Thursday, August 27, 2020

TRUMP’S BENT-UP, CROOKED TRUMPET HAS LED AMERICA TO BECOME A THIRD RATE DICTATORSHIP

To begin this post, Trump lost the 2016 American presidential election’s popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, but he ‘won’ the electoral college ‘tally’ by a significant number. However, that ‘Win’ resulted from a total margin of 77,000 votes spread strategically (through voter district gerrymandering) over three critical states - an accomplishment critically aided by a murky package of onion-layered data-mining and internet analysis-planting operations, shell companies and ultimately funded by Russian Intelligence. All of this added up to manipulation of the American 2016 election thru the ‘cooperation’  of Trump campaign managers, Wikileaks and an ‘independent’ Ukraine-based (not Ukrainian!), cyber-snooping startup that did ‘business with both the Republican and then the Democrat Party and alongside with  Russian Intelligence (GRU) - a fine mix as they would say in Boston. 

Once in office, Trump has openly, and without restraint from a partisan and blatantly enabling Senate, broached historically normative as well as some Constitutional presidential boundaries.

Trump has proven ignorant of, or ignores knowledge of American diplomatic practices, treaties and objectives; he has set his own personal, often erratic and short-term changeable, new ‘courses’ for American diplomacy that seems to change daily somewhere and appears to the international community to be a kind of drunken random walk. This has negatively impacted America’s trade and financial links.

Trump operates America like a small, sole-owner corner shop; or he wants to operate America that way.  He is a micromanager and to render America suitable to his small-scope managerial capabilities, he has unmethodically (but effectively) reduced America to a giant dressed in rags, now humbled and bent to his small store vision limits. Trump has stripped most of the major government departments of seasoned top staff, reduced significantly operational employees, and inserted his personal directors who like him are unfamiliar with the operations and purposes of their new jobs. As the result, America presents to the world a face of ignorance, amateurish bumbling and unprofessionalism that constantly throws historical allies off-balance and estranged America’s relationships with them. A telling sign of the Trump era are his apparently favorite international leaders, a consistent set of global autocrat dictators - principally those of North Korea, Philippines, Brazil and Russia. America, directed by Trump, is no longer a ‘peer’ within the diplomatic and trade circles of former allies…why…because America no longer knows what it is doing!

On other fronts, Trump has shown a propensity to associate with fringe elements from conspiracy-theory groups to pseudo-science to neo -Nazi racists. Nazi-flage wavers are tolerated in public now and have open-door access to Trump. 

Amid this and more, Trump has attempted to micro-manage America’s response to the COVID-19 virus pandemic - he has fronted new ‘cures’ as often as he hears of them even though some have been bizarre such as calling for testing bleach injections and throat sprays. Continuing with his attitude regarding the pandemic, Trump also displays a hostility to Science methodology and safety testing. Also in this regard, he has nearly destroyed the environmental regulations set up by former republican administrations to assure Americans of safe water, air and products. 

To summarize, but there is much more that can be described, the Trump presidency has been characterized by ignorance, unprofessionalism, anti-science, anti-regulatory, anti-intellectualism, anti-government, small-scope destructiveness and pettiness. Plus all of these characteristics are mixed in with what some see as psychopathy, malignant-narcissism and a projected self-destructive bent.

The question is, at this time, how further down this destructive path and to what darker corners will Trump drag America and the rest of the world?

Thursday, August 13, 2020

THE AMERICAN CIRCUS - STARRING PUTIN’S PUPPET, ‘D TRUMP’

We are now in final weeks before the 2020 presidential election and by now, we should have learned to expect any, and every bizarre trick that Trump could conjure to disrupt, corrupt, steal, delay or nullify that election.

A major factor in Trump’s ‘trick bag’ is perhaps not entirely his own to control. This factor is Trump’s backer (or ‘puppet master’, Russia, i.e., Vladimir Putin... arguably one and the same).

                     (foto courtesy of palmerreport.com, August 13, 2020)

Robert Harrington writes in today’s “PalmerReport” blog  his views about the ‘curiously close’ (some say ‘treasonous’) ‘friendship‘ and mutual support alliance between Donald Trump, America’s current president, and Vladimir Putin, the Russian ‘leader-for-life’ (Donald Trump, the Russian President, Palmerreport.com. August 13, 2020). Harrington further opines: 

“I don’t see how America can survive four more years of a Trump presidency.”

This blogger, Percles21, felt alarm about a Trump-Putin shady pairing from its first pre-election signs in June 2016, (perhaps years earlier?) when Trump, and family, had a series of one-on-one meetings with Putin and Russian officials... without the presence of independent, verifying American witnesses. The meetings‘ attendees were close family and associates who were still operating as members of Trump’s business operations.  

(And well after Trump’s inauguration date, Trump’s family members continued https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C8-1/ALDE_00001096/their dual (conflicted) roles as business operatives in the Trump enterprises yet also as Trump-appointed White House advisors with top level security clearances.)  This blurring of the line between Trump’s business interests and the policy integrity of the Presidency looked like clear and perhaps deliberate violations of the US Constitution’s Emoluments Act”, they are in that respect another blog subject. 

For this blog’s focus, those clandestine (closed-off) meetings seemed to paint another picture - the appearance of ‘treason’. And, those meetings set the stage for others like them after the election and inauguration. 

Back to Robert Harrington’s article cited at the start of this post: Harrington emphasizes the somewhat constant and strong ‘odor‘ hinting that Putin, the Russian ‘leader’, has some kind of ‘hold’ on Donald Trump. 

Harrington writes:

“I call him the Russian President because that’s what he is. Trump exists as an extension of Vladimir Putin’s will, ...and will always remain ‘Putin’s Poodle’.  

Putin...delights in his puppet mastery of Trump and the chaos Trump has sown in America.
Putin knows that another four years of Trump will mean the end of America as a world power. And I think he’s right.”

  Again, Harrington’s opinion of the Putin-Trump pairing: We are now in the final weeks before the 2020 Presidential election and, knowing from more than four years observation how erratic Trump can be, there are no boundaries that Trump might push or exceed to be re-elected.

“I don’t see how America can survive four more years of a Trump presidency.”

 We are now in the final weeks before the 2020 Presidential election and, knowing from more than four years observation how erratic Trump can be, there are no boundaries that Trump might push or exceed to be re-elected.

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