Cracking Up

Cracking Up

          It’s falling apart for Trump…again.  How many lives can this cat have?  Is this a dead cat bounce or is he likely to rise again from the ashes and regain lost momentum?  He was getting pummeled about his handling of El Paso and Dayton (while his fellow septuagenarian, Joe Biden was getting slammed for his thoughts on Houston and Michigan…ouch!) and then the markets started to gyrate.  Out of desperation, he came up with his being The Chosen One standing strong on China and then pushing Jews to the brink of his own brand of anti-Semitism by calling them that choose not to vote for him as either stupid or disloyal to Israel…you choose.  As the markets took his trade war to heart with the inverted yield curve poking him in the butt, he did what any sane grand-distractor would do, he obfuscated the situation by going on-again, off-again with the tariff war just to make the markets practice their dance steps.  Good, things are just where he wants them for everyone to be distracted from the new horrendous poll results while he is away at the G-7 in Biarritz.  What could go wrong on the Riviera in August?

          How about everything?  A bad handshake with Manny Macron followed by a yukky lunch at the Café de Paris in a chair that was a bit too tight for him.  I’ve sat in those chairs and they are a bit snug around the side arms, so who was supposed to watch for that when he accepted an impromptu lunch with Manny?  Melania was off practicing her pucker for Justin Trudeau (have you ever seen such love in a woman’s eyes as that pre-kiss photo?)  That whole Amazon fire wasn’t Trump’s problem, but he did enjoy watching Jairo go after Manny’s old lady.  After all, someone had to say something sooner or later to Macron.  You can’t go into a May/December thing in the reverse direction intended by nature and then wonder why someone might compare your wife’s face to an old Gucci handbag.  And what’s with the empty chair thing?  Since when can’t you cut class without getting nailed?  Just because it was Teacher’s pet topic of climate change?

          And then Trump gets repeatedly nailed for being off his nut by giving a simple 90-minute rant and press conference at the end of the G-7.  There were at least 10 recorded major gaffes that he got unfairly tagged with. 

1. The presidency will cost Trump $3-5 billion.  Wow, that’s over $1 billion per year even with the taxpayers footing the bill for his golf dates. That’s rough.  Poor Donny.
2. The President of the United States ran an infomercial for his Doral Miami Resort as the venue for next year’s G-7.  What’s wrong with that, it’s a great resort?
3. Apparently, Doral is the best kept secret in the Florida Resort world as explained for many minutes by the President of the United States to a roomful of Fake Press people.  Why do they always pick on Trump anyway?  All because it has bungalows?
4. “In my opinion, I’m not going to make any money. I don’t want to make money. I don’t care about making money. If I wanted to make money, I wouldn’t worry about $3 billion to $5 billion.”  But didn’t he just bring up the $3-5 billion?  And why does NOT worrying about it make him money?  Can we take a mulligan on that one?
5. His gut tells him that Iran wants to straighten out all this mess.  And he is willing to meet with Rouhani to get the ball rolling.  The fact that Rouhani wants no part of this is apparently not part of the gut-check.
6. Trump does nothing for political reasons.  Very believable and sane.
7. A lot of people (only not the ones willing to be quoted or who sit at the leadership table of the G-7) say they want Russia back in the club.  And why do people think Trump is Putin’s puppet?
8. That place in Ukraine, what’s-it-called, was taken from Obama and it was all so embarrassing to him that he got bested by Putin that he had to remove Putin from the G-8 because all those inferior submarines around that place that are not as big as ours were not enough to have stopped this even with the right – whatever. Everyone tells me that Obama was the worst.
9. He had many (and not just one) high level calls with China (China says they must have changed their number because they have had none) and Melania is best friends with Kim Jung Un (who, when she kissed Justin Troudeau, is who she thought she was kissing).
10. Hey, it’s how I negotiate, stupid.  Don’t you know anything?

I went to see Hadestown on Broadway last night. It’s the modern mythological story of how Orpheus goes into the underworld to rescue Eurydice using his song and his love. It was a magnificent performance that was both timeless and timely, as best shown in the lyrics (written some fifteen years ago!) of the haunting and evocative song sung by Hades in deep bass,  “Why We Build the Wall”:

Why do we build the wall?

We build the wall to keep us free

How does the wall keep us free?

The wall keeps out the enemy

And we build the wall to keep us free

Who do we call the enemy?

The enemy is poverty

And the wall keeps out the enemy

And we build the wall to keep us free

Because we have and they have not!

Because they want what we have got!

And the wall keeps out the enemy

And we build the wall to keep us free

What do we have that they should want?

We have a wall to work upon!

And our work is never done

And the war is never won

We build the wall to keep us free

There are now cracks in the wall.  Donald Trump is now telling his staffers to seize property and break environmentalist laws to build that wall, and make sure that wall is jet black.  Whoa!  The foundational basis of capitalism is property rights.  It is central.  Trump doesn’t realize it yet, but he has just given Elizabeth Warren the pro-capitalist mallet to hit the silly bastard over the head with. He did the near-impossible, offending conservatives and liberals to their core with one set of sweeping and repeated commands.  Commands that are anti-capitalist, anti-environmental, anti-lawful and, just for good measure, somewhat racist and fully fascist.   He is beyond cracking up. He is now officially fully cracked.