Fallout
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
Last week was not a happy one for Trump. Michael Cohen’s public testimony in Congress was devastating, the Hanoi summit with Kim failed because the president wanted to go big without offering anything that had not been on the table for years, namely sanctions for nukes, and his lying about Jared’s en Ivanka’s security clearances was exposed by contemporary memos from John Kelly and Don McGahn. At the CPAC Trump broke into the most unhinged and also the longest rant of his presidency, reminding some pundits of Fidel Castro, 122 minutes in all with 104 fact-checked lies. He attacked the usual suspects: Comey, Sessions, whose southern accent he imitated, Mueller, who was coming after him with ‘bullshit,’ Cohen, whom he called a ‘stone cold killer,’ members of Congress who ‘hate their country,’ and the Green New Deal, by trying to ridicule wind energy. Meanwhile it was clear that Kim had won the day in Vietnam by getting another photo-op with the US President without giving in to his demands. Back in his country the North Korean dictator immediately started re-building testing facilities for his IBMs.
The fallout from Cohen’s testimony followed this week. Polls showed that over 50% of American voters believe Cohen, while only 35% believe Trump, and that 64% believe that the president committed crimes before his election, while 45% believe he committed crimes when already in the Oval Office, a number that may still go up now that Michael Cohen has produced six hush money checks signed by Trump well into his presidency. New York State regulators started an investigation into insurance fraud by the Trump Organization, something the president can be indicted for regardless what the Department of Justice guidelines say, and the House Oversight Committee asked for documents from 81 organizations and individuals in connection with Michael Cohen’s testimony. Trump’s former fixer also handed documents over to the House Intelligence Committee that would prove that Trump’s lawyers coached him into lying to Congress about the Trump Tower project, one of the felonies he will go to jail for, and to add insult to injury Cohen is suing the Trump organization for $1.9 million in lawyers’ costs.
Via reporting in the New Yorker FOX News was exposed as the propaganda branch of the White House, although some pundits preferred to describe the White House as the political branch of FOX News. It turns out that the network had the Stormy Daniels story well before the presidential election, but killed it ‘because Rupert wants Trump to win.’ The Democratic Party decided not to let FOX News host one of its candidates’ debates, and former FOX boss Bill Shine left the White House for the Trump campaign.
Other than messing up his meeting with Kim Trump also set some records: the US has the highest national debt and trade deficit ever, the former because of Trump’s tax cuts and the latter partly because of his tariffs. In February there was an 11 year high in illegal border crossings in spite of the administration’s deterrence policies, and the lowest number of new jobs was created since Obama pulled the country out of the last recession.
Border patrol agents report that almost all the migrants who cross the border illegally want to get caught immediately, so that they can file an asylum request, and more and more observers agree that Trump is only running for re-election to stay out of jail. Since he didn’t expect to win in 2016 he never thought that his past would catch up with him.
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