For Better or for Worse

"What the Republican establishment now know is Donald Trump is unequivocally the leader of the Republican Party. He is the one who sets the tone of what takes place in Washington."
"He is the leader of our country, both politically and from a legislative side of things, and I think they’ve learned that over the last year."
Corey Lewandowski, former Trump campaign manager

"The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake)." "Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt?"
"Take away credentials?"
U.S. President Donald J. Trump 

The world went into a brief catatonic shock at the improbable election success of Donald J. Trump. This, despite the disbelief originally engendered that this brash, uncivil self-promoter whose manner and mannerisms betrayed an unsavoury character with brutish values made it as far as the Republican challenger of a Democratic contender for the presidency whose own lack of candor and reliability earned her a reputation that catapulted Trump in the estimation of Americans fed up with the kind of politics that bypassed their interests.

That Trump, in the final analysis, garnered sufficient votes where they counted, to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America caught everyone by surprise, but possibly not the president-elect. His confidence in himself is as great as his penchant for abrupt and disruptive changes of opinions and tactics. But this man, despite his unwholesome failings as a human being has performed as president precisely as he promised his many followers that he would.

The Washington establishment has been put on its back legs, job growth has cut unemployment substantially; he cut taxes as he said he would, and workers in the U.S. have taken heart from his suspicion over free trade agreements. The stand-off with North Korea has moved into a new phase which, if it fails to denuclearize the North, may end up pacifying the two Koreas toward more than an uneasy truce. Nobel Peace Prize? The very thought pulverizes rationality.

So what might this man's legacy be? A world power who declared that his predecessor erred in allowing the Islamic Republic of Iran to continue developing highly sophisticated ballistic missiles upon which the covert and continuing secret locations devoted to steering the Iranian Republican Guard Corps to proud possession of nuclear weapons could be mounted, thanks to cooperation with North Korea but which Trump is now prepared to contest through the re-imposition of strict and stricter sanctions?

The rough character personified by Trump gains more attention through the notoriety of his sexual predation than anything he could ever accomplish on the world stage, however. The titillating stories that erupt from time to time through his own unabashed admissions of groping women, vie with women coming forward to attest to having been molested by this man whose wealth and position gave him self-perceived entitlement to take what he wanted.

The latest scandal, courtesy of a professional prostitute , Stormy Daniels, has the Democrats chortling victory in their public relations war with Trump. Here is a woman who enjoys her own notoriety as much as Trump does his. Her principles can be seen in accepting $150,000 to keep her mouth shut, while planning no such thing, focusing instead on her disquieting revelations that Trump slept with her in a one-night stand soon after the birth of his youngest child to his wife Melania.

Dollars to doughnuts Trump cares less about how the public reacted to these revelations than how his wife did, at yet another public humiliation relating to her husband's boisterous infidelity. News media are falling all over themselves in broadcasting whatever incriminating evidence they can to 'prove' what a scumbag the President of the United States is. He's a Republican, after all, and unreservedly unrepentant about all his character flaws all of which he views positively as assets others should be envious of.

On a summer night in 1969, U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy drove into a pond. As his car began to submerge into the water, he got himself out but left behind Mary Jo Kopechne, who was a passenger in his car. She perished.
A new biopic "Chappaquiddick."

So, does this latest scandal define how odiously-behaved this man is? Well he has plenty of company, none of whom ever garnered the public censure that Trump has. Where to start? Oh yes, John F. Kennedy, a serial womanizer but whose exploits were discreet and kept that way by an approving Democratic party, and respectful press corps. And brother Edward Kennedy, responsible as a philanderer who chose to leave a young woman to drown when Mary Joe Kopechne had the misfortune of an illicit alliance with this unscrupulous cad.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

More latterly, there is the lady-killer reputation that four women brought along to besmirch the much-loved character of Arkansas-governor-turned-president, and which he decided to cap off with an exploit of a mature and unrepentant skirt-chaser in a position of supreme authority over a very young and very naive intern in the White House, thrilled to bits that the President of the United States noticed little old her, then denied he had sex "with that woman". It was she who suffered censure and humiliation.

None of the previous office holders whose affairs became fodder for discreet gossip have suffered the kind of full frontal attack that Trump has. This is politics at its most wretched and pathetic.