2017 Jan 11^th

Trump has had his well-advertised press conference and it was all about him. One would expect that a substantial portion of the first press conference for a President-elect would be about some policy issues. No, it was primarily about Donald Trump’s personal issues.

First, and very importantly, comes the issue of control of his assets; will there be a blind trust? Why sure there will. Trump’s eldest children will administer the blind trust. Trump has said that he will not talk to these children about the family businesses. We’ll just have to take his word for that. Hey, has he ever lied to us? Some blind trust!

A great point was made that the President is not required by law to put his or her assets in a blind trust nor to make their tax returns public. Both are true. However, there is an emoluments clause in the constitution that asserts the president cannot receive gifts from foreign leaders. If foreign dignitaries coming to see Trump and stay at the new Trump hotel in Washington, renting several floors, isn’t that unconstitutional on its face? Ethicists are forecasting dire things for Trump and that his time in office could be very short. The more belligerent he gets the fewer friends he will have. I wonder how large a crowd he’ll have at his inauguration.

On the tax return front… don’t hold your breath. Trump claims that he is under audit; the IRS claims that an audit should not be an impediment to releasing his tax returns as far as they are concerned, but I guess it does give Trump an excuse not to release them even if no one believes him.

Trump still has his nose out of joint with the intelligence services and with the media, specifically with CNN. The conclusion of the combined intelligence services is that Russia hacked into the RNC and the DNC servers and released information to WikiLeaks specifically designed to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This information came from hacking the private email accounts of Democratic leaders such as John Podesta. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange has a particular hate for Hillary Clinton so he was happy to push this stuff out there as soon as he could get his hands on it. Of course Assange, who is always truthful, denied receiving anything from the Russians.

According to Trump, while the Russians might have tried to hack the RNC they just couldn’t manage such a herculean task and that’s why there was no release of RNC data; it was easy for them to compromise the DNC files because Democrats are just so inept. It all had nothing to do with a Russian preference for Trump to win the election. Sure it didn’t!

At his conference today Trump showed a startling naiveté: He had a meeting with intelligence people and he told no one about it, no, not even his private secretary. No one knew about that meeting except Trump and the intelligence officials involved. Even so, as soon as the meeting concluded word about it was out. He was very upset. Hey Donald, welcome to Washington.

Then at his press conference he had a chance to be childish with a CNN reporter by refusing to take a question from him. What an embarrassment to the country is this man.