TWGB: The More Things Change, The More Trump Is the Same

Wow, Donald Trump just got booed out of the building, into his limo, onto Air Force One, and back into the White House residence.

Even the majority bro crowd at #UFC244 hates this guy’s guts.pic.twitter.com/ohI7Cs7opS

— TrumpsTaxes (@TrumpsTaxes) November 3, 2019

Was Trump supposed to not get booed at when he went to MSG for a night of UFC action? Like, did he expect something different from what he experienced at game 5 of the World Series because he was nestled in the bosom of his hometown (of which he no longer considers himself a resident) instead of that ballpark frequented by employees of the Deep State?

Maybe the president doesn't need to take it so personally. Everyone gets booed sometimes. Maybe people just go to sporting events to not think about politics, and feel like Trump is a polarizing presence. Me, I boo Trump for real from the privacy of my home, because unlike normal people I'm writing a TrumpWorld Grab-bag as once again, the news continues to make it pretty damn clear his whole presidency is snake shoes and fish tits.

Like, let's just take the Attorney General and the Secretary of State I mentioned in my last post as a kind of messed-up example of what's up with TrumpWorld. You've got the guy running the US State Department, Mike Pompeo, a department ostensibly about foreign policy, international relations, that kind of thing, with a weird kvetch about a Ukrainian conspiracy theory and a propensity for spending time in Kansas. I mean, when he isn't confusing folks in Italy (as has Bill Barr) or wherever else with his trying to personally track down the mysteries of what happened in 2016. It's very weird that he thinks his job is alienating allies and proving Trump right about debunked things, whilst some part of him clearly wants to click his heels and murmur "There's no place like home." And we also have Barr, who ostensibly runs a Department of Justice, who seems to want to overturn the results of numerous investigations into the Russian hack of the DNC to get a result more favorable to one person--President Trump. As if he was not an officer of the law, but a defense lawyer for Trump.

"Time is out of joint, o cursed spite," but I was ne'er born to set this right, myself--only to serve as your humble reporter. Today's impeachment inquiry has a lot to do with Ukraine, in fact, it has a lot to do with what Trump tried to do and how White House lawyers tried to cover for Trump. It is important to know, however, that Trump has a very odd idea about Ukraine--and appears to loathe the country:

“They are horrible, corrupt people,” Trump told them.

So far, a dozen witnesses have testified before House lawmakers since the closed-door impeachment inquiry began a month ago. One theme that runs through almost all of their accounts is Trump’s unyielding loathing of Ukraine, which dates to his earliest days in the White House.

“We could never quite understand it,” a former senior White House official said of Trump’s view of the former Soviet republic, also saying that much of it stemmed from the president’s embrace of conspiracy theories. “There were accusations that they had somehow worked with the Clinton campaign. There were accusations they’d hurt him. He just hated Ukraine.”

But if you want to get at the genesis of this loathing--you have to go back to 2016. (We never, ever, leave 2016. It is like a Stephen King short story from a collection he demanded be taken off the store shelves that circulates amongst fans of a very particular kind of horror.) Information obtained recently from the Mueller memos by Buzzfeed and CNN enlighten us a little on that score: Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort and his former NSA Michael Flynn both pushed Ukraine even back when in 2016 as being the source of the hack and the reason for the rumors that would inevitably occur that the campaign was helped by Russia. And even if the involvement of the GRU has since been greatly clarified, Trump is sticking with what his very good and not at all corrupt friends that he would like to pardon one day told him. That he is not at all a loser who got help from a foreign country. (But, if I consider Trump out of the loop on Russia's actual involvement and believing of a sweet-sop cover-story regarding Ukraine corruption, how does one account for Trump's willingness to spout the Russian line on things? Ah, faith--the belief in things unseen! He doesn't look the gift horse in the mouth, but he trepidatiously rides it all the same.)

So Trump believes in a bleak weird thing where 30 thousand emails that were on Hillary Clinton's server (which never were hacked) are on a single server (the entire fuck? a ginormous outfit like DNC has a cloud set-up with like, over a hundred servers) that are somehow in Ukraine because he's fixated on Hillary Clinton's emails (no, really, he was and his mega-fans still are) and even though his campaign and apparently the RNC coordinated with WikiLeaks in dribbling out the DNC emails, he loved them, but didn't actually get that they were two different things. To put it gently, "Pops is confused."

Which is why his "perfect phone call" to Ukraine was so damn confusing, because what in the hell of any of the CrowdStrike shit would have made sense to Zelenskyy? For that matter, for all the folks who want to say random things about whether Ukraine's president felt pressured or not based on what he said sharing a stage with Trump: Really? Go along with you! And would a battered woman standing next to her husband not say she got her black eye from walking into a door? And does that door have four fingers and a class ring? Yes, it was a very complicated door, indeed. Which is why, even if Zelenskyy can't deliver the right investigation outcomes, there are signs some kind of accommodation is in the offing.

I don't know what is worse in all of this, the dishonesty, the cover-up, the sheer incompetence required to get all of this going. and yet, we are only experiencing some information from the closed-door impeachment hearings, about which the transcripts in full will come to light, and open hearings will occur (even though for now, the White House is trying to prevent many key players from talking--and what does that even mean, one might legitimately ask!) There will be more Mueller memos distributed via Buzzfeed and CNN, which seriously means that the Mueller report is not dead, but has powerful new significance because of what it could have, but didn't include (so much obstruction of justice, apparently, though). But why so much obstruction? For what? Why? What is Trump hiding with all the vehemence he reserves for his net worth and the real story of his vital statistics?

The polls and the boos and the news show that something is changing in how Trump is viewed. But for now, he stays the same: in denial, and thinking he is a beloved leader who can survive his multiple scandals by changing address or brazening them out. I don't expect a lot from Trump. I expect a lot from us all, in voting, finally saying the best, most brutal kiss-off "Goodbye" to him. The final, most raucous, boos.

He will never get better from this point on. The worst is yet to come, and will be astonishing. Flynn's ongoing trials and Roger Stone's trials still continue, and more will be revealed.