Voters next week need to know: how Dumb can Dumb Don be? He used the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives in Istanbul to tell Vladimir Putin that if Russia spends $110 billion or so on U.S. goods, Vladimir can bump off anyone he wants, anywhere in the world that he wants to. Even here.
When asked to respond to Turkish evidence that the Saudis had killed Khashoggi in Istanbul, he said of the Saudis, "They're spending $US110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs...for this country. I don't like the concept of stopping an investment of $US110 billion into the United States, because you know what they're going to do? They're going to take that money and spend it in Russia or China or someplace else."
“Vladimir,” Don is saying, “Alexander Mishkin and Anatoliy Chepiga, the assassins you assigned to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter, are no problem for us so long you spend $110 billion in the U.S.”
We CAN be bought!
Typical of Dumb Don, he didn’t think to tell Putin the Small that even for $110 billion he must exclude Don from Russia’s hit list!
Obviously, what Don said was really, really dumb. Don is giving voters next week a horrible choice. Regardless of your preferred party or policy, you must ask a couple of hard questions.
Why did Don say something this stupid? Did he actually know that it was stupid? Is he so diminished that he could not foresee Turkish president Erdogan hanging him out to dry with damning revelations that would make him look like a fool? Was he unable to think that he should wait for more details before saying anything, let alone offering our list price for murder?
The more questions that you ask the weirder this gets. Our problem as voters is that all the answers to these questions rule out Dumb Don and anyone who supports him.
Which raises even deeper questions as to why he offered a list price for murder right before an election. If you are a supporter of the GOP Coalition, you have been sabotaged. And the Demos had nothing to do with it. Really, really bizarre.
Of course, what Don said is utter madness. But it fits perfectly with the logic of the twelve-mistake sentence Don used on August 15, 2016 to anchor U.S. security policy. (See Publius on Dumb Don.)
Don is now trying to walk back his lunacy, but it is too late. He has spoken for his country. In America, Don said, morality is for those who can’t put up $110 billion. North of that, anything goes. Humanity and the rule of law are for the poor.
The big problem is, as Publius was the first to demonstrate nearly three years ago, that Don’s intellectual incontinence is such that he has no idea what he has said and no idea what it means or implies. He is too mentally deficient to think through this, or anything else.
If you tried to explain to him that he has just pulled another Benedict Trump, betraying the nation’s deepest values, he would not understand what you meant or how you reached that conclusion. He would just get angry.
This brings up another issue. The media accuse Dumb Don of lying and some keep a count of how many lies he has told. But this is “fake” news. Don does not lie. He is incapable of knowing the difference between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, or smart and stupid. As with his assertion that America can be bought, he has no idea what he has said or what it means. He is not sufficiently intelligent to know. His intellectual effluvia run all over the place.
How bad is Trump’s mental deficiency? Bob Woodward’s great new book, Fear, shows in astonishing detail over 448 pages what Publius described in only 1,500 words in Trump Management Protocol (TruMP) a year and a half ago. End-to-end, Fear chronicles the second-to-second struggle that everyone associated with Trump has with TruMP.
There is an amazing scene in Fear where Dumb Don tries in Trumplish to coach White House staffer Tom Brossert on what to say in a TV interview (see Publius on Trumplish and Quantum Weirdness). Trump blurts out a series of two- and three-word sentence fragments that mean nothing by themselves or combined and expects a result. As always with the Dumb Dude, what result isn’t clear to Brossert, Woodward or to the reader. No one speaks Trumplish but Don. And because Trumplish has no syntax, no one can learn to speak it or translate it into English or any other language.
The cost of having a monolingual, Trumplish-speaking president gets higher by the day. The Center of Everything’s ambassador to the U.S., Cui Tiankai called out the TruMP mess on Fox recently: “Honestly, I’ve been talking to other ambassadors in Washington, D.C. This is also part of their problem.”
Here’s the rub. As we have known from the day of his inauguration, our Hacksident uses open smartphones that can easily be hacked by Russia and The Center. Don’t ask why, but the New York Times only just figured this out and calls it news!! Apparently, Don does this to ensure that Russia and The Center, plus the Five Eyes, Israel and other interested parties, have simple access to his conversations and so know his mental mish-mash well in advance of his administration, Congress or the public. But, as Cui shows, even with access to Don’s most intimate Trumplish conversations, they all still fail TruMP.
As Publius demonstrated they would in TruMP, anyone who comes into contact with Dumb Don, licitly or illicitly, must deal with his Trumplish gibberish 24/7. There is no getting away from it. The smart ones, like Michael Wolff, Omarosa Manigault-Newman and Bob Woodward, have figured out how to make money from TruMP. The rest just see their reputations destroyed.
Unfortunately for us, because Dumb Don is President, all Americans are damaged by TruMP bigly.
Enjoy your vote.