TRUMP THE WEAKLING

            Throughout his “Let’s make America Great Again” campaign for the presidency, Trump repeatedly implied that President Obama had been weak in international affairs. The recent announcement by Trump at the Helsinki Summit that Russia and Putin did not interfere in the U.S. 2016 election was a craven act of pandering and appeasement far worse than anything done by Chamberlain at Munich. It is hard to say what drove Trump to this act of cowardice, but perhaps Putin has blackmail video evidence of Trump’s cavorting with bed-wetting prostitutes in Moscow.

            Trumps capitulation to Putin in Moscow gave rise to stunned response from both Democrats and Republicans. They are aware that the entire U.S. intelligence administration has found that the Russians did, in fact, hack-into and interfere with the 2016 election. Even conservative George Will asserted that Trump colluded with Putin during the 2016 election. Trump is contradicting every department of intelligence in the U.S. Government. For some personal reason, Trump is betraying his own intelligence departments and coming to the support of a Russian dictator who wants only the destruction of American democracy.

            When Neville Chamberlin gave-in to Hitler in Munich, he used as an excuse that surrendering the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to the German Wehrmacht was a way to maintain “Peace in our time.” Trump used the same kind of language to justify his spineless submission to Putin. In effect, he said that he would rather maintain the peace by having good relations with Russia than rely on the intelligence departments of his own government.    

It is hard to decipher the motive for Trump’s gutless proclamation. Surely it was not to preserve the peace. Chamberlain was at least trying to avoid war at a time when England was unprepared. Right now, the United States is militarily strong and certainly stronger than Russia. No, the reason for Trump’s treasonable behavior is probably either that Putin has good blackmail material on him, or that Trump has important financial relations with Putin and the Russian Oligarchs, or that Trump is obsessed with avoiding the claim that he won the election with Russia’s help.

            You would think that millions of Trump’s supporters would be chastened by this revelation of his weakness, but they did not vote for him on account of foreign affairs. They voted for Trump as a form of class conflict. They wanted him to attack the  educated elites who run the media, the universities, the professions, and other institutions which employ educated people. The very name given to the CIA, NSA, FBI, and other such governmental entities, “Intelligence,” forces the average uneducated blue collar voters to deal with something they do not have. Those same supporters also wanted him to confront African Americans, immigrants, and other minorities, a demand he has met to their satisfaction. If you include the anti-abortionist voters who care mainly about Trump’s appointment of Supreme Court justices, Trump supporters will continue to vote for him no matter what he does with Putin.

            One hopes that for some of the people who supported Trump simply because he was the Republican candidate, this act will make them realize that he is a fraud and that he will not make America great again. He will diminish the reputation of America so that nations around the world will neither rely on us nor fear us.

TRUMP THE CLOWN

 After the election of Donald Trump as President I felt as if I had fallen asleep and awakened into a dystopian America where Trump, The Clown, was in charge of a bizarre circus called the Government. It seemed like a bad dream. I have a feeling that millions of other people have experienced the same sensation.

            When Trump announced that he was running for President I, along with millions of other people, thought it was some kind of hoax. Trump had distinguished himself as a “Birther” by declaring that President Obama was not born in the United States and was not eligible to be President. Trump showed no embarrassment when Obama released his birth certificate and proved that he was born in Hawaii and that Trump was an idiot. At that point the conservative columnist, George Will, described Trump as a “Bloviating Ignoramus.” That expression is one of the best I have ever read.

I had always considered Trump to be a loud-mouthed, publicity-seeking, jerk, and could not imagine him as a serious candidate for the White House. I guess I pretty much thought that Jeb Bush of Florida would be the Republican candidate (That shows how much I knew). When a Trump supporter asked me what I thought about Trump I sneered that Trump was a “Joke.” My acquaintance was shocked.

I think that millions of intelligent Americans still can’t believe that this ignorant, crude, bullying, jackass actually won enough votes to be elected. We were relying on polls that showed a majority of votes for Hillary Clinton. We didn’t comprehend the mysteries of the Electoral College. We didn’t understand the class-resentment that motivated so many uneducated blue-collar people to vote for Trump. Some of the people I know who are Trump supporters actually graduated from college. But if you were to inspect their homes you would be hard-put to find a book. Many people graduate from college and that is the end of all efforts at learning. Many colleges and universities grind-out alumni who are virtually illiterate.

As a brilliant writer and artist I know (My brother) said: “What we are experiencing is an anti-intellectual uprising by ignorant people who wildly resent the fact that they are not taken seriously (hence Trump's ‘elite’ references in his speeches).  They may be educated but they have no curiosity or interest in learning anything new. You might recall Josef Goebbels' speech at the 1933 burning of books in which he said that the age of Jewish intellectualism was at an end (substitute coastal elites for Jewish).  They love Trump because he does not read or pursue intellectual ideas and so he gives them permission to be stupid.” 

There is something clownish about Trump. He looks like a clown with his orange hair implants and his red face. When he speaks it seems like the speech of a high-school class clown. He does not use the manner of speech we are used to hearing from dignified international statesmen like Barack Obama. He likes to send daily messages on Twitter, but he does not employ correct vocabulary, syntax, or grammar. It appears that he is virtually illiterate. When he speaks, it is hard to tell whether he is serious or not. Some speeches wander all over the place as if he was mentally impaired. A number of his most outlandish statements have had to be recalled by the White House on the assurance that he was only joking. One observer described Trump’s behavior at the G-7 Summit as clowning around.

The New Yorker magazine portrayed Trump as a “Dangerous Clown” on its October 30, 2017, issue. The New York Daily News cover on Independence Day showed Trump wearing clown makeup and a broken crown. In The Week, Noah Millman wrote a piece describing Trump as a “Sad Clown.” One wonders whether the movie “IT,” with its scary monstrous clown, was meant to refer to Trump.

All of this would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that he is the president of the most powerful nation on Earth. I doubt that his supporters carefully considered the likely results of having such a clown as President.

           Now I've described Trump as a Clown, a Nazi, and a Mob Boss. The question is, which is he? The 

answer is that there is a little bit, maybe more than a little bit of each about him.