Note: Back from a brief vacation, your faithful "Keyboard Warrior" is back at it again.
Wow! I take a few days off and President Trump goes off his nut ranting about Speaker Pelosi, claiming again that he's a "stable genius," getting his stooges on the White House staff to say he was "very calm" in a meeting with Democrats, and putting out a doctored video of Pelosi to make her look stupid, old and feeble.
What the hell is going on! What kind of nutcase do we have running this country?
And then, to top it off, there was the report that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the oil exec who Trump hired and then fired, said the president was woefully unprepared in his meeting with super-prepared Vladimir Putin and was completely overmatched.
Once again, it was Trump engaging in discussions that could affect the well being of the entire world simply relying on his gut.
Ok, all the Trump-Pelosi stuff happened after Trump shut down a White House meeting Wednesday about infrastructure because the speaker accused him of engaging in a coverup because he's trying to stonewall Congressional investigations into his activities. On top of that, at her weekly news conference on Thursday, when asked if she was concerned about Trump's well-being, she replied, “I am,” adding she was also concerned about “the wellbeing of the United States of America”.
And then she said: “I wish that his family or his administration or staff would have an intervention for the good of the country. Maybe he wants to take a leave of absence.”
That sent Trump up the wall, so later Thursday at a meeting with farmers and ranchers in which he announced his $16 billion giveaway to help bail them out of trouble caused by his tariffs, he tried to counter Pelosi’s claim that he had “flipped out” and had a “tempter tantrum”.
“I was so calm. I was extremely calm,” and then proceeded to ask White House aides such as Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders about his demeanor. They and others dutifully reported that he was calm, very calm.
Ah yes. Calm, oh so calm.
So why did he feel the need to tweet out a doctored video purporting to show that Pelosi had "lost it," in Trump's words? Of course, Fox News was all over that one.
No matter, Pelosi, using Trump's favorite medium, Twitter, wrote late Thursday, “When the ‘extremely stable genius’ starts acting more presidential, I’ll be happy to work with him on infrastructure, trade and other issues.”
Trump's Gut
Then there was the Tillerson story about Trump's lack of preparation when he met with Putin, reported by The Washington Post following a closed-door meeting with the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
"“We spent a lot of time in the conversation talking about how Putin seized every opportunity to push what he wanted,” a committee aide said. “There was a discrepancy in preparation, and it created an unequal footing.”
That comment apparently got under Trump's skin, too, because after the hearing he issued a statement claiming that he “was perfectly prepared for my meetings with Vladimir Putin. We did very well at those meetings.”
Well, maybe. But remember that Trump in the past has downplayed the importance of preparation for such meetings, saying his gut instinct and ability to read a room are more important.
“I don’t think I have to prepare very much,” Trump said ahead of his first meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last year. “It’s about attitude, it’s about willingness to get things done. So this isn’t a question of preparation, it’s a question of whether or not people want it to happen, and we’ll know that very quickly.”
There you have it. A stable genius" who listens to his gut when meeting with our enemies and who uses gutter tactics like name calling and fake videos against his political enemies here at home.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the President of the United States of America.