Profiles In Courage
The absurdity of the Trump administration accusing Barack Obama of staging a “years-long coup” to “overthrow” Trump’s first presidential term, when Trump himself is of course the only president in U.S. history to actually, publicly, incite a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn an election result. Opposing a rival politician by semi-nefarious means, as Trump and Tulsi Gabbard are alleging against Obama, is politics as usual in a modern democratic country. Openly declaring an election result “rigged,” with everything that implies regarding an entire nation’s electoral system and its human workers, and then threatening the members of Congress, and even his own vice president, with a violently angry mob of “supporters” in order to coerce that vice president into complying with Trump’s demand that he commit an unconstitutional act, all for the sake of an evidence-free, flat-out lie that Trump began promoting months in advance of the election to explain away the possible shame of losing (which his toddler’s ego could not accept in the way every semi-mature adult in human history has been able to accept a failure), and then sticking to this deliberate and endlessly exploded lie in perpetuity in an overt attempt to fan within his cult an everlasting flame of fear, emotional dependence, and devotion befitting a great martyr, the future of civilized life in his country be damned — that is what we may truly call a “years-long coup.”
Typical of everything Trump, the Dear Leader has just announced a “massive” trade deal with Japan which will “reduce” the tariffs on Japanese exports to the U.S. to a mere 15%. A remarkable feat of tariff reduction that could only have been accomplished by the world’s greatest dealmaker — since only the world’s greatest dealmaker had proposed to punish the American people by imposing tariffs higher than 15% on imports from Japan in the first place. This is the very essence of Trump’s concept and history of winning: Create a potential disaster; slightly reduce the extent of the disaster you were promising to cause; claim this reduction as a brilliant act of averting disaster, which you and you alone could have achieved.
Of course, Trump is feeling more urgency than ever to produce headlines of victory and greatness, at a moment when his cult is suffering a genuine episode of vertigo over the Dear Leader’s sudden and “inexplicable” — actually easily explicable — pivot on, and belittling of, the notorious “Epstein Files.” Trump denies all wrongdoing, of course, because that is what Trump does, usually right before the damning evidence is produced to verify that he really did say or do what he has denied saying or doing, at which point he immediately shifts into “It’s a witch hunt” mode, and attempts to survive by convincing his idolators that “They” are only trying to bring him down because “They” are desperate to prevent him from making America great again. The idolators have bought this two-part act every time so far. Will they buy it this time? Probably.
One of Trump’s more ludicrous distractions of the moment, achieved with the assistance of his ever-compliant underlings in the House of Representatives, is a proposal to rename the Kennedy Center Opera House as “First Lady Melania Trump Opera House.” Now of course this is absurd on many levels, not least of which is the idea that the Opera House needs a new name at all. Secondly, is it not unnecessarily and, if you will, incendiarily, provocative to remove the name of an assassinated president from the opera house in favor of the name Trump? Thirdly, why should it be renamed for someone who is in no relevant way connected with the arts, let alone with the normal functions of an opera house? Finally, why should the chosen (obviously with Daddy’s approval) new name include Mrs. Trump’s current title “First Lady,” when surely — although perhaps not as surely as it ought to be — she will forever cease to be the holder of that title in just a little over three years?
Meanwhile, and along similar lines with everything noted above, Trump, with his pathetic “turn” on Ukraine, which consists mainly of selling weapons to Europe so the Europeans can donate them to Ukraine — in other words, Trump’s great change of heart is nothing more than another grift — has cleverly bought Putin plenty of time, thanks to Trump’s sweetly generous fifty-day tariff warning, to cause just about as much damage to Ukrainian cities, and take as much new territory, as his depleted manpower can sustain. Then, presumably, Putin will suddenly be willing to “strike a deal,” with Ukraine in a much weaker bargaining position, more desperate for an end to the suffering — or so Putin, along with his useful minion Trump, no doubt see it, although given all that we have seen from President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people over the past three years, Team Kremlin (of which Team Trump, in my judgment, remains a wholly-owned subsidiary) may be looking at their prospects through rose-coloured glasses. One would like to think so, since it is always annoying to see evil rewarded, even in the short term. In the long term, of course, it will be for these criminals just as it has been for all such abusers of humanity throughout history. They will get theirs.
