Saving Thanksgiving
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
After the House Intelligence Committee hearings Donald Trump phoned in on FOX & Friends to perpetuate the myth that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 elections and possessed the DNC server. It started a week with only bad news for the president. Emails revealed that the Office of Management and Budget had retroactively tried to come up with a justification for withholding military aid to Ukraine, and it turned out that two employees of OMB resigned after Trump had ordered the aid to be blocked. It also became clear that the president knew about the whistleblower complaint before the aid was released. A federal judge ruled that former White House Counsel Don McGahn has to comply with the congressional subpoena to testify, and in an attempt to save his skin Giuliani goon Lev Parnas revealed that he has audio and video linking both Trump and Giuliani to the Ukraine scandal. In an interview the president told Bill O’Reilly that he never ordered Giuliani to do anything, which makes it inexplicable why he told Zelensky to talk to Giuliani, and Hizzoner said on FOX News that he has ‘insurance’ if he is thrown under the bus.
Trump’s ‘you’ll have to ask Rudy’ and mentioning that ‘Giuliani also has other clients’ sounded eerily familiar to the way he severed his ties with Michael Cohen, and it puts both Trump and Giuliani in a bind, because the president cannot risk that Hizzoner starts singing to the FBI, while Giuliani’s only hope may be a presidential pardon if he’s convicted for some of the potentially criminal actions he’s being investigated for. In a bizarre tweet the president declared that he would ‘love to have everybody testify’ to Congress, something he explicitly prohibited, but that he cannot allow it for the sake of future presidents. After giving Turkey access to north-eastern Syria Trump continued his servile subjection to its president by asking the Department of Justice to look into Erdogan’s concerns about sanctions on a state-owned Turkish bank, and by instructing Lindsey Graham to block a resolution recognizing the genocide of Armenians by the Turks. Since significant earnings of the Trump Organization apparently come from Russia and Turkey this is an explanation for the president’s attitude towards Putin and Erdogan.
In an unprecedented move Trump intervened in the military justice process by restoring a Navy Seal, who had been convicted of a war crime by his peers, to his rank and status, forcing the Secretary of the Navy to resign. The president justified his action by stating that the US trains its soldiers to be ‘killers’ and cannot abandon them for doing what they have been taught to do, a remark that many in the military leadership find deeply insulting. Trump also announced that in 2020 he is planning to campaign with three convicted war criminals he already has pardoned.
On a lighter note, the president got into a spat with the military because he insisted that Conan the Dog, who assisted in the killing of Al Baghdadi, is male, while the Pentagon maintained that Conan is female, which was pretty obvious from pictures taken at her White House recognition event. Additionally, in a tweet Trump wondered why the commemoration of 100 years of women’s voting rights in 2020 has not been celebrated years ago, leaving mathematicians and historians puzzled.
At a Florida rally Tuesday night the president told his base to their own amazement that they went to great colleges, and informed them that he was ready to fight a war to save Thanksgiving, just like he had saved Christmas. During a surprise visit to Afghanistan Trump announced the resumption of negotiations with the Taliban, which was to be expected after his success in dealing with Kim Jong-un and China.
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