The Trump Mess

Trump in Saudi Arabia with the King and President of Egypt.
Credit: Flickr.com

Trump in Saudi Arabia with the King and President of Egypt. Credit: Flickr.com

Sam Ketchem, Web Editor

The Trump presidency is a mess, and that’s almost an understatement. He has only been in office 139 days, but it feels like 9000. Every day, we see more scandals and failures in policy decisions. And it’s only gotten worse. He keeps digging himself into a hole. Twitter has not been his friend

While he was on his first international trip, his account stayed mostly quiet, which was a smart move. But when he got back, he hopped right back into the 3 am tweeting. First, he decided to attack the “fake news media”, which he says is pretty much everyone but Fox News. He especially hates the New York Times. They have been critical but mostly fair to him. But, he has tweeted almost 15 times about them specifically, saying how much he hates them. Since he first announced that he was running for office, he has only visited one news agency, the New York Times. Out of all the news agencies, he chose to visit a relatively small one. Trump needs everyone to like him, that’s why he criticizes the people who don’t.

Then, after two horrific terrorist attacks in London, Sadiq Khan, the mayor and a devout Muslim, released a video showing solidarity with his fellow Londoners.

Quickly, Trump tweeted, “Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his ‘no reason to be alarmed’ statement. MSM [Main Stream Media] is working hard to sell it!”

That’s not Trumps only problem with Islam right now. The Supreme Court will soon hear the case for the Travel Ban that Trump and his supporters have been so passionate about. He has put 2 different plans forward, both of which have been blocked by federal judges. The second and less harsh version is the one moving to the top. But even here, Trump may have just screwed it up.

When the courts look at a ban like this, they base it on the intent of the order, not what the creator says the intent is. If Trump says over and over again that we need to ban Muslims and have a religious test, then puts forward an executive order that is a “travel ban” from 7 Muslim majority nations, the court may throw it out. The key is to never say travel ban, ever. All of his staff, including press secretary Sean Spicer, repeatedly said that it wasn’t a travel ban at all.

It looked like everything was fine, until Trump tweeted, “That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!”

That tweet may have destroyed the case. But then he blamed officials in the Justice Department.

“The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the water down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C. [Supreme Court],” he tweeted.

Here’s the one big problem, he’s the one in charge of the Justice Department. Donald, you’re the president now, so let’s start acting like it. Take some responsibility for once.

Now we move on to the mess in the Middle East. Just a few days ago, Saudi Arabia and other kingdoms in the gulf region decided to cut off all diplomatic ties with Qatar, an oil rich state right next store. They put forward claims that Qatar had ties to terrorism. But, another reason could be because they are getting closer to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s sworn religious enemy. Just today, they also enacted economic sanctions against them and cut off all food shipments, causing major food shortages. Trump took credit for this as soon as it happened.

“So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding…extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end of the horror of terrorism!” he tweeted.

Now, helping cut off funding to violent extremists certainly is a good thing, but what Trump needs to remember is that we have our largest military base in the middle east there. The Al Udeid Air Force Base controls logistics, launches strikes against ISIS and other radical groups, and keeps the Strait of Hormuz, a huge oil transportation hub, safe from attack or closure by Iran. If the Qataris become offended, they could shut down the base and hurt our military operations. The base cost a billion dollars, so it would be a huge waste.

Speaking of money wasted, the Trumps have spent millions of our tax dollars on security. The Trump children supposedly have control of the business, so that requires them to fly all around the world. But since they are the First Children, they need to have a large security presence. Trump’s time golfing at his Mar-a-Lago estate almost every weekend has also racked up a pricey bill. The Secret Service has requested an additional $60-$80 million in funding to secure them. Interesting how Trump complains about how much we’re spending on education and healthcare, but wants more money so he can go golfing.

Trump also made a potentially deadly decision last week. He also announced that the we would pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. Over many years, almost every single country on the planet came up with a deal to reduce climate change by lowering carbon emissions by 25% per country and invest in clean energy alterantives. In the end, every country except Nicaragua (they didn’t think it went far enough), Syria (because of the civil war), and now the US have not participated. This could

There’s also a potentially huge problem looming over him, the Russia investigation and possible obstruction of justice charges. Russia has been accused of spreading negative fake news about Hillary Clinton all over the internet before the election and helping the hacker group Wikileaks obtain Hillary’s emails. Russian officials have also had off the record meetings with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn was forced to resign his post only days after taking office. A special prosecutor was assigned to investigate.

While all of that is happening, we find out that Trump may have obstructed justice, an impeachable offense. Yesterday, James Comey, the former FBI Director Trump fired, released a public statement to a Senate committee saying that Trump tried to get him to stop investigating Flynn and Russia all together. Trump also wanted him to pledge complete loyalty to him. Today, Comey will go and publicly testify to the Senate. If the claims are strong enough, impeachment claims could be brought against him.

The scary thing is all of this has happened recently. In the past 6 days Trump mocked a mayor of a grieving city, possibly destroyed his travel ban, hurt our standing in the middle east, increased the rate of climate change, and faced investigations into election meddling and obstruction of justice.