Flights of fantasy: Donald Trump

[Chris James]

Perhaps you watched the interview on ABC last night. David Muir tried to get Donald Trump to make sense, but no one can do that. Here's the recap:

 http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/in-his-first-major-tv-interview-as-president-trump-is-endlessly-obsessed-about-his-popularity/ar-AAmfSFs?li=BBnb7Kz

 

The words Trump spoke were his usual off kilter babble that he kept steering back to his inauguration attendance and how much he is loved. The petulant child in him was all over the screen, especially when he entered his new playpen, formerly known as the Oval Office. The only thing missing in those images was the throne this deluded demi-god might sit on when he holds court, but perhaps it is still being constructed.

Trump, often referring to himself in the third person, displayed the portraits of past presidents he has hung on the walls, and in the running dialogue he managed to compare himself to Andrew Jackson. Trump thinks Jackson was one of our greatest presidents but thinks perhaps his own presidency will overshadow that piece of history. Let's hope not: Jackson was the genocidal monster that was responsible for the death of tens of thousands of Native Americans.

Overall, I hope ABC has a special vault to keep the record of this interview. It will be interesting to roll it out in ten or twenty years in an effort to explain the insanity of this election. They can show it in series with the Trump impeachment trial coming soon to a television screen near you. But perhaps that won't happen since Trump seems to be keen on dismantling government agencies right and left...Congress must certainly be worried about their jobs when Trump seems about to declare the Constitution null and void, sit in his throne room, don his crown, and share home movies with Vladimir Putin.  

[ChrisR]

7 hours ago, Chris James said:

Overall, I hope ABC has a special vault to keep the record of this interview. It will be interesting to roll it out in ten or twenty years in an effort to explain the insanity of this election.

I admire your optimism that we might live that long. The Federation of Atomic Scientists just updated their infamous Doomsday Clock to read two-and-one-half minutes until midnight. That's the closest to the end since 1953, shortly after the US detonated its first thermonuclear device.

Trump's patois is difficult to follow, though one way or another it ends up being self-aggrandizement at its finest (worst?). This guy isn't 96 hours into his presidency and I'm already looking back with comparatively fond memories of the Watergate era.

[Cole Parker]

Has his sanity been checked recently?

 

C

[Chris James]

I just finished asking Addym Kerris how many shrinks would it take to declare Trump insane. He replied that if they work for the government we'll never get a truthful answer. 

[Cole Parker]

Alternative sanity.

C

 

[DesDownunder]

On 1/27/2017 at 6:10 AM, Cole Parker said:

Has his sanity been checked recently?

 

C

I think that he checked his sanity into the cloakroom when he entered the building, but now they can't find it...and in any case he declared he has no need of it because he is very smart, or something...

 

[Chris James]

You are judged by the company you keep, and although this can be said about our insane resident of the Oval Office, it seems it also applies to the men and women our new president has chosen to advise him.

Steve Bannon has no political experience, unless you count his days defaming President Obama from a right wing website. He did study politics in college, but it seems he slept thru the lectures. Now he sits as advisor to the least experienced president we have had in modern history. How will this affect the administration of the United State? I read this and shuddered:

 http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/steve-bannon-were-going-to-war-in-the-south-china-sea-no-doubt/ar-AAmwFbi?ocid=spartandhp

 

Not that any news source can be taken at face value, but this sounds like something Bannon would say even several years ago. The biggest mistake of Trump's administration will turn out to be the lack of knowledge and experience in the mob around him. Perhaps they would be fine if the job was selling real estate or planning a television show, but that is not the case.

We have an executive order crisis in hand. Who told Trump to renew the push to build the Keystone XL pipeline at a time when the U.S. is experiencing an oil glut and gasoline supplies are overflowing the storage facilities? Perhaps the former Exxon CEO who is now a cabinet member, no conflict of interest there. 

An opinion piece in the local news asks is Trump 70 or 7. He calls the Mexican president and threatens to send in U.S. troops if that country doesn't clean up all the "bad hombres" they have. He spends a phone call with the Australian prime minister telling him how to run that country and bragging about his high numbers in the election. Trump isn't acting his age, he's a petulant child on the loose.

Perhaps he is off his meds. Do they still give Ritalin to irrational children? The doctor who gave Trump a passing grade on his last physical looks and talks like one of the lunatics in the asylum. Go to war with China and Trump will see how the big boys play rough. He probably isn't man enough to appreciate the irony.

[DesDownunder]

On proposed repeal of the Johnson Amendment

(  The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code that prohibits all 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates. )

The American people must be made aware that repealing the Johnson Amendment prepares the path for a theocracy to gain control of the Republic. Churches, which engage in political activity, are in direct conflict of the separation of church and state and risk oligarchy; or an extension of the plutocracy by the wealthy under which, the Congress (and thus The People) already suffer in no small way. This amounts to a corruption, a coup, by the religious extremists assuming control to rule by divine commission, examples of which can be seen in many nations currently regarded as hostile to American values as written into the Constitution.

Our freedom and the freedom of the human race to determine its future without divine interference is threatened by the repeal of the Johnson amendment. Moreover, every thing we have fought for is made obsolescent, and all those who died in service to the ideals of human rights and freedom have their sacrifice and their memory defiled.

 

[ChrisR]

There is an interesting if somewhat frightening perspective on this in the Australian press today. I don't necessarily buy it, but it's worth some thought. Entitled:

Is The United States In The Middle Of A Coup?

http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/is-the-us-in-the-middle-of-a-coup/news-story/ab0ece5c5b27b004b0b203fcce435a92

[DesDownunder]

I know that there are journalists in the U.S.A. who also feel the threat of a coup. There are many parallels with Nazi Germany, but this alone is not enough. What is frightening is the sociopathic symptoms lurking around the White House. I'd rather not have a coup, of any description, but the signs for even an accidental one, even without a conspiracy theory, are not without concern. At some point it becomes too real to ignore and the momentum can carry the whole planet, this time, into a global war. The same could be said for a global peace (with a lot more work, I will admit) but I doubt that such a peace can come from psychopathic origins. War can arise from ignorance, greed and ambition. Peace has to be knowingly nurtured.

 

 

[Cole Parker]

A few months ago, any talk of a coup would have had people rolling in the aisles.  It's not so funny now.  The speed with which The Trump is ripping apart the fabric of our society is truly alarming.  I would hope at some point the folks in Congress will rise up and stop him.  So far, they're all being obsequious pussycats.

C

[Merkin]

I am hoping our system for "The Balance of Power" will kick in.  Our founders believed that the accumulation of power in any person or institution was dangerous and that balancing the principal elements of our government off, one against the other, protected against tyranny.  Consequently we have structures in place so that each branch of our government -- executive, legislative, and judicial -- has some measure of oversight and control over the others.  It is time for that process to assert itself.  It will not happen overnight, but it must happen.  However, we who are citizens of this sorry mess of a democratic republic MUST protect ourselves by providing the pressures that result in legislative and judicial branch actions that will be in our favor.

 

[DesDownunder]

Well said, Merkin. 

[colinian]

The Donald has certainly followed his coach, Vlad Putin.

Colin