He Already Flinked

I was going to call this column “TW3” after the Brit and Yank comedy tellie show of the early and mid-sixties formally called “That Was the Week That Was.” Very cheeky. I’ll get to it.

First, though, about “He already flinked,” which was a reply by my sister Ellen to a question I put on Facebook as to whether or not Trump would last his whole term. I got about 25 answers, many of them thoughtful and/or impassioned, with about an even split yes or no. Still, my sister’s “flinked” comment (obviously “flunked”) was the coolest. This was a typo that said a lot, like Trump hadn’t just flunked, but had moved into a new and extreme kingdom of flunk called Flink. Which he obviously has.

I think this week that was has to have been a milestone in the run-amokness that pours out of Washington and New York like one of Donald’s Diet Cokes flowing fresh from the can.  

Somewhere along the line Michael Cohen went all Fifth Amendment and “Doc Ronny” Jackson stood down from the VA gig after it turned out that he just was a typical Trumpian bum, a drunken one, at that, and then the French president got some phantom dandruff brushed off his well-tailored shoulder by Trump, who dresses like a two-bit tout, in what had to be the feeblest upstage in the history of feeble upstages and I’m sure it will be voted Schoolyard Move of the Year. I expected him to ask Macron next, “Did you just fart?” 

But the piece de resistance was Trump’s semi-surprise telephone interview on Wednesday – or was it Thursday? – with Fox & Friends where he set a new record for fucking up. 

Donald Trump could have Clarence Darrow in his corner – yet alone Rudy Giuliani, that semi-hysterical escapee from the Home for Useless Old Lawyers With the Teeth of Twenty-year-olds – and Trump would still be off the reservation more than Geronimo. Of course, Clarence Darrow would have as much truck with Trump as he did with the Great Orator, William Jennings Bryan, who died a couple week after Darrow destroyed him at the Scopes Trial. Whatever.

Trump was running his mouth like a fire hydrant on Fox & Friends, only a hydrant squirts in a straight line. Trump was all over the place like verbal pinball machine with all the balls rolling at once. 

And those three strange people who host Fox & Friends just sat there while this strange and strident faceless monologue enveloped them like a  mist of looniness for all the cable world to see.

Most of it was prattle and various-sized lies, but Trump did manage to fairly well blow up two of the critical legal cases that are impacting him at present. He put it out there that he had in fact stayed in Moscow “a night or two” during the infamous Miss Universe Contest. This after James Comey’s claims in both his book and memos that Trump had made a point of telling him repeatedly that he hadn’t stayed overnight. Trump’s answer was, of course, that Comey was lying. Who do you trust? I’m sure Robert Mueller’s ears pricked up there.

And then Trump mentioned that Michael Cohen did only a “tiny, tiny fraction” of his legal work. There goes any attorney-client privelege in the matter of Stormy Daniels and whatever else the feds uncover from the Cohen raids. 

It wasn’t a bad bit of fucking up for only 32minutes on-air and a bum’s rush by the three strange ones to get him off before he admitted he’d killed Kennedy.

Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’ cool-ass lawyer, later asked the president on MSNBC if he would please come on Fox & Friends every day.

‘Cause he knew that Trump “already flinked.”