The response to that will be “you say that because you are WEAK!!” – the notion that any part of the government or of independent public entities does not have as its primary mission making DJT look good at any cost, that there is NO official or organization who is not an underling owing him personal obedience, or even that anyone has to accept that sometimes you lose, is just unacceptable.
As previously mentioned, the only way he knows how to deal with pushback is through intimidation, through “hitting back harder” so they are sorry to have challenged him. And so far in life it has worked well because even people who could have been in a position to push back effectively often felt it was not worth the cost and aggravation and image hit to do so (the “wrestling with the pig” scenario).
Yabbut, the DOW climbed to effing 26,000, and the other indicies saw similar gains. The really smart people sold above 26k, and made a healthy profit, not losing at all. The sort-of smart people like me swapped out of stocks above 24k, locking in gains from the whole economic expansion, if they’d been investing all along. Some still pretty smart people will decide it is still worth selling now, either to take what profit they can or to protect against the downside. And the very last guy who decides to sell takes a bath, because he’s selling at the bottom and the whole thing is going to bounce the other way some day. It’s called a Stock Market.
Then there’s Trump, who suggests firing the Treasury Secretary over falling stock prices, when he’s the guy who tethered his star to stock prices in the first place! :smack:
I’ll admit, Trump is a genius at jackassery–it’s a feature of what he is and does, not a bug. It’s also what appeals to much of his base. Country might be going down the toilet, but at least the liberuls are triggered.
Of all the total outrages of the Trump Administration, we can cross off “Failed to ever visit troops in a combat zone.” That only leaves 847 other crimes, failures, embarrassments and fuck-ups.
Amazing how quickly a PR stunt can be organized when necessary. If only that same level of organization could be applied to any and every other thing in this administration.
Whether or not it was a last minute publicity stunt, this one I can’t criticize much. If public pressure/perception got him to act like a halfway decent human being at least a few times during his miserable tenure, all the better.
The other million terrible things happening on a near daily basis on the other hand…
Maybe I’m a little too cynical and mistrustful, but I can’t help but wonder if six months from now someone will come out and say, “Yeah, this was actually filmed at Fort Myer.”
Agreed. How long did it take to fly there, one-way? And the trip back? All that for a 3-hour photo-op, I mean, visit to the deserving troops? When his original plan was to be golfing in Florida about this time? I find it hard to believe he was talked into this by his PR staff, too – it’s such an imposition on his time, and a trip like this, for a man of his years (and health) is not nothing, even in a flying hotel room. It does fit with his ego and level of displayed ‘intelligence’ that he would think he could perpetrate such a scam and not think (and not care, either) it would ever get exposed.
In all honesty, every presidential visit to Iraq since 2003 has been a PR stunt. It’s not like they’re going there to hand-deliver military orders.
(And…every presidential or cabinet-level visit to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001 has been “unannounced”. When the day comes that we all get advance notice that a president is going to put Baghdad or Kabul on the itinerary, we’ll know that we’ve achieved Utopia.)