Transactional?

Nobody can claim to be surprised by the way Our President responded to CIA assurances that Prince MbS did, indeed, order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  Tr*mp did stop short of claiming that Khashoggi was an Iranian agent, but only by a hair's breadth.

News analysts, once again, had to come up with a term to describe Tr*mp's approach to foreign policy.  Seizing on his emphasis of $110 billion dollars in imaginary arms contracts, once again they settled on transactional.

Other terms come to mind — "morally bankrupt" is a strong contender — but rule books at major media outlets demand the appearance of neutrality, and transactional is such a neutral sounding word!  It started me thinking, though.  Rather than transactional, they could have used corporate.

The Supreme Court long has recognized corporate personhood.  (The recent Hobby Lobby decision maintains that a corporation is enough of a person to have religious beliefs!)  Unlike your average person, though, corporations have but a single objective: to increase the wealth of shareholders.  Pretty much any corporate "person" would have made exactly the same decision as Tr*mp: their values appear to be identical.  Tr*mp just might be the embodiment of corporate personhood.

If a corporation really were a person, driven by a single goal to the exclusion of all others, that person would be diagnosed as psychotic.  Presumably, Our President has a variety of goals; but, as we've seen, his approach to all of them is the same — transactional.

Bargaining Chips

Most Americans are horrified by the policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at our southern border, and plenty of politicians, whatever their real feelings, have concluded it is in their best interest to say they are as well.  Even our Psychopath-in-Chief has mouthed concern, while blaming Democrats for the damage he has done.

The "deterrent effect" claimed by Jeff Sessions is a ruse: desperate families are unlikely to believe that emigration to the US presents a greater threat than the gang violence and poverty that drives them from their homes.  Immigrant children are just the latest bargaining chips in the Republican effort to remake American immigration policy: holding DACA recipients hostage was not enough to sway Democratic votes in Congress, so Republicans have upped the ante.  "If we kidnap the babies," one imagines Stephen Miller whispering in Tr*mp's ear, "you'll get your Wall."

 One only can hope this latest "negotiating tactic" is ineffective: that Democrats will hang tough, and that enough Republicans will find (or feign) the decency required to reject the radical and racist Ryan "compromise" bill, forcing a humane, immediate resolution of the current showdown.  Too much damage already has been done.

Batshit Crazy

The whirlwind of lunacy emerging from the Oval Office since the inauguration has been nearly overwhelming, but one unifying principal (-al, not -le) has emerged, and his name is Stephen K. Bannon.  Now elevated to a leading role on the National Security Council, at the expense of the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the head white nationalist and dispenser of agitprop appears to be firmly in charge of the Tr*mp administration.

It's time to ignore the Imperial Tweets in favor of those tooled leather folders from which Our President so enjoys displaying his flamboyant signature.  The tweets are just little bursts of fandom for Bill O'Reilly (or, in the case of torture, the fictional Jack Bauer) — the leatherbound executive orders come straight from the twisted brain of Bannon and his not-especially-comic sidekick, policy chief Stephen Miller.

Fortunately, those executive orders are not being ignored.  The immigration ban drew strong criticism not only from traditional progressive quarters, but from essential Republican power brokers like the Koch brothers.  While it's traditional for a new administration to begin with a flurry of executive orders aimed at gratifying its base of support (like the inevitable Mexico City Policy/Global Gag Rule), Tr*mp seems to be tossing just a little too much red meat to his ravening hoards.