CAN ONLY CONSERVATIVES STOP TRUMP?

 Recently, Fox News interviewer and host Brett Baier did something that is almost never seen on that network: an honest interview with Donald Trump in which he asked real questions, came prepared with notes and pointed out Trump's own contradictions in his policies.  In other words, the kind of interview that he should have had to go through years ago, but rarely has.  At one point Baier pointed out that in 2016 Trump  said that new would surround himself with the "best people", and then read off a list of 12 different people that he once chose to work for him that he has now broken with (often by using an immature nickname for them).  It was a devastating moment showing how much complete loyalty he expects while providing so little in return. (Although it barely scratched the surface of people who had fallen out with him after working with him, such a list would be very long,  stretching back decades!).  While it remains to be seen if this interview will have any actual effect on Trump and the polls (some foolish comments he made may well be used against him in his missing documents trial), the fact that it happened at all is surprising.  Usually, Trump's visits to Fox involve fawning hosts asking him puffball questions, and the fact that he looked genuinely flustered at one point shows that he certainly didn't expect the kind of grilling from Baier that he got.  While this interview may be an anomaly, it could portend a possible break with Trump for the network.  We'll see.

This tough interview with Baier coincides with the entrance of former Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie into the presidential race.  Christie has had an odd political career: his term as Governor from 2010-2018 saw him go from a 77% approval rating for his handling of Hurricane Sandy to a measly  15% in the wake a scandal about unnecessary traffic stoppages that caused big traffic jams.  In 2018 he unsuccessfully ran for the Republican Presidential nomination, and later was one of the first Republicans to endorse Trump.  Although he never had an official role in the Trump administration, he did often advise the former president, especially regarding his presidential debate with the  candidate Joe Biden.  Christie, who's bullying personal nature has often been seen publicly, advised Trump to interrupt Biden as a way to bring out his former stutter.  So it's Christie we have to blame for Trump's behavior in that utterly shameful first presidential debate in which Trump barely let Biden start a sentence.  (It was an example of a big bully advising an even bigger bully to be a super bully!)

But it was in that preparation for that debate that the seeds of Christie's falling out with Trump were sown.  Shortly after that meeting, Christie got a case of covid so bad that he was near death.  He is convinced that it was Trump himself who gave it to him, saying that the former president was the only person that he knew was infected that he came in contact with without a mask. Christie had assumed that Trump was negative because he was not told about Trump's positive test, (and, of course, Christie wasn't the only person that Trump dangerously exposed) and to make matters worse, Trump called Christie while he was sick and asked him if he was going to tell people that he was the one who gave it to him.  

So, yes, for Christie, opposing Trump for the nomination is really more personal than political.  So far, Christie poll numbers have been lousy, but he still is doing something that no other Republican running against Trump is doing: calling him out by name.  While other candidates like Nikki Haley and Tim Scott seem to be angling to be Trump's vice president pick by mostly saying nice things about him, Christie is laying down the truth.  He's called Trump  "a petulant child.”, said  his behavior was "vanity run amuck" and called the charges against him in the missing documents case "devastating". (And I for one must admit that I love seeing a bully get bullied!) Now Christie certainly isn't the first Republican to take on Trump (remember Mitt Romney's sad attempt to pull back his party in 2016?), he is the first who used to be a professional prosecutor who isn't afraid to get down in the muck that Trump lives in.  Hopefully, Christie's verbal attacks will wound Trump in the primaries, even if Christie himself doesn't benefit from them.  (He could be Ron DeSantis's best friend).  Christie knows that the best place to attack Trump will be on stage at the Republican primary debates, but whether or not he will get there is another question, given that he needs 15% approval in the polls to qualify to be there.  Even then, the cowardly Trump may just refuse to join in the debate because he will probably be way ahead of the nearest contender, so all it could do is hurt him.  (He's probably right about that).

Still, Christie will be able to spread his attacks against Trump into areas that most Republican voters caught in their conservative media bubble won't be able to ignore.  And with Fox News possibly starting to turn on Trump, not to mention the criminal charges piling up against him, it's possible that America may finally be through with the man who has been trashing American politics, and  the office of the presidency, since 2015.

STUPID?

“I do whine, because I want to win, and I’m not happy about not winning, and I am a whiner, and I keep whining and whining until I win.” (Trump: CNN, August 11, 2015)

 Now that former President Donald Trump has been formally indicted with 37 criminal charges by Special Council Jack Smith concerning the former president's holding on to classified documents, one thing is clear: the absurd idea that Trump is a smart man must be abandoned by anyone with any level of honesty.  Because Trump is about to face criminal charges for crimes that he appears to have committed for no reason other than plain stupidity and a complete lack of understanding of just what the office of the presidency is and how our government works.  And the important thing to understand here is that these documents were classified for a a reason; some of them contain the names of American agents in hostile foreign countries whose lives would be in danger if the wrong people were to see them.  In other words, files that shouldn't be stored in a bathroom.

“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” Trump: Washington Post, 27/2/17

Remember the timeline here: Mar-o-Largo was raided back in August of last year, and at first it seemed to have come out of nowhere.  But over time we were told that Trump had been contacted repeatedly by the government concerning the classified documents that he took out of the White House after he left.  And we now know that he only returned some of the documents and appears to have lied about what he held on to.  And in new information that has come out, we have discovered that he kept the documents in random places in Mar-o-Lago, like in a bathroom, and  a ball room.   Along with Trump, his aide, Walt Nauta, has also been charged for moving boxes of documents around  and later lying about it to investigators (it sounds like he was seen  moving them on a security camera before saying he didn't).

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)

The question that arises here is simple: why did he do this?  What reason did he have to hang on to classified documents when he could have very easily  returned them?  While it is possible that he held on to them for nefarious reasons, like selling them to a foreign government, the more likely reason seems to be that he just likes having them to show off to people, to remind them that he used to be president and  got important briefings.  Like a small child, Trump assumes that every document he ever got while he was in office is his to do whatever he wants with forever.  He's a grown man shouting "MINE! MINE!"

“I’m speaking with myself, No. 1, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. … My primary consultant is myself.” (Trump: MSNBC, March 16, 2016)

Is this kind of behavior really so unexpected?  To me Trump is worst kind of fool: one who is utterly convinced of his own intelligence, and who was lucky enough to be born into a family of enormous wealth and raised around people who never told him he was wrong,    So, to him it makes sense that he can call himself a smart businessman while stumbling into 6 bankruptcies and being bailed out by his father to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid loans.  A list of his failed business ideas include steaks, vodka, bottled water, a magazine, vitamins, an airline, a board game and, of course, a so called university that was such a blatant con that he had to pay a 25 million dollar class action settlement to people who had been scammed by it.   A list of Trump's stupid ideas would be a long one, here's some of them: that the sound from windmills cause cancer, that climate change is a Chinese hoax to destroy the American economy, that joking about sex parties he used to go to was a good topic to bring up at a Boy Scouts Jamboree, that we could prevent forest fires by raking the forest floor, that injecting bleach is a way to cure covid, and, he may have even possibly suggested that nuking a hurricane could be a good way to stop it!  He also appeared to once crudely use a marker to alter a weather map to conform to a tweet he earlier made, and then proudly held it up for the TV cameras to show that he was right. And more seriously, he completely mishandled the outbreak of covid and held a masks optional  rally in Tulsa Oklahoma during the height of the pandemic. And now, it appears that Trump not only held on to classified documents after being told to return them, he allegedly openly showed them to visitors without any kind of security clearance.   A transcript of a recording has been released in which Trump once held up a secret document to some visitors and said , "This is secret information! Look!  Look at this!"   On that same recording he even admitted that the document was still classified because he didn't declassify it as president.  In other words, this fool of a man admitted to committing a crime while being recorded.  That's going to be hard to defend in court.

"Testing is a double-edged sword. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people ‘slow the testing down please’."(Trump: speech, June 2020)

Yes, Trump's life is the perfect example of one of the worst things about America: that it's better to be born rich than smart or talented.  I only hope that he may finally have found the one thing he can't get away with, no matter how much money he has.

"My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars."- Trump Campaign speech, 2015.

THE DEBT CEILING DANCE

 President Joe Biden negotiating and then signing the debt ceiling today after it was passed by congress gives credence to his 2016 campaign's assertion that  Biden was going to be a good deal maker with congress, given his decades of experience in the Senate.  And while I'm glad that the deal was passed and the government can go back to its usual gridlock without the global economy being threatened, the whole debt ceiling drama is a manufactured, absurd dance.  

The debt ceiling is, basically, the amount of money that the country can borrow to pay off its debts; without it, government bonds, salaries, and payments to contractors would not be honored, with dire consequences for both the nation's economy and the world's.  The national debt really began to grow in the late '80's, after years of massive defense spending and tax cuts for the rich under Ronald Reagan found the nation falling into debt.  The number really climbed during the early part of the 20th century, as then President George W Bush fought two wars and created the Department of Homeland Security without raising taxes or cutting enough other spending to cover those costs. 

At the time congress passed the debt ceiling with little to no serious discussion.  But then when the Tea Party movement saw Republicans win the majority of The House of Representatives in 2010, they seized on it as a political issue, threatening then President Barack Obama with economic calamity if he didn't overturn his signature piece of legislation, The Affordable Care Act. Republicans, like Representative Paul Ryan, gave interviews in which they claimed that they were only concerned about reducing the deficit calling it an existential threat. The essential dishonestly of that stand was shown a few years later when Republicans not only voted to pass the debt ceiling when Donald Trump was President, they also, led by Ryan himself, eagerly passed Trump's massive corporate tax cut that added more to the same deficit they were so worried about when Obama was President.

While the debt ceiling that was just signed was passed by a congressional bi partisan vote, with both right and left wing politicians disappointed in it, the only reason it was a problem in the first place was Republican obstinacy; you would think that a party that only bare won the House and lost seats in the Senate in the midterms would not have been so brazen, but that's what happened.  And if they really supported lowering the deficit, they would at least consider raising taxes on the rich or lowering defense spending, but of course those possibilities were never even discussed by them.   

Now that this manufactured crisis is behind us, the question arises as to how to handle the debt ceiling in the future. Many pundits have said that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which states that "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned", could be interpreted to mean that Congress cannot actually suspend the debt limit. But if Biden had tried that approach and basically done nothing about the debt, the validity of that argument would have inevitably been settled by a conservative Supreme Court who very well may have ruled against Biden, even if economic chaos was the result.  So, in the name of avoiding an unnecessary economic crash, Biden negotiated a deal, with the debt ceiling issue put off until 2025 and who knows what congress and The White House will be like by then?  Either way, the debt has been kicked down the road again, and that's mostly a good thing, although the country still needs to get serious about raising taxes on the rich in my opinion.