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Joe Biden drew a huge target on himself this week, with his comments on getting along with stone-cold racists in the United States Senate. Conservative commenter Ana Navarro perhaps best summed up Biden's error, criticizing him for "dragging up these dead racists instead of talking about the live racists."
We have to begin by first ignoring all the rampant criminality spewing forth from the White House -- just for the moment, mind you -- to concentrate instead on looking forward, not back. Because we're less than two weeks away from the first round of Democratic 2020 presidential primary debates, and the Democratic National Committee just announced the lineup for the two nights.
President Donald Trump just made news by admitting what everyone already knew or suspected -- that he'd be just fine with Russia feeding him dirt on a political opponent during a presidential election campaign. He wouldn't see any necessity to inform the F.B.I. if a foreign government offered up negative information, and he furthermore insisted that any other American politician would do exactly the same thing. He's trying to normalize his own amorality, in other words.
Donald Trump has one go-to tactic in what passes for his political toolbox: personally create a crisis, rail loudly about it and make threats, and then "solve" the crisis and claim it was the biggest victory of all time. He's used this tactic over and over again, and he really doesn't care who pays the price for his political flim-flam job -- Dreamers, farmers, manufacturers, consumers, or anyone else. But an interesting thing just happened with his most recent deployment of flim-flammery: absolutely nobody bought it this time around. The media didn't fall for it and the public certainly didn't fall for it. Maybe this boy has cried "Wolf!" once too many? Because it certainly feels like something has changed.
Well, we certainly never thought we'd use that particular lyric as a headline, but it's just too tempting to pass up this week. Because President Donald Trump just tweeted the following bit of wisdom:
That's enough history, and as you can tell it's a pretty weak attempt to tie the following article to D-Day. This was intended to mask the real reason for both writing the article in the first place and rerunning it today, which was just a sheer love for AMC vehicles and has nothing really to do with the military, World War II, or D-Day at all. So I guess another year will go by without me writing explicitly about "the longest day." My apologies to the "greatest generation" for such irreverence.
Even Richard Nixon never dreamed that his "madman theory" tactic would become the entire playbook for a United States president on any foreign policy issue, but that's where we now find ourselves, apparently. Nobody -- including even his own closest aides -- has any idea what Donald Trump is about to do next. Will he slap a five percent tariff on Mexico next Monday, or is it all just a big bluff to increase his leverage in trade talks? Nobody knows. White House aides say one thing, and the president then contradicts them within hours. Then they say something different, and Trump contradicts that, too. Sometimes Trump seems incredibly determined to levy a new tax on imported Mexican goods no matter what the outcome, and sometimes he seems like it's all just a giant ruse. Welcome to "madman trade theory," in other words.
Robert Mueller broke his two-year silence this week, as he strode boldly to the podium and loudly announced: "ITMFA!" and then withdrew. 'This caused the term to spike in Google searches to a level never seen before on any subject, ever.
Well, no. That's not what happened. Many now think that's what should have happened, but unfortunately it did not.
What do you do with a president who wants to be impeached? That's a surreal question, but then again we live in surreal times. Donald Trump seems more and more like a man begging the House Democrats to impeach him. It's like every political decision he makes is designed to be so outrageous that it'll surely goad Democrats into starting an impeachment committee.
It's been yet another week of life so bizarre it'd be hard to even imagine it as satirical art. Who would best be able to capture the lunacy and doublethink emanating from Trump's White House? Joseph Heller? George Orwell? Douglas Adams? Or perhaps Dr. Seuss? In other words, just another glorious week in Trumpland, folks.