When they don't have a winning hand, poker players often resort to bluffing their way through the betting. But the bluff, as any good card player knows, has to be believable to have any chance of paying off. His record suggests that, metaphorically, the Present-dent of the U.S. is a lousy poker player. But as usual, The Donald continues to bluff like crazy. He has, he will brag, good cards; very, very good cards! His playing partners roll their eyes even as they slyly encourage him with consistent success to raise his own bet.
Faced with diverting attention in any way possible from the constant, pregnant FBI, congressional and intelligence agency inquiries into his Russian ties, the Present-dent is, according to The Hill newspaper, once again ready to deploy his favorite distraction: blaming Barack Obama. You see, our Present-dent holds all the cards, even when he's discarding them at warp speed.
This week the Present-dent reportedly will order the Interior Department to review designations of national monuments by his predecessors, an order most likely meant to target monuments designated by one predecessor, Barack Obama; and in particular, one Obama designation: the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
Obama designated the 1.35-million acre site as a monument to be preserved because of its natural beauty and strong Native American heritage.
But the red state of Utah and its coterie of nutball lawmakers from Orrin Hatch on down are unhappy and want to un-designate the designation. That would be an action unprecedented in U.S. political history. Luckily, the Republicans have as their flun... I mean, leader, our current Un-Precedent, who's apparently been running up some more political gambling debts.
Trump is as close as you can get to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, where the past is entirely malleable, sometimes twice a day. And at the top of his revisionist list, there is nothing President Obama ever did that Trump wouldn't like to un-do. For him and those Trump Whisperers at the card table, Bear Ears one seems an especially annoying Obamism.
You see, the monument designation takes potential power and wealth from special interests that would dearly love to develop the breathtaking and pristine lands into a big-time mess. How about a Trump Tower Utah where that big rock bluff now soars into the sky?
Observers do not doubt the Present-dent's disregard for natural resources or minorities. Some of his followers defend his approaches to, among other issues, environment, diplomacy and immigration as modern forms of "manifest destiny," the early American nation's lame but handy excuse for seizing the property of original tribes and redistributing them to white immigrants and white businesses looking for a free grubstake.
Here's the thing Trump fans don't get. His agenda isn't so much about Manifest Destiny, except incidentally. Rather, he's all about what might be called MANAFORT DESTINY -- the collecting around him and deploying as minions a coterie of officialized deal-makers and back-room operatives, whose main purpose is to curry favor with the current financial and elected powers in Russia.
That's Manafort, of course, as in Paul, Trump's former campaign manager who -- as revealed after he left -- had far-reaching and high-level ties to Russian special interests.
The original Manifest Destiny led to the "Go west, young man" philosophy that drove the country's rapid expansion via, as history tells us, wars of acquisition, constant double-crosses, and wholesale genocide. The new Manafort Destiny instead looks eastward, across an ocean and toward a secretive, bluff-oriented, and very Trump-like regime that's all about billionaires, their care, and their feeding.
Of course. Because our new destiny is to scam not just the rest of the world, but ourselves, as well.