When any old hero will do
It’s a sad day when Jeff Sessions, the 84th attorney-general of the DSA (Disunited States of America), is hailed a hero after being forced to sign a letter of resignation by President Donald Trump. The former senator from Alabama was an early supporter of the Trump campaign, and has been strongly opposed to illegal immigration and sanctuary cities. Allegations of racism swirled round his appointment to attorney-general, but now that he is the latest to be let go in order to protect the president from a special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Sessions emerged from his forced exit looking like Christ on a bike to cheers from a tribe of his fellow Americans. Never underestimate the US heroism industry – any excuse of a man will do.
Meanwhile, that other tribe that Trump likes to call the enemy of the people, the White House Reporters Tribe, have been on the particularly savage receiving end of President Grump’s postmidterm election "blues’’ over losing control of the House of Representatives.
Watching the White House press conferences is always a scintillating spectator sport. The warmup to the showdown is your typical Trump messianic address, the latest an endless self-congratulation of how well he’d done in the midterms, complete with bitter and spurious stats comparing himself to his bete noire, Barack Obama.
There was also a nostalgic walk down memory lane to the good old days when he and Oprah Winfrey used to hang out together at each other’s luxury pads. He voiced grave intellectual doubts about her latest assurances that she was absolutely 100 per cent sure she wasn’t going to run for president in 2020.
Sadly, he wondered if Oprah still liked him, because he said sentimentally, sending her a secret squirrel message, that he still liked her. Big orange Barkus was still willing, especially when the crazy ride is over and everyone goes back to their old corners. As if that’s going to happen now that so much has been unleashed.
There was also a loud and clear warning to the new Dems in the House that he was prepared to play nice with them, but he could do nasty too if they pressed him on any investigation into matters such as his tax returns, which are, according to the president, too complex and difficult for the ordinary Joe to understand, so the public should be spared their dull and dusty details.
By the time Trump was ready to take questions from the press, his gathering sense of loss over the House of Representatives was hitting him hard and he was in a mood to accost CNN reporter Jim Acosta.
Trump’s habitual hostility to ‘‘horrible’’ CNN journalists is legendary. It is a setpiece for him to abuse them for their provenance alone. But this time Trump’s act was even more villainous and showy as a White House aide tried to wrest the microphone from Acosta as he asked perfectly reasonable questions.
Footage of this small scuffle was doctored to look dodgy by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she whose pearl necklace serves as Frankenstein neck bolts to keep her lying head attached.
Trump, in the manner of the late R D Muldoon, is addicted to intimidation to scare off hard questions, and wants only fluff pieces to tell his fiction. With journalists and their organs thin on the ground, maybe one day all too soon Trump will get his wish and there will be no hack left to write even ‘‘nice things about me’’. Deprived of reading about his heroic acts, how will the narcissist know himself then? For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Colossians 1:13-14