Mar-a-Lago Situation Room

There is a highly secure “Situation Room” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where he and his aides can figure out how to respond to fast-breaking crises like North Korea test-firing a missile in the neighborhood of Japan. It’s cleverly disguised as a public dining room. So seemingly blatant breaches of security are not breaches at all, but the normal kind of activity to be expected in any highly secure area. Or something.

As should be obvious to all at this point, Trump is an insane clown who has no knowledge of how the government works, or diplomacy, or security, or, really, anything other than how to be the center of attention at all times. It’s pointless to criticize an insane clown or attempt to hold an insane clown accountable for the insane things he does because, after all, he’s insane. Also, the miasma of free-flowing insanity around the clown at all times is so dense, you couldn’t possibly pick a good starting place or even prioritize it all or try to respond to any of it in a rational manner.

This Failing New York Times piece points out that Democrats are lamenting  “the fact that the national security incident played out in public view”. “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Nancy Pelosi tweeted.

In this one, the scene at the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room is described and Trump is likened to the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack: “a reckless, clownish boor surrounded by sycophants, determined to blow up all convention.”  It goes on, “But this is real life, and every time Mr. Trump strikes a pose, the rest of the world holds its breath.”

From the article:

The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Trump, Mr. Flynn or Steve Bannon, another member of the National Security Council, who also trained his cellphone on the paperwork, that holding a cellphone camera over these documents might allow foreign adversaries and hackers to get “some pretty good pictures,” too. Cellphones aren’t allowed even in secured areas of the White House. Yet there they all were, playing Situation Room in the open air, for a random crowd in Palm Beach, Fla.

None of this surprises me, or probably anyone else, at this point. It’s Trump being Trump. And by tomorrow, we’ll be on to the next insanity and this will be tossed on the heap of scandals never to be revisited.

I just want to point out one quick thing here before we move on to God-Knows-What: when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used a private email account to send her aides information like changes to her calendar. She is therefore unqualified to be president and should be arrested, tried, convicted, and, if Trump’s “base” has anything to say about it, hanged.

Is there a double standard at work here? No, of course not. You can’t seriously compare the actions of a sane competent woman to those of an insane incompetent clown.

In other news, the fees to join the Mar-a-Lago “club” have doubled to $200,000 since Trump won the election, but he is absolutely not benefiting financially in any way from holding office. Or something.