DEAR, DEAR, WHAT CAN THE MATTER BE

Mark Twain remarked that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."  No one needed it more last week than our own Donald Trump, who found himself stuck in a shithole country where the cheese is bleu and the politicians hit on your wife.  Cherchez le fromage. 

Even factoring in those hardships, it still appears to me that Donald Trump been acting stranger than usual since election day.  He traveled to the land of Roquefort and guillotines, ostensibly to honor those who served in World War I.  But when it began to rain, he decided he’d rather be at a civilized place like Mar-A-Lago.  He blew off the memorials, and scowled his way through the few public events he bothered to attend.  The only time he cracked a smile was when the Godfather, Vladimir Putin, favored him with a glance.  He left France early and returned to the United States, only to skip yet another opportunity to honor America’s war dead at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday. 

I’ve seen speculation that Trump suffered a physical or mental health issue on this trip, and that his schedule has been scaled back to minimize his public exposure.  That’s not impossible, but he pops up just often enough with a rage-tweet or an impromptu interview that it’s hard to believe that he was really incapacitated.  The more likely explanation is that he was just sulking.

What’s really strange, though, is that Trump stopped tweeting for several days.  Oh, a few prosaic tweets were issued under his name, but they were obviously written by staff.  Stranger yet, a number of other right-wing outlets also went silent on Twitter during the second week of November:  Fox News, Wikileaks, National Enquirer, and Matt Drudge (who deleted all his tweets).  Golly, you’d think something was up.  Here’s what it looks like to me.

After an initial burst of optimism as polls closed on November 6, White House insiders say that Trump has retreated into “a cocoon of bitterness and resentment.”  Since bitterness and resentment are core components of Trump’s nature, you have to wonder how his staff could tell the difference, but apparently things have taken a turn for the worse in Trump’s world.  Let us count the ways.     

Perhaps Trump has finally begun to grasp the full import of the mid-term elections.  During the campaign, he did his best to turn the election into a referendum on himself.  That worked in 2016, and it worked again on his base in 2018.  But Democrats were ready for him this time.  They nominated a younger and vastly more diverse slate of candidates, who basically mopped the floor with most of Trump’s hand-picked candidates.  The trumpier Trump gets, the worse he does with the two-thirds of the electorate who are non-deplorables.  That became clear as Democrats flipped the House decisively and are close to breaking even in the Senate.

As a result, his firewall – not the mythical wall along the border with Mexico, but rather the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which scuttled every attempt to hold Trump accountable – fell to the enemy.  The blue wave of 2018 grew slowly but inexorably.  In close races, Democrats resolutely kept calm and insisted on counting the votes, and their candidates have notched some impressive victories as the days have passed.  Gone are the days when Trump and his cronies could count on Republicans in Congress to stifle investigations into their corruption.  New Democratic committee chairs with subpoena power will put Trump’s affairs under a microscope. 

But it gets worse for Trump.  After two years, he finally got up the nerve to fire Jeff Sessions.  No doubt he thought his troubles with the Justice Department were finally over.  Unfortunately, he didn’t put much thought into the choice of the next Attorney General.  Instead, he appointed an unvetted sycophant as acting Attorney General.  It’s not clear that Matt Whitaker’s appointment is entirely legal, and anything Whitaker might do to interfere with Robert Mueller will certainly be challenged in court. 

Golly, who could have anticipated that a random right-wing grifter might come with baggage?  You and me, maybe, but no one who talks to Donald Trump regularly had the sense – or the nerve – to point this out.  Until last week, Matt Whitaker had been a small-time right-wing scam artist, cheating on taxes and bilking veterans.  A guy who was being investigated by the FBI suddenly became the boss of the FBI.  In other words, Whitaker is pretty much indistinguishable from other members of Trump’s Cabinet. 

Not that any of these mere peccadilloes keep him from being a good Christian.  Perish the thought!  

Why, when it comes to screening potential new judicial appointees, Whitaker said, “I’d like to see, are they people of faith?  Do they have a biblical view of justice?  New Testament.  And what I know is as long as they have that worldview, that they’ll be a good judge.”

Frankly, I think our judicial system could use a good dose of New Testament principles.  “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”  “Turn the other cheek.”  “Judge not lest ye be judged.”  “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”   “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”  Justice, in other words, tempered with mercy, humility, and a little common sense.

But that’s not what Whitaker meant.  Notice how quickly he qualified “biblical view” with “New Testament.”  He was making sure that his evangelical audience knew that he was excluding Jews.  That also makes hit a good fit for Trump’s team.

This is also the week that Trump is supposed to be working with his attorneys on written responses to questions from the Special Counsel’s team.  Those meetings must be a barrel of laughs, especially since there are persistent rumors that Mueller is likely to unseal a new batch of indictments in the near future.  They will reportedly include at least one member of Trump’s immediate family. 

OK, I guess maybe it’s not so hard to figure out why Trump is in a foul mood.  As St. Paul wrote in his epistle to the Galatians (6:7), “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”  Or, as the Old Testament prophet Hosea put it (Hosea 8:7), “they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”