General Discussion

mcar

(42,376 posts) Sun Jun 10, 2018, 04:29 PM Jun 2018

Pierce: Jesus, Take the Wheel

Jesus, Take the Wheel
The president alienates our allies and cozies up to autocracies—all in a single weekend.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JUN 10, 2018

Having left the rubble of the Western alliance behind, the president* touched down in Singapore in the early American hours of Sunday like a…well…like a thief in the night. And The New York Times took that moment to inform the gobsmacked world that the president* always really has been Helen Caldicott.

When President Trump declared that he did not really need to prepare for his legacy-defining meeting with North Korea’s leader, he drew sighs or snickers from veterans of past negotiations. But he had a point: In his own unorthodox way, Mr. Trump has been preparing for this encounter his entire adult life. For an American leader who came of age in the early 1960s, when the United States and the Soviet Union stepped to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the meeting with Kim Jong-un strikes a personal chord, offering Mr. Trump a historic chance to rid the world, and his own presidency, of the greatest threat from atomic weapons.

Coming after the president*’s schoolyard pissing match in Quebec, it takes a rare kind of analytical mind to continue to write about “his own unorthodox way” without even a whisper of irony. Also, the available evidence is that the president* has no “personal chords” to strike. He has nothing but appetites. And, having done all this, he gives the world a quick vision of the foul stewpot that passes for ideas in his addled head....

But it remains a question best hashed out among democratic, self-governing countries. And the president* has just decided he'd rather not be part of a club that would have him as a member. Instead, he’s pitching the readmission of Russia to the organization, despite the fact that Russia’s economy pales next to those of India, Brazil, and California. And it also appears that he’s piqued because every other country wants to do something about the climate crisis that he doesn’t believe exist.

Jesus, take the wheel.