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    • Apr 23, 2017

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S TOYS


AN EMPOWERED FOOL IS AT THE HELM

Virtually all US presidents seem to learn very quickly how to use America’s military might to kill, maim and destroy. It doesn’t seem to matter at all what they promised to the never suspecting populace about this critical issue. Get elected, drop bombs.

So it seems completely natural that Trump would almost immediately gravitate to the “toys” that come with the office. In his scorched earth rise to political stardom, Trump at one time or another promised everything to the American people and nothing to the American people, so he didn’t even have to pause for a fact check on his way to the toy box.

Now that Trump has awakened to the notion that children are maimed and killed by “bad guy” bombs, we can only hope he figures out that “good guy” bombs often do the same thing to children, and lots of others. Maybe Princess Ivanka will whisper something about this to him over yummy chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago. Or perhaps, his empathetic Attorney General Jefferson Sessions will ominously note that kids are usually up to no good when they get in the way of all those bombs.

While these vignettes on a comedy show would give us a good laugh, the real Trump and his real toys are giving the real world a real scare. Trump is flailing away without the requisite historical context, the relevant substantive and procedural knowledge, the principles, or the respect for the office or the truth that are minimum requirements to govern wisely and to successfully confront the complex issues of the day. To fill his personal voids, he turns to sycophant courtesans and right-wing ideologues, most of whom lack the same critical fundamentals that he lacks.

Trump’s disinterest in learning and building a substantive base for decision-making is appalling. It was widely reported that Trump went into critical meetings with the President of China to discuss, among other things, avoiding a nuclear disaster on the Korean Peninsula without a basic understanding of the relationship between China and North Korea. It was left to the President of China to fill this significant void however he saw fit.**

Apparently neither Prince Jared nor anyone else around King Trump thought it necessary to educate him about the historical context that the Chinese President was bringing to the meeting and the consequences of this historical context for a constructive outcome. Perhaps Prince Jared was so busy re-envisioning government that even he didn’t have time for a consult with experts at the State Department on China and North Korea that he could have then distilled down for the seemingly minuscule attention span of the King.

Now that many of us are way beyond surprise at how little Trump knows about the substantive issues of the day and the procedural context for addressing those issues, there appears to be nothing anyone can do about it. The same press that abdicated early in holding candidate Trump to account now clutches at every straw in the wind to try to legitimize the King. Drop some bombs on a Syrian airfield and before you can say “mother of all bombs,” some media moron is talking about the “Trump Doctrine.” The guy can’t get more than a sentence out of his mouth without butchering his own language, and all of a sudden he has a “doctrine.”

While you try to grapple with the word “doctrine” and Trump in the same sentence, keep in mind that all this doctrine talk started with horrible images of gassed and dead children in Syria, images that apparently Princess Ivanka brought to the King as a means of distracting him from his ongoing concern about losing the popular vote. The emotional “no dead babies” line in the sand doctrine seemed destined for greatness, until round two of the “doctrine” brought us the “mother of all bombs” without a single word about dead babies.***

To further confuse the “doctrine” crowd, there are thousands of babies in East Africa now dying of starvation with tens of thousands more to come.**** Yet, instead of dropping $16 million worth of food from a cargo plane to save some of these children, the King opened that cargo hatch to drop $16 million worth of bomb on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. Apparently Princess Ivanka didn’t get to the article in her fashion magazine that covers starving children.

As you wait for doctrinal clarification from Sean the Joker, be reminded that the King is the keeper of the “toys.” He alone has the final say about which toys to take out of the toy box. And just to make sure that we all know this, the King’s choral refrain of “all options are on the table” is sung from every right-wing megaphone across the land. To the King, this seems to mean little more than one from column A and one from column B. To me, it means that a dangerous ignoramus has spread his new “toys” on a figurative table and is trying as hard as he can to choose which one to play with at the expense of others.

So, it now falls to many among us to hold our collective breath and wait for some manageable disaster that can be laid directly at the feet of the King, where Princess Ivanka, Prince Jared and Sean the Joker cannot shield him from the truth that others see. This is a dangerous reality for a nation that has chosen to be led to the promised land by an empowered fool. But it is not enough to wait and hope. We have to confront the King today and every day before the bombs start bursting everywhere.

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