Maverick's World

The looming US government shutdown

So it appears that despite the GOP having a super-majority - they can't actually get the debt increase passed. Trump is railing at the Democratic Party on twitter but the truth is that several GOPers having been screwed by Trump and the GOP leadership on the Tax Cuts are asking for their pound of flesh now that its time to raise the debt limit. A shutdown looms and there is no clarity where this will ead us.

GOPer reluctance seems to be taking many forms, some want Trump to actually do something specific on immigration, others want him to do something on trade, still others want to cut social security and medicaid, still others want to see sops for their specific constituencies so that their path i 2018 gets easier.

To top this off - the GOP seems to be dragging its feet on actually killing the Russia inquiry. Gowdy has resigned from the Ethics committee. Bannon and Hicks have been brought before various committees. The rumors spilling out of the Congress and Senate committees are that not only is OSC Mueller going after Trump over his ties to Russia, he is also going after Trump for ties to organized crime, money laundering and basically everything that involves being Trump.

As the true scale of corruption embodied by the Trump enterprise becomes clear, Trump supporters will find it impossible to continue claiming that this is "corruption as usual" - especially as Trump's USP was supposed to be that "he is an outsider, not like those thieving bastard politicians in DC!". The way it is looking like right now - Trump is a lot more than just a common DC thief!

Against this backdrop - Trump was driven to play his usual race card. The "shithole" comments provokes a predictable response among the Coulter-Spencer-David Duke community but it is unclear how much this move actually moved the needle with his supremacist supporters. Among soft-core racists there does not appear to have been any motion at all, especially as Trump appears to be largely pedaling in place over the DACA issue.

As the numbers start to come in on the jobs and outsourcing to China side of things, Trump's numbers are looking a lot worse than anyone before him. The Chinese are making money hand over fist and now that it is becoming increasingly clear to everyone that the "Anbang Investment" has paid off - Trump is talking big about "sticking it to China". Outside of the botnets he pays for and then retweets - it is unclear who believes him.

Last week - aside of the dubious victory of shoring up support in the 10 or so dickheads on Twitter who still support him - Trump scored a spectacular own goal. By listing a large number of African countries in the "Shithole" category - Trump spectacularly fucked himself in the ass.

For the Trumperally challenged, let me spell that out. African countries have large resources that routinely raped by developed nations. A combination of cruel local despots and unscrupulous (and racist) corporations usually facilitate that rape. When all is said and done, the money that the local despots earn is usually squirreled out of the African country and put into things like Trump condos. A case in point is Haiti's former dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. Papa Doc stole a ton of money from Haiti and bought Trump Condos with it. Now Haiti has gone off and made all the documents of its own legal investigations into Papa Doc and his money laundering public. Other African republics seem to be asking pointed questions - South Africa is doing it openly. Once those nations open their files to public, OSC Mueller will not need to dig very deep to find where Trump and his friends have buried the bodies. This may be why Trump has reversed his gleeful posture on the "shithole" comments today.

It is fantastically stupid to make enemies when the most powerful investigative agency in the world is crawling up your ass with a microscope.

But logic is not the world Trump lives in. He was certain that Mueller would deliver an exoneration by Christmas. But nothing of the sort has happened, and lo and behold Trumpers seem to have forgotten all about his claims on that issue too.

posted by maverick @ 11:26 AM