Monday March 5 2018

I have been trying to write about other things for weeks now, but with such an avalanche of scandal and poor governance coming from the Coalition it has been almost impossible. Even as I write, the headlines in Fairfax Media are suggesting that Barnaby’s baby might not be his. No, really. Let’s stop here.

Now I haven’t written a Trump Report for months. In fact, August last year was the last time. I stopped because I felt we Aussies had had enough of this excuse for a President. After all, Americans are the only race that believe their own bullshit.

But it surely cannot have escaped everyone’s attention that the President has gone mad. Well, the American press is suggesting it to be so.

Who would have thought that the likes of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, and Rob Porter and Hope Hicks would have their access to the President limited. A group of well-connected young folk who had been granted privileges that were beyond the reach of others.

Kushner’s security clearance has been taken from him and he is under scrutiny for playing on both sides of the court (mixing government with business), and the Russian probe looks like closing in on him. He was once the President’s favourite, but many say we are witnessing the end of the “House of Kushner, ” and we learn that:

Kushner is now stripped of his access to the nation’s deepest secrets, isolated and badly weakened inside the administration … [But] Trump said only a week ago; “Jared’s done an outstanding job. I think he’s been treated very unfairly. He’s a high-quality person.”

He only forms part of the chaos inside the White House.

The President also lost his fourth Communications Director, Hope Hicks who was so close as to be called a surrogate daughter. His responses on gun control following the deaths of 17 – mostly high school students – was frightening to say the least. An acknowledged draft dodger, after declaring himself a genius he backed it up by saying he would have been a hero by confronting the shooter unarmed. Here is a man who needs a buggy to get around a golf course.

Now it looks as though he intends start a world trade war (they are easy to win) that has the world wobbling on its axis. So bizarre and ubiquitous has been the President’s behaviour that his sanity is now being seriously questioned. Why has it taken so much time, you might ask?

David Smith in The Guardian writes that:

“… whilst there has been disarray in the White House before this time, observers say, the checks and balances that have provided a modicum of restraint in the past appear to be crumbling, leaving Trump isolated, angry and ready to lash out. It is, they fear, not inconceivable that the world’s most powerful country is now being guided by instinct, by impulse, by whim and by mood swing.”

“Rick Tyler, a political analyst, said: “It’s appalling that anyone would leverage their time in government to enrich themselves or do personal business and Jared Kushner appears to have been doing that consistently. He ought to leave immediately. They are nothing but grifters.”

Remember when Trump was victorious and we were told to focus on what he does rather than what he tweets or says?

Well, with victories including economic growth,(started by Obama), tax cuts (controversially making the rich richer), and the appointment of conservative judges (enshrining conservatism), the President looks as though he will continue to govern according to what’s best for the US and stuff the rest of us. “America First.”

Trump seems to be increasingly relying more on emotion than factual evidence, The steel tariffs are a case in point. Trump,?like many of his vintage, maintain that foreign countries cheat American workers out of their jobs.

People in Australia of the same ilk as Trump also bring up the same theory when it comes to manufacturing. Trump thinks that simply by applying tariffs he will correct the problem when the job’s lost, because of automation, will never be regained and if manufacturing were to begin again then the factories would be technologically advanced, requiring few workers with skills that the existing workers no longer have.

He would of course been told all this but his “America first“ state of mind has even scared the **** out of his own conservatives. Let alone Australia, Canada and his other allies. All this exercise from a mind buried in the past will do is gain a few extra votes in an otherwise futile exercise.

Only a deluded mind would do this for so little gain. Remember what he said:

“We are living through the single greatest jobs theft in the history of the world.”

Nobody stole their jobs. They lost them.

To quote Peter Baker of the New York Times:

“The week of wild policymaking has left lawmakers on Capitol Hill, investors on Wall Street and leaders around the world trying to make sense of it all. Republicans in Congress are wondering if Mr. Trump really intends to defy one of the party’s most valued and powerful constituencies to push for gun restrictions that they say will never go anywhere in Congress. Corporate executives and foreign governments were guessing whether Mr. Trump will really follow through on his unscripted vow to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum and, if so, what that might mean.”

My thought for the day

”We live in a time where horrible things are being perpetrated on us. The shame is that we have normalised them and adjusted accordingly.”