Trump Embarrasses the United States on the World Stage...Again

While in Hanoi with the world’s press gathered after the US-North Korea talks abruptly ended, Trump was asked about whether he spoke with Kim Jong Un about American Otto Warmbier who had been held for months by North Korea and was brutally tortured until he was comatose, then hurriedly released to the U.S. so he could die hours later at home.

Trump answered the reporter’s question by saying Kim “tells me he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.”  

Trump could have made a statesman-like appeal to Kim and ask him to launch an investigation to find out who ordered and carried out Warmbier's torture - because who would have the nerve to do something that besmirched and sullied Kim's reputation and make him look like a blood-thirsty monster to the world rather than a great leader? Trump would have finally looked presidential with that one request. But Trump just doesn't have it in him.

Once he was safely back home where he thinks he can massage whatever message comes out and do his own damage control he reinvents the moment and claims it was a misunderstanding, tweeting “I never like being misinterpreted, but especially when it comes to Otto Warmbier and his great family. Remember, I got Otto out along with three others. The previous Administration did nothing, and he was taken on their watch. Of course I hold North Korea responsible…”

Trump didn't “get Otto out.” That's just Trump hyperbole. Only days before Warmbier died, panicky North Koreans contacted the U.S. and demanded they take the dying man off their hands. Trump didn't lift a finger. Trump also played the “blame Obama” card in his tweet - as though passing the buck to cover his own shortcomings in defending Kim's implication in murder is a rational and adult way to explain why Trump is not to blame, for anything. Trump ends the tweet almost in a whisper “Of course I hold North Korea responsible…” 

Of course you do. 

 

Yet when Trump had the opportunity to say that on the world stage he crumbled. He showed everyone his true colors; he defended the regime that killed Warmbier, and he actually used the world stage to praise that regime. What does that say about the United States with Donald Trump as our president?

Worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has already floundered and remains low after a dramatic drop during Trump's first year in office, while China's rating ticked up to its highest in almost a decade. That’s according to a new Gallup poll released Thursday, February 28th that measures how adults in 133 countries feel about the global leadership of countries like the U.S., China, Germany, and Russia. The low approval rating for the U.S. "suggests that the doubts sowed in Trump's first year about U.S. commitments abroad have taken root," it reads. "Russia is now on a more even level with the U.S." Trump is the reason we are at this new low point.

Trump has repeatedly embarrassed the U.S. on the world stage.

He shut down the U.S. government over Mexico not paying for his border wall. When that didn't work, he declared a National Emergency when there was no emergency at all, even according to his own military commanders. It was such a serious situation that, after declaring it, Trump spent the next three days playing golf at Mar-a-Lago.
        In Helsinki he validated Vladimir Putin’s interference in the 2016 election…interference that got Trump into office. Trump used the same opportunity to defend Putin, taking his word over the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. All the while Putin stood next to him and proudly boasted "Yes I did, yes I did" want Trump to win.

Trump validated Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ordering the execution of U.S. legal resident Jamal Khashoggi. What is one death when measured against the billions U.S. defense contractors, and real estate moguls like Trump, make off the Saudi government?

He defended as "fine people" racists, White Supremacists, and the KKK at the Charlottesville Virginia march even after a White Nationalist had killed a protester and injured 19 others. 

He referred to African nations as “shithole” countries, just as he did with Haiti and El Salvador. Even after being told the correct pronunciation, he still repeatedly mispronounces Namibia as ‘Nambia’, Tanzania as 'Tan-Zay-nee-uh, Bhutan as “Button,” and Nepal as “Nipple.” He doesn’t understand that Colombia and Columbia are not the same things.

Trump was actually laughed at by the entire world…literally, on September 25, 2018, when he bragged about phony accomplishments before the U.N. General Assembly.

His administration still uses the terrorist tactic of ripping children away from parents who’ve crossed the border into the U.S. attempting to flee terror in their own country. Several of those kids have now died as a result of maltreatment while being held in U.S. government facilities. The Trump administration doesn’t care.

That is because Trump doesn’t care...about America or anything else. Trump only cares about Trump. The entire Trump presidency is one long get-rich-quick scheme.

We will pay for Trump’s enriching himself at our expense far into the future unless we use our Constitutional right to demand enactment of the 25^th Amendment to remove him from office and indict him as soon as he steps outside the White House. He should face the consequences for his lifetime of unethical behavior, criminal activities, and treasonous actions taken as president. 

For his massive corruption, dishonesty, deceit, fraud, sexual assaults, money laundering, numerous Emoluments violations just to name a few, Trump should become the first U.S. president to die in prison.

It will be cheaper for us.

Trump Re-shuffles the Drug War Deck of Cards

On Monday, March 19, 2018, Trump will release his plan to combat the opioid epidemic with a call to Stop Opioid Abuse. The plan includes law enforcement measures that allow the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for some drug dealers “where appropriate under current law.”  Trump will also call on Congress to pass legislation reducing the threshold amount of drugs sold that are required to invoke mandatory minimum sentences for drug traffickers and trigger the application of the death penalty in certain other cases. Those are actually two old ideas that have, to date, jammed our prisons past full capacity. In true Trump fashion, if it didn’t work before, just double down on it.

 This is what happens when you let people who don’t understand the problem come up with a simple (or rather simple-minded) solution, because Trump’s plan to include the death penalty for drug offenses is a “might-makes-right” approach and is no different than the way drug lords handle drug turf disputes, Also of note is that these offenses are ill-defined and likely to be interpreted any way a Trump-appointed judge wishes to interpret them. It will no longer be the rule-of-law in this country but the rule-of-Trump.

The opioid commission, chaired by Jared Kushner, was supposed to introduce its recommendations on ways to curb the epidemic November 1, 2017, but we can see Jared has been as effective at that job as he has been at bringing peace to the Middle East.

In late October, Trump and his administration finally got around to…declaring the opioid epidemic a “national public health emergency,” not a crisis, in order to buy extra time to come up with something…ANYTHING. In the meantime Trump went around bragging at his staged pep rallies that he liked the solutions of thugs and foreign leaders like Duterte of the Philippines, Xi of China, and Loong of Singapore. They claimed to have ended the drug problem in their countries by liberally applying the death penalty. So naturally Trump now thinks the best course of action is killing drug offenders, specifically people pedaling opioids.

But we know opioids are not plants grown in secret indoor gardens or cooked up in mom-and-pop meth labs. They are the result of pharmaceutical companies creating powerful pain killers as medicine, for a profit of course. How many pharmaceutical CEOs or lobbyists will be executed for manufacturing the opioid pills that are at the heart of the crisis? For example, will Trump demand death for Dr. Craig Landau the current CEO of Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, Oxycodone and Hydrocodone? If not, why not? If Trump is looking for the biggest “pusher” of opioids, you can’t get any higher. (Pun intended.)

How about executing Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, and Paul Ryan, three of the biggest recipients of Big Pharma lobbying dollars? These are people who have used their positions to ram through legislation benefiting Big Pharma financially, as well as generously lining their own pockets, and to hell with the people who get hooked on Big Pharma’s products.

Will doctors be subject to the death penalty for simply prescribing an opioid medication to a patient in pain because later on some bureaucrat looking through the doctor’s notes decided the person had been prescribed too many? Will this be a new avenue for the DEA to apply their military approach to the Drug War? Shoot first; ask questions later. (It’s a variation on Trump’s approach to gun violence; take the guns first, apply due process later.)

Has it ever occurred to Trump that maybe people are deliberately overdosing on opioids because they are so embarrassed he is the president?

Applying the death penalty is such a revolutionary idea; let’s apply it to other crimes that indirectly harm people. Like money laundering. If someone…anyone…is even suggested to be engaged in money laundering, give them the death penalty. And apply it the way the Chinese do; 24 hours after conviction, the sentence is carried out.

Another area might be ethics violations. If any member of the White House is charged with an ethics violation, have them executed on the front lawn of the White House. There must be zero tolerance. That would be one way to stop people like Kellyanne Conway from thumbing their nose at the Hatch Act.

Where's a wooden stake when you need it?

          In Trump’s grandiose plan to sentence drug dealers to death, he seems to forget just how much money drug companies, the biggest drug dealers in the world, pour into in American politics. Pharmaceutical companies were among the biggest donors to Trump's inauguration, right up there with Big Tobacco and Big Oil companies. Is Trump really going to cut into Big Pharma’s profits by threatening to kill its users and sales force?

Watch for the sun to rise in the west first.