Sound and Fury in D.C.
Freak Show Grows by the Day
CALL IT TREASON? If Donald Trump actually colluded with the Russians to help swing the presidential election for himself (and Vladimir Putin), he should face charges of treason.
But he won’t, of course, and will take the oath of office tomorrow, January 20, even though what’s left of his ethical reputation is in shreds for becoming a Putin patsy.
The running joke in Washington, D.C., is that Trump cavorted on camera with hookers peeing on one another — the notorious, kinky “golden showers” — and is so palsy-walsy with Vlad that he was named (this really is a joke) “Kremlin employee of the month.”
It’s clear now that the Russians saw him coming years ago, like a rube at a county fair in a checked suit too small for him. Someone to slap on the back, pour the drinks, call in the girls, and turn on the video cameras.
Then play the old “compromat” game that the Kremlin worked so well over the years with others, blackmailing him by holding the Trump tapes (how many are there, anyway?) over his head in case he gets hard to handle. Not that the next president of the United States shows anything but admiration for his buddy.
In the meantime, Putin’s boys passed on hacked info to make Hillary Clinton look bad and then voilà! — have Vlad’s boy in the White House. It worked, thanks to help from the poverty-ravaged Rust Belt.
Keep a closet of Trump tapes, such as the 2013 golden shower show in the same Moscow Ritz-Carlton bed where Michelle and Barack slept on a prior visit. What a laugh Putin’s guys must have gotten out of that.
I have read the 35-page dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele (available on BuzzFeed) about all this Red Square electioneering and bedroom hanky-panky, and while it’s still unproven and may never be, it doesn’t strain one’s credulity to imagine a man who’ll grab women’s crotches in public would watch a live sex show.
But, ironically, it’s hard to embarrass Trump. He attacked the news media messenger, issued a denial with a wave of his hand, and figured that was that. I have been to D.C. and Moscow, and they’re beginning to sound alike.
SWARM OF LOCUSTS: As more and more of Trump Inc. floods into Washington, D.C., some remind me of the Snopes family, a ruthless, money-grubbing clan from the pages of William Faulkner’s Southern novels.
The Snopes are corrupt, poor whites who stop at nothing, including barn-burning. There seems to be no end of rapacious Trumps, getting richer by the minute now that they’re seizing the levers of money and power in a 2017 version of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County.
The big question in D.C. is: Who has Donald Trump’s ear, whispering the names of weird polluters named as cabinet members and top-dog officials who strike the public as a series of sick jokes?
There’s Senator Jeff Sessions, lugging his racist background through the congressional laundromat scrubber to become U.S. attorney general in charge of civil-rights laws, all the better to ignore them.
Crackpots are already circling the White House. Anti-vaccination wackos. Global-warming deniers. What next? The loonies’ freak show grows by the day.
How could a talk-show host and Fox news commentator such as Monica Crowley be proposed as the senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council when her main claim to fame is a book she’s accused of building with 50 examples of plagiarism?
I had to go to college to learn about Keynesian economics, but it seems that all Crowley needed to do was lift a section from a 2009 published article in Investopedia.
Isn’t anyone checking the credentials of these people? Crowley’s even accused of employing plagiarism to write her PhD dissertation. The embarrassed publisher of her book What the (Bleep) Just Happened? has now pulled it from the market. Crowley pulled out of the proposed position with Trump this week.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a five-star, 100 percent, major-league, full-time prevaricator in the White House.
But we will starting tomorrow, and I have a feeling that he actually believes some of this stuff he blurts out. Someone feeds it to him, and it sounds good.
In the real world, Trump wouldn’t know a fact from a fart.
