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Monday, January 21, 2019

Why Can't Giuliani Make Up His Mind?

It sure does seem that Rudy Giuliani is a total idiot. One day he'll give an interview where he says that Donald Trump was trying to make a deal with the Russians from the day he announced till the day he won the election. This is tantamount to admitting Trump was making foreign policy decisions to benefit himself.

The next day Giuliani will say that was just hypothetical, and he was making assumptions about what Trump was saying, or that someone in his company might have been making deals, but there's nothing wrong with that, and anyway Trump was totally oblivious about what was going on with those deals in his own company, or the changes to the Republican Party platform to remove sanctions on Russia so that companies could make those kinds of deals without being charged with the same sorts of crimes that the Trump administration is hammering companies with that do business with Iran.

Which begs the question: if Trump has no idea what his company, or his campaign or his government are doing, and refuses to take responsibility for the actions they take in his name, why is he president?

One day Giuliani will say that Trump never told Cohen to lie to Congress about his Russia deals. The next day Giuliani will say that Trump and Cohen might have talked about Cohen's testimony before the hearings, implicitly admitting that Trump tried to get Cohen to fudge his testimony, but that there's nothing at all wrong with that.

Why is Giuliani talking at all? He clearly has no idea what anyone said or did, and he's just spouting his own suppositions. What kind of a lousy lawyer is he?

Is Giuliani senile, lying or just stupid? Yes, on all counts, but he has also assumed the same garbage-filled speaking style that Trump has: say everything, toss every wild theory out there, contradict himself endlessly, then deny everything in the hopes that the public will just throw up their hands in confusion and forget about it.

Then, when the truth comes out, and we know with absolute certainty that Trump really was trying to get dirt on Hillary from Russian hackers, and really was trying to cut a real estate deal with the Russians, the White House will say that this is old news, everyone always knew that Trump was talking to the Russians, and no one cares about it because he won the election anyway (pussy-grabbing!), so we just forget about the collusion, the backroom deals, and the conspiracies to sell out American foreign policy, NATO and our European allies so that Trump can plaster his name on a tower in Moscow and feel like big-boy dictators like Vovka and Un and Recep.

This is the strategy: lie, and lie, and lie and lie, and repeat the lie five different ways, and then come up with five new lies, and sow so much chaos and confusion that no one has any idea what went on, and hope that they just get tired of the mess and want it to go away.

The irony of it all is that the Russians were always playing Trump for a fool. They've been stringing him along for decades, dangling a shiny Moscow tower in front of him since the 1980s.

If Trump had lost the election, it's inconceivable that Putin would have given a prominent American politician -- an enemy of his state -- such an ostentatious symbol of power and wealth in the center of Moscow. It would make Putin look like he was giving loser Trump a consolation prize after Russian hackers failed to get him elected.

And if Trump won and Putin let him put up a tower in Moscow, it would make Putin look even weaker, rewarding the winner of the election from Russia's greatest foe with a huge Moscow propaganda blitz.

So this deal was never going to happen. Trump had to remain a reality show gadfly and backstage voyeur at his soft-core porn beauty contests to have any shot at Trump Tower Moscow. As soon as he won the Republican nominee any such deal was off.

But Trump was still going after the deal until election day. Only a greedy narcissistic sucker could actually believe that there was any chance in hell for that Moscow tower. Trump has got to be the worst deal maker in American history.

He can't negotiate his way out of a paper bag. Or a month-long government shutdown of his own making, as shown by the fact that all sides flatly rejected his Saturday proposal for ending the shutdown.

Trump's only negotiation tactic is a flat demand: my way or the highway. That's why the shutdown won't end. He doesn't have the slightest clue on how to negotiate a deal that benefits all sides. He views every deal as a zero sum, with the only acceptable outcome is him winning everything and the enemy losing everything.

And that's not how democracy works.

Even Trump's fans are getting tired of this stupid routine: the latest polls show that his voters are starting to blame him for the shutdown.

Which they should, because he claimed he would own the shutdown and never blame the Democrats for it. And then he promptly blamed it on the Democrats.

Trump is always trying to have it not just both ways, but every way, the sure sign of a con man and liar. I am still completely baffled that the Republicans in the Senate still have not realized they'll be going down the toilet with Trump when he finally gets flushed.

It seems the only way out is for Senate Republicans to save Trump from himself by passing a continuing resolution to fund the government with a veto-proof margin. Trump would sign the bill defiantly, saying that he would continue to fight for the wall tooth and nail, and then it will quietly die.

Just like it died during the two years that Trump and the Republicans had total control of the entire federal government, but never did anything to start building the wall, because no one actually wants the god-damned wall. It's just a hammer for Trump and white nationalists to pound Latinos and liberals with to make them squirm and scream.

But Senate Republicans are too cowardly to rear their crocodilian heads from the swamp, for fear that Trump's nihilistic supporters will primary them come re-election time.

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