After a brief hiatus, As The Donald Turns is back with a vengeance. Clearly, Donald is giving us enough material to be able to put up a new column every day, but these have been a different 48 hours. As Donald would, and does, say “Believe me.”
As The Donald Turns; “Believe Me”
Big Accomplishments
- Donald gave a great speech Wednesday in Missouri, about nothing in particular. “Believe me,” the staff here took copious notes and while the theme was supposed to be the tax cut bill, Donald talked about Christmas, and North Korea, and some more about Christmas and the economy, and people wearing his hats, and winning….lots of winning; “Believe me.”
When “believe me,” is followed by a statement that is completely untrue, it makes for some serious headaches for our staff. Donald said, “I will tell you this in a non-braggadocious way: There has never been a 10-month president that has accomplished what we have.” The research staff put together a list of Donald’s accomplishments….and then we lost the post-it note they were written on.
The president has had zero major legislative successes this year. He has signed lots of memorandums that have no legislative authority. He has looked to wipe out anything that carried Barack Obama’s name. There have been plenty of post office naming works. Oh wait…we found the post-it note!!!!! Yes, here it is….President Trump authorized the re-opening of the Keystone Pipeline project. That was big…..Let’s see, the pipeline leaked 210,000 gallons of oil in pristine South Dakota land and the people on the ground waited five hours to report the leak. Um…ok…maybe that is not what he had in mind.
He ran on building the wall….ok, well that isn’t happening. He ran on repeal and replace of Obama Care….hhhmmm, ok not so much with that. He ran on throwing Hillary Clinton in jail. That seems pretty likely. The legislative successes really look like this:
Two federal spending bills required of every president and Congress to keep the government running; a bill overhauling government-employee travel policy; a bill about the United States competing for an international expo; a measure addressing Department of Homeland Security vehicle fleets; and the official naming of a federal courthouse in Tennessee.
North Korea Is Scared
- He also ran on keeping North Korea in check. “Believe me,” he said. North Korea will know who they are dealing with now. Today in a speech about tax cuts, he called North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un, “a sick puppy.” Believe me, that little jumpsuit wearing dictator knows who he is dealing with after that. The US is levying more sanctions on North Korea today. North Korea is currently the most sanctioned government in the world. They do not care. We showed them, “believe me.”
- We almost forgot. Donald ran on “winning.” It says so right here on the post-it note in the upper corner. Well, it either says that or it says “whining.” It’s hard to tell after you use it to wipe up the mustard stains from lunch. Donald says we are doing lots of winning. You how we know we are winning? Because Donald said at the speech, “We are going to celebrate Christmas with a big, beautiful tax cut.” You know, because nothing says celebrating the birth of Jesus quite like giving more money back to the uber-wealthy and cutting welfare for the poor.
- Donald also celebrated the rescue and restoration efforts in Houston and Florida. He left out Puerto Rico for a few moments, and then said it was tough because the island was in such poor shape to begin with. FEMA is not winning so much. Turns out they bought 30 million plastic tarps to help with shelter issues and two months later, the tarps are still not there. To follow Donald’s logic though, they did not have 30 million tarps before the storm, so they are really no worse off. Winning!!
- Workers were going to be winning. Donald told them, “Believe me.” Tell that to the workers at Carrier in Indiana. You remember them? Before he was sworn in as president, Donald made a big deal of a visit there with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the former governor of Indiana. Carrier got a massive tax break from the state of Indiana in exchange for saving about 800 jobs from going to Mexico. Well, 300 of those jobs were cut back in July. Now, 200-300 more will be cut by year’s end. But Carrier gets to keep the tax break for the next seven years. But at least those losing their jobs have Donald’s blessing to say, “Merry Christmas.” Not like anything else in the new tax bill is going to help them.
Unhinged
- Speaking of “Believe me,” there is the matter of Donald’s twitter account. He was busy Wednesday morning retweeting the videos of a right wing extremist organization in England. Jayda Fransen is part of an anti-immigrant group called Britain First HQ. She has videos posted, and cannot verify the authenticity of them. They show Muslims throwing a teenage boy off a building. They show a Muslin immigrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches. Here is the thing. She is a devout racist. It is believed by many in the British government that the videos were staged. The US Embassy in the Netherlands confirmed that the video with the boy on crutches is fake and the alleged attacker is not an immigrant Muslim but a Dutch citizen.
Still, low information Donald retweeted the videos as a presumed of show of support for his anti-Muslim stance. The reaction was swift:
@DrDavidDuke 10h10 hours ago
“Trump retweets video of crippled white kid in Europe being beaten by migrants, and white people being thrown off a roof and then beaten to death, He’s condemned for showing us what the fake news media WON’T. Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him!”
Yes, the most well-known racist in the country came to Donald’s defense. Believe me. On the other side of the pond, British Prime Minister Theresa May said, “It is wrong for the President to have done this.” The British government has labeled Britain First as a hate group, as the organization has a history of staging videos in order to stir anti-immigrant fervor.
Donald slapped back at May Wednesday night:
Donald J. TrumpVerified account 15m15 minutes ago
“Theresa @theresamay, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!”
Fortunately, we had Trump whisperer Sarah Sanders to explain that, “Whether it is a real video, the threat is real, that is what the President is talking about, that is what the President is focused on is dealing with those real threats, and those are real no matter how you look at it.”
Why?
- Speaking of Twitter and taking stabs in the dark, Donald went after MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough.
Donald J. TrumpVerified account 11h11 hours ago
“So now that Matt Lauer is gone when will the Fake News practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin? And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough based on the “unsolved mystery” that took place in Florida years ago? Investigate!”
For those that do not know, when Scarborough was a congressman from Florida, one of his assistants died. According to the coroner, she suffered heart failure in the office, hit her head on a table as she fell and died from the head injuries. Conspiracy theorists, the kind that have Hillary running a child sex trafficking ring out of a DC pizza parlor, have long suggested Scarborough was somehow involved, even with zero evidence to prove it.
Why Donald felt the need to go after Scarborough out of the blue like this is up for speculation. There are many things to not like about Scarborough….like his hair reminding us of Johnny Bravo but this seemed random. “Believe me,” the staff here has its theories, but we will wait until we have more than unproven conspiracies.
