A message to you Rudy... beware the storm that’s a-coming
hired,” it trembles. Despite being a climate change denier, the President has shown there is no one in the States better at recycling than him.
Each month he discards one piece of ‘trash’ in his administration, only to replace them with another.
The guy can’t even find a doctor who is not an unmitigated disaster while his head of Environmental Protection Agency is facing at least 11 federal charges.
This, after Trump has fired his secretary of state, communications director, FBI chief, press secretary, national security adviser, chief of staff and chief strategist to name but a few.
So when Trump told ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani he was hired as part of his legal team, the country’s bookmakers began taking bets over how long he would last.
And boy did it not take long before the odds were shortened.
Last week Giuliani, who was brought in to become the President’s mouthpiece over the investigation into his alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, dropped his first bombshell.
For months Trump denied any knowledge of a $130,000 payment made to the X-rated actress by his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to buy her silence. But a day into the job, Giuliani tells the world how his new boss knew of the payment all along. It was a stunning revelation.
The world has been led to believe Cohen’s claim that he funded the payment himself by borrowing against his home. It was, it now seems, a clear attempt to avoid suspicion the money was in fact from Trump’s election campaign funds which would be a serious breach of the law.
“Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll (sic) in this transaction,” twittered Trump in defence.
It came after Giuliani had told how the payment was “for personal reasons”.
Speaking in the same gibberish the Trump does, he said: “The President had been hurt, personally, not politically, personally so much. And the first lady, by some of the false allegations, that one more false allegation, six years old.”
So in effect what Giuliani was saying is that Daniels was kept quiet not to prevent harm to the President during the election but to protect Melania from a broken heart.
Trump is hardly the first president or politician to lie about his sexual escapades.
Bill Clinton was a master at that game. But with Clinton, at least as far as we know, he didn’t pay anyone through backchannel fixers to keep them quiet – all in order to influence a campaign.
Trump’s dismissal of hush money payments and nondisclosure agreements as no big deal (“very common among celebrities and people of wealth”) stinks of entitlement and sexism, but he’d be foolish to think the people and the justice system won’t figure out why Daniels got paid out.
This whole episode is sadly typical of America’s morally compromised president, and the party that continues to defend him.
With friends like Giuliani, who needs enemies?
FORTY years after Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to raping a 13-year-old girl, Oscar bosses suddenly seem to have found their moral compass following Bill Cosby’s conviction.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences appears to be finally agreeing on a set of standards when it comes to expelling convicted rapists.
Oscar bosses announced they have thrown out Cosby and Polanski “in accordance with the organization’s Standards of Conduct” and as part of a drive “to uphold the Academy’s values of respect and human dignity”. Director Polanski had remained a member up until last week despite the board kicking out Harvey Weinstein, who although admitted some of the accusations against him, hasn’t been criminally convicted.
Polanski pleaded guilty to raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977, then fled the US rather than serve his sentence. The belated move shows how disgusting an organisation the Academy is.
Hollywood needs to expel itself.
This whole episode is typical of America’s morally compromised president