Trump administration reaffirms it has no scruples
The reality TV show presidency is on a roll.
Donald Trump said Bahamian people who lost everything in a Category 5 hurricane will not be given refuge in the U.S. without valid passports and visas. The storm victims who lost their homes, livelihoods, relatives and every possession they ever had apparently should have had the foresight to get proper U.S. documents before the storm struck.
The White House is exploring ways to keep out refugees in general.
Leaders of the Afghan Taliban, the terrorists harboring the al Qaeda murderers who killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11,
2001, were invited to a summit by Donald Trump at Camp David the week of sacred 9/11 remembrances. Then they killed another American, and Trump rescinded the invitation. No Afghan government official was invited.
John Bolton, the national security adviser who told Trump his Taliban plan was balmy — and who also opposed Trump’s overly friendly overtures to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — became Trump’s third national security adviser to be fired. Bolton served at the displeasure of the president, but there is a long list of top officials who have been dumped and replaced by “acting” administrators so Trump doesn’t have to deal with people who have been confirmed in their jobs by the Senate and have actual authority. The National Security Council effectively has been gutted.
Defense Department officials were persuaded to divert $3.6 billion from such previously approved expenditures as a middle school at Fort Campbell (where for 18 years, service members have been being sent on deployments to war in the Middle East), so that Trump could say his wall on the southern border is being built. This sleight of hand came after Congress refused to allocate the money, saying the wall is a boondoggle, prompting Trump to shut down the government, which cost federal employees a month of salary at Christmas.
Defense officials also approved hundreds of air crews, who were ferrying supplies to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, flying to Scotland to spend more money to refuel than it would cost at U.S. bases so that crew members had stay at one of Trump’s costly golf resorts, thus diverting government money to him and keep a nearby airfield in business.
Vice President Mike Pence and his entourage also stayed at a Trump golf resort even though it was 180 miles away from his meeting in Ireland. Even though the Constitution forbids a president from benefiting monetarily from his job, Pence said he saw nothing wrong with the arrangement.
Even though 90percent of Americans (and 80 percent of gun owners) want enhanced universal background checks for people who want to buy guns, Trump told Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell he wouldn’t sign pending legislation. So McConnell says senators won’t vote on the issue.
When Trump met in the Oval Office with top Russians and Russian state-owned media (but with no Americans present), he revealed some top-secret information Russia was not supposed to know. Worried a secret informant in the Kremlin might be compromised, possibly even by the president, the CIA brought the mole back to the U.S., thus losing a source of information about what Vladimir Putin’s communist government is planning.
Since Trump scuttled an agreement hammered out by six nations to prevent Iran from continuing its efforts to get nuclear weapons, Iran has announced it is expanding nuclear research.
Reelection campaign surrogates for Trump are going to leaders around the world hinting that U.S. foreign aid might be forthcoming if they have any dirt on Trump’s potential 2020 political rivals.
Alabamians, who never saw a drop of rain from Hurricane Dorian, nonetheless were warned repeatedly by Trump that they were right in the hurricane projected path. He even used a Sharpie to redraw a government weather map. The administration later forced government weather scientists to lie about the storm’s path so Trump wouldn’t be seen as having made a mistake, which he did.
When you encounter one of the four out of 10 Americans who says he or she will vote again for Trump in 2020, raise your eyebrows, walk away and marvel that you just met somebody who must be really rich, loved that $2 trillion 2017 tax cut that you didn’t even notice, has no need of a decent salary increase, doesn’t farm and doesn’t care that the stream-of-consciousness president of the United States has no scruples.