Freak Out Friday – April 20, 2018

I’m a big fan of “Designated Survivor.” In this season, President Kirkman has pretty much been going through hell. The accidental death of his wife shattered him, and at the insistence of his staff, he wound up sitting down with a therapist and trying to piece his life back together. But it turns out that someone has obtained recordings of the sessions (it’s always recordings that screw presidents, isn’t it) and released them to the nation. Kirkman’s self-admitted mental difficulties have prompted the VP and his cabinet to implement the 25th amendment in order to relieve him of duty.

And I couldn’t help but think what a stark line has been driven between fact and fiction. Kirkman is victimized by some asshole who releases private moments and doubts, and his cabinet wants to push him out. Yet Trump’s private recordings get released, and he’s still elected president. While in office, he displays the clear attitudes and actions of someone who is not mentally fit to be president, and yet the VP and his own cabinet do nothing to challenge him. They look away or they look up their own asses and ignore him, giving him license to do whatever the hell he wants even though it lowers the bar for what is considered acceptable behavior.

Remember Gary Hart? He was the front runner for the Democratic candidate for President in 1988. Then it was revealed he’d had an extra-marital affair with Donna Rice. Boom, he was out. Because we had standards for the presidency back then. If you could cheat on your wife, then you could cheat on the American public. So you were unacceptable. Contrast that to current days where a serial adulterer is the president and no one blinks an eye. One wonders how in God’s name the actions that we would refuse to accept in a president could have spiraled so low in just thirty years.

So what has the jerk-in-chief been up to this week?

1). Howling at the Moon. Trump’s twitter feed has been very lively in the past week as he continues to battle back against the “slime ball” James Comey. Hillary supporters really have no idea how to react. On the one hand we despise Comey because his election surprise regarding her email definitely helped get Trump elected. But his book (which I am in the midst of reading) gives us a no-holds-barred view of Trump, and to say it is unflattering is to understate it. Naturally Trump drives its sales by howling that Comey is a liar.

Seriously? The man who is so determined to maintain an ethical standard that he helped sink Hillary is now lying about Trump? Only Trump’s most dedicated supporters would buy into that because they will accept anything he says. Why? Self-preservation. They cannot accept that they were so astoundingly wrong about the Fake POTUS, and so they will seize any excuse Trump gives them in order to preserve their own innocence in foisting this fiasco of a Prez on America.

2). Old sins come back to haunt you.. A former reporter for Forbes stated that back in the 1980s, when Forbes was assembling its list of the Forbes 400–the 400 richest, most powerful people in the world–Trump called him pretending to be the fictional employee John Barron and convicted the reporter that his “boss,” Trump, should definitely be on the list, even though his debt load and lack of assets should have kept him off. In the world of Gary Hart, that alone would get the 25th amendment into motion. Nowadays we just shrug and say, “It figures.”

We need to fight against this. We have to reassert our mentality so that we don’t accept the lowered bar that Trump has set as the new norm.

3). The non-Sean Astin Rudy. . At the insistence of the GOP, Comey released his memos that he made back when he interacted with Trump. This was a remarkably stupid thing for the Republicans to do because all it does is back up everything Comey wrote in his book and makes Trump look even worse. They lend remarkable validity to the notion that Trump obstructed justice with his firing of Comey.

So what has Trump done to rebut this? He’s added Rudy Giuliani to his team of lawyers. This certainly tracks with Trump’s preferences because when the time came to choose a new Supreme Court judge, Rudy was his first choice right up until the staff convinced him to go elsewhere. It’s obvious that Trump still adores him even though Rudy’s PR stock has gone significantly south since his “glory” days of 9/11. What impact Rudy will have remains to be seen, but I very much doubt it will be anything positive.



Did he do anything right? Actually, he did. He decided not to attend Barbara Bush’s funeral. He’s sending his wife instead. Smart. Why should this walking stick of dynamite risk setting off confrontations with his predecessors at such a serious event? Even his showing up would have added tension to the proceedings. Whoever convinced him not to go made a smart move.