Plain and simply, Donald Trump isn’t doing his job.
Our Liar-in-Chief keeps yelling that Special Counsel Robert Mueller III is conducting a witch hunt (we had naively thought that he was supposed to be doing something constructive after January 20, 2017, but it only took most sensible folk a week or two to realize, well, nope).
And now he says that he could run Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s collusion with his campaign, all by himself (https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/20/trump-mueller-investigation-790059).
Our crack associate solitary reporters Susanna Sherman and Keith Coleman were in Salem, Massachusetts, yesterday, because associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones had told them that Trump told his extremely uncooperative (from Trump’s point of view) Attorney General, former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, to grab Mueller and take him to a historical reenactment of the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, under the Puritans in Colonial Massachusetts.
Trump knows virtually nothing about American history, and he sure as hell ain’t a Puritan, but it’s theoretically possible that he might know something about McCarthyism. No doubt, he’s never seen The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 film directed by John Frankenheimer, staring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury. The Manchurian candidate is crackpot Sen. Johnny Yerkes Iselin, masterfully played by James Gregory. In the film, Ben Marco (Sinatra) and Raymond Shaw (Harvey) are brainwashed in Manchuria during the Korean War when their platoon is captured and taken to Manchuria. Their Chinese and Russian brainwashers turn Shaw into a pre-programmed assassin. When Shaw, who is Sen. Iselin’s stepson, returns home, Mrs. Iselin (Lansbury) arranges for her son to be treated as a war hero. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a must. You can skip the Denzel Washington 2004 remake. Sen. Iselin is just like Sen. Joe McCarthy (1908-1957), Republican of Wisconsin, the least popular senator during his tenure, though he hit the political bigtime when he yelled repeatedly that there were Communists in the State Department, only he never could come up with a number that he could remember. For his outrageous conduct, he was censured by his colleagues in the Senate in 1954. McCarthy died in office in 1957, most likely from conditions associated with alcoholism.
ASRs Sherman and Coleman arrived in Salem shortly before Trump, White House Counsel Don McGahn, and FBI Director Christopher Wray went to the site of the executions in 1693, where nineteen Salem women were hanged on suspicion of witchcraft, and where one man was pressed to death for refusing to plead.
Trump, 72, was made to attend New York Military Academy by his father, but he managed to avoid any military service based on heel spurs. By contrast, the 74-year old Mueller, a conservative Republican, was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with Combat "V” for heroism, as well as the Purple Heart, for his service as a Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam War.
Mueller, a true patriot, arrived at the site of the Salem Witch Trials shortly after Trump, McGahn, and Wray. Most politely, he tried from a distance to greet Trump and asked how he could be of service. That’s when Trump snarled at Mueller and told McGahn (who, incidentally, has been questioned for 30 hours by Mueller’s investigators) to grab Mueller and put a fire under him, or to devise some other system for treating Mueller to very grievous bodily injury from which he was not supposed to recover.
“Sir,” McGahn said, “what kind of fire would you like me to arrange? Or what other method of punishing him would you prefer?”
When Trump made his wishes slightly more specific, McGahn said, “Sir, I can’t do that."
Disgusted, Trump threw a hissy-fit, got into his specially equipped helicopter, and left McGahn and Wray at the Witch History Museum in Salem.