By George B. Kauffman, Ph.D.
American political commentator, talk show host and author Chris Matthews, best known as host of the nightly hour-long talk show Hardball on MSNBC, has characterized Donald J. Trump’s nightly, now perhaps hourly, idiotic, petulant tweets that promote his lies and attack respected journalists as distributing “fake news” as “michegoss.” The term borrows from the Yiddish meshugas and meshuge (“crazy”) and from the Hebrew meshugga` (“crazy”), shugga` (“be driven mad”) and shigga` (“drive mad”).
Things are moving fast!
Pence Creates PAC Ahead of 2018 and 2020 Elections
Vice President Mike Pence is launching his own PAC—the “Great America Committee”—to aid his own future political interests, including helping Republican candidates ahead of the 2018 midterms.
The group, which filed paperwork with the FEC on Wednesday, will be able to use the funds to cover the costs of the vice president’s travels on Air Force Two to campaign on behalf of GOP candidates across the country.
This is the first time a sitting vice president has formed such a separate political arm. Former administration officials have used either party or campaign funds to cover travel costs.
(Vaughn Hillyard, NBC News, May 18)
According to Michelle Fox@MFoxCNBC, Jeremy Siegel predicted that if Trump resigned tomorrow the Dow would go up 1000 points because Wall Street prefers President Mike Pence to President Donald Trump and tax reform would get done. Although the market follows its own trajectory and is not the Trump market (although Trump characteristically has claimed credit for it) or the Obama market, the country seems to believe that if the market continues to improve, Trump’s chances of surviving his numerous scandals will improve.
Trump has not retracted his false claim that President Obama illegally tapped his phone lines during the 2016 presidential election nor has he released his complete tax returns or his connections around the globe in violation of the emoluments clause.
In contrast to those who claim that he hasn’t accomplished anything during his first 100 days, he has accomplished a lot that should make progressives cringe. Rather fulfilling his pledge to “drain the swamp,” he has championed authoritarian dictators and illegitimate strongmen and has proposed cutbacks in health care, Social Security, environmental protections and help on student debt and has advocated handouts to his rich cronies and Trump companies and affiliates.
Trump illegally has told Russian diplomats in the absence of legitimate American journalists that the respected honorable former FBI Director James Comey is a “nut job” and his attempts to link Trump to Russia are a “witch hunt.”
As I write this, because he has refrained temporarily from his customary ludicrous nocturnal tweets and is following a script, Trump, America’s spoiled adolescent, is being hailed as presidential. Rather than bringing America together, however, he is actively dividing our country. It’s not difficult to tell when Trump is lying; it’s when his lips are moving or when he says, “Believe me.”
It will be instructive to see how Trump fares on his “triumphal” tour as he deals with those that he previously excoriated—Muslims, immigrants, the poor, the Pope, etc. I’m not optimistic.
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George B. Kauffman, Ph.D., chemistry professor emeritus at Fresno State and a Guggenheim Fellow, is a recipient of the American Chemical Society’s George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education, the Helen M. Free Award for Public Outreach and the Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution, and numerous domestic and international honors. In 2002 and 2011, he was appointed a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society, respectively.
