In Washington, the Bullies Are Out in Full Force
Did you know that October is National Bullying Prevention Month? We found this out on Monday, when Melania Trump took to the podium and described her new platform, “Be Best,” which included pleas for kids to stop writing mean things about each other on the Internet. Her husband, the meanest kid on the block, was in the Rose Garden too, giving her a European-style double-cheek kiss after her speech, with far less enthusiasm than he evinced when doing the same to Emmanuel Macron. And speaking of Macron—all that unctuous Gallic buttering up didn’t convince Trump to honor the Iran nuclear deal. With his usual eloquence, the president announced on Wednesday: “This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”
Despite Melania’s imploring, the bullies were out in full force this week. On Monday, Attorney General Sessions told those seeking refuge in the U.S.: “If you cross the border unlawfully . . . then we will prosecute you . . . If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that.” Chief of staff John Kelly added his voice to this xenophobic choir, telling NPR, “They’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people in the countries they come from—fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English. . . . They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills. They’re not bad people. They’re coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws.”
But not everyone gets in trouble for running afoul of the law. Take that sunny fellow Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of North Korea. At 3:00 a.m. Thursday morning, after commenting on what a rating coup this was for the networks, Trump stood with three freed hostages at Joint Base Andrews, and said it was “very nice” that the notorious dictator had finally released them. But wait—wasn’t this nice guy Kim the one who kidnapped and imprisoned these American citizens to begin with?
Quiz time! Guess who has a brand-new job as president of the NRA? Why, it’s Oliver North, who spent years in prison for his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Even before he got his first paycheck, North was making people sick, comparing gun-rights activism to “civil terrorism.” And guess who has one less job? Rudolph Giuliani, whose law firm announced that they would be parting ways with the increasingly unhinged attorney. And guess who has had just about enough of this pesky Mueller investigation? VP Mike Pence, who George Will described in a Washington Post editorial on Wednesday as “the oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness . . . America’s most repulsive public figure.”
“It’s time to wrap it up,” Pence told NBC on Thursday. But, Mike! There is new hair-raising information emerging each day! Why would we wrap it up when we only just found out that heavy hitters like Novartis and AT&T gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, in what one can only assume was an attempt to curry favor with the vice president’s boss, a man Pence has lauded ad nauseam for his “broad shoulders” and “big heart.”
But perhaps the lowest point of the week came when Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a POW during the Vietnam War, explained why he wouldn’t support Gina Haspel as head of the CIA, since she has a checkered history with Bush-era CIA “enhanced interrogation” sites. White House staffer Kelly Sadler reportedly joked in a closed-door meeting on Thursday that it didn’t matter what the ailing McCain said, since he would be dead soon anyway. Asked about this astonishingly callous remark on Friday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose dress that day might put those with vivid imaginations in mind of convict stripes, had only this to say: “I’m not going to comment on an internal staff meeting.”
