Courtesy of Pam Martens
President Donald Trump Addresses a Joint Session of Congress, February 28, 2017
It has been soundly demonstrated that the President of the United States has a knowledge vacuum in proper presidential decorum, diplomacy, and accepted norms of behavior. Just yesterday the President Tweeted that a former black female colleague in the White House, Omarosa Manigault Newman, is a “crazed, crying lowlife” and a “dog.” On June 25, the President Tweeted that a sitting black female member of Congress, Maxine Waters, is “an extraordinarily low IQ person,” despite her being elected to 14 consecutive terms to the House of Representatives.
There’s a serious danger that the current occupant of the Oval Office defines American etiquette so far down that we are shunned by enlightened countries as a backward, rogue nation. America has already gone rogue in withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the Iran nuclear deal. And to the horror of the civilized world, the Trump administration is refusing to hear asylum applications from immigrants at our Southern border, ripping the children and infants from those parents, and effectively orphaning the children by deporting the parents.
At the very least, this era in American presidential history will be written about for centuries by scholars attempting to understand how the American people let this happen and why Congress failed to censure the President as his conduct went from unseemly to unthinkable.
But the biggest danger to Americans is that as this daily theater of deviance in the Trump administration commands the media’s attention, the hard investigative work into the dangers building on Wall Street goes unmet.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the worst crash of the U.S. financial system since the Great Depression, and yet, the worst contributors to that crash have yet to be meaningfully reformed. We’re talking about over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives.
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