A Stable Racist Genius
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
The thrust of Michael Wolff’s book is that Trump is mentally too unstable and on top of that too dumb for the presidency. Since the book came out Trump has been trying to disprove its central thesis, first by sending the re-incarnation of Roy Cohn, Stephen Miller, to CNN, where he made a complete ass of himself by attacking Jake Tapper, and then by taking things in his own tiny hands. At an impromptu press conference in Camp David Trump called himself ‘like, really smart’ and a ‘stable genius.’ Before this could properly sink in Axios got hold of Trump’s real, not his official schedule, which shows that he spends the mornings watching television and tweeting, with the occasional phone call, and doesn’t get to the Oval Office until 11 am, leaving before 6 pm for more television. So now the story was that Trump is not only dumb and unstable, but also monumentally lazy, and he decided to do something about it. With a partly televised bipartisan meeting in the White House about immigration Trump tried to demonstrate that he is not only hard-working but also on top of things.
Unfortunately for him he succeeded in taking completely contradictory positions within a very short period of time, showing that he had absolutely no clue what was at stake. In the end, to emphasize how much he is in charge, Trump simply said that he would sign anything Congress would put in front of him.
Trump’s next blunder came when Fox News, the only broadcaster he trusts, did a number on him. One of the anchors of ‘Fox and Friends,’ his favorite show, questioned why Trump would sign a renewal of the FISA act, ‘because it was the program that had allowed Obama to spy on Trump during the campaign.’ Those words had the effect on Trump like a red flag on a bull, and within ten minutes he tweeted that FISA should not be renewed. Trump had forgotten, or probably never knew, that last week his administration had put out a statement that FISA should be renewed, and Paul Ryan had to spend half an hour on the phone with him to explain that FISA is about foreign, not domestic surveillance. Trump corrected himself with another tweet that ended with ‘Get smart,’ as if he was talking to himself. Having thus demonstrated that he gets most, if not all of his information from Fox News, Trump returned to the issue of immigration when he met in the Oval Office with a bipartisan group of senators, who had agreed on a comprehensive plan that would contain protections for the DACA population but also for immigrants from Haiti and some African countries. Trump refused to accept the plan and asked why the US should be so hospitable to immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries, instead of promoting immigration from a country like Norway.
The previous day Trump had hosted the Norwegian Prime Minister, but again he demonstrated his complete ignorance about something he was talking about. Norway is the wealthiest country in the world, thanks to oil and natural gas revenues, and most Norwegians probably consider the US a shithole, because of income inequality, the high poverty rate, homelessness, the lack of a safety net and the crumbling infrastructure.
While Trump was digging himself deeper in the manure his former Senior Strategist Steve Bannon lost his job at Breitbart under pressure of its main financiers, the Mercer family. Nobody has fallen harder the last couple of months than Bannon, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person, but although he lost his ‘weapons’ Bannon can still spell trouble for Trump when he testifies for the House Intelligence Committee next week.
Trump’s shithole remark hit particularly hard in Miami, which has a large Haitian community that was promised by Trump during the campaign that he would be their ‘champion.’ Yet it should not have shocked anybody who has followed Trump since he and his KKK father had to settle because they refused to rent apartments to black Americans.
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