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Has the Trump Show jumped the shark?

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It's been quite a week for the leader of the Free World and the Twitter champion of free speech. Jim McArdle reports.

The mad dog (Cartoon by Terry Wynne)

 

LOOK, I’m not even going to touch the Don Jr thing, except in passing. No, I’m moving straight on to this week when normal service was resumed, after an uncharacteristically quiet few days from the Twitter President.

There was, mind you, last Saturday’s unqualified support for the young’un:

After that, nothing really until yesterday when Trump conceded the possibility there was some Russian meddling — but definitely not by Putin. I’ll get to that.

But first……

If someone had said to you a year ago that you’d be reading headlines such as we’ve witnessed in the last 12 (Christ!) months you’d have called them a looney. Don’t believe me? Here, have a look.

Let’s start with an old favourite from last October:

 

Then  there was Trump’s early response to the first reports of Russian meddling:

 

But then things started to get serious:

 

Or did they?

 

That rang a bell for me:

 

Then we had an ingenious change of tack, fingering Obama for it all:

 

And this. I’ll leave it to you to decide which parts of the headline are accurate and which aren’t:

'Trump announces he's teaming up with Putin to fight election hacking, leaving top Republicans in disbelief'.

By now you may be thinking about that old stockmarket joke. During the GFC, a sharetrader jumps off Wall Street’s tallest skyscraper – number 40 – but now better known as, you guessed it, the Trump Building. On the way down, he’s heard to call out: “So far, so good!”

You’d have to wonder just how much worse things can get.

Well, the rest of the world worked it out a month ago:

And yet... and yet...  there are those who keep hanging in, keep saying it can’t get any worse. Well, let the markets provide another lesson from history.  The stockbrokers were saying that all the way from October 1929 until late 1932, when they were finally proven correct, many of them, alas, posthumously.

It does keep getting worse, just like the ratings for ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ after Big Arnie took over:

 

This week, the press reported Trump, among other things, coming to his son’s defence.

Here’s the gist of it and honestly, this is the best I can do. The President, who has steadfastly and vehemently denied even the possibility of ongoing Russian meddling in the election, has agreed that there may in fact have been ongoing Russian meddling in the election. He categorically denied, however, that a meeting between his inner circle, including Donald Jr and a Kremlin-linked lawyer promising info on Hillary Clinton as part of Russia’s ongoing meddling in the election had anything to do with it.

Said Trump:

"Zero ... [ improprieties occurred in a meeting that] ... most people would have taken.” 

He continued:

“As far as my son is concerned, my son is a wonderful young man. He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer.”

Even better, it wasn’t Putin who was behind all. And he could prove it. Take it away, Mr President:

"First question - first 20, 25 minutes - I said, ‘Did you do it?’ He said, ‘No, I did not, absolutely not.’ I then asked him a second time, in a totally different way. He said, ‘Absolutely not.’"

(Yes, yes, I know. How do you ask “Did you do it?” in two completely different ways?)

Then he added these two absolute pearlers:

“Somebody did say if he [Putin] did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it. Which is a very interesting point.”

Yes, it is an interesting point, if taken to its inevitable, logical, Trumpian conclusion. That is, if Putin had done it, we wouldn’t have found about it. So, because we did find out about it, it couldn’t have been him. QED.

Then a sign off with a flourish, speaking on behalf of the American people:

“Now, everybody agrees that there was no impact on the votes in this election, which is very important to say, but we have to make sure that nothing could ever happen to our election process."

Rough translation; any Russian meddling didn’t affect the result but we can’t have it happening again, can we?

It can’t get any worse, can it?

You can follow Jim McArdle on Twitter @JamesMcArdle7.

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