Donald J Trump’s AsianTour featured one disaster after another. But one, to me, overshawdoes all the others. I’ll get to it in a moment, but first allow me to set the scene that surrounded it.
On his Asian tour, the following events occured.
-The juvinal exchanges between the North Korean leader and the Amerian president continued. Kim Jong Un called Trump “an old lunatic” and Trump called Kim Jong Un “Short and fat.” Laughable if it weren’t for the fact that these two children control nuclear weapons.
-Trump, in Beijing, praised Chinse President Xi Jinping who has just consolidated his power in an effort to match Mao as China’s perpetual dicator.
The Trump of the 2016 campaign who railed against China and promised to make the Chinese stop “playing” the U S unfairly on trade was nowhere to be seen.
-But in Vietnam at the Conference of Asian nations working to cement a new Pacific Trade deal to replace the Trans Pacific partnership (earlier this year Trump had pulled the U S out of that partnerhsip) , the swaggering, tough talking Trump returned, telling the others: “We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of anymore (on trade)…I am always going to put America first…”
But, with the Asian nations now sealing a trade deal with out the U S, “America first” is quickly becoming “America Alone,” as Brian Klass at the London School of Economics observed earlier this year.
And guess who will be leading this new Pacific Trade deal? Why Xi Jinping and China, of course.
-Speaking of Dictators, In Manila Trump fawned over one of the newest, cruelest “strong men,” Phillipine President Duterte who has been busily endorsing the execution of suspected drug dealers (and others) without benefit of trial (critics claim some if not many of Duterte’s victims were inocent, but never mind).
Trump said he and Duterte have a “great relationship.” In their private meeting, a Trump spokesman said the subject of “Human Rights” came up briefly. A Duterte spokesman said it was never mentioned.
By the way, also attending that private meeting was Jose E. B. Antonio, a real estate developer who is building a 150-million luxuery tower in Manila along with his partner Donald J Trump. Some people who have just returned from living on Mars complain this is totally inappropriate, not understanding this is business as usual for Trump.
Heck, can’t a fellow make a buck without the little people complaining?
-And now, speaking of dictators who kill people they don’t like, we come to the overriding disaster (outrage of the trip), a brief exchange at the Conference in Vietnam Trump had with Vladimir Putin, the ex KGB Colonel who is the president of Russia.
Trump at one point told reporters Putin had again denied to him any Russian “meddling” in our 2016 presidential election and Trump indicted he believed Putin over the U S Intelligence agencies who have unanimously said there was, indeed, Russian “meddling.”
My ability to put this outrage into perspective is no match for that of Charles W. Blow, who is a superb op-ed writer for the New York Times. His column this morning (11/13/17) is headlined “Siding With the Enemy,” which I have borrowed to headline this blog. Of course Putin would lie but can you conceive of any other American president, for that matter any other Amerian, taking his word other than Donald J Trump?
Here is the link to Blow’s column. Please read it. And weep.:
Allow me to say it again (and again), we must never surrender to Donald J Trump, never accept his attack on decency and sensible leadership that he and his merry gang of thugs are waging as the “new normal.”
New or old, the push by authoritarians, particularly those likeTrump who are vulgar ignoramouses, is something we must oppose with legal means of every description. And we cannot leave it to others.
Everyone of us must be in this fight for a return to American values that reflect Ronald Reagan’s famous adaptation from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount of a “Shining City upon a Hill.”
“America Alone” cannot survive.
This article is right on Mr. Donaldson. Donald Trump is yearning to be a dictator and it shows through his admiration for all those dictators out there. We are leaving in a really stressful and sad time right now with this crazy guy in the white house. I hope this nightmare will end soon.
Love your blog and please keep them coming.
While on active duty in 1958, Donaldson was one of the military observers of an atomic test in the Nevada testing grounds when an atomic device, with a yield roughly equivalent to the bombs dropped on Japan, was detonated three thousand yards away from the slit trench protecting the observers.