Great and Unmatched Wisdom
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
During the 2016 presidential campaign Jeb Bush predicted a ‘chaos presidency’ if Trump were to be elected and boy was he right. It’s the only thing that the president does well, confusing and obfuscating, to the point where he himself cannot keep track of his lies. Realizing that his perfect call with Ukrainian president Zelensky might actually get him impeached Trump tried to shift the blame to Energy Secretary Perry, who had just resigned and allegedly made him do it even thought he didn’t want to. That version of events didn’t have a long life, because it was unclear why Perry would have wanted Joe Biden investigated. So the president tried another tack, first denying that he had ever asked for Biden to be investigated and then declaring that it was perfectly fine to have Biden investigated in the context of his never yielding battle against corruption. Imagining the most corrupt US President ever as a corruption fighter was a new challenge for the American public, made even more arduous by the idea that Trump would disapprove of the children of politicians being engaged in profitable foreign business ventures.
Meanwhile House testimony by the former US envoy to Ukraine and text messages he made available showed that for an extended period of time American diplomats and Rudy Giuliani had pressured Ukraine to comply with Trump’s wishes, initially with a White House visit by Zelensky as the reward, but eventually with military aid to Ukraine hanging in the balance. The acting ambassador to Ukraine called this ‘crazy,’ but was silenced by the Trump sycophant who is the ambassador to the EU, who, after checking back with Trump, assured him there was no quid pro quo in the interactions with Ukraine. The White House considered it too risky for this character to testify in Congress, so his appearance was canceled in the last minute, which resulted in a subpoena. In response to these developments the White House Counsel sent a letter to House Democrats calling the impeachment inquiry ‘illegitimate’ and ‘unconstitutional,’ and declared that the White House would not cooperate. In the meantime in New York Trump’s lawyers argued that impeachment is the only constitutional process to investigate a president.
Over the weekend Trump decided to immediately withdraw the US troops who formed a buffer between the Kurds, who had fought side by side with them against ISIS and had 11,000 corpses to show for it, and the Turkish border, all but guaranteeing that the Turkish army would invade Syria and slaughter America’s only reliable allies in the region. Warned even by his staunchest supporters that this was a big mistake Trump tweeted that in his ‘great and unmatched wisdom’ he would obliterate the Turkish economy if Turkey attacked the Kurds, which it has now done.
Trump made his decision after a phone call with Turkish president Erdogan, and since he has significant business interests in Turkey, among them two Trump Towers in Istanbul, he’s not very likely to follow up on that threat. After throwing the Kurds under the bus the president pointed out that they didn’t help us on D-Day, and with a possible release of ISIS fighters by the Kurds he had no problem because they would want to go back to their European countries.
Even the Evangelicals are now split about Trump. Pat Robinson stated that the president would lose his ‘mandate from heaven’ because of the way he had responded to Khashoggi’s murder and abandoned the Kurds, while Ralph Reed said that Christians have a ‘moral obligation’ to support Trump. According to the latest polling 51% of Americans disagree and want him out of office.
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