I expected President Drumpf to embarrass himself—and us by proxy—when he went abroad last month. He did not disappoint, so long as you’re a fan of dark humor.

Consider DJT as the perfect poster boy for what I’ll call the neo-Ugly American: cutting in front of the Motenegrin Prime Minister, and then strutting in place for the photo op like some cartoon bully. This article features a repeating GIF of Trump brushing aside P.M. Dusko Markovic. It makes me want to slap some sense into that spoiled child Donald. Or send him off to boarding school. Oh wait, his parents did that.

Next came Trump refusing to reaffirm the mutual defense pact that is NATO’s foundation, then calling our fellow member nations deadbeats. At last! —a mainstream Republican behavior: accusing others of the wrong that they are doing themselves. Deadbeat Donald is the poster boy here too, with a long history of not paying contractors and employees for work performed. Not to mention sticking investors and banks with a project’s losses while skimming his personal profit in the form of salary and expenses.

But who am I to complain? It could have been worse! No, really. The tweet-storm that Trump generates each morning, ruffling feathers and driving the day’s news cycle, ceased during that trip. Trump’s week-plus spent abroad played here at home as calmly as the eye of a hurricane. How? The frenetic nature of a multi-stop foreign trip. The necessity for Trump to read off a teleprompter rather than the voices in his head. The lack of down time. His handlers used that perfect storm of busy to keep him off Twitter.

But he tweeted, you say. His account did, yes. Trump’s tweets from overseas were clearly written by someone else:

and

Wow, those sentiments make me want to walk up to a soldier and gift him a daisy in the barrel of his gun. We know that those words came from an aide with a strong sense of politics and a weak sense of drama—because once Trump arrived home and got his phone back, the calm eye of the tweet-storm quickly became a memory:

Indeed! Fox News’s favorite lead into the latest lie they are generating themselves is “Some people say…” Perhaps Mr. Trump’s investigators in Hawaii could check out those sources, IF they’re done investigating Obama’s birth. Much of that fake news is coming from inside the White House. Trump should debate this Twitter user:

 

Next: Ignoring the newsier half of a story by falsely accusing the press of ignoring the other half:

I read a lot about it for many days after. Of course, the stories were about police charging Greg Gianforte with assault, not his win. I’ve read that Trump’s staff go to great lengths to keep negative news from him, so maybe he just doesn’t know.

 

Wait, there’s more!

Sigh. And I suppose the Israelis were delighted with Trump’s leak of highly classified information to Russian spies. While entertaining them in the Oval Office! Netanyahu may have greeted Donald the Declassifier as a bosom buddy, but it’s a safe bet that Israeli Intelligence has already downgraded what they can share with any U.S. president, from now on.

And now that the trip is in everyone’s rear view mirror, we’re back to feuds and daily crises, gale-force tweetstorms that undermine his TRAVEL BAN even as it sludges toward the Supreme Court, a clueless revenge attack on London’s mayor—and by proxy, the people of London and England.

And back for a swing at his favorite foe:

 

Later, channeling Captain Obvious while shaming the Chinese:

Yup, that ought to work…

Damn, I’m doing what I hoped I’d gotten past.

You haven’t heard from me in awhile because I felt I was merely echoing the complaints that you read every day from others. You don’t need another liberal whining at you. With that said, I do find this interesting: you can watch Trump warn us about his own presidency in a speech he delivered on October 11, 2016. The section in question is at time code 4:20-5:50. It’s unnerving: he speaks the same words about Hillary Clinton that are being spoken about him now:

“The FBI now has multiple open criminal investigations of Hillary Clinton.”

“This election will determine whether we remain a free country, in the truest sense of the word, or we become a corrupt banana republic controlled by large donors and foreign governments.”

“This is collusion and corruption of the highest order and is one more reason why I ask my Attorney General, I will ask, to appoint a special prosecutor.”

Sheesh.

The news media’s compliance with getting everything Trump says out to the general public is, to me, emblematic of the devils in our nature that elected him. We should be ignoring him, yes, even the President of the United States, not giving him the attention that he craves like mother’s milk.

But don’t worry: we can’t look away from this train wreck. And probably shouldn’t. Here’s more irony: we knew Trump’s presidency would be a train wreck before it even left the station—and yet, there was no way to stop it from happening. There still isn’t. So talking about it, protesting it, fighting it, mocking it… that’s what’s left. Other voices, that is what I started out to write here…

The New York Times sorted, organized and cataloged every Trump tweet from his first 100  days in office.

Every President winds up photographed in various ridiculous-looking situations. Trump’s first real laugher came with a glowing orb in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia:

 

And after that, he fell into a creative variation of his “I love the last thing I saw” act:

 

Norwegian leaders mocked the scene:

 

…as did the hoi polloi:

 

Remember how Fox News and other right-wing media attacked President Obama for bowing to foreign leaders?

 

MAD Magazine got into the act a few months back, only to the plagiarized by TIME:

 

These days, attitiude comes in instantly viral video, too.

And what of Europe? Macron displayed the fortitude that all of Europe must now find within. He called his white-knuckled handshake with Trump “a moment of truth. We must show that we will not make small concessions, even symbolic ones.”

Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau sums up Trump’s paranoia:

Let us not forget who is the person most obsessed with the past election: its winner.

 

Even Mother Nature offered an opinion!  The comments beneath this tweet about a Mar-A-Lago sinkhole are predictably repetitious, but still fun. Click on the tweet to read them:

 

And I love Stephen King’s in-character response to Trump’s bogus wiretapping claim last March:

Even the serious allegations of Trump vs. Comey seem too clumsy and cartoonish to be real. And yet they are. With Comey’s words and notes ringing in our ears, read this piece about a friend of the former FBI director recalling recent, revelatory conversations. The money quote:

“…these incidents … sketch a trajectory in which Trump kept Comey on board only as long as it took him to figure out that there was no way to make Comey part of the team. Once he realized that he couldn’t do that—and that the Russia matter was thus not going away—he pulled the trigger.”

It’s remarkable in its predictable unpredictability: Donald Trump’s presidency is playing out as Shakespeare Noir, a Bard tragedy in three acts that was translated into Amurrican by Mickey Spillane. Overlay the back-alley plot with whining dialog rewritten by Woody Allen, and you’ve got this century’s first Great American Tragicomedy.

 

I do love the irony of the Nixon library defending their namesake’s reputation against Trump’s:

The Political Apprentice #11

Written by

Steve Schlich is retired after 35 years of writing fiction about software: “easy to use,” “does what you want,” and the like. Hobbies include webmaster for www.RodSerling.com, writing songs and short stories. In 2004, he created www.NakedWashington.com, a website chronicling the naughty public art in Washington, D.C. He lives happily with his wife and cats, north of San Francisco.

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