The Week In Crazy

So much insanity has happened this week that I'm almost ready to give up blogging.

First, there was Trump's temper tantrum over trade with China, a legitimate issue, considering our trade deficit with the world's most populous country, that he has de-legitimatized with tariff threats and unilateral bullying of China's president. Trump said  he was "the chosen one" - at the same time that he also accused Jews of selfishness and disloyalty for voting Democratic and thus betraying Israel (therefore expressing solidarity with and making anti-Semitic tropes against Jews simultaneously).  Trump may have been chosen by 304 electors, but 54 percent of the American popular electorate chose someone else.

And then there's his sudden support for manifest destiny.  I don't know how this whole business started (to borrow an opening lyric from a late-seventies pop song), but someone suggested that Donald Trump might want to buy Greenland.  I used to joke, back in the late eighties when Trump was a real estate developer and climate change was called the greenhouse effect and not taken very seriously by anyone whose name wasn't Albert Gore, that if the planet warmed up, Trump would buy property up there to build condos.  Now he wants to buy the whole damn island!

Denmark, which owns Greenland, politely let Trump know that the island is not for sale, and Trump canceled a state visit to Copenhagen because Denmark's female prime minister was "nasty" to him.  There may be strategic reasons to own the world's largest island - Secretary of State William Seward tried to buy it when he bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, and President Harry Truman considered the idea in 1946 - and there are also commercial reasons to but it, which I'll explain in the next paragraph. But Trump made a hissy fit when he was old that Greenland was not for sale, not unlike in the book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," when Veruca Salt refused to take no for an answer when she wanted to buy one of Willy Wonka's trained nut-shelling squirrels.  ("I want the world . . .")

Despite being far up in the Arctic, Greenland is a viable island because of its vast mineral resources, which Americans are eager to get in on, and the Danes would be happy if we do, because they make money off mineral exploration, which is already being undertaken there by . . . China.  But then, mineral exploration in Greenland is only made possible by climate change, which is melting glaciers up north as well as exacerbating rain-forest fires in the Brazilian jungle, and rain forests there, which help blunt the effects climate change, have been cleared for farmland at an amazing clip already.  French President Emanuel Macron hopes to address the Brazilian wildfires at the Group of Seven economic summit in the French seaside resort town of Biarritz, except that Trump won't want to talk about it because he wants to keep Mr. Murray's coal trains running back home. 

At least one billionaire industrialist - not the coal magnate Bob Murray - won't live to see the worst effects of the climate change he's famous for denying.  It seems that David Koch died.

And on the day that Trump, whose protectionism the Kochs despised, made unflattering remarks about China and his own Federal Reserve director, sending the stock market down over six hundred points and threatening his own re-election hopes - so long as Marianne Williamson isn't the Democratic nominee.

Crazy.

Crazy

Bob Woodward couldn't have picked a better time to release a book about Donald Trump's White House as the midterm elections get underway.  His new book "Fear: Trump In the White House" depicts a President that acts on impulse, needs adult supervision, and constantly has to be saved from himself when he tries to undermine trade deals and mutual defense pacts or tries to do things like assassinate Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.  Many of this orders have gone ignored, hidden from his  view, or kept from his attention to prevent a third world war involving Third World countries.

But Republicans are obviously too busy shepherding Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court to care. 

While this is going on, a White House aide has written an anonymous piece in the op-ed section of the New York Times saying that, while he or she is committed to helping Trump acheive the goals of deregulation, a stronger military, and lower taxes, he/she and others have thwarted Trump in his efforts to have friendlier relations with dictators and undermine trade agreements with like-minded allies.

"We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous," this anonymous writer says of himself/herself and like-minded Trump staffers.  "But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic . . .. The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making."

Gutsy, yes, but hardly a profile in courage when you remember that this person doesn't want to be identified and has indicated no interest in taking responsibility for helping to instigate what he/she calls a "two-track Presidency."   As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta  said this week, staffers should be more forthcoming in trying to maintain the ship of state, he said, and staffers aren't supposed to run the country - the President is.

"When you have a President in the United States elected by the people, and at the same time have a staff who believe that this President, for whatever reason, is not exercising the right kind of judgment, that situation cannot exist," Panetta told PBS. "That is an issue that, very frankly, I believe the leadership in the Congress has a responsibility to look at and determine what is happening, because we cannot allow that situation to continue. It puts the country at risk."

This makes Trump look all the worse as the midterm campaigns get underway.  The White House has been turned into what one staff member calls "Crazytown," and unless House Speaker Paul Ryan - who is retiring in January - and House Republican leader Mitch McConnell intervene, the GOP will lose the House and possibly lose the Senate as election campaigns tighten up.  The midterms are two months away.  Right now, though, I wonder if the country can hold out that long.

Brett Kavanaugh will likely be around longer.