Fear

Apparently, Trump's administration has a number of members trying to manage Trump behaviour through underhanded tactics, like hiding documents he asked to get readied to be signed, because they think that he is mercurial, unprepared, reckless and incapable and unwilling to learn.

Why they don't just step away from the guy and voice for invoking the 25th amendment?

Because they can use him as a tool to get what they want - the tax cut, repeal of anti-pollution rules, the dismantlement of the Financial consumer protection bureau etc.

Also, the 25th amendment takes time;  It is a slow process, who would not remove Trumps' powers for - likely - some months .

Trump still has unfettered access to the "nuclear football";  In four minutes, he can launch a massive nuclear attack and be rid of the judgement of history because - as you may know - history is written by humans that have the luxury items required to write on storable media.

A nuclear Armageddon should eliminate most of the firsts an virtually every of the seconds.

He seems like a raving lunatic in his best day, and has shown a morbid fascination for the USE of nukes as the last embodiment of macho swaggering.

- "Why can't we use them?" , he asked (three times) while they were briefing him on the nuclear attack procedures -

Now, imagine him looking down a removal from power for unfitness - humiliating - or a Clinton-esque impeachment process - more humiliating?- followed by a raft of civil and criminal trials of members of his administration - most of them seem as bent as a three dollars banknote - and staff of his private enterprise - it is not exactly a mystery that many foreign governments and political figures shovel money to Trump concerns as a way to mollify the big guy... efficacious for them, but does not really smell legal, right? - included, maybe, of some of his family.

"Après moi, le déluge" reads very Trumpian, I think. 

Now you feel it?

Fear.

What Trump does not get... is that I can't take any more of his crap.

When I draw this, he still hadn't worn me down.

 I think that the biggest problem for Trump is his very experience as an entrepreneur...
He is used to operate in a big market, with thousands of operators, where news of his bad habits can get lost in the noise, and in a structured society with rule of the law, where using superior lawyers firepower can effectively intimidate most counterparts.
He seems to think that the same tactics and strategies that he used in his career as a real estate mogul can be translated effectively in international diplomacy.
He misses some fundamental differences between the two markets...
On Earth, there are less than 200 sovereign nations.

The "big ones" that counts for most of, well, everything and anything are a maybe a quarter of that number, and each has a professional community dedicated to track what the others do.
Trinidad y Tobago may get away with something, Iceland would already have problems, and every fart of the U.S. is analyzed, dissected and extrapolated by every other government on the planet.
In his private and professional life, Trump has always used lawyers and lawsuits as threats, especially to control the narrative about his endeavors. Needless to say, nothing even remotely similar is possible for the president of the U.S. - the other international players have their own information systems which routinely flaunt little details like the treasonous behaviors required to their sources, and decades worth of information on any associate of a target government.
Also, lawyers are not really that much of a threat in and by themselves - the result of trials must be enforced, and in a rule of law state there is a whole sector of the government that is dedicated to this.
Now, imagine to live in a society that had no police forces whatsoever.Would suing and winning in courts of law mean much? No, right.
While the U.S. may have prided themselves to act as the world's policeman, there is really no such thing as a world's policeman.
Imagine a village populated by two or three hundred thugs, each one more than willing to cut someone else throat at the smallest slight, and many of them organized in small crime families, more or less secret.
Now, take a breath, and consider this - that is the world, seen at the level of governments and other international policies actors.
A village of thugs, each knowing to the number of panties in the closet the affairs of the other, each ready to cut the necessary throats for reasons of "national security" that, by the way, they devise themselves.
If the "thugs" images seems excessive to someone, consider that here is virtually no government on the planet that does not disregard some individual rights of their own citizens when it suits its needs, starting with the usual host of discrimination policies against this or that undesired minority, and up to the occasional secret assassination. As for the non-citizens, they are usually seen as non-entities whose extermination is avoided just because they usually are citizens of other thugs, and bad P.R. is bad P.R..
It is a far cry from the Manhattan where Trump grew up, and a lot more akin to Corleone or Casal di Principe... (famous Italian mafia towns).
In the last 70 years, the U.S. has tried to inject a bit of rationality in this otherwise deplorable state of affairs, fostering a host of international organizations created to act as mediators among the various thugs - pardon, governments - so that there was some intermediate steps to try, before cutting each other's throat - go to war.
Contrarily to Donal's vision of things, the U.S. has managed to steer the rules of these organizations so that they were slightly favorable to them, and thus rip their share of benefits - not an excessive one, of course, as that would have provoked the widespread resistance of the other thugs.
Let's say, the "right" one - organizing things costs effort and produce value, so it is only right that it is rewarded, even though a number of players have gone along rather grudgingly.
Of course, a disproportionate part of said profits has been gobbled up by the country's ruling class, leaving the underclasses more or less destitute, but that is mostly a problem of internal policies of the U.S. being excessively biased toward the improvement of The Weatlhy's lot in life. 
But it rests that the US profited of the erstwhile world order that it had built - any other government on Earth would likely have crumbled by now, under a spiraling exterior debt, for example.
In little more than a year, Trump has more or less undone it.
And he is not going to replace it with any "new system", simply because he has thrown away an awful lot of political capital and demonstrated that he is not a reliable partner.
From now on, even when the U.S.A. will manage to get to some kind of negotiating table, it is going to be for show - because tomorrow the Dude can wake up and undo everything. Al the while, the thugs are going back to their old habits... which include chronic backstabbing disorder, trade war, war war and other fun pastimes.    
The question is now not whether China will overtake the U.S. as hegemonic super-power before crumbling under the burden of its own set of internal problems (not the least of which is Xi Jinping's authoritarian instincts already schlerotizing its policy discourse - Xi, China needs good ideas, not more censors), but when it will do.

Chances are the world is going to be stupendously interesting and exciting, when I'll be old.

I love boredom... please, world, let me be bored to my heart's content.

You know what? I do not care about the guy any more.

I just hope that the "deep state" manages to keep it [sic] from tumbling the world fully into 1932-like chaos.

It is hard to say this - but I wrote it anyway.

Don't wring my neck, kid - I had to say it.

The Irish people voted  for the repeal of Ireland infamous 1983 virtually total ban on abortions. 

On one side, I tend to think that it was somehow overdue.

When a country is willing to force 12 y.o. carry to term the result of an incest rape , and let women die of septicaemia to respect the right of an ectopic pregnancy - no, it won't ever become a live child, sorry - then the law is a bit on the fucked-up side of things.   

At the same time, I recently came to the conclusion that the abortion discourse should be more "symmetrical".

Right now if, be it by way of bad chance or guile, a man incurs in the mistake of fathering a child that he does not want to have, he finds himself rather at the mercy of  the woman.

She may acquiesce and go for an abortion, or carry the pregnancy to term and then demand the clueless "father" for support till the undesired offspring is adult.

Women wants to be able to get rid of unwanted, accidental pregnancies and go on with their life?

OK. I am positively convinced that it is in their rights. Also, they would find a way to do it anyway, so why bother criminalizing it? It's just another "war on" something, and we've seen how well they work.

But it should be in men's right to disown their accidental offspring, too.

Having the right to ask for the abortion of the accidental product of one's  misguided copulation, request to whom the mother may refuse - it is her body, after all - but that would anyway signal the cessation of every legal tie between the father and the future born.

It seems fishy?

OK - we know ourselves, men.

Plenty of asses would exploit it to have sex without rubber, no matter if they trust the woman or not, just because it is more fun.

Some would maybe even argue that these are a kind of men whose reproduction should rather be avoided ...

Leaving aside the vague smell of eugenics emanating from this latter argument - and you may know how much I like eugenic... let's direct our species evolution, because our little brains clearly know which conditions will be around in 25000 years, right? Come on -  I really think that we've all done it, at least once.

Yes, even me... and my list of dalliances can be counted on one hand. 


Let's put some constraints to it, thus - So that the serial philanderers would still get stuffed in the end - what is a reasonable number of abortions, one that covers 99% of women's lives in countries where it is allowed? 3, 4? Sounds about right; let's give men 3 scot-free cards - and make these requests public acts, with information freely available on them.

No no-disclosures agreements, or other such poppicock on this. Let it be publicly known that you are an ass that abuses his reproductive ability.

But I do not see a reason why a 19 y.o. girl that had a fling with a manipulative ass-hole can avoid having her life destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy, and a 19 y.o. boy can't.

Do you? You do? Really? Genderist much, I'd say.

Harsh?

If us men can't have it both way, so shouldn't you, ladies.

If you really care for parity, that is, and that's not just an excuse for some power grab.

Because if it is, then you can't complain that the Trumps of this world get elected.

Externalities

It is not true that I hate pregnant women

I read an article on the Irish referendum on abortion.

In it, the writer notes that the current state of abortion in the country - more or less, illegal no matter what - does not produce the outcomes usually predicted by the proponents of its legalization.

While it is true that hardly any Irish woman dies in back-alley abortions, it is a bit of a disingenuous argument in that they simply take a plane, and move to the nearest country where it is legal to have it.

However, the article also notices that the Irish government does something more than just prohibit the medical procedure, in its efforts to convince women to keep their babies - it reaches into its dilapidated pockets and manages to fork out some benefits, a well as some helping labor rules, to try to offset the burden that represents bringing a pregnancy to term.

The Irish government, and the conservative forces driving its policies on reproductive issues, seem to be open to the incontrovertible fact that one can't have something for nothing.

It is a bummer, as it really botches the vision of conservatives as I know them.

As far as I can see in the U.S.A and other  countries , most often than not the same ones  that would punish women for doing the financially sensible thing - cut their losses and move on with their life - are usually also the ones that press to reduce "entitlement programs" like the one that helps cover health care for poor children.

They want women to keep their children - sometimes adducing truly honorable reasons like "we need them kids to work and pay for our retirements" (1)  - yet they refuse to help in the upkeep of the produced offspring.

I realize that wanting the barrel full and the wife drunk is an integral and basic human characteristic, but a bunch that usually complains about the financial unrealism of wild-eyed progressives should really know better.

They want women to have babies - maybe just to put them up for adoption once delivered? (2)

Let's pay them their time and pain, generously - I suspect it would tip the scales in the right direction more than the kind of draconian laws that most conservatives favor.

If they do not want to sacrifice any sizable portion of their wallets for the cause of life - which I suspect accurately describe an awful portion of GOP supporters, even among the fervent pro-life evangelicals - then they should just shut the fuck up.

(1) Which kind of conflicts with the "in the next ten years, as much as 30% of U.S. workforce will be made redundant by automation" - after which, chances are the tech will really improve and all bets are off. If by the mid of the century all but a fraction of the general population is going to be jobless, having more kids to jail for being vagrants is not going to improve things..

(2) That was the way in Causescu's Romania, and the effect of being reared that way isn't exactly genial... a study found that - on average - it resulted in 20 I.Q. points less, when compared to siblings who were raised normally, for those unfortunate enough to receive no maternal cares in their fist three years. It beats the alternative, until you factor in the content of note 1 here above, which leads to a " we could as well enroll them in jails as they are born, it would be more earnest" kind of illumination. .  

A Tarot Card

It's hard to stand tall, with so many out to rape you.

It is not without misgivings that I used The Donald face - I usually stay away from politicians and other similar figures, in that they are temporary fixtures of our culture, destined to fade away.

Raise his hand who could recognize a cartoon of Henry Kissinger, nowadays...


But the Donald?

Even if he would manage to be impeached, he is the man that single-handedly terminated seventy years of "Pax Americana", and the tradition of U.S. " 'benevolent' rule" in the international arena (predicated and practiced on the base of US' own enlightened self-interest, of course, and only as benevolent as long as nobody was so daft as to pick a bunch of commies for government).

I think that there are quite some chances for him to become an iconic allegorical figure.

The very image of the angry, little, privileged white man, deaf to history and reality, more than willing to break the very social order that allowed it to keep afloat - just for the sake of shoring up the perception of his own "virility".

Story repeats itself - first as tragedy, then as farce, and finally then as burlesque.

No, not finally, because history never ends - sorry, F.F., you were wrong.

Can Trump survive Trump?

Or rather, can the "Trump Brand", of whom the Donald is awfully proud, survive the "Trump Administration" clear display of mismanagement, infighting and borderline treachery?

After having seen the managerial style of the Man in action, his almost pathological incapability of looking at a deal without seeing it only as a shackle to cheating out of if in any way hinders him, would you buy an house built by one of his similarly lead enterprises?

After knowing that his enterprises had 3500 litigations opened by contractors for not paying - usually citing badly executed works as a reason, yet trying time and again to rehire some of the very same "incapable" contractors - would you accept to, say, lay down parquet for "The Donald" ?

I know, the answer is "Yes".

After all, it is the very same man since forever, and this didn't manage to turn him into a pauper (though, I suppose, this mostly shows that once you are big enough, being borderline incapable but greedy as hell still pays enough to keep growing).

However, it would be nice to see if his "prized" brand suffered any significative loss, in terms of value. 

Trump

The disenfranchised white lower middle class of the USA had found its champion, Donald  J.Trump.

The media may have been dumbfounded, and I admit it, I was too.

Because, the last time I saw it happens, when my fellow Italian countrymen chose Silvio Berlusconi as their rescuing hero, that man virtually complete control of media was an essential part of his ascension.

(Berlusconi has always denied having such control... but, how many time the owner of an American private  broadcasting corporation has ever called the chief of  PBS to get a job to a starlette, that was in turn shagging a supporter of the then-current government, so that said supporter withdraw and let said government topple? S.B. was accidentally taped doing such a call, some years ago...) 


Donald Trump is not Silvio Berlusconi. By his own preferred metrics for success in life, he is just a bit more than half a Berlusconi.

The Italian, son of a mid-level bank manager, went from playing pianos on cruising ships to 6.9 billion $ of personal wealth.

The Donald went from being the son of Trump senior to... 3.7 billion $.

It's a lot... still, merely a 1/7th of what Bill Gates donated ever since he was fed of being singled out as the incarnation of new tech corporations greed. 

So, if someone voted for the guy because they bought in Trump's mythology as a successful entrepreneur... I can concede that he does not suck, but some players in his league could argue differently.

As for, fixing things in the economy so that his voters may have it better?

They may as well forget it.

These Americans are in for a discovery... they just elected as their President a member of that very same 1/1000th that, in the last 30 years, has scooped up that 8% of the national income that went out of the pockets of the lower half of the middle class.

He is also someone that whole-heartedly believes that giving his fellow 1/1000thers more opportunities to do business on their own terms - community needs be damned - will result in improvements.

Is it going to work, this time? 

No - if it did, the Bush era would not have ended with the great recession.

In this four years, we will likely see to a lot of stuff that appeals to the guts of Trump voters - the disbandment of Planned Parenthood, more systematic obstacles on the access to abortion, the repeal of affirmative action initiatives, maybe a push to renew a ban on gay marriage (I don't think it will pass... after all, LGBT are born with the same incidence everywhere and from everybody and, to be honest, given that they seem not better not worse than anybody else at the parenting game, society has little real reasons to renege that right... if the economical purpose of families is to create the next generation of citizens, gay couples function just about the same).

Mind you, it is all stuff that does not cost a dime.

Probably, we'll see Obamacare dismantled, so that insurance companies will be allowed top ditch someone's ass again, whence (s)he became too costly a client to maintain (it was among the reasons why cancer statistics in US were so appalling) and the cost/benefits ratio of the U.S. health system will keep being abysmal.

We'll see it, because many people who contributed to his campaign will gain from it.

It would give healthy dividends to some of the worse rent-seekers on the planet.

We'll see maybe more spending on weapons - which is, really, more a way to subsidize uncompetitive local industries, for the sake of political gains, than an actual improvement of national security - and less on anything that DJT does not care about.

Maybe it will finally be the end for NEA - mixed feeling on that, on my part. I was never going to get a grant from that anyway.   

But, serious policies to try to improve the lot of that white, low middle class America that voted for him?

That costs money and political capital that DJT does not really have.

I expect four years of complaining about the resistance put up by democrats on his proposals- truth is, many of the Republicans in both houses will have their reasons to stop the guy, on this or that issue - and not much more.

But by the end of the term,  nothing will have changed in his voters plights, which is understandable.


It is just about what a bunch of economical has-been should expect from the rule of a social Darwinist. 

Or, if you prefer, what the same kind of Italians got from 17 tears of Berlusconi.