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What a Week!

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The White House has become a dysfunctional family sitcom, kind of like Homer Simpson in the Oval Office.  Trump's minions have tried their best to cover for him.  Gen. Kelly attacked Frederica Wilson's account of the phone call Trump had with Myeshia Johnson.  Sarah Huckabee defended Gen. Kelly in turn, telling us we have no right to question generals, as if they are the ultimate authority on all matters, including the Civil War.  But, according to the creator of Dilbert, Trump is more than capable of handling his own with his never-ending supply of "linguistic kill shots."

Scott Adams has arisen from nowhere to become an expert of sorts because he predicted Trump would "win bigly" with a probability of 98% back in November, claiming Nate Silver only gave the Donald a 2% chance.  For the record, Nate gave Trump a 28.6% chance of winning, which he got chastised for being too high.  No matter, Scott Adams used his best "persuasion" skills to convince a doe-eyed Smerconish how right he was then and now about Trump.

Adams, like Michael Moore, think we are badly misjudging Trump's persuasion skills.   He feels Trump has his finger on the pulse of America and knows how to play the country better than anyone.  It is hard to fault him since Donald won, but did Trump really pull this off on his own?

I liked Michael Stipe's take back in November 2016.  Americans weren't being racist, he said, but voting to "smash the machine."  Trump was the equivalent of the guy running for homecoming queen and the university students thought what the fuck, why not!  All those insults, or linguistic kill shots as Dilbert calls them, reduced the playing field to Donald Trump's level.  The more Hillary was touted as the most qualified candidate ever for the job, the more voters were willing to accept the Trump campaign's "Crooked Hillary" narrative.

In voters' minds, the system was rigged.  Donald pointed this out on numerous occasions, boasting that if he lost Pennsylvania, a key blue state, then you knew the Democrats had bought the election.  As it turned out Donald not only won Pennsylvania but Michigan and Wisconsin too, cementing his incredible upset.

Was all this clever stagecraft, as Dilbert and Moore suggest, or just being in the right place at the right time as Michael Stipe suggests?  Probably a little of both, but if there was any clever wizard here, it was most likely Stephen Bannon,  the man behind the curtain in this campaign who no doubt came up with most of the linguistic kill shots Trump effectively deployed.

Whatever the case, we are now stuck with Trump.  The news media counts the days on the wall like an inmate would his jail time, only in this case the situation is reversed.  It is Donald who is holding us all hostage with his endless stream of tweets.  A great panic was created when some disgruntled Twitter employee temporarily deleted the realDonaldTrump account.  The real question should be why does Trump still have a personal account after repeatedly violating twitter user policy, not how this outgoing employee was able to purge the account himself?  But, this is the perverted reality show Donald Trump's White House has become.  We seem to enjoy living in this prison we created for ourselves.

When has the media ever had more fun bashing a President?  I suppose they are trying to make life in the White House as miserable for Donald Trump as they feel he has for Americans.  There's a literal "whack-a-mole" game going on as the White House continues to try to find the moles divulging all the discord going on inside, which Trump continues to deny in his tweets and Sarah in her press conferences.  But, are we really that miserable?

If we are enjoying this White House sitcom, even in a perverse way, it will come to an end, as all sitcoms do, except maybe the Simpsons, which had predicted Trump long before Dilbert or Michael Moore did.

The only question is how low will Trump sink the White House before he is ousted from the Oval Office.  Many of us would like to think Robert Mueller has the silver bullet, but more likely we will be forced to endure Donald for the remainder of his term.  It's like we are trapped inside the television set with Homer Simpson, having to endure all those puerile jokes and pranks again and again and again.

These "linguistic kill shots" proved to be an effective campaign tool, but they haven't served in anyway to deflect our attention away form Donald Trump during his presidency.  They've only showed how truly incompetent he is, as his tweets affected the Bowe Bergdahl case and may undermine the case against the New York truck attacker, Sayfullo Saipov.  Similarly, he is again mouthing off at Jeff Sessions, which may lead to long overdue obstruction of justice charges being brought against him.  At the very least, a gag order, which may finally result in the deletion of his twitter account.


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