Trump Scorches the Earth All Around
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
A scorched earth military strategy aims to destroy anything that might be useful to the enemy. It can be applied to keep a losing enemy from regrouping, as William Tecumseh Sherman did in the southern states, or to keep a winning enemy from advancing too fast, as Nazi Germany did in Russia. The bizarre thing about Trump’s ‘strategy’ is that it affects his own forces more negatively than the enemy’s. His obstruction of the transition process frustrates the Biden team, but also threatens the security of the American people, of which 46.8% voted for him. His vetoing the National Defense Authorization Act would hurt the military – where he has a lot of support – if there is no override in the Senate, and it puts Republicans in a bind because they have to choose between loyalty to the president and loyalty to the troops. His initial refusal to sign the COVID relief bill and his demand to increase payments to $2,000 created a similar dilemma for members of his own party, who looked like sheep if they followed Trump and voted along with Nancy Pelosi and like assholes if they didn’t. Delaying the 2021 omnibus spending bill would have hurt all Americans.
Trump is furious because he has convinced himself with the help of a couple of lunatics that the election was stolen from him, so he lashed out at the Democrats who are the culprits, at the ‘fake news’ media for not reporting the theft and at Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans for not supporting his campaign for ‘electoral justice.’ Paradoxically he is also angry at the American people for not in majority voting for him. In his convoluted attempts to hurt all of the above his raging brain came up with ridiculous arguments, like refusing to sign the budget bill because it contains items from his own budget proposal that were put in there by his Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin. Meanwhile his delayed signing of the relief bill has already cost the neediest Americans $300 in unemployment benefits, and his bringing $2,000 relief checks into play put Georgia’s senators Perdue and Loeffler in a pickle, because they had to choose between being loyal to McConnell or to Trump and most of their electorate. This coming weekend the president will campaign for them and if they still change their minds and go with McConnell he might as well go golfing.
With 1 in every 17 Americans infected with COVID and over 1 in every 1,000 Americans dead because of the virus neither Trump, who spends most of his days on the golf course, nor Pence, who is skiing in Colorado, have spoken out about the surge or tried to boost the vaccination campaign. Mike Pence is the president’s last hope, because Trump seems to think that the Vice President can refuse to accept the result of the Electoral College vote on January 6th and declare him the winner, although for backup he has urged his hoodlums to come to DC for a ‘wild’ day.
It is fitting that in the current situation Representative Louie Gohmert, a former judge who would fall off the bottom of the scale if he ever took an IQ test, filed a lawsuit to compel a federal judge to tell Pence to violate the Constitution and commit an auto-coup in the middle of the Congress. Even Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell have not come up with something so ludicrous, although Hizzoner would probably pull the hair out of his head because he didn’t think of it if he had hair.
More important than the pandemic was for Trump that Melania has not been on magazine covers as First Lady, which caused him to air an undoubtedly heartfelt complaint, and out of the blue Ivanka Trump, whose three children have one grandfather pardoned by the other grandfather, tweeted ‘Iowa,’ suggesting that maybe the president’s idiot daughter considers running in 2024.
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