Saved by the powers behind the throne
JUST hours before Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report into Russian interference in the US election, deluded Donald Trump likened himself to a Game of Thrones hero.
Posting a meme of himself looking out onto the horizon, surrounded by dramatic mist, he wrote: “No collusion. No obstruction. For the haters and the radical left democrats – GAME OVER.”
The President could not have picked a more apt comparison as the parallel between the hit show and his time in the White House. Both are fantasy dramas.
But no sooner had Trump, aided by his flunkies, cleared himself of any wrongdoing, the real truth emerged.
What the US leader described as “complete and total exoneration” would have left even the most imaginative of scriptwriters struggling to make it plausible. Contrary to the sycophantic spin of his Attorney General William Barr, the unavoidable conclusion of Mueller’s exhaustive report is that Trump tried, and tried hard, to obstruct justice as government officials endeavoured to get to the bottom of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation,” Mueller wrote, “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.” It turns out Mueller and his team of prosecutors and investigators found “substantial evidence” Trump broke the law on countless occasions by attempting to shut
down or interfere with the nearlytwo-year Russia investigation. In addition to pointing to possible criminality, even the heavily redacted report revealed a White House riddled with dysfunction and distrust, one in which Trump and some of his aides lie, with contempt for one another and the public. Within the 448-page pages, there was even Trump’s own assessment of Mueller’s appointment as special counsel.
“This is the end of my presidency,” he moaned. “I’m f ***** .”
There is also the laying bare of the President’s public bluster, evident in his Twitter rants, and his own timidity embodied in Trump’s lawyerly written responses to Mueller’s queries, full of “I do not recall” and “I have no recollection”. Trump may survive, thanks to advisers who chose to refuse or just ignore his demands to do what the former White House counsel Donald McGahn at one point referred to as “crazy s***”. Trump is shown as so attentive to covering his tracks that at one point he scolds McGahn for taking notes during a meeting.
“I never had a lawyer who took notes,” Trump is quoted as saying. McGahn responded that he was a “real lawyer”.
If nothing more comes of Mueller’s report, it is a correction of Trump’s ridiculous assertion that he hires “only the best people”. Though he has just enough staffers with just enough legal and moral decency to save his skin, he surrounds himself with scores of unqualified toadies.
The bottom line is that Trump tried to obstruct justice while some around him refused. No wonder, then, in less than 24 hours after the report went online, paperback versions took the top two spots in Amazon’s new-release sales ranking.
If it weren’t based on truth, the document would be believed to be a best-selling work of political fiction with more twists and turns than Games of Thrones.
Sadly, unlike the show, Trump’s games are far from in their final season. FOR a car salesman, Elon Musk hasn’t done badly.
NASA has just announced it has awarded his SpaceX company a £53-million contract for a daring mission set to save Earth from the threat of apocalyptic wipeout. The US space agency has instructed the Tesla boss’s aerospace company to help in the first attempt to deflect an asteroid by purposely crashing into it.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will look to divert any objects which threaten the Earth’s atmosphere.
The mission is set to be launched by a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in June 2021.
The following year the spacecraft will attempt to crash into a 540-footwide “Didymoon” travelling at a speed of 13,500mph. With the mission, NASA said it would look to “demonstrate a kinetic impact”. “The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6km/s, with the aid of an onboard camera and sophisticated autonomous navigation software,” the website reads. “The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one per cent, enough to be measured using telescopes on Earth.”
The collision is expected to redirect the course of the asteroid when it comes within 6.8 million miles of Earth. To put the distance in context, the Moon is 240,000 miles away and the Sun is 93 million miles away. Unsurprisingly Musk welcomed the cash boost, tweeting: “Thanks on behalf of the SpaceX team. We love NASA.”
They could always save themselves a lot of money and just send up one of his Teslas in autopilot mode. Given the number of accidents drivers have had on Earth, it’ll crash into that asteroid even if you don’t want it to.