Tag Archives: Donald Trump

media news, national news, political news

Hoping to head off Trump Fatigue

I might need an intervention.

News junkie that I am, I usually cannot resist watching cable and broadcast news channels’ discussion of current events, of public policy and, yes, even politics.

Until now.

I awoke this Sunday morning and decided to avoid the weekly news/commentary/analysis talk shows. I didn’t watch George or Chuck on ABC or NBC, respectively. I had no particular desire to listen to the talking heads on “This Week” or “Meet the Press.”

Why? I fear it’s because of the subject matter: Donald John “Smart Person” Trump, the current president of the United States of America.

The guy is starting to wear me out. We’re not even at the 100-day mark in his presidency. Good grief! That means we have another nearly four years to go before the next presidential election!

Heaven help us. Or maybe just me.

I don’t intend to stop commenting on this clown’s tenure as president; I consider contributions to High Plains Blogger to be a form of therapy. I might even be able to fend off the Trump Fatigue I fear is beginning to overtake me.

Maybe I just need a day or two — or maybe three or four — away from the TV set.

Wish me luck. I’ll extend the same to you.

national news, political news

FBI managed to muck up a murky election

I continue to have great respect for FBI Director James Comey — even after reading a lengthy New York Times article providing excruciating detail about how might have changed the course of political history with a single letter to Congress.

Comey was holding on to information that I reckon he felt he had to make public while keeping secret other information related in some fashion to what he was about to disclose.

Did the nation’s top cop swing the 2016 presidential election all by himself by giving up the goods on Hillary Rodham Clinton while keeping quiet what he was looking at regarding Donald John Trump? I don’t believe that’s the case. But, damn! He made a tough call at the just the wrong time!

The article is long, but worth your time. It details the agony that Comey endured during the final months of a bitter presidential campaign.

Eleven days from Election Day, Comey decided he had to send a letter to Congress telling lawmakers that he had more information that might be pertinent to an investigation he had concluded regarding Clinton’s e-mail use during her time as secretary of state.

Do you remember how he held that press conference in July 2016 in which he criticized Hillary’s “careless” use of the personal server? And how he then said he had no grounds to prosecute her? That presser was, in itself, highly unusual.

When some more e-mails became available, he then seemed to believe he owed the public some sort of explanation of what he found.

But, man, the timing was terrible!

While all this is engulfing the campaign, we didn’t know that Comey’s agency was probing allegations that Trump’s campaign might be colluding with Russian computer hackers seeking to influence the election, trying to help the Republican nominee defeat Hillary.

He didn’t reveal any of that. Indeed, he only went public with that tidbit just a few weeks ago during a congressional hearing.

FBI policy had been to stay out of partisan political activity. It cannot be seen as a factor in deciding elections. I get it. So does everyone else.

As for whether Comey’s disclosure of the e-mail issue late in the campaign and whether it proved decisive … I’ll simply make this point: Hillary Clinton’s campaign never should have had to worry about an election outcome in the first place.

She and her team made enough mistakes without that disclosure to keep Trump’s campaign close enough to catch them.

Hillary Clinton is far more qualified to be president than the man who defeated  her. Her abject failure to communicate with voters as a living, breathing human being — to talk directly to them and to spell out a clear vision for how she intended to lead the country — doomed her effort to make history.

business news, national news, political news

Trump Hotel poses potentially huge conflict for … Trump the POTUS

How in the world does Donald John Trump get away with this?

He serves as president of the United States. He continues to hold onto business interests, such as the Trump International Hotel, which plays host to foreign government leaders; those foreign governments spend money doing business at this hotel.

And the president somehow doesn’t violate the “emoluments clause” of the U.S. Constitution, the clause that says president’s cannot accept money or other inducements from foreign governments?

It’s an anti-bribery clause, in a manner of speaking.

Yet the president continues to dine there, which I suppose he is entitled to do. What is making my head spin is how this particular hotel can, in the words of The Hill, be the “go-to” place for foreign government dignitaries.

Isn’t the Constitution clear about this?

The emoluments clause is in the very first article of the Constitution. The founders were clear, I have thought, to prevent the president from doing any form of private business with any “King, Prince or foreign State.”

Let’s remember that Trump hasn’t divested himself of his vast business empire; he’s handed it all over to his sons

But as The Hill reports: “The hotel has been the go-to location for foreign leaders and dignitaries since it opened last fall, when Trump was still a presidential candidate.”

He’s no longer a candidate. He’s now the man. The president of the United States. Leader of the free world. Commander in chief. Head of state.

Unless he’s giving away all the services his hotel is providing those foreign “dignitaries and leaders,” it seems to me that he’s committing an unconstitutional act.

legal news, national news, political news

No intention to lecture AG about the law, but really …

I am acutely aware that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is an educated man.

He went to law school; passed the Alabama state bar; served as a federal prosecutor; tried to become a federal judge in the 1980s, but was rejected by the U.S. Senate because of some things he reportedly said about black people; then he was elected to the Senate.

He now serves as U.S. attorney general, thanks to an appointment by Donald John Trump.

There. Having stipulated all of that, I need to remind the attorney general that he should not disrespect the tenet of judicial review that the nation’s founders established when they formed our republic more than two centuries ago.

I say this with no desire to lecture the AG about the law, or the U.S. Constitution.

However, when he pops off about a federal judge sitting on the bench “on an island in the Pacific,” he has disrespected one of the basic frameworks set aside by those founders.

The judge presides over a federal court in Hawaii, one of the nation’s 50 states. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson ruled against Trump’s temporary travel ban on constitutional grounds. The travel ban is now heading to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

You’ll recall, too, that the president himself referred to another federal jurist in Washington state as a “so-called judge” when he struck down an earlier travel ban involving refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries. Trump might need a lecture about the Constitution and the separation of powers written into it; he might need to be told about how the founders intended for the judiciary to be independent of political pressure. Given that Trump had zero government experience prior to becoming — gulp! — president, he might be unaware of the not-so-fine print written in the Constitution.

The attorney general should know better than to disparage a federal judge in the manner that he did.

An island in the Pacific? C’mon, Mr. Attorney General.

Suck it up. Let the courts do their job. Sure, you are entitled to challenge court decisions’ legality. However, let’s stop the petulant put-downs.

Same thing goes for you, too, Mr. President.

political news, State news

Even Texans are mad at Trump … go figure

When residents of Texas are polling negatively against Donald John Trump, well, then you’ve got a problem.

Are you paying attention, Mr. President?

Texas Monthly reports that a Texas Lyceum poll suggests most of us here in the Lone Star State disapprove of the job Trump is doing. The poll surveyed everyone — those who vote and those who don’t. Texas Monthly reports further that among Texas Republicans who do vote, the president remains popular, with an 85 percent approval rating.

According to Texas Monthly: “The key seems to be which group of Texans you’re talking about. Overall Trump’s disapproval/approval rating among all Texans was 54 percent/42 percent. But while Republicans support him, 86 percent of Democrats disapprove of his job performance, along with 73 percent of the millennials and 61 percent of Hispanics. Sixty percent of whites view Trump positively.”

Trump in trouble in Texas?

I am not going to presume for a second that Trump couldn’t win Texas yet again if an election took place in the next day or two. Texans have shown a propensity over many years to be intensely loyal to whichever party is in power.

I’ve noted already that a semi-trained chimp could get elected to public office if he was a Republican.

To be, um, fair and balanced, you could have said the same thing 40 years ago about Democratic candidates for office.

The tide has turned here. Having been at ringside in Texas as the state turned from moderately Democratic to strongly Republican, I borne witness to the shocking nature of the transition.

The Lyceum poll also suggests that U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s up for re-election in 2018, might be in some trouble against a strong Democratic challenger. The poll puts Cruz and U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke — the only announced challenger for Cruz’s seat — in a dead heat.

But … as they say: A week is a lifetime in politics. In Texas, I’m not about to count Cruz out as dead meat more than a year away from the next election.

As for Trump, his relatively poor standing is emblematic of the trouble he is encountering throughout the nation. He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which remains popular with a majority of Americans; and he wants to build that wall along the Rio Grande River, a notion that I keep hearing isn’t popular at all among rank-and-file Texans.

But, hey. If we were to ask Trump about his low poll standing, he’d blow it off. He’d call it “rigged.” He would say it’s cooked up by the media that he describes as “the enemy of the people.”

You know what? Most Texas Republicans would believe him.

Imagine that.

International news, national news, political news

How did The Wall become our responsibility?

Hey, didn’t Donald John Trump vow, declare it a lead-pipe cinch that Mexico would pay for a “big, beautiful wall” along the border between that country and the United States of America?

Didn’t he say he would force Mexico to foot the bill because, after all, those criminals and terrorists were “flooding” the country through our southern neighbor?

He got into an immediate war of words with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto after taking office this past January. Why? Pena Nieto said “no way” would his country spend a nickel to pay for the wall.

Here we are, nearly 100 days into the Trump administration’s existence. The wall is now central to a domestic political dispute — in the United States. The federal government might shut down if Congress cannot come up with a plan to stick American taxpayers with the bill to build a wall that (a) won’t work and (b) will blow up the annual budget deficit.

What’s the cost of this boondoggle? $20 billion to $25 billion? For starters?

Congress and the president are squabbling over whether to approve one of those “continuing resolutions” that would fund the government for the short term. Meanwhile, that damn wall is still being negotiated between Republican congressional leaders and the Republican who now sits (once in a while) in the Oval Office.

If there is a more impractical, illogical and ill-conceived idea than building such a barrier between two ostensibly “friendly” nations, then someone will have tell me.

A huge portion of the U.S.-Mexico border happens to be along a mighty river — the Rio Grande — that separates Texas from Mexico. How in the name of civil engineering does the president build the wall along that border? How does the president propose to seize all that private land without adding to the already-enormous cost? The U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment requires “just compensation” for any “private land taken for public use.”

Well, why quibble over the small stuff?

The very notion of this wall becoming central to this political dispute simply illustrates yet another blind and thoughtless campaign promise the president cannot keep.

And if he made that promise knowing that he couldn’t fulfill it, isn’t that just another flat-out, bald-faced lie?

national news

This presidency seems so, so lengthy … already!

Do you mean to say we haven’t gotten to that 100-day mark in the presidency of Donald John Trump?

This guy is wearing me out. How about you?

Trump has been president for about 92 days. Almost every single day there is something that causes concern. Sometimes it’s big. Sometimes it’s not.

Every single day the media are reporting on some investigation into possible corruption involving conflict of interest, probable meddling by a foreign government in our electoral process — and whether the president’s campaign was complicit in it — and whether the president’s daughter is fattening her bank account because of her role in the administration.

The president has fired his national security adviser, hired his son-in-law to be a senior adviser, reportedly considered a wholesale shakeup of his senior White House staff.

He has jetted off to his ritzy resort in south Florida, costing the Treasury a ton of money it doesn’t have.

And to think we’re barely three months into this guy’s term. We’ve got 45 more of them to go!

This is going to be the longest four years — if he lasts that long — in anyone’s memory.

Guess what. There’s actually the tiniest silver lining in all of this. For those of us who are getting a little long in the tooth, we often lament how quickly time flies especially when we’ve lived most of our lives already; there’s relatively little time left on this Earth for many of us.

The turmoil we’re enduring with Donald Trump’s tenure as president seems to make us think that time is slowing to a halt.

I know. That’s not a good thing.

All I believe at this point is that the past three months seem to have gone on forever.

This is not how a “fine-tuned machine” is supposed to run.

national news

Motor City Madman doesn’t belong in ‘our house’

1 Comment

Donald J. Trump’s recent guests at the White House have drawn some chatter around the country.

Sarah Palin, Kid Rock and Ted Nugent came calling on the president.

I won’t discuss the former half-term Alaska governor (and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee) or Kid Rock in this post. Nugent’s presence in the White House, though, is worthy of a brief — and unkind — comment from yours truly.

The Motor City Madman disgusts me at many levels. The idea that he would darken the White House door — the house that belongs to you and me — is revolting.

Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, noted this on a social media post:

“Nugent once referred to former President Barack Obama as a ‘mongrel.’ He has said he wanted to shoot former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and called for Obama and Hillary Clinton to be assassinated. In 2012, after making a threatening remark about Obama, Nugent was the subject of a Secret Service investigation.

“As Trump’s dinner guest, Nugent was asked if he regretted his comments about Obama and Clinton. He responded, ‘No! I will never apologize for calling out evil people.’”

It’s not Nugent’s politics that should disqualify him from entering the White House. I get that he’s a political conservative; he’s an avid Second Amendment activist. That’s all fine as far as it goes. We’re all entitled to our points of view and political opinion.

However, this washed-up rock guitarist has a lengthy record of uttering profoundly hideous diatribes against people with whom he disagrees. The “mongrel” comment about the former president is just one of them.

The notion that the current president of the United States would welcome someone who has spoken so disgracefully about a former president demonstrates why so many millions of Americans believe he is unfit for the office he occupies.

environmental news

Let us cherish the only Earth we have

Is it me or is Planet Earth going to get some major disrespect from the current president of the United States?

I ask because Earth Day is upon us. We commemorate our home planet with marches, speeches and occasionally fiery rhetoric from activists who proclaim the need to take care of our home.

Many of us take these exhortations seriously. Many others don’t.

I fear that one of those who don’t now resides in the White House. The 45th president of the United States, Donald John Trump, has said some pretty hideous things about some of the environmental crises facing this planet of ours.

The worst of those things has been to declare climate change to be  “hoax” promoted by our trading foes in the People’s Republic of China.

I have written about Earth Day previously in this blog. Here is this past year’s entry:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2016/04/happy-earth-day/

Trump has assembled a Cabinet that includes an Environmental Protection Agency director, Scott Pruitt, who shares the president’s denial of climate change. Pruitt has sued the federal government multiple times dating back to when he served as Oklahoma attorney general.

Indeed, the EPA’s very mission is spelled out explicitly in its title: to “protect” the environment.

What did the president do shortly after taking office? He signed an executive order that rolls back regulations that sought to clean the air. Trump contends that the rules and regulations are “job killers” and he vows to do all he can to restore jobs for heavy industry.

At what cost? To pour pollutants into the air, which well could create hazardous living conditions for millions of Americans?

I remain committed to the idea that climate change is real and that human beings are playing a major role in creating the havoc that’s occurring around the world.

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating. This is the only Earth we have. We must cherish it. Protect it. Love it.

This terrestrial affection must exist far beyond a single day.

national news, political news

Trump’s big mouth threatens to swallow him

2 Comments

That dreaded 100-day “deadline” looms for Donald John Trump. We’re about one week away from it.

Will it produce a winning report card for the president? Will those of us in the peanut gallery be able to call the new president’s start a rousing success, which Trump himself has done already?

I do not believe so.

Does the 100-day mark matter? Perhaps it shouldn’t count as much as it does. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up this artificial barrier when he took office in 1933 and it’s been held as sort of the benchmark for early presidential success ever since.

But it’s early in any new president’s term. Donald Trump is no different.

Except for one little thing.

All along the way en route to his winning the election, the Republican candidate for president kept telling us about all the things he would accomplish in those first 100 days.

* Affordable Care Act? Repealed and replaced.

* Tax reform? Enacted.

* Draining the swamp of corruption? He’d institute a new government ethic.

What’s happened? The ACA remains. Tax reform hasn’t even been introduced. The swamp is still full.

The president can count precious few legislative triumphs. In fact, I can’t think of any. Can you? He’s signed a lot of executive orders. I particularly like the one that banned government officials from becoming lobbyists immediately after leaving public service.

Sure, he launched that missile strike against Syria after that horrendous chemical weapons attack. I give the president kudos for that action. But he’s got North Korea sounding more threatening than ever; Trump said he dispatched the “great armada” led by the USS Carl Vinson, but the carrier-led strike group to date is nowhere near the Korean Peninsula.

Donald Trump’s very own big mouth has victimized him.

Just maybe once the president gets past this 100-day hurdle, he will decide to tone down his constant boastfulness and learn finally — finally! — that governance requires much more than shooting off one’s big mouth.