Donald Trump isn’t even trying
Donald Trump, who – according to an old DOJ memo can’t be indicted because indicting a sitting president would cause too much disruption to the running of the country and would also make the U.S. look weak and vulnerable – has decided it would be a good idea to spend his time trolling everyone on Twitter.
The President of the United States has a new attached tweet on his beloved Twitter account which is an animated version of a TIME magazine cover showing a row of TRUMP campaign signs starting with TRUMP 2024 and going up in four-year steps all the way to 2048. Then, there is one last sign behind which Donald Trump lingers – unchanged – as the numbers go up into the thousands while the accompanying soundtrack of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite grows increasing wild and frantic. The video ends with a sign that says “TRUMP 4EVA”.
The basis of this nauseating vision is a genuine TIME magazine cover from about eight months ago which dealt with Trumpism and how it may well outlast Donald Trump himself. What the Trump campaign did with the cover shows how utterly detached from reality the man and his supporters are.
The same thing became clear on Tuesday when Donald Trump officially launched his re-election campaign. (Never mind that he never stopped campaigning in the first place.) What took place in Florida earlier this week resembled a rock concert or a cult meeting much more than a political event. People came for the show and not to listen to a candidate’s carefully crafted vision for the future of the country. Doing what he does best – and we all have to admit that he is good at this – he gave his supporters what they wanted, which was mainly a regurgitation of all the old buzzwords and phrases from the 2016 campaign. Hillary Clinton got a good number of mentions, even though she is definitely not running for president in 2020, and the crowd answered with chants of “lock her up” in good ritualistic fashion.
Another old favorite that made an appearance at the Florida rally was the idea of draining the swamp. As he was listing his successes, Trump claimed to have “stared down the unholy alliance of lobbyists, and donors and special interests who made a living bleeding our country dry.” This is quite a claim for Donald Trump to make on the exact same day that he decided to replace former Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan – whom he had tagged to run the Pentagon – with defense industry lobbyist Mark Esper.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show, it is easy to spot a clear pattern in how the current president fills positions in his administration: he routinely puts lobbyists for special interest groups in command of exactly those agencies which are supposed to control and regulate the industries they represent. It is quite obvious by now that, when Donald Trump said he would clean up the swamp, he clearly meant that he wanted to get rid of the old swamp only to replace it with his very own swamp.
Between the bald-faced lies, the executive time Trump spends watching TV and tweeting, the frequent golf outings and the constant campaigning, it is hard to see how removing this particular president from office would in any way be detrimental to the country.
