Author: mosqueeto

Originally shared by Helen Ikua

Is Trump a commoner who rallied the peasants for the greater good, or is he as much a son of privilege and a cynical agent of the status quo as the Washington royalty that he professes to detest?

Washington’s elite as well as vast swathes of a nation were recently united in their grief, even as they took a moment to say goodbye to one of America’s most recognizable sons. But notable by his absence at such a sombre event where America bid farewell to an eminent senator, was the man whose boorishness and ornery dispostion has turned him into persona non grata at the funerals of America’s great and good.

And the fact that Trump’s presence does not seem to be particularly required or welcome at the funerals of former First Ladies and senators, has only convinced Trump’s MAGA audience that Washington’s crowd have got it in for the underdog in the White House, which is why the nation’s political elite have latterly taken to hijacking the funerals of Washington’s erstwhile denizens, so that they can coalesce around their deep seated loathing of Donald Trump.

However, pictures of a jovial Trump hobnobbing with the Clintons on his wedding day to Melania, show that far from being spurned for being a barefoot country boy who fell off the turnip truck, and far from being a quixotic outlier who doesn’t care for the machinations of power, and far from being a man who doesn’t secretly crave the approval of Washington’s parading courtiers, Trump has not always been on unfriendly terms with the infulence merchants that he purports to despise for the titillation of his MAGA base.

And while contrarians are known for their ideals for which they’d be willing to suffer and be shunned for, Trump is hardly a contrarian who espouses a disgreeable if lucid philosophy on many things. In fact, the cognitive dissonance that comes through in Trump’s daily tweet attacks, shows him to be a man who’s driven less by ideology, policy, or principle, and more by evolving grievances that can escalate quite suddenly into ferocious displays of petulance.

In a man of studied thoughtfulness and considerable intellect, Trump’s blunt refusal to adhere to Washington’s code of conduct, might even pass muster as a revolutionary’s gallant efforts to shake things up for the benefit of ordinary Americans. But there’s a fine difference between irreverence for established systems that have failed to deliver, and the kind of rhetoric that can easily be misconstrued as just plain bad manners. Going out of one’s way not to say anything laudatory about an American senator whom many Americans revered, or claiming that men who get captured in combat are not made of the stern stuff of legend, does not exactly detract from the fact that one pretended to have a bad case of the bone spurs in order to avoid military service.

For all his bombast and cheap nativist populism that sells well to a certain cadre of white person who’s convinced that he’s been left out of a pie eating contest, Trump was never going to be the new broom that swept Washington clean. Far from draining the swamp of all its slimy inhabitants, or reining Wall Street in like the runaway bronco that it is, and all the yatta yatta promises which he made on the campaign trail, the New York real estate guy who rose to power simply by posing as an America first nationalist, has only enabled the kind of chaos and administrative dysfunction in which influence peddlers, special interests, and lobbyists tend to thrive.

And by choosing to conduct the business of state at Mar-a-Lago, instead of appointing ambassadors and key government officials who are vital to the smooth running of bureaucracy, Trump is not only showing that he has little interest in representing America properly to the world, but he has not even begun to do away with red tape. Indeed, Trump’s unorthdox style of leadership far from being a breath of fresh air, has only encouraged a disorderly feeding frenzy in which factionalism has become the default setting for his administration.

Ouch.

Originally shared by Helen Ikua

More than just political gamesmanship? July 27 2016, Trump’s public plea to Russia: Russia if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

Those who’ve convinced themselves that Robert Mueller is conducting a witch hunt by unfairly targeting Donald Trump instead of going after Hillary for crimes that have never been proved against her, should try and remember that rain does not come out of nowhere. For, when candidate Trump very publicy and with much aplomb invited an unfriendly foreign power to hack into Hillary’s emails and likely release sensitive information contained in those emails, candidate Trump must have had an inkling that he was not speaking into the thin air, but to Russian friends who’d only be too happy to acquiesce this most public of flirtation with conspiracy to commit a crime against the United States.

Now, some might argue that Trump’s friendship with the Kremlin is for all intents and purposes an imaginary friendship, and those who’d propound such a proposition would probably be right. In fact, judging by the ease with which Russia has sown discord in America, sometimes by hacking the DNC, sometimes by responding to Trump’s direct urging and hacking into Hillary’s emails, or sometimes by planting disinformation about vaccines for the express consumption of America’s vacuous masses, it’s clear that Russian intelligence does not think much of the general IQ of Americans and does not mind toying with Americans every which way.

Still, one cannot erase the fact that Russians, though only imaginary friends of Trump who see him as a useful chump that they can troll, nonetheless came through for Trump during critical moments in his campaign. Releasing hacked emails for instance, just for purposes of detracting from scandalous material that was contained in the Access Hollywood tape which featured Trump trumpeting his sexual prowess for the benefit of novices who don’t know a thing about grabbing pussy, easily counts as one of those moments when Trump’s pals in the Kremlin dove into the milieu of America’s politics in order to make good their pseudo-friendship with Trump.

And while it’s not entirely unexpected that Trump would try and deflect attention away from the Russia probe by lashing out at Mueller, at Hillary, at Obama, at the Democrats, or even by throwing his own employees under the bus, and while it’s no longer surprising to hear that Flynn met with Russians, Carter Page met with Russians, Manafort met with Russians, Don Jr met with Russians, Jared Kushner met with Russians, what must never be lost on Americans is that Trump’s inner circle were peddling something to Russian intelligence, they were peddling influence in exchange for promises to dole out certain favours to Russia should candidate Trump win the 2016 election.