Rick Kinnaird

Day 822 Monday April 8, 2019

574 Days to the 2020 election and 652 Days to Inauguration Day

Kirstjen Nielsen is out. She will, however, stay on until the day after tomorrow to help with a smooth transition. This should give her enough time to pick up the ruler out her desk and the mementos off the walls.

What was the problem? Like a lot of officials working for Trump, she probably told him she couldn’t do what he wanted. You know like throw a switch and shut off the border. Or put kids in smaller cages.

This is being touted as “she wasn’t tough enough,” and “Trump wants someone tougher.” The problem is no one knows what that means.

I mean when throwing kids in cages, when separating kids from their parents, when having a policy of creating orphans of kids, when tear gassing immigrants across the fence in Mexico, when forcing people seeking asylum to sleep for days and weeks on bridges isn’t considered tough enough, then people don’t know what it is. I guess we’ll have to wait for Stephen Miller to lift the rock he’s living under and come out of his hole and explain.

In other immigration news,  which is laughable, The president went to the border where some fencing had been repaired, called it a wall, slapped a sign on it with his name. Naturally, the fact that this was a repair job authorized under the Obama administration had no effect on him. 

In climate change news, president Trump said windmills create cancer. Don’t ask, I don’t know. Also, you can’t use windmills for power because the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Wow. This is deep. I guess he doesn’t know Buckminster Fuller. Why am I even asking? Of course, he doesn’t know who Bucky Fuller is. Because the guy’s name isn’t Trump. Bucky said that witin fifty miles of where you are the wind is blowing. Thar she blows!

In the 1800s the reigning chess master at one point stood up on a chair, pointed to his opponent, and asked, “Why do I have to play this idiot?” I dunno what made me think of that right now.

I hope Nielsen has a smooth transition. It’s hard for me to imagine someone who could be worse than her, but I have faith Donnie can pick someone. There are a few fat f*cks still at Mar-a-Lago who don’t have jobs in this administration. Hey, that would be better than Kirstjen in that they wouldn’t know how anything works and therefore would have a hard time screwing the pooch worse. Just sayin’

Have a nice day!

574 Days to the 2020 election and 652 Days to Inauguration Day

PS There a promo for Ari Melber’s show where Corey Booker quotes a line from Public Enemy and says, “Fight the Power.” Ari responds with the question “Who in the Trump administration most reminds you of Flavor Flav?” It’s a good one. And one I hope to return to from time to time. I think Stephen Miller would look good with an alarm clock around his neck.

PPS “Both Members of This Club” by George Bellows 1909

Day 821 Sunday April 7, 2019

575 Days to the 2020 election and 653 Days to Inauguration Day

Sundays are a good day to review things because hopefully the awful news has slowed down and we can contemplate our navels a bit.

I’ve had several old thoughts running around in my head and this got me to thinking about the fundamental difference between a progressive and a conservative, or Democrat and Republican. 

I think there’s a difference in core values and beliefs. 

Let me tell you the things running around in my head then I’d like to extrapolate to the real world and today.

One was a clip from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 

I think the clip was of Glenn Beck giving one of those “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” type speeches. In it he said you can go to the library where books are free. 

Immediately, the clip was cut short and there was Jon Stewart looking into the camera say, “No they’re not.” He pointed out that someone had to pay for those books. Maybe not you the person going to the library, but someone had to buy those books, and the building, and pay the staff, etc. etc. etc.

The other was an example from Michael Lewis’ book “The Fifth Risk.” In it Lewis recounts how a Fox News commentator who was a big proponent of doing it all yourself was out in a rural region where he had a farm or business of some kind. He hated the Federal government, always interfering in our lives, blah, blah blah. He had a big new project he was kicking off with a public announcement and there was a woman standing near the stage where he was about to go on and tell the audience how he had done it all himself. How the local bank had made him a loan, etc. etc. etc. He asked the woman who she was. She told him. He asked why she was here. She said she was from the USDA. Why was she here? He asked. “I’m the woman who made you the loan from the USDA via your local bank,” she told him. He was speechless. He had no idea that the big bad Federal government was the one that had made his project possible.

The last example is FDR and Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor. Roosevelt was always worried about people “being on the dole.” Perkins was worried about the poor and the aged. She saw the attempts by volunteer organizations to help out in limited ways. They got money together and created a home for a limited number of poor or aged. Why, asked Perkins, can’t we do that on a national scale? The attitude was not one of something for nothing or being on the dole but rather one of helping out those in need – notably the old and the poor. From that simple idea came the idea of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

From FDR’s efforts to electrify rural America and the low interest bank loans the USDA makes to farmers via their local banks rural America has been transformed. In Lewis’ book one person says if it wasn’t for such programs rural America would look like rural China.

So what’s the point? I think that a progressive is different from a conservative because a progressive wants to improve people’s lives. Conservatives subscribe to a do it yourself, rugged individualism philosophy. They seem to believe its all up to them and they can do it all themselves. They seem to worry about someone getting something for nothing, of others being on the dole, of banding together to help everyone (which they call socialism.) 

The truth of the matter is that no one does it on their own. They have help. Be it in the form of roads to drive on, or mail to be sent and delivered, to being able to apply for a 30 year mortgage. Or having clean water, safe medicine, safe food, they had help.

I find the basic tenet of conservatism flawed. Not only is it flawed at a fundamental level but in practice it is hypocritical. It’s the idea that “I don’t want you to get something for free, but it’s okay if I do,” that most conservatives subscribe to. It might be dressed up in fancy words and phrases so they don’t have to look it in the face and admit it. Or maybe they do know but don’t mind screwing over some group they feel doesn’t desrve what they have or are in some way inferior to them, but it’s there.

Some may want to argue this point and I’m happy to hear what you have to say, but please provide an example or a case where conservatism has actually done some good, and by that I mean more good than harm. I don’t know of any.

575 Days to the 2020 election and 653 Days to Inauguration Day

PS EDWARD HOPPER “Ground Swell” 1939

Day 820 Saturday April 6, 2019

576 Days to the 2020 election and 654 Days to Inauguration Day

A few days ago, maybe it was last week, the Republicans on the House Committee now chaired by Adam Schiff asked him to resign. I like that idea, but for every Republican serving. I think every meeting in which they participate should start with a request that they resign. In fact, I have a great idea. I think Mike Pense and Donald Trump should resign. 

The resignation deal (it should be a deal right? I mean he is “Mr. Art of the Deal”, right?) should be as follows:

Donald J. Trump should resign immediately. In exchange he will be charged with no crimes except for the ones he picks out of a hat of all the possible crimes he could be charged with. He only has to draw five times.

Michael R. Pence will immediately be sworn in as president, and thus will be listed officially as the 46^th President of the United States. His official photo will be taken and a painting of him as president will be unveiled. He will then resign and Nancy P. Pelosi will be sworn in as the 47^th President of the United States. Her job as President will be to clean up the mess these two idiots and their toadies created.

Here is a sample resignation request: 

“Dear Mr/Ms/Mrs/Honorable XYZ, The American people have lost faith in your ability to govern or lead. You are therefore asked to resign immediately and give up all official and unofficial government jobs, functions and capacities, and you will not seek nor accept any such jobs, functions, or capacities either in government or in any political party or lobbying position. In exchange, you will not be charged for any crimes you committed while in office, you will be allowed to keep your pension. You must further agree to a permanent gag order and never speak in public again; not on social media, not on cable TV, no where.

Humbly submitted by a real patriot and protector of the public interest.

Signed,

“

Is that too much to ask? Maybe, we can get all of them to resign en masse if they get to keep their ill-gotten gains, and aren’t threatened with prosecution?

I dunno. I can dream.

In other news. I guess it’s news. We are watching Trump, who has packed the top of the IRS, Treasury Department and the Justice Department with toadies and flunkies now try to have a lawyer in private practice tell those entities how to run things. In a letter that is a joke from beginning to end this guy suggests that they should ignore the law, which is plainly written. The law says that the head of the House Ways and Means Committee can request the tax returns of anyone or any entity and that those returns “shall” be handed over. This isn’t up for debate. This is the law. Period. Full stop. Seeing as how the Trump administration has taken a cavalier attitude toward enforcing the law: some they enforce, others they ignore; I guess they figure they can do this with a co-equal branch of government. I don’t think so… But, I don’t know what the remedy is if they so choose to ignore the law and not hand over the documents requested. It will be interesting to see what happens. 

It will also be interesting to see what the House learns from the president’s tax returns. Here are my guesses:

– He wasn’t under audit.

– He took money from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. Much of this money will be tied to money laundering, illegal contribution schemes and bribes when compared to bank and insurance applications he has made. In other words the tax returns at a minimum will show bank and insurance fraud when compared to other documents.

– His assets will be under valued.

– His net worth will be way way under a billion dollars.

– He, his children, and his companies will show a pattern of cheating and illegality that will be breathtaking and hard to deny. 

How the Republicans and toadies will try and spin this will be – well – interesting? Sad? Pitiful? 

Hopefully, our institutions will hold and justice in some form will be done.

Oh yeah, then there’s the Mir-a-Lago fiasco. For $250,000 you can become a member and hang out with like minded seemingly rich fat entitled folk. It has been if not a royal road at least a super highway for Chinese people to get their picture taken with Trump. Remember the outrage of the one photo Hillary had with a person that was her equal as Secretary of State that also contributed to the Clinton Foundation? Yeah, well this is the real deal. This is buying your way in on steroids. 

So they caught a Chinese national with a bunch of cell phones and thumb drive with malware on it. She said she was going to the pool to swim, except she had no swim wear. Slipped right by the security folks. Then she said she was a friend of Charlie. Charlie is a Chinese guy who has an organization that sounds like it’s part of the United Nations, but it isn’t. It’s a PR “I’ll get you close to big shots” outfit. 

How was this woman found out? Why a receptionist thought something was fishy. Yup, a receptionist. Mir-a-Lago is a nightmare for the security folks because anyone can walk into the place. It’s a club. Great.

Why not have a photo booth set up and sell photos of you with Donald? Five thousand a pop. Come on. A guy’s gotta make a buck.

What’s that game where you have a plastic mat with giant colored dots on it and you spin a pointer and it shows you which colored dot you place your hands and feet on? Twister! That’s it! Watch for the legal version of that this week to play out as seemingly adult people try to deny the law and reality.

Stay tuned. It’s not over yet.

576 Days to the 2020 election and 654 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Georgia O’Keefe “Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 2” 

Day 819 Friday April 5, 2019

577 Days to the 2020 election and 655 Days to Inauguration Day

Folks on the Mueller team are pissed and the word is getting out. Apparently, Bill Barr’s review of their findings is not accurate. Shocking that a trained attorney acting as Attorney General could get that wrong, but he did! It was, apparently, way too positive in Trump’s favor. Who could have seen that coming? (Okay, anyone based in reality, but some 40% of the country is  not…so, here we are.)

As to the summary that Barr gave (It’s not a summary! Yeah, I know. It’s a giant lie – deny that.) was not only inaccurate, legally questionable, and legislatively not necessary, the Mueller team had prepared a summary of each section of their report and, I think, an overall summary. Barr says he didn’t release that because parts of the summary were marked “may contain sensitive information” or some such warning. He also said that there is grand jury testimony and other stuff that is under the grand jury guise and that stuff can’t be released so Barr, ever the good man, is personally taking it upon himself to cut all that out before showing it to anyone. It turns out both of these excuses are hogwash. Every page in the Mueller report is stamped with a warning about “may contain sensitive information.” Doesn’t mean it does. Folks found it odd that the Mueller team would write summaries if they didn’t intend for them to be made public, and it turns out they damn well intended them to be made public and this is an excuse because of a rubber stamp image on every page of the report. As to the grand jury excuse, a lawyer goes to a judge and asks that the information be releasable to the public. It was done during Watergate. Boom. Done. Next?

Then there’s the weird argument by Trump and the right that the Mueller report completely exonerates him, so why are the underlings standing in the way (ie the Senate) of releasing the report?   Well, shucks, I don’t know. I’d have to take a wild guess here and mind you it is only a guess on my part but if I were to guess I’d have to say THE MUELLER REPORT DOESN’T EXONERATE TRUMP. In fact, I’m guessing that any sane person reading it ( and in our country that’s all of us minus the Trump supporters or between 60-67% of the country ) would conclude the opposite and that he’s guilty as shit and he knows it. In fact, and this is a little known fact to those in that Trump base but Trump’s lapdog AG said in his wacky letter that Mueller didn’t exonerate the president. But, of course, they didn’t hear that because after running it through the Trumpolater it came out just the opposite, which is what we’ve come to expect.

In other news Big Pharma has put a provision in some health care bill that Trump is trying to pass that would permanently lock in their absurdly high prices here in the USA. And why not? That’s capitalism. A person’s gotta make a buck. Of course, Canada, Europe and every other country in the world said no and they pay much lower drug prices for the same stuff. How much lower? Well, from personal experience I can tell you in my case it was 80% lower. For the exact same thing, we get here. Meanwhile people are dying who can’t afford their drugs.

Speaking of dying, the heart breaking story on 60 Minutes of the couple whose daughter was murdered by one of those mass shooters. They sold everything, bought an RV and travel around the country from one mass shooting to another offering aid and comfort to other victims. They help folks with grief and with the practicality of how you ship a body, and stuff like that. They are kept extremely busy, going from one shooting to the next. Gawd, It took Australia one shooting to change their laws and they haven’t had a mass shooting since, and gun owners can still own guns. Now, New Zealand is following suit. One mass shooting and that’s it. But we can’t seem to manage that.

Doesn’t seem to matter if its guns or drugs we can’t stop our politicians from being bought off. It’s no surprise I guess because when a whole major party goes in the tank for a known, proven liar and con-man, what can we expect? In both cases it’s really all about the same thing – money.

And just when we thought Trump couldn’t go lower, couldn’t do something stupider, he proposed Herman Cain for the Federal Reserve. OMG! Interest rates will go to 9.99% (get it? Remember the 9-9-9 plan?) Herman Cain, Mr. Godfather Pizza, former Republican hopeful who didn’t seem to know much about anything in foreign policy (or anything else for that matter) who tried to fake his way through questions on Libya, and most dangerously a man who believes that we should return to the gold standard. (I thought we had that argument with William Jennings Bryant and is was over. Sorry he wanted silver, not gold, but the problem is the same. )

For those of you who haven’t had an econ course, or don’t understand the problem with the gold standard argument lemme ’splain. The idea behind the gold (or silver, or any precious thing) standard is that you put a bunch of gold in a bank vault and you give folks a piece of paper and tell them that the piece of paper represents an amount of gold you have in your vault. This saves lugging around gold, which is heavy, and hopefully stops you from getting robbed of your gold – handy. An economy is the exchange of goods and services. To make an economy work you need a method of exchange. You can trade stuff, called bartering, but then you have to find someone who has what you want and you have to have something they want and then you have to agree on how much of each you each are willing to part with to get what the other wants. It can get complicated and hard to actually get what you need,

For instance, I understand in Japan wedding guests are given a rice bowl as a present for coming (maybe they are inscribed like for instance “Donald and Melania” or “Donald and Marla” or … you get the idea, I hope.) Rice bowls cost about one dollar to make. Imagine if you wanted to buy a Cadillac? That’s a lot of rice bowls. Can you imagine a seller of Cadillacs wanting 50,000 rice bowls? So barter is a tough way to go, but works in limited circumstances. 

So you get a medium of exchange, could be gold – actual gold, or it could be a currency – like dollar bills. Whatever it is people have to have faith that it’s going to hold its value. Currencies can change in value, that means the amount of goods and services they can buy can change. 

Here’s where economists go crazy constructing thought experiments and models trying to explain what is happening in the real world. (Spoiler alert: no one really knows what is happening in the real world. We only have rough ideas, and they can be inaccurate, but at times those generalizations are the best we can do.)  If you think of an economy as a box and everything happens inside this very large box then we can create some models to try and explain what is, or should be, happening. In this box we have people buying and selling stuff (and services). Let’s say everyone is making $5 an hour and a six pack of beer costs $2.50. You’d have to work for half an hour to buy a six pack. Now let’s say everyone got a raise to $10 an hour. All of a sudden you can work for 15 minutes to buy that six pack. What’s happened? More money has been put into the system. In fact, it doubled. Do you think the person selling beer is going to keep their price at $2.50? Heck no. He has expenses, everything is going to cost twice as much in terms of dollars. Because as everyone got more money they are willing to pay more because they have more money and the value of the money goes down because the beer guy is going to raise his prices to keep up. This is called inflation. Most economies have a little bit of inflation in them. 

Let’s look at the other side of the situation, prices and wages go down, called deflation. This is where the gold standard comes in. There’s only so much gold in the world. I’ve been told that if you put all the gold in the world in one place you could fill two tennis courts to a height of six to eight feet. That’s it. Yes, we might find a little more each year but it’s not going to change the overall height of the pile of gold much. So we say the amount of gold is fixed. If you peg your currency (ie the dollar) to the amount of gold you have then you have a fixed amount of currency that your rectangular box can have. It doesn’t matter how many more people are born, each of which will need some money. There is only so much money to go around. What happens is everyone gets desperate to get some money. They’ll sell things really cheap, if only they can get some currency. This is called deflation. This is what happened during the Great Depression, which was started by the stock market crash of 1929 but made really really bad when the bankers (all Republicans) refused to loan out money in the early 1930s. It took FDR coming in in 1932 and spending money, a lot of money to put money back into the system to get things back to normal. That’s not to say that the Republicans and the bankers didn’t fight him every step of the way – they did. It wasn’t until WWII that it would have been unpatriotic to do so, and besides they were skimming so much gravy off the top from the war effort that they went along with it.

Governments try to control the amount of inflation by putting money into or taking money out of the economy via the banking system. They do this by adjusting the interest rates on treasury notes. This is done by a central bank. In our case it’s the Federal Reserve. If the interest rates are high, banks will buy those notes rather than putting their money somewhere else. Once the treasury note is issued then that money is out of the system and the effect should be to slow down the rate of inflation. If those interest rates are low then people won’t buy the T-bills and they’ll put their money elsewhere, thus leaving it in the economy. Certain treasury bills are constantly coming due so this will put money, more money back into the system and the supply of money will increase and therefore inflation will rise and one’s dollar won’t be worth quite as much.

This is basic basic economics. If you don’t understand this you have no business being on the board of the institution that regulates this sort of stuff. Neither Herman Cain or Stephen Moore, both of Trump’s most recent picks for the Federal Reserve, have any idea how this works. It’s hard to say which man is more dangerous to the economy. The man thinks the gold standard is the way to go, thus creating a depression, maybe on the scale of the Great Depression, or the man with a proven track record of ruining an economy (ie Kansas.)

The one thing that continues to astound is the ability of Trump to not only go lower, but to go stupider. Neither the bottom, nor the brick wall are in sight, as we hurdle down the track or fall deeper into the pit.

I’d say God help us, but that ain’t gonna cut it. We need to help ourselves. What I can’t figure out is how many of these clowns don’t really know or understand and how many are just playing the system?

577 Days to the 2020 election and 655 Days to Inauguration Day

PS The Annunciation, Jan Van Ecyk 1434/36, in the National Gallery, Washington DC. It is all alleged that when this painting was last bought in the 1920s the price paid was the highest per square inch, coming in at approximately $20,000 per inch.

 

Day 818 Thursday April 4, 2019

578 Days to the 2020 election and 656 Days to Inauguration Day

Several things I left out from yesterday’s screed and a few little tiny news items.

These news items are so minuscule they are hardly worth mentioning, but I feel compelled to so do.

There is a report out that the way AG Barr characterized the Mueller report is not in line with what the report says. Shocking, I know. Who would have thought the guy who wrote an 18-19 page memo to the president about why he would make a great AG, specifically because he thought the Special Counsel’s investigation was illegal would write a misleading report? (I did! I did!) 

This is the man behind one of the greatest criminal miscarriages of justice in our time. He’s the guy who strongly suggested to Papa Bush (aka Nixon’s illegal messenger boy) that he, the president, pardon all those connected with Iran Contra, thus showing the world that their are two tracks of justice in this country. He’s at it again. ( Warning. Warning. )

Besides that, not much happened yesterday, other than the head of one of the two committees in the House of Representatives that is legally allowed to demand any tax return in the United States of any individual or corporation has done so for one Donald J. Trump and five or eight of his businesses. This demand is for the returns from 2013-2018. He did not have to subpoena them, because by law, he can merely ask for them – by law (Did I mention “by law”?). Why is the law written this way? Before Warren G. Harding was in office, only the president could ask for someone’s tax returns. However, in the bid rigging and bribery scandal known as The Teapot Dome Scandal that involved the president and his cabinet, the law was changed. It was used to look at Nixon’s tax returns. Surprisingly (NOT) Tricky Dick owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes! Why is it Republicans are the ones caught with both hands in the cookie jar? While Dems are caught only with their finger tips? I suggest that it’s more inherent in the Republican nature to cheat (and claim its their god given right or some horse BS.)

So, despite the gaslighting of the right wing media, the president, his children and his flunkies in Congress there is evidence in the Mueller Report that as William Barr said the president is not exonerated. Apparently, Barr’s weird letters painted the president in a more positive light than Mueller’s team suggest. How do we know this? Why some of Mueller’s team are speaking out. They are so outraged over Barr’s slimy attempt to cover up the truth that they are speaking up. This for the first time.

The night before last I saw an interview with Julian Castro, who is running for president. I like him, and I especially like that he has laid out a detailed plan of how to deal with immigration. Apparently, the Trump plan of closing the border and caging immigrants isn’t going so well. Who could have predicted that? (Well, anyone who is not a white supremacist or not a conservative fake economist, like the guy picked to be on the Fed that ran the state of Kansas’ economy into the ground. ie anyone with half a brain.)

What I like about Castro’s plan is that he has gotten to the heart of the problem in Central America and announced a proposal that makes sense. Naturally, this means that Republicans won’t like it because it is based on facts and experience, and an old Republican plan suggested by Henry Kissinger.

Castro has said we need a Marshall Plan for Central America. Kissinger said we needed to spend a ton of money to help the economies of Central and South America or people would be coming to our borders. Guess what? People are coming to our borders, fleeing the terrible economic conditions in their countries that is aggravated by corruption, lawlessness and drug gangs. Who knew? Once again, anyone who was paying attention.

The problem has gotten much worse since Kissinger’s time. The drug gangs have infiltrated the political structure much more. Many of these countries are ruled by a small group of families, some descended from the conquistadors. The problem of corruption in government is huge. One person I spoke to in Mexico said he wished they’d bring in 1,000 Chinese judges to enforce the laws. In that way there wouldn’t be a lot of “so and so is a friend of mine (or part of my family)” excuses, and justice would be done.

The Marshall Plan idea has a lot of appeal and at a high level makes a lot of sense. The question is, can you get the money into the right people’s hands to do the job? If anyone can figure it out in the current crop of candidates it is Castro. He has been a mayor and a member of Obama’s cabinet. He has actually done things! Solved problems, come up with solutions. He’s not talking that garbage that Trump pulled in the last presidential election or Shultz is trying to do now. That “I’ll put smart people in a room and they can come up with a solution” garbage. Hey, why not put the smart people in a room now, come up with a plan, and present it? Don’t tell me you’re going to do it AFTER you get elected.

Oh, and now Trump is claiming that he’ll come up with a great health care plan after he is re-elected. Please. Fool me twice, three times, a hundred? Give me a break. You’re an idiot. You lie. You try to hide the truth that is in plain sight. You haven’t been able to accomplish anything positive as president and you want someone to believe the same old BS you used to sell Trump University and get you elected? As a Cambodian woman said to one of the people in my tour of Ankgor Wat whom she was trying to sell postcards to and he claimed he had no money, “IDON’TBELIEVYOU!” (Must be said in a high pitched singsong voice, for full effect.)

Meanwhile there is an on-going grand jury investigation of a company owned by a country that is being fined $50,000 a day for non-compliance. We don’t know the country or the company, but the probe is on-going. Something left over from the Mueller probe. 

So to summarize where we are with Trump, over the last few days these events and facts are still with us:

– The president seems to have no plan on anything, other than to argue and fight back with people.

– There are investigations into Trump’s: campaign, inauguration, administration, charity, university, businesses, taxes, and granting of security clearances.

Let’s talk about the security clearances. Apparently, Jared and Ivanka and some 25 other people were given security clearances that the intelligence community said were a threat to our national security.

In Jared’s case he claimed he went through normal procedures. This is a lie, which surprisingly makes Jared a liar. He was given a clearance despite the conclusions by the intelligence communities that he was a security risk on at least three different fronts: finances, business dealings, and personal conduct. He’s hugely in debt, his dad overpaid for a building in Manhattan that Jared is part of, and he secretly communicates with business and world leaders without telling anyone. Like with MBS using WhatsApp. And he almost started a war between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He probably leaked sensitive information to MBS about people in MBS’ family that weren’t completely loyal to him. (They were rounded up a few days after Jared visited MBS.) His personal nature has been discussed by several foreign powers and they see him as naive and easily manipulated. He’s referred to as “the clown prince.” His behavior may have been one of the factors that made MBS think he could get away with killing Jamal Khahsoggi .

578 Days to the 2020 election and 656 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Pablo Picasso “Family of Saltimbanques” 1905, at the National Gallery, Washington, DC.