THE BITCH IS BACK
The White House has announced that Donald Trump will have his annual performance review with Vladimir Putin on July 16 in Helsinki. He’s prepping for the meeting by holding pep rallies to boost his spirits. On Thursday, He was in Great Falls, Montana, where he trotted out some of his usual campaign tropes, veering from topic to topic, often in mid-sentence.
Perhaps the biggest revelation was that Trump is still obsessed with Elton John. He played “Tiny Dancer” at his early campaign rallies, and more recently dubbed North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un " Rocket Man." But based on a Trump rant in Great Falls, the relationship appears to have turned into a rivalry.
Trump launched into a fairly long riff about having bigger audiences in Montana than Elton John. "I have broken more Elton John records...and I don't have a musical instrument: I don't have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. We do without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical, the mouth. And hopefully the brain, attached to the mouth, right? The brain more important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.” Or would be, if he had one.
As best I can tell, Elton John has performed in Billings, Bozeman, and Missoula over the years, but never in Great Falls. And of course, Elton charged admission for his concerts – at the 2011 Billings concert, the average ticket price was just under $90. Trump supporters get in free. So Trump wasn’t exactly making an apples to apples comparison. Still, I like the juxtaposition of Trump’s mouth and Elton’s organ.
Will press coverage focus on the craziness? I doubt it. My guess is that they’ll focus on the enthusiasm of the crowd. Well of course. Trump’s fans are as crazy as he is.
Our national media remains strangely deferential to Donald Trump. Most of them use circumlocutions to avoid calling him a liar. Even when they call him out – discreetly, of course – on his dishonesty, they studiously avoid drawing several obvious conclusions: he’s not very bright, he’s mentally unstable, and he’s an inveterate liar. Even if you reject the first two points as unverifiable, his lying is a matter of public record. And yet despite the fact that they know they can’t trust anything Trump says, they headline his outrageous claims and bury the facts several paragraphs below.
They’re also bending over backwards to avoid drawing logical conclusions from the verifiable fact that he’s been up to his ample posterior in Russians for years. In less than two weeks, Trump will travel to Finland, where he expects to meet with Vladimir Putin alone. He’ll kiss Putin’s ring, and probably his ass, and get his marching orders for the next twelve months. Most of the national press will pretend that this is perfectly normal.
Sir John Harington, a 16th century English courtier, wrote a prescient epigram about how misbehavior gets normalized.
"Treason doth never prosper.
What's the reason?
Why if it prosper,
None dare call it treason."