June 1, 2020--Under Siege.

With our cities under siege and Tump cowering in his White House bunker, I am thinking again about the Apocalypse and something I wrote and posted two years ago on June 12, 2018.

I thought it might be sadly appropriate to reprise it--

In something I wrote and posted in May, "What's He Up To?" I speculated that the he, Donald Trump, obsessed with making as much money as possible, but fearing he is compromised by the goods the Russians have on him, and the still-leaking revelations about his tangled sex life that includes, now admittedly, paying hush money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, faced with this, Trump will do all he can to undermine the various probes underway into these and other malfeasances, especially smearing the Mueller investigation which is clearly most comprehensive and threatening.

I ended with what I thought would be a smirky throwaway line--  

"Then, if this fails there is the Gotterdammerung scenario where Trump goes up in flames and brings the metaphorical house down on all of us."

Well, fewer than three weeks later the Wagnerian scenario seems to be the one unfolding with Trump and Rudy Giuliani [remember him?] in an operatic duet that eventually will bring on the flames.

Trump like Siegfried is on his own Rhine Journey. Siegfried first kills a dragon and then subsequently is murdered while Rudy, in familiar drag, channeling Brunnhilde, is ready for his own Immolation Scene. In the Gotterdammerung ("Twilight of the Gods"), Brunnhilde assembles her own funeral pyre and after igniting it rides her horse into it where she is consumed by flames.

Of course I'm being metaphoric.

But the best recent example of the approaching political Gotterdammerung was Trump, acting out of a geopolitical death wish, basically blowing up the G-7 summit meeting held last week in Canada with our allies. Or should I say, "former allies"? 

"There's a special place in hell for Justine Trudeau" intoned Peter Navarro, a senior Trump economic advisor, because the Canadian prime minister wouldn't roll over for Trump when it came to accepting Trump's outrageous trade demands.

Not getting his way on trade, our petulant president in a improvised smirky aside said that if the other G-7 nations will not give in to his ruinous requirements on trade and tariffs maybe the U.S. should take home its "piggy bank" and stop trading altogether with EU and Asian members.

Sensing this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (who Trump called "weak" and his economic team on the record accused of "stabbing Trump in the back") quipped that maybe the G-7 should reorganize itself into the G-6 Plus-1. Or, an actual possibility, just the G-6 with us and the Russians dealt out.

Since de facto this is already underway, when I heard this, I said to Rona I'm glad the stock market is closed for the weekend since acting-out Trump is in the process of bringing down the world.