Looking Forward to the Past

Leaking continued last week

July 30, 2017

Feels repetitive. How can that be?

Well, we survived another week of Trump chaos and it’s been a big seven days. We’ve watched team Trump force out the chief of staff by calling him names – bullied the guy right out of his job. Very gangster.  And, in an all-time first, we got to hear the President use sexual innuendo in a speech to the Boy Scouts, then follow up a couple days later with encouraging brutality while speaking to the police. The Donald’s been on a roll.

Additionally, last week, Senate Republicans, again, reinforced their theory that government can’t do anything, by not passing a bill that no one actually wanted. The Draconian bill, their third failure in a week, was sold as a “way to get the debate into committee – where they could collaborate with the House on a real bill”. Yeah, except the House was quietly preparing to pass whatever the Senate sent them – as is. The House leadership kind of tipped their hand when they started changing the rule that required a one day wait between Senate passage and a House vote. Collaborate? Don’t think so. They weren’t going to wait single day.

So, the Senate chickened-out. (Now, there’s a sentence we rarely see.)

The Donald, of course, responded to the loss by threatening the Republicans who voted against it. Well, actually he threatened the women. (Do you know that a Google search of “Trump Threats” yields 79 million results? A “Clinton Threat” search only gets 36 million. The Donald just keeps on winning.  But, I digress.)

The public flogging of Jeff Sessions has continued through the week. Trump keeps swinging and Jeff, not a young man, keeps taking it. Odd, either he’s too dense to know he supposed to quit or he enjoys it. Don’t know which, but have my suspicions.

Trump’s big randomizer for the week was his banning transgender people from military service. (By randomizer I mean an outrageous, from out of nowhere, accusation or policy pronouncement. The Donald likes to drop randomizers every week, or so – just to keep things amusing.) The country reacted to this latest rant as expected, with revulsion.

Scores of other subplots percolate in the background: the Russian investigations stumble on, conflict of interest questions keep surfacing, the Trump legal team interest turns to pardons, …

After two-hundred-sixty-four days of Trump leadership, this is what a typical week looks like. And looking forward, we can expect another of the same. Except for the big randomizer thing; that’s always random.

The republic suspects that the Donald is trying to over-stimulate us into submission. It won’t work; if Jeff Sessions can take it, so can we.

Jail the Tyrant,
osv