is expected to step down soon.
While he was feuding with his Secretary of State Trump found the time to continue his bromance with Putin, who praised Trump in a press conference for the performance of the US stock market under his presidency. Trump called Putin to thank him, and simultaneously it was revealed that in Trump’s daily national security briefings information about Russia he might consider too negative is hidden in a stack of papers he’ll never read, while it is omitted in the oral presentations.
And then there were the departures, current and upcoming. Omarosa had to be pulled out of the curtains in the Roosevelt Room and announced a tell-all book, and Paul Ryan may soon leave the House. If Ryan wants to be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 he can no longer afford to be associated with Trump and be partly held responsible for the expected electoral disaster in 2018.
The poor condition of the administration and the GOP is best illustrated by the fact that they try to pass a hugely unpopular tax bill that most Americans understand to be a scam on behalf of corporations and the wealthy, and celebrate it as their only legislative achievement this year.