Just a thought; Will we someday be able to say “You’re Fired!!!” to Trump?

Donald J. Trump is the one-time New York real estate developer who gained his national fame by being the host of an insipid reality television show whose focus was that at the end of each episode, he’d fire someone from their job.
 

Ideologues probably wish for more firings ...

It’s the reason why the headline on this weblog the morning of Nov. 9, 2016 would have been U.S. to Trump: You’re Fired!!! had Hillary Clinton won; instead of the The nation goes goofy?!? headline that actually appeared when it became apparent early that morning that Trump’s 46 percent voter support would actually be capable of giving him an Electoral College victory.

I BRING THIS thought up only for one reason. Many of us are getting all worked up these days because the president terminated the employment of FBI Director James Comey.

 

... than Comey and Yates

Yet if you think about it, Trump is the guy who got himself elected because there was a significant segment of the electorate that had no problem with a chief executive of our government who would behave like that comic book-style buffoon he portrayed on television (and which Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn't quite pull off as a successor).

There probably are people who wanted to see mass firings throughout the ranks of the federal government.

Which makes me wonder if Trump has managed to show some restraint.

FOR AS I’M doing the countdown, he dumped on Comey and also canned the woman who was serving as Acting Attorney General.

Yet let’s be honest – Sally Yates was destined to be replaced once Trump got his own pick confirmed as attorney general. She’d have been long forgotten by now and replaced by Jeff Sessions – even if she hadn’t have resisted his efforts to impose restrictions on people from various Islamic-oriented nations.

Is Trump "Jules" or "the Gimp?"

Considering that the courts wound up striking down that initiative anyway, it seems that Yates was correct. Not that it means she would have kept her job.

Comey and Yates are the two top pieces in the political bloodbath that I’m sure many ideologue-oriented people would have wanted to be far more intense.

IN FACT, FOR all I know, Trump may well wish he could have fired more people by now. We have to wonder if there is some higher power with a touch of sense that is keeping him from reigning down with “great vengeance and furious anger” (remember actor Samuel L. Jackson’s hit-man character from “Pulp Fiction?”) on the masses of society.

Of course, there also were all those U.S. attorneys scattered across the country who were told one Friday that they had until the end of the weekend to be out of their offices.

That included the U.S. attorney for Chicago and also for Northern Indiana, where it seems particularly cold that David Capp, based in Hammond, lost his job back in March. Because he already had made it clear he intended to retire by June.

But partisan politics reigned supreme. Although we ought to keep in mind that federal prosecutor posts often are politically motivated to begin with.

MAYBE I’M JUST trying to downplay the damage because I’d rather not acknowledge the reality of a political madman running amok. But I actually have watched the past few months of activity during the Age of Trump and I can’t help but be awed by the number of people willing to speak out against his governmental recklessness.

We have those wondering if his latest round of activity related to Comey’s dismissal will be the one that causes certain people to move forward with his termination from the presidential post.

I’m not sure we’re on the road to impeachment yet. For all I know, we may never fully get there, and may have to wait until 2020 for our chance to undo the harm that was wrought upon our society by those of us willing to put our racial and ethnic hang-ups over all else.

Then, with the passage of time, we can look back upon this era and see it for the comic relief of buffoonery that is being offered up on a regular basis! After we as a society can tell the Trumpster and all his acolytes, “You’re Fired!!!” and make it stick.

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It’s truly sad our ‘tweeting twit’ of a president thinks he can govern this way

Donald J. Trump is the Twit who Tweets, using the social medium that values insipidity (only 140 characters, really?) as his way of getting his limited thoughts out to the public; unchallenged.
 

TRUMP: Wants to go unchallenged in public eye!

It’s also becoming more and more clear this would be a presidency conducted by Twitter, if there were any way that Trump could get away with it.

TRUMP HAS BEEN in the news on a daily basis for the past six or so months, ever since he got himself elected president, with a barrage of nonsense and half-truths that make it clear the man has no respect for truth.

Of course, he doesn’t want to be called out for having this attitude – he wants to be able to lambast everybody else for thinking that a president ought to be truthful!

So it gets ugly, particularly with the activity surrounding the dismissal of James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump probably committed the ultimate gaffe of his lifetime when he tossed out hints that there were recordings of meetings he and Comey held just before his professional termination.

As stated by Trump, it is Comey who ought to be fearful because the Trumpster could easily pull out a recording and use it to denounce anything that Comey tried claiming.

BUT THE PROBLEM is that the public at large (except for the minority of our electorate who actually voted for Trump and will desperately want to believe anything he says no matter how ridiculous it proves to be) is now going to want to know if there was a taping system in place at the White House these days.

And if so, we’re going to want to hear those tapes so we can have historical evidence of how irrational Trump himself is during his presidential conduct.

If it turns out there are no recordings, some of us are likely to believe that Trump somehow tampered with the system to destroy them. He created circumstances that will lead many of us to never again trust a word he publicly says.

Worse yet, he brings to mind the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, which eventually was taken down by the existence of recordings in the White House of the president talking with his top aides.

IT MADE IT impossible for anybody to believe anything Nixon said for the public record to the point where the only Nixon believers these days are those hard-core ideologues who are determined to ignore truth.

Which, when you come down to it, probably means some of them are the same people desperate to side with Trump. Or more likely, are the grandparents of the modern-day followers of the Age of Trump!

What should we think of anything Trump says? Personally, I found some of his Tweets from the past couple of days to be particularly telling.

Especially that one about how he’s so “active” that, “it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” Actually, that is exactly what we should expect from someone working on behalf of a government official – that we can count on every word they speak being truthful.

GOVERNMENT AIDES AT so many levels have lost their jobs and gone into professional disgrace for this very thing. Any reporter-type person who ever tried to justify less than “perfect accuracy” for their work would find themselves terminated “for cause” in an instant.

And that’s the way it should be!

There also was that Tweet about “cancel(ling)” future press briefings “and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy.”

My experience in dealing with government operatives is that the ones who refuse to answer questions and insist on doing everything in writing is usually because they’re such control freaks and they’re most concerned with making sure they don’t offer up any relevant information by mistake. A 600-word statement may fill newspaper space or broadcast airtime without serving a purpose.

AH, WHO AM I kidding! We have a president who probably thinks his 140-character Tweet (about a single sentence – this commentary, by comparison, is 4,356 characters) would be sufficient.

All I know is that there are people who argue Trump makes a wonderful president because of his business background, and I don’t doubt he ran the Trump Organization and its subsidiaries in a similar manner.

The only question I have is how he managed to avoid running his company into the ground amidst financial ruin the way he seems to be intent on doing with our country these days – not because it makes sense, but just because he can!

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Does Trump yearn for old Everly Brothers tune; “When will I be loved?”

I’m sure the people in our society who gave us Donald J. Trump as our president (the 46 percent who actually voted for him) are wondering right about now what it would take to appease the rest of us.
 

COMEY: Trump got to fire somebody

For many of us are disgusted with the conduct of now-former FBI Director James Comey. Some of us believe it was his handling of an investigation into those “dreaded” e-mail messages by Hillary Clinton that gave a last-minute momentum push to the Trump campaign to put it over the top on Election Day.

THE POINT BEING that many of those who are saddened that we’re not now experiencing the deep spiritual experience of our nation having its first female as a chief executive aren’t going to feel much sympathy for the fact that Comey is now among the ranks of the unemployed.

Although it will be interesting to see how quickly somebody manages to put him on their payroll as an adviser or consultant or some other make-work post that enables them to provide him with something resembling an income.

The ideologues probably want to believe that all of us (the majority of the electorate that wanted Clinton or someone other than Trump to be president) have now got our way, and we ought to just “Shut up!” about our Trump criticisms or anything else we have to say.

Of course, the conservative ideologue type usually just wants everybody to “Shut up!” and do what the ideologues tell us to do. So there’s nothing new there.

BUT THE TERMINATION of Comey’s employment did manage to catch the nation off-guard, what with its timing Tuesday night. I’m sure there were conversations taking place across the country during the evening hours by people speculating on how erratic the behavior of our president truly is.

There is the speculation that Trump fired Comey so as to thwart any investigation the FBI might be doing into whether or not Russia government officials or operatives in any way committed any acts that might have influenced the election outcome.

Did the thought of a woman as U.S. president so bother the thought process of Russian leader Vladimir Putin that he felt compelled to get involved?

 

TRUMP: Wants our admiration, even if by force

Other people are bringing up the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973 when then-President Richard M. Nixon wanted to fire a special prosecutor so as to try to knock down investigations into the Watergate burglary, and wound up having to fire several levels of officials in the attorney general's office before he could find someone (William Bork, remember him?) who was willing to do the presidential “dirty work.”

BUT A PART of me wonders if it is something more basic, in that Comey in recent weeks has continued to talk about his actions with regards to Hillary Clinton and e-mails and why he was bothered enough by what he learned to keep the issue alive in the public eye.

He recently made statements indicating he was bothered by Clinton spouse (and former president in his own right) Bill having that private meeting with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, which he said created the perception that HE was trying to tamper with FBI investigations into his wife’s behavior.

The point being that by continually bringing the issue up, Comey was reminding the public that it was NOT a majority of people who wanted Trump to be president. Although supposedly being the factor that made Trump president, he was becoming the reason some of us will NEVER regard this Age of Trump as being a legitimate expression of the sentiments of our society.

Whereas if Comey could have kept his “trap shut” and let the issue wither away, the reality is that most of us would have forgotten the details. Then Trump with his knack for “alternative facts” could have come up with a version of reality that would make us think we “like me, you really like me” as much as Sally Field felt at that Academy Awards ceremony of long-ago.

BUT THAT IS likely never to happen, although it is also true that we’re likely to never know the truth of what really happened, or how Russian operatives could have tampered with our electoral process or if it was more our own incompetence that could let something happen.

Yet this is Donald Trump, the real estate developer from Manhattan who likes to build gaudy structures around the globe and brand them all with his name – thinking that it means we associate the mention of himself with class, elegance and sophistication.

Instead of just tacky trash that comes in overpriced.

Which is why I often get the image in my brain of our president in some secluded room, singing to himself that 1960 hit by the Everly Brothers – “When will I be loved?”

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