Putin’s secret Santa is filling his wish list
It’s going to be a lean Christmas for Americans who voted for Donald Trump.
So far, he’s already walked back on, or outright broken, nearly every major promise he made over eighteen months of campaigning.
-He’s not going to “build the wall.”
-He’s not going to “lock her up.”
-He’s “drained the swamp,” directly into his own Cabinet and White House staff.
-He hasn’t released his taxes after the election.
-He’s traded imposing tariffs and tax penalties on American companies who outsource US jobs for bribes in the form of million-dollar tax incentives to only outsource half of their jobs.
-He’s empowered Goldman Sachs almost as much as he’s boosted ISIS’s recruitment potential.
-He’s continued to act like a toddler tripping balls on Halloween candy with almost daily Twitter meltdowns and personal attacks against reporters, politicians, and even a private citizen.
Nor does his humbuggery end with just the things Trump has failed to bring, it also extends to things he and his new GOP majorities in Congress are now promising to take away.
{mosads}Millions of people who pulled the lever for Trump are poised to lose their health care coverage when McConnell finally achieves his fever dream of repealing the ACA and booting twenty million Americans off their insurance with no plans to replace it. Millions more elderly voters, who disproportionately supported Trump, are at risk of seeing their retirement incomes slashed as Paul Ryan’s quest to gut Social Security approaches its conclusion.
And those same voters are in for a real shock when the GOP in Congress send a bill privatizing Medicare and turning it into a voucher program to Trump’s desk that will hit them squarely and fiercely in their already depleted checkbooks.
Indeed, the only people in America whose stockings Donald Trump isn’t stuffing full of coal are the unemployed coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia.
But fear not.
Because The Donald isn’t without Christmas cheer.
He has a sack full of goodies that he’s about to hand out to his campaign’s big league, most important supporter, Vladimir Putin.
See, nasty old Trump pulled the Russian autocrat’s name out of the hat in their office Secret Santa pool, and his heart grew three sizes.
Unlike Trump’s voters, his pal Putin is poised to get everything on his Sear wish list and more. Instead of the condemnation and containment it has so richly earned, Putin’s Ukrainian expedition and the collateral damage of Malaysian Air Flight 17 that accompanied it, is about to pay dividends, with Trump on record for rolling back the economic sanctions the Obama Administration rightfully put in place as punishment for the first annexation of a sovereign nation’s territory on the European continent since the end of the Second World War.
Nor is Trump done filling the space under Putin’s tree.
On the campaign trail, he made noise about the U.S. refusing to live up to our treaty obligations to defend NATO members from Russian invasion, going so far as to threaten to leave the organization that has spent the last sixty-seven years curbing Russia’s expansionistic impulses. And as if throwing our relationships with some of our most enduring international allies isn’t enough, Trump is going out of his way to weaken America’s military capabilities from within.
In just the last week, President-elect Trump used his personal twitter feed to attack both the Lockheed Martin Corporation and The Boeing Company, two U.S. companies that not only employ hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled American workers, but just happen to be our two largest defense contractors.
Trump’s twitter tantrums targeting the F-35 Lightning II program and Air Force One, (yes, I know AF1 is just a call sign and not the actual plane, you pedantic assholes) have thrown government contracts signed long before he “won” the election into question, casting doubt on to military procurement programs and weakening both investor confidence and the stock prices of both companies.
But wait, there’s more. Not satisfied to embolden the former KGB agent by merely weakening America’s defense industry and most important international strategic partnerships, Trump is poised to give Russia’s economy a “yuuuge” gift basket as well.
Trump has appointed Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, famously created by that intractable pinko-commie, tree-hugger, Richard M. Nixon. Mr. Pruitt is an outspoken denier of the scientific fact of anthropogenic global warming and is noted for bringing frequent lawsuits against the very agency he is now tasked with dismantling, sorry, I mean “administering.”
Along with ending “job-killing” environmental regulations that will allow the petroleum and coal industries to return to old fashioned human-killing pollution, trump has also promised to extricate the United States from the Paris Climate Accords which sought to keep parts of the Earth somewhat livable in the future.
The incoming Trump administration has gone so far as to send out questionnaires demanding information about any government employees that may have had a hand in crafting climate policy, a move widely interpreted as the prelude to a purge of anyone in the machine who actually accepts the settled science and reality of global warming.
But all of this pales in comparison to the rumored front-runner for Secretary of State in Trump’s cabinet. Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, not only has deep, long-term financial ties to the Russian government that reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars, but in the words of former deputy defense secretary John Hamre, “[H]as had more interactive time with Vladimir Putin than probably any other American with the exception of Henry Kissinger.”
For his part, Putin isn’t even bothering to contain his excitement.
Like a kid excitedly inspecting all of the carefully-wrapped boxes under the tree, state-run Russian television proclaimed about the immense potential Tillerson had to improve relations between the long-term adversaries.
Every drop of this news is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears. Russia’s fossil-fuel-based economy has been in a near free fall since the rest of the world, including China, has come around to take the threat of global warming seriously and has started taking steps to curb their carbon emissions to prevent the nightmare scenarios that educated, experienced scientists have been sounding the alarm about for more than thirty years.
Scenarios that are already playing out in many parts of the world, causing droughts, floods, famines, and the sort of economic and political instability that has lead even the Pentagon to sit up and take notice of AGW as one of the greatest security threats we face.
Putin knows all of this to be true. He is not a global warming denier. Indeed, during the deliberations over the landmark Kyoto Accord in 2003, he made his strategic position on global warming plain when he said it, “[W]ouldn’t be so bad for a northern country like Russia, we could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”
U.S. domestic and foreign policy falling under control of oil men and moving away from renewable energy and touching off a new fossil-fuel extraction boom can only benefit Putin and his oligarch cronies who control Gazprom, Russia’s ‘publicly owned’, state-run, natural gas and petroleum giant.
Look, I’m not saying that I know for certain that the CIA is right and Donald Trump only “won” the Presidency (lost it by almost three million votes) due to the deliberate and malicious machinations of a hostile foreign state run by a former KGB agent. I don’t have the security clearance and I haven’t been invited to sit in on the briefings Trump is refusing to attend.
But I am saying that, if Russia had conspired to install our President-elect with the goal of weakening American military supremacy, shaking confidence in our international partnerships, and manipulating all levels of the American government into benefiting the geo-political and economic interests of Mother Russia at the expense of American sovereignty and the welfare of American citizens, that man’s actions would be indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s actions since Nov. 8.
Someone is getting everything they want for Christmas, and it isn’t us.
Ho, ho, ho.
Patrick Tomlinson is an author and regular contributor to the Hill on state, local and national politics. Follow him on Twitter @stealthygeek.
The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.