Fire At Will, Donald!

DUCKS IN A ROW: WORKING FOR THE DONALD

The Trump administration has come to resemble a shooting gallery a year into his first term. Really is anybody surprised? The man's catch phrase on his TV show was "You're fired!" His blind supporters make excuses for the chaos. They excuse his embarrassing simple-minded tweets, and if you criticize him they jump all over you. I know the swamp draining process is going to be chaotic. Pundits like Bill Whittle point out that the most positive thing about Trump is his bull in a china shop approach to the DC establishment. Tear it all down, they say. We can always rebuild from the rubble.

Protecting the government from its own people may just be the smartest thing they could do. Firing FBI and justice department officials caught protecting presidential candidates from the consequences of their own corruption is probably necessary. Look at how corrupt the FBI became after 8 years under a Democrat president. I just hope President Trump becomes enough of a conservative to clean that place out. We don't need another J. Edgar Hoover. We don't need law enforcement agencies that support the political agenda of the dominant political party or the president. 

We don't need a CIA that massages the data it delivers to the president - telling him what they think he ought to know and not what is really going on. That's what happened to President Bush his first year in office. Under Clinton CIA learned not to tell the president things he didn't want to hear. It explains why Bush didn't know what was happening prior to 9/11. I remember in 2001 having dinner with a CIA staffer. It was entertaining to listen to him screaming about how electing Bush was the worst thing ever. Well the reason CIA was upset about Bush was that they were all Democrats at the top and they were manipulating the daily security briefings to give the president what the CIA thought he ought to hear rather than the whole story. CIA officials, who came up under Bill Clinton, were furious that he was president and not Al Gore. So they focused on manipulating Bush instead of doing their job and as they'd done time and again during the Clinton administration, they missed all the red flags. Next thing we all knew, four airplanes were hijacked and crashed by terrorists with a death toll of 3000 Americans who paid for the political struggle in the American civil service during the early months of the Bush administration.

A lot of folks think that Trump will save us, but I'm not sure he'll do much more than blow things up. Of course the first step to renovating a rotten building is often to blow it up and start over. We'll see. At least it's not Hillary Clinton at the helm. At least the economy is recovering and promises to keep doing so if Trump doesn't turn into a Democrat and ruin everything.

And yes he does these stupid tweets, but hey, he's talking effectively to the 50% of Americans with less than 100 IQs and he does it frighteningly well. That monumentally irritating habit of adjectivizing his opponents - lyin' Ted, leakin' Comey, Rocket Man, Crooked Hillary, etc.. It would be nice if he'd be a bit more sophisticated, but he can't. I don't think he knows any other way to get his way. Democrats have been aiming at the lower 50% for decades using simplistic phrases like "soak the rich", Democrats are for the poor, Republicans are mean, and that sort of thing.

So the heavy attacks by Democrats on Trump pretty much guarantee that he is going to keep on doing what works with the lower 50 and the rest of us be damned. He's not worried about us. He figures the rest of us can keep up. That's monumentally sad in some way, but probably the only way to poke holes in the swamp so that at least some of the sludge will leak out.

© 2018 by Tom King