Ending White House subscriptions to a few newspapers won't stop bad news for a president who is "bad news" incarnate

We can reasonably surmise that former far-right “freedom caucus” congressman and current acting Trump chief-of-staff Mick Mulvaney contacted his old crew and persuaded a few of them to stage a ridiculous, juvenile, and thug-like charade in which they attempted to storm the conference room where the impeachment hearings are being held, in an effort to disrupt the testimony of a Pentagon official after Ukrainian ambassador Bill Taylor’s damaging testimony yesterday, which has all but sealed the impeachment fate of Trump.  The claim was that because the Democrats were holding the hearings in “secret,” there was something “sinister” about it, completely impervious to the fact of the sinister nature of Trump’s Ukraine activities, which may include yet another shadowy “back channel” of extortion in the form of Kashyap Patel, a Trump aid who has no other experience in Ukrainian matters. Of course we know perfectly well that if the depositions of key witnesses to the Trump administration’s crimes were held in public, and the more damaging was the testimony, the greater the likelihood that Republicans like Rep. Jim Jordan would join the rest of the Freedom Caucus in a public circus of deceitful thuggishness. 

As if this country’s tolerance for moral, ethical and lawful failure by this so-called president can't get any lower, now we hear that his lawyers are publicly stating that as a sitting president, Trump can’t even be prosecuted if he did go out on New York’s 5^th Avenue and shoot someone dead. This was the claim by Trump lawyer William Consovoy, who furthermore had the audacity to assert that the state of New York did not even have the right to even investigate Trump for falsifying state tax returns and other crimes. I mean really, how low can low get? We can’t ask Sen. Lindsey Graham how low it can get, because he still can’t see the bottom yet. 

Trump’s utter stupidity was again on display when he announced “victory” in Syria when he claimed that Turkey had agreed to a “permanent” ceasefire in exchange for the lifting of “sanctions” that were never actually enforced.  When Nancy Pelosi told Trump last week that with him all roads lead to Putin, this was yet more evidence of that. Turkish dictator Erdogan reached an agreement with Russian dictator Putin in a mutual “understanding” on how to carve-up northern Syria and “deal” with the Kurds. This is absolutely unheard of between a member of NATO and a Russia that still acts as if it is the enemy of the West. But this is just “par for the course” with Trump; he is also “chummy” with Hungary’s dictator Viktor Orban, who joined with Putin to influence Trump’s feeble mind against the Ukraine. Both Russia and Hungary have territorial disputes with the Ukraine, but Trump was easily persuaded to ignore these self-interested motives, the advanced level of anti-democratic corruption in those countries, and the warnings of the few remaining “adults” in his administration. Why? Because they gladly gave “credence” to Trump’s absurd, self-serving conspiracy theories concerning the Ukraine’s alleged “role” in the 2016 election.

Anyone who offers Trump an alternate reality opposed to facts is his “friend.” Like a petulant child, Trump announced that he is cancelling the White House subscriptions for The Washington Post and The New York Times; unlike other daily newspapers which do not have their national reach, these two newspapers have the resources and credible reputation to conduct major investigations into the Trump administration’s corruption (unlike, say, The Federalist and the National Review who apparently only have enough resources to pay opinionators who will claim that every accusation against Trump is a “lie”). Of course it is foolish not to know what the “enemy” is up to, but Trump has been steadily losing his mind under the pressure of the realization that after decades of escaping responsibility for his criminal activities, the walls are closing in on him. The feeling of claustrophobia where he can’t make a move or say anything that won’t be immediately rebutted or refuted, and being made to look like the fool he is on late night television, won’t stop just because the two publications are not laying about to upset Trump and his familiars; after all, Trump seems to have difficultly reading anyways, and everything he knows about the reporting of the Post and the Times are the snippets he hears about on cable news shows. 

One wonders what does it take to survive serving Trump and his nightmare delusions. The few remaining members of his cabinet who have “survived” from day one have done so mainly because they either operate in complete obscurity (like Elaine Chow in Transportation), or—like Ben Carson of HUD—they share Trump’s arrogance and  inhumanity. Those who claim black people can’t be "prejudiced" against other groups clearly have not been paying attention to Carson’s inhuman actions in regard to immigrant children, or the non-allocation of Puerto Rican disaster assistance two years after Hurricane Maria. Carson is clearly unqualified for his position, only installed in Trump’s cabinet because he needed a token black who was sufficiently supportive and easily manipulated. His appearance before Congress last week to “defend” his failure  to allow the process of Puerto Rico receiving disaster funding that was already allocated by Congress to go forward by the mandated deadline was a despicable display of both his subservience to Trump and his familiars’ anti-Hispanic racism, and his own lack of simple human decency. 

The “excuse” for doing so was the same hypocritical line about “corruption” that Trump has been pushing with the Ukraine, despite the fact that HUD’s own inspector general has stated that there wasn’t sufficient evidence of corruption in the use of disaster relief funds previously to warrant refusal in issuing the funding; Puerto Rico, which was devastated to far greater effect by Maria than stateside, still has only received one-third of the money allocated to it two years ago. Carson’s contemptuous mugging and non-answers during questioning by Rep. Nydia Velázquez last week was just more evidence that the Trump administration is nothing more than a den of moral and ethical corruption. Right-wingers like Carson claim that “political correctness” will “destroy this country,” but isn’t it “odd” that the ignorant on the right are in reality trying to push their own version of “political correctness” that has no room for reasoned discussion or alternative views, let alone such inconveniences like facts, or simply being human? 

Bill Taylor told Congressional investigators that he feared for the lives of Ukrainians impacted by Trump’s embrace of a corrupt dictator like Putin whose principle goal was to re-merge the Ukraine into a Russian vassal state. It seems that Trump’s dealings with Turkey in allowing them free reign to collaborate with Russia in Syria suggests that he is quite willing to be Putin’s stooge—or at least dumb enough to be one. Trump familiars like Carson demonstrate that in order to survive in his administration you have to be not just subservient to his dictation, but share his bigoted beliefs regardless of how the history books will judge such indifference to simple human decency (William Barr himself has stated he doesn’t care about his own “legacy,” since “everyone dies”). And where are Republican lawmakers in all of this? Most of them seem to be taking their cues from Trump and and at least talking like thugs.