Trump is Never Wrong
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
After congratulating Poland with the attack by Nazi Germany 75 years ago and canceling his visits to that country and Ireland, sending Mike Pence instead, Trump spent the weekend playing golf and tweeting about the threat of hurricane Dorian. In one of his tweets on Sunday he implied that among the states in Dorian’s path was Alabama, an assertion that was almost immediately contradicted by the National Weather Service. It is against the law to file false reports about weather emergencies, because people’s lives are at stake, but Trump cannot be indicted, so he got away with yet another crime. To prove his point, on Wednesday Trump produced a map from the National Hurricane Center that had been altered with a sharpie, the president’s favorite writing tool, to put Alabama retroactively in danger. It is also illegal to modify government documents, but Trump truly believes that he cannot be wrong and that truth is a relative concept. His mentor, political henchman Roy Cohn, taught the president never to apologize, but Trump did Cohn one better by making ‘never admit a mistake’ the guiding principle of his presidency.
Meanwhile the grifting went on. Trump ‘advised’ Pence to stay at his Irish golf resort – which would put a significant amount of taxpayer dollars into the president’s pockets – even though the resort is on the west coast and Pence’s meetings were on the east coast, meaning that the taxpayers would also incur costs for two cross country flights of Airforce Two, and in DC it was revealed that Attorney General Barr will throw a $30,000 holiday party in Trump’s hotel. To make Washington even more dysfunctional the president is encouraging Corey Lewandowski, a first class thug and his former campaign manager, to run for the US Senate in New Hampshire. In order to build at least part of ‘the wall,’ one of his campaign promises, Trump diverted $3.6 billion from the Pentagon’s budget, money that was intended for military construction. He may think that this will keep his base happy, even though the funding doesn’t come from Mexico, but in all 127 projects are affected in a large number of states, some of which Trump has to win to get re-elected. Taking away federal money and thus jobs doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.
The Washington Post observed that during this last summer before an election year the president has done nothing to expand his base. His plan, if there is one, appears to be to follow a very narrow path to a majority in the Electoral College, presumably with Russian assistance, leaving the national popular vote to the Democratic nominee. However, with the manufacturing sector crimping for the first time in years and markets in disarray because of Trump’s tariffs, his approval ratings finally start to go down, not in the least because ‘Trump fatigue’ is slowly settling in thanks to all the drama the White House is responsible for.
Trump’s presidency is one of unkept promises: a significant tax cut for the middle class, great and affordable healthcare for everybody, and mining and manufacturing jobs coming back to the US, to mention a few. The 33% wack jobs in the US population who are now members-for-life of the Trump cult will vote for him, but others may have their doubts: farmers, whose businesses have been destroyed by the trade war with China, and miners and factory workers, who begin to realize Trump lied to them.
A third group Trump cannot automatically count on consists of high earning executives, doctors and lawyers, who benefited from his tax cuts for the wealthy, but realize that no more give-aways are coming and dislike the president as a person. Unlike these unprincipled opportunists the president is loyal to his soulmates: in the middle of the UK’s current political mess he said: ‘Boris is a friend of mine and he’s going to win.’
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