Freak Out Friday – August 11, 2017

On Comedy Central, they have a weekly sitcom in which a comedian imitates Donald Trump. It’s called “The President Show” and the announcer always declares Trump to be, at the top of the show, “the 45th and last President.” With what’s going on this week, I’m beginning to wonder just how accurate that may be.

1). Yeah, I can totally imagine Hillary doing this. As Trump glides us toward nuclear war with North Korea, I am reminded of all the idiot voters who saw no difference between Trump and Clinton. “Each,” we were told, “is equally bad.” Okay, I would like a show of hands. How many people can imagine Hillary Clinton threatening Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury, the likes of which no one has ever seen.” Well, yes, we have seen it. We saw it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki exactly seventy-two years ago. We’ve seen it in a variety of movies in which humanity was stupid enough to unleash Armageddon upon itself. And the odds of us seeing it in our lifetimes is rapidly escalating. Because Trump, rather than relying on diplomacy and sanctions and keeping one’s head screwed on as we have been doing for decades is instead basically daring Kim Jong-un to take his best shot and see what happens. So what we’re now in the position of hoping is that North Korea’s man-child of a dictator is actually mature enough to realize that Trump is nothing but a thundering oaf who should be ignored. That’s a pretty vague hope upon which to hinge the prospect of no-nukes continuing.

I mean, it’s always a given that the President has access to the nuclear football, but I don’t think on a daily basis that we gave much thought to the notion that he would actually use it to fire missiles. Yet now I can very easily imagine Trump hearing on Fox News that North Korea is preparing to shoot a missile in the direction of Guam and decide that a pre-emptive strike is the only way to deal with it. “I Warned him; he brought this on himself,” Trump would declare, and suddenly the missiles are flying. I wonder how China would feel about that? Or Russia? If China and Russia team up to retaliate against us, do we think we can win that war? Does ANYONE win that war? Or do those few of us who are left wind up in a Mad Max movie?

I think what it comes down to is this: Trump believes, and rightfully so, that he is a joke to the rest of the world. Other leaders ignore him or make jokes about him. For a control freak like Trump, that is intolerable. So he needs to make people afraid of him by endeavoring to take charge of something–anything. Preferably anything that doesn’t involve Congress. So he decides that North Korea is the perfect target and starts threatening the country with nuclear annihilation. Suddenly the world leaders are no longer laughing. Because they realize that they’re dealing with a serious nut bar who is perfectly willing to kill millions of people in order to prove that he’s tougher than anybody.

You know what? God knows I have no love for Mike Pence, but there’s a big difference between him and Trump: I don’t think he’s insane. I think they need to implement the 25th amendment and get Trump out of office in order to prove to the world that America is able to realize when we’ve made a mistake and are willing to do something about it.

But would Pence really initiate that? Probably not. But I know who might.

2). Making friends and then betraying them.. We already know that Trump’s MO is to make friends, use them for a time, then turn against them the moment they no longer serve his purpose. But now he’s taking on Mitch McConnell and that may well backfire spectacularly.

See, he can’t fire McConnell. He can’t throw him out. He can’t get him unelected. All he can do is make pissy tweets about him and say that McConnell should resign his position as the majority leader. Yeah, that’s not happening. Trump can blame McConnell for their inability to repeal and replace Obamacare, and there’s some validity to that. But let us not forget that Trump promised for months that he had a much better plan in mind that he was going to start running on Day One. He didn’t mention any specifics, though. I wish I could have been there the first time McConnell finally asked him what he had in mind and Trump naturally came up with zip. So yes, McConnell didn’t get it done, but Trump did nothing to help, and now he’s blaming McConnell entirely. I’m sure McConnell isn’t thrilled about that, and I’m positive that every day he contemplates how much better his life would be if Trump wasn’t in it. The 25th amendment would be his way of turning around and saying to Trump, “You’re fired,” and if he wasn’t considering it before, I’m sure he is now. His obsession with holding on to power is one thing, but if McConnell believes that Trump’s dementia could result in missiles rocketing toward D.C., you can bet your ass he’s going to want to do something about it.

3). National Lampoon’s Vacation.. Barack Obama, who Trump mercilessly accused of being a lazy, elitist bastard because he played golf, didn’t hit the links for the first four months of office. Trump waited exactly two weeks before fleeing D.C. for the golf course, and he’s been at it ever since. Since taking office in January, he has bene to golf clubs on forty days, which has cost American taxpayers somewhere around $55 million dollars according to the website Trump Golf Count. When one adds in his visits to Trump facilities, he has spent nearly a third of his time in office…out of office. This from a man who couldn’t snark about Obama’s golf habits enough and repeatedly declared that he would never set foot on a golf course during his presidency because he would be working too hard for the American people. No, he’s really not. He has passed no major legislation. He has endeavored to ban transgenders from the military, a move that was not recommended by his people and has not yet been implemented if for no other reason than that they can’t figure out how to do it without being sued. And now he’s off on a seventeen day “working vacation,” which is amusing because he hardly works when he’s at the White House.

Hey, Donald: how about going on a permanent vacation?

PAD