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Some days, so many things happen that it’s hard to know
where to look. It’s like you’re driving down the highway and see four traffic
accidents – all in the same location. Maybe you really don't want to look, but your brain says you must. So you do look but your eyes
tend to jump from one to another and before you know it, you’ve passed them by.
Wednesday was that kind of day.
All of these things came to light on Wednesday, and looking
back, I’m not sure which of them I find to be more disturbing:
(1) Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow with the non-profit progressive
research organization Media Matters, studied the relationship between the right-wing
morning talk show “Fox and Friends” and the tweets that fly off the fingers of
Donald Trump. He found that many times, whatever is discussed on the Fox News program
is regurgitated by our faux-president, usually within a half-hour or so of the
broadcast. In other words, American foreign and domestic policy could well be influenced
by such luminaries as Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt.
In addition, The Washington
Post reported that Trump has tweeted to, or about, Fox News nearly 130
times since he was elected president, and frequently repeats views and topics
he has heard on the network.
(2) Trump once again demonstrated that he can’t maintain a policy
position on any important issue for more than, say, six hours in a row without
changing his mind several times. He then forgets whether he’s for something or
against it, so he changes the subject until someone reminds him to bring it up
again somewhere down the road.
He did this Wednesday with regard to a bi-partisan bill
proposed by two senators to temporarily fix the damage Trump did to the Affordable
Care Act, when he reduced the funds used to promote the program and cut off altogether
the government subsidies that make the ACA “affordable.” Trump was for the bill
before he was against it before he wasn’t sure about it before he was taking
credit for it before he was probably against it again.
Never mind that this is exactly the kind of across-the-aisle
collaboration that Trump said he wanted after the famous John McCain “thumbs
down” defeated the last of the Republican efforts to repeal and replace
Obamacare. But instead, Trump was on and off so often Wednesday that I got a
stiff neck from SMH.
(3) Next, Trump showed us how he feels about communicating with
the families of American military members killed in action overseas. Instead of
acting as Consoler-in-Chief – a sad, solemn but necessary responsibility of his
office – he instead turned the deaths of four soldiers in Niger into a competition
among himself and former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush to see who
could make the most phone calls to grieving families.
Then, when he actually did start making phone calls – albeit
nearly two weeks late – he botched the whole operation by insulting a Gold Star
family as well as other veterans around the U.S. with his lack of empathy and
his inability to speak directly to adults unless they’re waving Confederate
flags and shouting “lock her up” at his rallies.
(4) And finally, Trump reinforced the notion that the pain and
suffering of other Americans means very little to him unless he can find a way
to turn the spotlight on himself. People are still dying in Puerto Rico,
California’s wine country has been burning for days, millions of people are on
the verge of losing their health insurance and North Korea is still taunting us
with nuclear missiles, yet Trump still finds time to be pissed off at the
National Football League because it won’t demand that its players stand for the
Star Spangled Banner.
I guess he’s still hung up on that whole United States Football League thing when he tried to take on the NFL and failed miserably.
Even so, the USFL folded way back in 1986. It seems to me, after 31 years, it’s about time
to give that grudge a rest and get on with the business of, oh, I don’t know, insulting
John McCain?
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