President Donald Trump does not like the press he is
receiving. The press – we now call it the media, because bloggers and
ideologues with knives in their brains have been folded into it – convinced of
its moral rectitude, begs to differ. Trump’s press notices would be very much
different if he were the media, and his twitter activity has been taken by
some as an attempt to offset this lamentable deficiency. Trump has been setting
the day’s press calendar by tweet-twerking. He is, his Democratic and Republican
opponents insist, the presidential equivalent of the-guy-in-a-bathrobe-in-his-mom’s-cellar
turning the world upside down by loosing upon it nuclear tipped declarations.
To Trump, tweets may be no more than a new colorful crayon in his box of
tricks. To the contra-Trump media, they are a threat that must be disposed of,
as the sixties radicals used to say, “by any means necessary.”
The anti-Trump media so far has been successfully baited. The
New York Times and the Washington Post have been so unforgivingly anti-Trump
that they appear to Americanus Ordinarius to be purposefully unhinged, confirmation that Trump’s relentless
opponents are either disappointed establishment Congressional timeservers, part
of the DC swamp Trump has pledged to drain, or reporters and editors longing
for a return to the balmy days of President Barack Obama, an interregnum that
allowed them to snooze at their keyboards while the president performed
cosmetic surgery on the face of Mother America. Throughout the first year of
the Trump Presidency, which already feels ancient, bruised Democratic and
Republican opponents were rubbing their sore noggins and wondering groggily, as
Hillary Clinton did in her most recent book “What Happened?”
Ya’got mugged. That’s what happened. And, as the majority of
Americans who did not buy Lady Clinton’s latest book suppose, you perhaps deserved
it. Since he first stepped out of the cradle, self-advertising has been Trump’s
business. He has been compared to President Andy Jackson, the hero of Arthur
Schlesinger’s biography, “The Age Of Jackson.” Before Jackson was devalued a
decade ago by squeamish Democrats, the seventh President rightly had been considered
the father of the modern Democratic Party. Others think Trump is the 21st
century’s re-incarnation of P.T. Barnum, who was, people tend to forget, a
pretty savvy state legislator and Mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Energetic and forward looking, Barnum was an early
abolitionist. He protested against the city’s saloons, pushed for prisoners to
have work, and modernized Bridgeport’s utilities. Barnum certainly would not have
been pleased to learn that Bridgeport politics has become something of a two
ring felony circus: Current Mayor Joe Gamin, now exploring a run for Governor,
spent years in prison for corruption, and Ernie Newton,
having spent more than four years in prison, is returning to his Town Council
roots in Barnum’s old haunts.
Trump’s name has been invoked by leading Democrats and some
media analysts as a cautionary tale that Republicans in Connecticut would do
well to heed. According to some Democrats, presidential toxicity will infect
Connecticut Republicans in the state who perversely refuse to denounce the
nominal head of the national Republican Party. Republican leader in the State
House of Representatives Themis Klarides already has been reproved for
supporting the nominal head of her party. Voters in Connecticut will be asked
during the upcoming 2018 race, if only indirectly, whether they believe a
president or a governor wields more political influence in Connecticut. The
correct answer to the question is: governors play a more decisive role in state
government than presidents, however toxic.
Oddly enough, the upcoming elections in Connecticut will in
large measure be a contest between two politicians not running for office in
the state: Governor Malloy, who has lame-ducked himself, and Trump, who is at
best a moving target.
Both Connecticut U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris
Murphy have taken turns thwacking the Trump piñata. In recent remarks, Murphy has suggested that
Trump may be batty and therefore impeachable. "We are concerned that the
President of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a
decision-making process that is so quixotic that he might order a nuclear
weapons strike that is wildly out of step with US national security interests," said Murphy, who often dashes in where even devils would fear to tread.
Impeachment and salacious behavior in the post Harvey
Weinstein period, some political watchers suppose,
could be a touchy matter for Democrats, many of whom, including Connecticut
moral avatars Blumenthal and Murphy, have enthusiastically supported impeached
President Bill Clinton and his wife, co-President and First Lady Hillary
Clinton, who has only recently discovered the moral impropriety of married men
sexually mauling women. The late political provocateur Christopher Hitchens
wrote a whole book about this titled “No One Left To Lie To” that likely did not
sell as many copies as “What Happened?”
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