Circling the Drain

The President of the United States is going through another bad patch.

All of the racist crap he’s been peddling, all of the lies he’s been telling, all of the short-sighted policies that he’s been imposing on America are beginning to bear rotten political fruit. 

Nothing’s really working and he’s getting frustrated and angry.

Really, he’s got no no one to blame other than himself. He won election by the thinnest of margins, and it appears pretty convincing that his victory was tainted by dirty tricks, both domestic and international. So, his “mandate” to govern the country was minimal, because no matter how one counts votes, or measures popularity, the President only represents the views of a fraction of Americans.

This has been the anchor weighing him down for two years now. His ideas are not only unpopular, they are, for the most part, not American, not democratic, and not even moral, by most people’s standards.

Donald Trump’s response to his failed Presidency is to increase his  lying to the people, his nasty tweetstorms toward critics, and his destructive behavior toward public servants who have the onerous task of keeping the ship of state afloat. Not a very effective way to increase popular support, in my opinion.

This week, with the stock market tanking and the new Democratic majority House of Representatives a few weeks from taking office, the President is doing what he does best: lashing out. He’s playing hardball with a budgetary government shutdown, trying to impose his “border wall” on the American people. It is an issue that is near and dear to Trump’s MAGA supporters, but opposed by 2/3 of voters (according to polls). Who knows where this mess will end up.

The President actually did something that I agree with this week, although politicians of both parties and representatives of the “military industrial complex” are aghast: he announced that American troops are going to be brought home from Syria and Afghanistan. In typical Trump fashion, he simply declared victory over ISIS and the other Middle Eastern bad guys. It reminds me of George W. Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” gaffe. However, that whole inferno over there is a no-win situation for the U.S., so, whether we’ve won anything or not, maybe it’s best to let the locals go at it, like they’ve been doing for 3,000 years to no avail.

Trump’s Middle East initiative, which came out of the blue and was opposed by many of his top advisors and his own Republican Party, cost him his Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis.

Just recently, another one of “his generals” (as he liked to call them when he hired them in the early days of his Presidency), General John Kelly, was replaced as White House Chief of Staff. Trump couldn’t get along with him either.

Then there’s the case of ex-General Michael Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s National Security Advisor. The President fired him when the press revealed that he was an un-registered foreign agent. He’s now facing prison time, along with a raft of other Trump advisors who got caught up in the Russia-gate fiasco, which the President calls a “witch hunt”.

As I’ve mentioned before, the next two years are going to be quite ugly, politically. The President is going to have to bust his hump getting anything positive done, because the Democrats, who he gleefully excoriated for two years, now control Congress. That means they control the fiscal purse strings of the Nation. Trump, who loves money, will have less of it to carry out his destructive policies.

And, it is not difficult to foresee numerous investigative hearings in the Administration’s future, looking into things like: (1) election tampering; (2) violation of the Constitution’s “emoluments” clause; (3) graft and abuse of office by Cabinet officers; (4) immigration enforcement practices; (5) tariff practices; and, (6) off-putting Administration foreign policy initiatives towards allies and benevolent attitudes towards dictatorial regimes.

And, that’s just the mischief that Congress has in store. There’s also the small matter of the Special Prosecutor, who is slowly unwinding the tangled Russia-gate matter. If Mr. Mueller conclusively links anyone in the Trump family to the tainted 2016 election shenanigans, all Hell will break loose.

This Presidency is circling the drain. It is a dangerous time for America, because an unstable and spiteful man is at the helm.

Fasten your seat belts!