The Lard of the Manor

"President Obama was pure and simply outsmarted." "President" Donald Trump, August 26, 2019

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari) 

"We could've had a G8!" we were forced to endure for the third summer in a row in the flaming shit show passing itself off as the "Trump administration." During a press conference for the ages yesterday, Donald Trump put on full display two of his biggest obsessions (if you discount watching Fox, fast food and underaged girls): Getting Putin back into the G7 and America's last real president, Barack Obama.

     Well, make that three obsessions if you factor in Trump's maniacal obsession with reversing everything Obama did and, in Trump's funhouse mirror mind, Obama unilaterally kicked Putin out of the G8 and essentially made it the G7. And during the press conference, Trump, as usual, got everything wrong that he tried to tackle.

     First, he blamed Obama for Putin annexing the Crimea and essentially stealing it from Ukraine. Trying to blame on Obama something Putin did that Trump would've either cheered or ignored in and of itself displays a Mr. Bill simplicity of mind that is hard to take in real time let alone historically. How this qualifies as outsmarting Obama is anyone's guess but the fact remained that at the end of the day, Putin was the one who got his ass kicked out of the G8, not Obama.

     Second, it was not up to Obama to unilaterally kick Russia out of the G8. That had to come about through a general consensus among the other six world leaders. It was not a decision President Obama could unilaterally make.

     From the start of this ersatz "presidency," it's been the G6 and will continue being the G6 as long as we have to endure the hulking evolutionary dropout in the Oval Office hell-bent on making us recede from the world stage. It's become obvious to the other six G7 leaders that America has since early 2017 quickly shriveled from being a major player at the G7 and G20, ASEAN and other world summits to being a mere ineffectual appendage of Putin's Russia.

     Undeterred, Trump has already signaled that when we host the G7 next year (assuming he's not cooling his heels in a Supermax), not only will he want to host it at one of his golf clubs (and make a pile of dough in the process), he'll invite Putin just as Clinton did Yeltsin in 1995. If the other six world leaders were smart, they'd boycott Trump and his attempt to play Lord of the Manor, which would be earthshaking. Or, if they want to troll Trump, Justin Trudeai and Macron could bring a certain Canadian/French dish to Mar a Lago and exclaim, "Oh, we thought you wanted us to bring poutine back to the G7!"

Three Was Not the Charm

If Trump thought at his third G7 that he'd find an ally in Boris Johnson, virtually the sole right wing lunatic in the South of France that weekend, he was sadly mistaken. Indeed, even the man who once admitted to making little wooden buses with little faces scrawled in the windows (think of all the time Winston Churchill wasted writing erudite books) pulled himself together long enough to say that he hoped for a peaceful resolution to Trump's trade war with China that he'd touched off before slouching toward France.

     That would be the same Boris Johnson who was terrified at the idea of a Trump presidency as well as being mistaken for him and once said he would've taken Trump on a tour of London except that he didn't wish for Londoners to "run the risk of being exposed to Donald Trump." So, Trump hadn't found an ally in Boris Johnson any more than he had Theresa May, whom Trump had mercilessly savaged over the Tory nightmare of Brexit.

     It was a G7 that Trump didn't even want to go to considering there was nothing there to interest Trump since not everything was about him. Nonetheless, the other world leaders resorted to the tried-and-true tactic of flattery in order to nudge our pretend president to their worldview. They had to be gentle: Japan doesn't want to meet the same fate as China. And Johnson was also desperately triangulating for a much-needed trade deal for the UK. It didn't work. Near the summit's end, with the Amazon in flames, Trump couldn't even be bothered to go to the Climate Conference then lied about why he'd skipped it.

     At the bottom of it all is perhaps black penis envy. Trump reportedly is absolutely terrified at posterity looking at Obama as a better president than him. From the very start, when Trump thought he could run the country by royal edict (aka Executive Orders), Trump was obsessed with the idea of reversing everything Obama did in his eight years. The crown jewel of this would be Obama Care, which was denied to him by the Democrats and John McCain (Explaining the Umber Nightmare's obsession with the late Senator).

     And, in that Mr. Bill mind of Donald Trump, he even places the "blame" for kicking Putin out of the G8 squarely on Obama's shoulders. Given his sick obsession with undoing everything Obama did, getting unwavering resistance from the other six world leaders is absolutely intolerable. Trump is acting like a dinner guest who doesn't want to go because the rest of the family banned the love of his life from attending. If it wasn't for the geopolitical implications, the relationship between Putin and Trump would be the bromance of the century.