WEIRDNESS CANNOT BE TRUMPED

Posted on 29th April 2017

Slane Castle

I’m still in  America this week and luckily enjoying some sun in West Palm Beach.  Trump is gone and the town of Palm Beach is calm before Sunfest and rock n’roll amble into town at the beginning of May.  All around the preparations are in hand to welcome artists like Snoop Dog.  I fly home over the weekend to start the build-up to Guns n’Roses at Slane on May 27th.  It seems somewhat surreal to consider they last played the castle 25 years ago when my youngest daughter was one.  My wife found a Scratch cartoon published in the Daily Star on the 12th April 1992.  It depicts a concerned looking Axl Rose and Slash looking at the then wrecked castle with the words underneath “Sound check seems okay, Mister Mount Charles”.  Boy have times changed, and yet in some ways they haven’t.  “The boys are back in town”.

But back to Trump.  He may be back in Washington but he dominates many conversations I have had with American friends.  The occasional one even admits they voted for him, usually because they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary and mumble about how they wish Joe Biden had run.  So incidentally do I, as he would have walked into the White House.

Let me try and give you a read on where this is all going.  First, the Russian scandal is not going away and it seems possible that General Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, who he was forced to fire because he had lied to the Vice President, may have broken the law.  Increasingly it also looks like there is a cover up.  Remember it was the cover up that did in Nixon.  Secondly, there is Trump’s performance.  He is doing more flip flops than a circus performer and people are actually getting sick and tired of his lying.  This is a serious problem for a commander-in-chief who may need the support of the American people when faced by a serious external threat.

Finally, there is what I call the sheer weirdness of it all.  America had a revolution to get rid of a king.  Remember the movie “The Madness of King George” ?  How about replacing it with “The Weirdness of The Donald”.  He is already a figure of ridicule on a nightly basis thanks to Stephen Colbert on NBC and as for Alec Baldwin’s portrayal on Saturday Night Live, it out-trumps Trump.  The son- in- law is his most trusted adviser and his daughter goes to Berlin at the invitation of Angela Merkel. Does this not increasingly look more like a court than a government ?  Mar-a-Lago, chocolate cake, missiles and voodoo economics.



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