We're all asking ourselves this question -- Trump's time in the White House seems like an unending horrific nightmare, and he's only been there a little over 70 days. OMG! And now he will be meeting with the Chinese...God help us all.
EXCERPT:
And just what will this blockhead of a president be doing in his 11th week? God help us. He'll be meeting with Egypt's President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, Jordan's King Abdullah II, and … and … pop a Xanax … China's President Xi Jinping, who will, likewise, swallow Trump whole. The Chinese aren't as carefree and lighthearted as the Germans, whose leader, Angela Merkel, Trump has already met with. A "senior European diplomat" summarized that meeting thus: Trump "frequently and brutally [kept] changing the subject when not interested." Obvious to everyone present was that, as the NYT's Roger Cohen put it, not only Trump's temperament but his "preparedness was roughly that of a fourth grader."
A mere 10 or 11 weeks, each suffused with chaos, confusion, incompetence, breathtaking failures and spectacular self-destruction. Customary it is that in a president's first 100 days, legislative victories roll out in a honeymoon whirlwind of mutual affection — especially if the president's party controls both houses of Congress. This president and this Congress, however, decided on the rather novel course of airing deep-seated antagonisms over a massive social program that both detested but neither had given any thought to — not a whit, throughout years of promising to crush and replace it.
That bust of a season opener was the president's legislative doing; he could have debuted with something less contentious and a trifle more decided. Instead he blundered ahead, arm in arm with a self-advertised wonk of no policy substance whatsoever.
When he wasn't signing extravagantly unconstitutional travel restrictions and religious bans, the president was unwittingly launching a war with his own political party — not with one faction but two, both conservatives and moderates; which is to suggest, again, his entire party. Meanwhile, the president was conducting yet another two-front war — one with the singularly responsible opposition party, and one with the barrels-of-ink media. Here was Operation Barbarossa in exponential deployment. And during his honeymoon, no less.
Enwrapping all this chaos and conflict has of course been the Trump-Russia Affair — a political train wreck so faultlessly vacuous in conception and execution, it makes one look fondly on the comparative intelligence of Watergate. Who knew that Machiavellian incompetence could be so immense, and strutting, and recidivist?
And just what will this blockhead of a president be doing in his 11th week? God help us. He'll be meeting with Egypt's President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, Jordan's King Abdullah II, and … and … pop a Xanax … China's President Xi Jinping, who will, likewise, swallow Trump whole. The Chinese aren't as carefree and lighthearted as the Germans, whose leader, Angela Merkel, Trump has already met with. A "senior European diplomat" summarized that meeting thus: Trump "frequently and brutally [kept] changing the subject when not interested." Obvious to everyone present was that, as the NYT's Roger Cohen put it, not only Trump's temperament but his "preparedness was roughly that of a fourth grader."
A mere 10 or 11 weeks — all of which seems like an endless eon. One ponders the chronological accumulation of this president's chaos and incompetence — try, just try to imagine their 111th week — and one wonders if such an accumulation is even possible. Can Trump's rank ineptitude and madness just go jaunting along — with impunity, with no earth shattering consequences? That political party Trump is at war with (his own) would be well advised to start asking that question and then planning a constitutional escape hatch — for itself, and all of us.
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