A Trump Abroad

I'm not by nature a pessimistic person, which regularly shocks me--my generation is known for cynicism and snark and sarcasm. But I sometimes am hopeful about things, like maybe that the White House plans hotel bookings for the President when he does important stuff abroad so he doesn't have to schlep a room in an embassy like he was Julian Assange or something. (He's staying in Hamburg's Senate house--it's nice, and I am just being mean.) Sigh. I wish I felt better about his being out and around people, is all.

Maybe he would just give a great speech in front of a sympathetic bussed-in crowd. Maybe it wouldn't be a weird white nationalist rant about Western Civilization. Maybe he wouldn't get some historical thing, like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, really wrong. Maybe he wouldn't mention his election results. 

I also was hopeful that the US President who took an oath to the Constitution would not actually deride freedom of speech and the press which is a big thing, really. (That hope got dashed.) And if I was looking for some kind of acknowledgement that Trump understood that Russia meddled in the 2016 elections and probably was going to try it again, well, again, disappointment.  Trump basically agreed Russia could have been involved but so could anyone and anyway nothing is proven, blah blah blah. Which is itself fake news. There is a lot of consensus that meddling came from Russia to benefit Trump.  And that they will try it again. Right now, they seem to be trying out our nuclear plants. 

I would like to think that a person who put "America first" would be mad about this kind of invasive attack by any foreign government on our infrastructure--whether our electoral infrastructure upon which our faith in government might depend, or on our electric grid. That someone who was speaking for the US interest in, well, anything, had a plan.

But this self-interested SOB can't even admit that Russia is a problem. He is going to go into his meeting with Putin with a handful of people--Tillerson, Lavrov, some translators. And I don't feel good about this based on his meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak.  But maybe we will see, despite efforts to keep this meeting very closed.