Can’t wait to find out what kind of problems Trump will be causing for us and for himself on his first trip abroad. He’ll be visiting Saudi Arabia and Israel, and, of course, has put forward many nonsensical opinions about both in the past.
He is supposed to be giving an “inspirational” speech to the Saudis about moderate Islam. Last year, his Facebook page said, “Saudi Arabia wants women as slaves and to kill gays.” And during a presidential debate, Trump said Saudis were “people that push gays off buildings” and “kill women and treat women horribly.”
As we have often been told in recent months, Trump is not “ideological”, but “transactional”. This is supposed to be a good thing for us because it frees him from the constraints of protocol and history, and allows him to exercise his purported greatest strength, that of master negotiator. He’s a businessman, you see, not a politician. What a crock!
In fact , this “transactional” nonsense is just another way to say he has no principles, doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about from minute to minute, and certainly can’t be held to any past statements because he didn’t really mean them the way you thought and anyway they were just opening gambits in some fantastic negotiation he was conducting on our behalf.
Trump reverses course and contradicts himself so often that he ultimately takes all sides of every question. The beauty of this approach is that you can brag that you were “right” all along when whatever happens happens. It also helps him to speak in a weird kind of gibberish, never using complete sentences, and ignoring the usual subject-and-verb conventions of English language communication. He can rightly say that everyone misunderstood what he was really saying, got it all wrong, and are criticizing him for political reasons and because they’re all losers.
Part of being “transactional” is to criticize every action and statement of your perceived enemies, the list of whom becomes longer every day. During the Obama administration, there was basically nothing that happened, big or small, that Trump didn’t find fault with. The simple explanation for this, of course, is that his “views” are just the parroting back of whatever he sees on FoxNews.
Anyway, when Obama went to Saudi Arabia in 2015 to attend the funeral of Saudi King Abdullah , Michelle Obama did not wear a headscarf. Many people applauded her for this, including both yours truly, Stewie Generis, and my cousin Screwie. There are limits to how far the First Family of the Free World should have to go to accept customs that are in opposition to our own values, and maybe we should be “leading” in this area by setting an example.
Of course, citizen Trump was outraged by the First Lady’s “insult”. He was worried about creating enemies, a subject about which he is truly an expert. He tweeted,
Can’t wait to see Melania and Ivanka in head-scarves.
Get Off My Lawn 