Yeah, yeah.  Saudi sword dances, the Pope, NATO, G7, blah, blah, blah.  Trump manhandles another NATO leader; rudely jerks Macron around with his famous Queens-style jerk and push handshake; runs out of gas and has to follow other G7 leaders while they stroll the streets of Taormina, Sicily in a…wait for it…golf cart.  Then he refuses to join in the consensus on the Paris climate accord.  What a 24 karat gold dick, right?  (Sorry, Momma, but it’s the only word I can think of today)

But that’s not the breaking news.  Here’s the breaking news:

See it?  Please tell me you see it.  For the first time in my memory, he actually buttoned his goddam jacket.  Famous for his 3-foot-long-cheap-made-in-Gīna ties, with which he attempts to cover that huge full-of-well-done-steak belly and not call attention to that massive, er, uh, rear terrace, he habitually stands in that weird slump with his suit jacket gaping open for all to see.  You’ll notice here a first (or at least first in a long time), where he actually buttoned his jacket and looked less like a NY mafia don and more like the disgusting and hair-weaved narcissistic reality television star that he is.

Oh, and here’s the only view I want to see of him for the last time – leaving the WH forever:

So there.

In response to a House Oversight Committee document request, Trump’s lawyers sent a slick pamphlet describing how he’s NOT going to track money he receives from foreign governments, strictly prohibited by the Constitution’s emoluments clause.  Much has been written by legal scholars about Trump’s egregious violations of the Constitutional provision, and it’s all been ignored by the GOP and surprisingly, the press.  The Brookings Institute has published some of the best analysis of Trump’s real and continuing problem of taking money from foreign governments. It’s an impeachable offense, but no one is even trying, at least yet, to do anything about it.  Bloomberg has written about how money is pouring into Trump’s DC hotel which is housed in the Old Post Office building, both from foreign governments and GOP World, which has established the hotel as its new headquarters.  Oh, BTW, Trump is also violating federal rules prohibiting leasing to an elected official, but that’s another story the press is ignoring.

Before the inauguration, Trump said that he was putting all of his interests in a trust, which he didn’t, and wouldn’t be involved, which he is.  The pamphlet generally outlines how his spider web of hotels, resorts, and golf clubs will attempt to track payments, but basically says that it’s just too difficult, “impractical” I believe it says, to track all the payments.

So there.  Emoluments Clause?  We don’t need no Emoluments Clause – it’s just too hard to keep up with the graft, so we’ll just not try.  Just another day in Trumpland.

In recent weeks, many who feared Trump as a dangerous ideologue have come to learn he’s actually the opposite – rather than having firmly held beliefs and programs to implement policy on those beliefs, he’s actually just a clown.  He’s a dangerous, life threatening clown, but he is, in the end, simply a clown.  He has no idea what he’s doing, veering from disaster to disaster, always shocked that his latest brash move, childish insult, and idiotic tweet doesn’t result in adulation which he apparently needs on a minute by minute.  This moron actually believed that firing James Comey would 1) be wildly popular, especially among Democrats; 2) end the FBI investigation against him and the rest of his clown car.  Apparently, he really was shocked at the reaction by the press and the general public, and in the process has attracted an even tougher investigator who has prosecutorial authority.

These aren’t the actions of an ideologue, these are the mindless reactions of an idiot.  I don’t know which is scarier; a radical ideologue with totalitarian tendencies, or a simpleton, susceptible to manipulation by actual dangerous people whose poor advice results in the daily dumpster fire unfolding every day on our television sets.

One thing we know is that foreign leaders around the world, but especially in Europe, are shaking their heads and laughing at him (and at us).   Friday, Susan Glasser of Politico wrote of the international reaction to Trump, and it’s not pretty.  A few tidbits:

“People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”

“The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span.”

I could go on and on, but you get the drift.  My thinking on Trump has evolved over the last 120 days of the worst president in US history.  Before, I was furious that Americans could be this stupid to elect a reality television star who played a successful businessman on television.  I feared he could burn down the world trying to play his new reality role as president.  I still fear that, but am now just embarrassed; I’m humiliated that the US could go from the most globally popular president in modern history to this clown.  However, I’m liking the new bumper sticker that’s shown up recently on the inter webs –

Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus.

As we all know by now, fired former FBI director James Comey left a paper trail of his conversations with Cheeto Jesus that will likely be damning to this president and carry great weight in the investigation of his and his cronies’ ties to the Russians.  Yesterday, though, there was a new twist to the story.  Pamela Brown is reporting on CNN that even though Comey routinely documented his conversations with Trump, he didn’t do so with his conversations with President Obama.  The reason?  Brown said,

“Even though he liked to create paper trails through his years at the Justice Department and the FBI, it was not common practice for him to document conversations with senior officials unless he thought it was significant. Conversations that Comey had with Trump he documented. In one memo, Anderson, he included a description of the President talking to him about crowd size at the inauguration. The source I spoke to said Comey did not do this with President Obama in part because he had fewer one on one conversations with the president, and as the source said, in Comey’s view, there was no need to document the conversations with people that are truthful or situations that are routine.”

Have a look:

I’m  old enough to remember in detail the Watergate scandal that ended in Richard Nixon’s abrupt resignation from the presidency in 1974.  Welp, it looks like we’re going that way yet again.

Did you see that story on MSM this morning about how Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s security detail attacked protestors across from the Turkish embassy in Washington?  Me neither.  If there is any coverage at all, it’s about how “violence” broke out a protest yesterday.  Watch this video:

The guys in black suits are Erdoğan’s security detail.  The protestors are across the street.  Apparently forgetting that they were in the US, Erdoğan’s goons attacked the protestors, violently punching and kicking them.  DC police were caught completely off guard, and had to hustle to stop the attack.  We understand that none of the black suit guys were arrested, just shuffled back to their side of the street.

This is what happens when the President of the United States lends credibility to an authoritarian despot by inviting him to visit in the WH.  This can’t end soon enough.