On the same day...
Trump rushes another decision to reverse a major policy of his predecessor by publicly stating his intention to completely abandon the entire nuclear deal with Iran...
...numerous outlets report on new allegations from Stephanie Clifford attorney Michael Avenatti regarding roughly $4.4 million dollars paid to Michael Cohen, Trump's aide de hush (or his aide de tush?), through his shell company Essential Consultants, LLC. This is the same shell company used to shield other off-the-book ahem "expenses" of Donald Trump. These alleged payments arrived BETWEEN the November 2016 election and August 2017. $500,000 of that was paid between January and August of 2017 and came from a Russian oligarch, Victor Vekselberg, who has "close ties" with Vladmir Putin and was in attendance at the same December 2015 dinner with Michael Flynn who later became Trump's national security adviser for two weeks.
Other chunks included $200,000 in "fees" paid by AT&T for "insights into the new Administration." So Cohen was not a PART of the new administration. He is an executive of the Trump Organization and had an office at another law firm named Squire Patton Boggs. If the payment was made to Essential Consultants, LLC, it clearly wasn't intended for any work he might have done for Squire Patton Boggs and the "advice" had nothing to do with the Trump Organization business, so what was AT&T going to get for $200,000 paid to a shell company of a lawyer with no official portfolio of responsibility in the Administration? An Administration opposing a merger pursued by AT&T?
Seriously...
This is a bad dream, right? Trapped in a theater, stuck in the front row, too close to look away as a really bad, acid-inspired mashup of every cheesy Cold War spy thriller and every mob movie ever made plays from a reel that seems to be the diameter of Stonehenge.
I seriously wonder about Trump's mental state. He seems absolutely driven to roll back ANYTHING at all that Barack Obama might have even SPOKEN about in eight years, much less helped promote or enact into law.
* improvements to health insurance coverage
* new protections for consumers from bank fraud
* higher fuel standards
* worldwide agreements on carbon dioxide emissions
* support for solar / renewables
* nuclear deal with Iran
He seems to be rushing these decisions, as if he knows he's running out of time to unwind more. The decision to abandon the Iran deal is maybe the most telling tip of Trump's mental modus operandi.
EVERY notable military and security leader in Trump's Administration has publicly testified in front of Congress that Iran is in compliance with the agreement as written. Every one of our European allies made personal contact with Trump to reiterate the value of the deal and the costs of abandoning it. The only ally making a case to exit was Israel, using data from documents in the early 2000s reflecting policies 10+ years prior to the deal being reached. Every pundit with two brain cells has drawn the obvious conclusion that tearing up a nuclear arms agreement with CountryA and expecting to sit down in thirty days and negotiate a new nuclear arms agreement with CountryB is fraught with risk of failure.
What could be motivating Trump? His desire to honor a campaign promise? He's already done enough in the trade realm to prove he doesn't care about core Trumpies in flyover red states.
It's like Donald Trump has become stuck in time, on April 30, 2011, frozen at his table at the White House Correspondents Dinner, unable to respond as the sitting president mocked him for three whole minutes in front of three hundred people. ENRAGED as a man who had the nerve to govern while black made him the hit of the night. In the worst possible way.
Or maybe what we are seeing is the future, coming back to the present, to slap us all in the face as if to say...
What the hell's wrong with you? Are you unable to connect two dots together? Are you unable to connect FIFTY dots together? What more do you need to see? Have you misplaced every copy of the Constitution? Why can you not ACT?
WTH
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