Don't Care Act

President* Donald Trump seems determined to champion the proposed Republican health care bill and negotiate it himself with Congress. Republicans are very eager to try to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, popularly referred to as "Obamacare". The official name of the new legislation is "America's Health Care Act".

Judging from how little effort appears to have been spent creating the bill, how even Republicans seem reluctant to embrace it, and how it would make millions of US citizens lose their coverage, a better name would be the "America's Don't Care Act".

Going unchecked

March 7, in an early morning Twitter rant, President* Trump made this claim:

122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!

"Gitmo" refers to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay naval base, "GTMO", that was set up in 2002 to hold terrorist suspects. A simple fact check, one phone call away for the man commanding a small army of intelligence professionals, would have told him something different. His statement is completely false, like so many other statements he has made.

The probable cause for this particular tweet was a passage an hour earlier on Fox News, where they quoted statistics from an old National Intelligence report from September 2016. Trump assumed, without bothering to ask anyone for confirmation, that all of these 122 people must have been released during Obama's presidency. That was implied by Fox by not stating when it happened, but they never said it straight out.

The reason Fox never said it is, of course, that it isn't true. Of those 122 prisoners, 113 were released by the Bush administration, and only 9 were let out under Obama's watch.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, mounted a pathetic first defense a few hours later by trying to claim that "of course the President meant in totality" and referred to prisoners released either by Bush or Obama. That is completely false on its face, because that is not what the President's tweet said. The text reads "released by the Obama administration".

The next day, Spicer instead tried a different approach and said that under the Bush administration, "most of the releases" were court-ordered, while Obama had an agenda to release everybody and close the camp. Obama certainly had that goal, and he was very vocal about it, but once again, Spicer's statement is completely false. Checking the facts, the proportion of court-ordered releases from Gitmo during the Bush presidency was around 4%. Thus, not even a handful of the 113 releases were court ordered. Calling a 4% fraction "most of the releases" is, once again, completely false. Coming from the official spokesperson of the White House, it's nothing short of a deceptive and nefarious lie.

Defending a lie with more lies, and not even bothering to make any of those lies hard to reveal, does not exactly make things better for the deeply troubled Trump administration.

Faulty Trump Towers

Last night, I was reminded of the John Cleese TV series "Fawlty Towers", where the running joke was for the hotel manager, Basil Fawlty, to make some relatively small mistake, and then spend the rest of the episode trying to cover it up, making a huge mess of it. The debacle always ended in total disaster with his complete and utter humiliation. In the next episode, he hadn't learned anything, but did the same mistake all over again.

This is what we are seeing with President* Trump, every week. With John Cleese as a fictional character, it was great and memorable comedy. In real life with the President* of the United States in the lead role, it's not the least bit funny. It's sad, embarrassing, and very, very scary.

Ghosts from the past

In their book "The Final Days", Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein gave a troubling account of the last month of Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974. They described a president suffering from severe paranoia, hiding in the Oval Office during the day and spending his nights walking around drunk in the White House, talking to portraits of previous presidents. The current president of the United States is probably not having conversations aloud with the portrait of his idol Andrew Jackson (perhaps the most controversial of his predecessors), but his behavior signals very clearly that he is becoming increasingly mentally unstable. He literally seems to be coming apart before our eyes, and it's not a pretty sight.

President* Donald Trump has been detached from reality for quite a while, probably since long before he was elected. His wild accusations of massive voter fraud and illegal wire tapping makes it clear that he is now also paranoid and goes all-in on baseless crazy conspiracy theories presented without proof. Paranoia definitely doesn't sit well with being one of the most powerful persons in the world. President* Trump poses a severe security risk to his country, and by extension to the entire world. He must be removed from office as soon as possible, before he does irreparable harm. What he has done so far has been appalling and reckless, but none of his legislation has actually kicked in yet, and there is still time for the Congress to call for support from what few decent people there might be in the current administration, invoke Section 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution and save the world from President* Donald Trump by doing the right thing: removing him from office.

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Having a dangerously insane person like Donald Trump in the Oval Office is disastrous, unsustainable and, frankly, unthinkable.

The rats are leaving the ship

After President* Trump stubbornly refused to back down on his serious accusations, made Saturday morning on Twitter without proof, that his predecessor Barack Obama ordered an unlawful wire tapping of his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower, even his fellow Republicans are dropping support for him.

Their methods differ, but nobody, not even his closest associates, are agreeing with him. Some Republicans voice their doubt and demand more information, and some remain silent or make noncommittal statements. Some, like the White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, try in vain to spin what the president actually wrote on Twitter into something less explosive and less embarrassing, but nobody wants to jump on the crazy train, and everybody seems uneasy, ashamed and generally upset over what President* Trump did.

A particularly clever response came from Jason Chaffetz, Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Chaffetz said he hadn't seen any proof, but assumed that President* Trump would not have made the accusation without some piece of evidence:

“Look, it’s a very serious allegation. The president has at his fingertips tens of billions of dollars in intelligence apparatus. I’ve got to believe -- I think he might have something there, but if not, we're going to find out.”

Now, think whatever you want of Chaffetz, but he is obviously not stupid. Read this quote under the reasonable assumption that he knows that the entire accusation is pure hogwash and has no proof whatsoever except for a crazy Breitbart article about one delusional conspiratorial rant made by a kook radio host. This is very clearly not a statement of support. Quite the contrary: this is Jason Chaffetz preparing to denounce Donald Trump and cut all ties with him. He is not alone. Similar responses were heard from high ranking Republicans, including people in Trump's own administration. Even the infamous Kellyanne Conway, otherwise provenly comfortable with lying through her teeth for President* Trump, took this approach, distancing herself from a massive, incriminating false accusation made by her boss.

The ship is sinking, and the rats are leaving. The question is: is there anywhere they can go?

Off to Mar-a-la-la-land

We should seriously question the mental stability of President* Trump. His wild accusations against Barack Obama failed to convince anyone, and he spent his weekend at Mar-a-Lago in Florida fuming and ranting over it. According to the Washington Post, he ran into his old friend Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, on the golf course, and he vented to him over dinner on Saturday. Ruddy said that Trump told him: “This will be investigated. It will all come out. I will be proven right.” Ruddy further added about Trump that “He was pissed. I haven’t seen him this angry.”

James Comey, director of the FBI, has made a request that the Department of Justice release an official statement to debunk the false claims about Obama wire tapping Trump Tower. When nobody at the DOJ rose to the challenge, Comey didn't wait. Instead, he decided to make his request known to the public. When the director of the FBI feels an urgent need to tell the country that the President* is lying, it spells serious trouble for that President*.

President* Trump has been living in a bubble of denial, and now he seems to be entering a state of outright paranoia. This is not going to end well for him, and I fear he will do more harm before he's done.

Reality refuses to bend to Donald Trump's will

On Sunday morning, the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, went public on NBC:s "Meet The Press" and clearly denied that any wire tapping took place in Trump Tower during his time in office from 2010 to the end of Obama's presidency. He stated in no uncertain terms that he "would definitely have known about" a FISA warrant, and that it never happened.

There is no longer any doubt that Donald J Trump once again sank to the level of using his unique and strong platform as the President* of the United States to regurgitate an outlandish lie and a conspiracy theory taken straight from crazy right-wing news outlets. However, his request that the Congress Intelligence Committees look into his unfounded accusations remain. Congressman Jim Himes responded via Twitter: "as a member of the committee onto which you've dumped this mess, I look forward to seeing your evidence".

On the bright side, President* Trump asking his secretary to print out a short Breitbart story and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees dismissing that "evidence" shouldn't take long. The toddler-in-chief might use his marker pen to circle the words "Obama" and "silent coup", but that still doesn't make it true.