Sunday afternoon, America was treated to the latest barrage of venom directed at special counsel Robert Mueller by Donald Trump. Tweet One, posted at 3:35 p.m., could have been labeled Trump’s greatest hits. No collusion! Witchhunt! Fraudulent dossier! Angry Democrats! Illegal scam! But it was Tweet Two, posted at 4:12 p.m., which reminds us not what the liar-in-chief does, but how he reaches each and every one of his inaccurate conclusions.
Is Robert Mueller ever going to release his conflicts of interest with respect to President Trump, including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business relationship, I turned him down to head the FBI (one day before appointment as S.C.) & Comey is his close friend..
Donald Trump believes everyone on earth behaves in the same manner as he would in a similar circumstance. All you need to do is parse the 480 characters in the above tweet.
- Robert Mueller must have conflicts of interest because I have conflicts of interest.
- Robert Mueller must have “nasty and contentious business relationships” because my business landscape is littered with nasty and contentious relationships.
- Robert Mueller is seeking revenge because I did not make him FBI director (assuming Mueller would have ever taken the job if offered) because I want revenge every time someone does not give me what I want.
- Robert Mueller defines friendship in terms of loyalty which includes protecting one another at all costs because that is what I expect of my close friends.
The nature of this diatribe should come as no surprise. From day one of his campaign, projecting his own personal failings on others has been the primary modus operandus in Trump world. At the top of the list was his charge Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were trying to rig the election when his campaign was doing exactly that.
Some media outlets have picked up on this, but only in the realm of politics. What is becoming more clear every day is Trump approaches both foreign and domestic policy from the same perspective. Assume for argument sake the Trump/Putin relationship is not dependent on Russian money to finance Trump properties or kompromat. Does anyone truly believe Trump would not still have an affinity for the Russian dictator? Trump would admire Putin simply because he runs his country in much the same fashion as Trump ran his business. Staffed by family and friends. No transparency. Loyalty based on fear. Putin runs Russia the way Trump used to run his organization and the way he wishes he could, and in some instances tries to, run the United States.
Which brings me to the latest example where Trump again used his “my way” mentality to justify that which is unjustifiable, the failure to comply with a court order to reunify ALL of the parents and children separated as a result of the Trump/Sessions zero-tolerance policy. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw set a July 27 deadline for reunification of the approximately 2,500 affected families. Late Friday, the Trump administration declared “mission accomplished” although there were only 1,440 documented cases of reunification.
How is this possible? The administration claimed approximately 650 children (according to a report by NBC’s Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley) were “ineligible” for reunification. Where had we heard that before? In response to lawsuits filed by unpaid or underpaid contractors, Trump lawyers argued the workers were not entitled to payment often based on technicalities or inaccurate interpretations of the work orders. Therefore, Trump had no obligation to comply with the contracts on which the contested payments were based. Just as Trump claims he was an ethical business man (if you just ignore the thousands of people he scammed and the promises he broke), he now asks us to discount the yet uncoupled parents and children who do not fit his falsely congratulatory pat on the back for meeting Judge Sabraw’s deadline.
In the spirit of Paul Anka’s lyrics to the Frank Sinatra classic, “My Way,” we can only hope:
And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain…
For what it’s worth,
Dr. ESP
Yes! This tendency of his always makes me think of the old PeeWee Herman comeback: “I know you are, but what am I?” The tried and true “I’m rubber and you’re glue…” also comes to mind.
When laws are not enforced – especially over time – we get to this terrible place.
Yes, we have arrived at a point described by Arendt: “the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true…one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”