A Not-So-Innocent Abroad

President Donald Trump’s second official foreign tour hasn’t yet gotten to the juicy part, which will be today’s long-awaited face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but it’s already generating plenty of news.

The trip shrewdly began in Poland, where Trump could expect a much-needed welcoming reception. Poles have been favorably inclined to Republican American presidents since at least the days of Ronald Reagan, whose staunch cold warrior stance did much to liberate Poland from the the totalitarian rule of the Soviet Union, and these days their government has a nationalist and protectionist and anti-immigration bent and is waging a war on the local media that make it all the more inclined to embrace such a Republican as Trump. With fans bused in from the Polish hinterlands, Trump delivered a scripted oration denouncing Russian meddling in Ukraine and elsewhere that revved up a huge Polish crowd and confounded the American media.

There was a brief news conference with the American media, though, and of course there were questions about the Russia thing with Trump and Russia that has been a bigger story here than it’s probably been in Poland. Standing next to the Polish head of state, Trump reiterated his view that no matter what his intelligence agencies say Russia might or might not have meddled in the past election to Trump’s benefit, and that if they did it was all the fault of President Barack Obama for letting it happen, and besides everyone does it, and we’re not sure how that will play. There’s no telling what the Poles will make of it, especially when you take into account the press crackdowns on fake news we’ve been reading about, but here in the states all of the putatively fake but still-free press was highlighting that Trump seemed more concerned about Putin’s meddling in Ukraine than his meddling in America’s past election.

All of which makes today’s face-to-face and officially bi-lateral meeting with Putin all the juicier, of course, and it was already juicy enough. That robustly anti-Russian speech Trump gave to the adoring Polish crowd included a robust and widely applauded affirmation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s mutual defense clause, which was conspicuously absent from his big oration on his first European and clearly annoyed all our western European NATO allies, but the following press conference probably exacerbated their more general annoyance. Most of those NATO allies have lately survived challenges by the same nationalist and protectionist and anti-immigration impulses that have lately prevailed in Poland in America, and have come up with some proposed globalist free trade arrangements that leave America out and rival the economic clout of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Trump has threatened to dissolve, so the geo-political and global economic implications of that Putin meeting are pretty darned complicated.

If you’ve been following the fake-or-not coverage of that whole Russia thing with Trump and Russia, it’s exponentially more complicated yet. Russia has lately been joining with China to propose that America abandon a longstanding alliance against with South Korea against the North Korean government that just launched a missile test that might deliver a nuclear strike against Alaska, and Trump had plenty of things to say about both regimes during his campaign, all of which have been changed since, so todays big meeting will be damned juicy.

The meeting with Putin will take place in Germany as part of the G-20 summit of the world’s twenty biggest economies, and Trump can’t expect such a friendly reception. There are already angry and violent protests against the globalist world order, which are too angry and stupid to realize that Trump is a sort-of ally, and of course all the establishment types of western Europe have a lingering disdain for Trump since his last foreign trip. There’s little chance that Trump will charm or bully Putin into abandoning North Korea, less chance that he’ll take a firm stand with Putin to defuse all that domestic talk about the Russia thing with Trump and Russia, and no chance at all he’ll come home to the heroic welcome he found in Poland.

The best-case scenario is the least juicy, with Trump and Putin having a boring feeling-out meeting that is full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing, but given the personalities involved that seems unlikely.

— Bud Norman

When the News Requires Asterisks

In yet another of those almost daily signs of our very weird times, one of the people who figured prominently in Wednesday’s news chooses to call himself HanA**holeSolo. The asterisks were inserted by the more polite people at the Cable News Network, who gave him his 15 minutes of fame when they discovered he was one of the people who created that viral video of President Donald Trump body-slamming a former professional wrestling foe with the CNN logo superimposed on the villain’s head.

Trump proudly “tweeted” the video, which was the previous day’s reminder of how very weird are our times, and it got plenty of attention even on a Fourth of July when the nutcase regime running North Korea launched a successful test of a missile that could have reached Alaska. The old-fashioned sorts of Republican commentators in the establishment conservative press tsk-tsked that it was not befitting the dignity of the presidency, while the more newfangled sorts on the right lustily cheered it as a masterpiece of modern political rhetoric. On the left the reaction ranged from the more sober sorts who found it undignified and downright embarrassing to the shriller sorts who insisted it was another Trumpian provocation to violence against journalists. The story also raised question about journalistic practices and privacy protections in the internet age, too, along with usual bi-partisant tsk-tsking about how very weird the times are lately, as well as further reason for partisan bickering, so of course it got a lot of play.

We chose to write about that North Korean missile test instead, which CNN also devoted much time to, but the network has a larger staff and a more personal stake and thus sent out a couple of enterprising reporters to find out who had created the video. All of the stories had already noted that Trump or one of his associates had found it on some sort of social medium called “Reddit,” in a particular “thread” where Trump’s most fervent supporters meet on-line to cheer their hero and boo his media opponents, which sated our curiosity about the question, but CNN dug deeper to discover the identity of the specific poster who had helped create the video. They also found out, unsurprisingly enough, that the aforementioned and self-described HanA**holeSolo had a long history of posting outrageously racist and religiously intolerant and openly violence-provoking comments on the site.

That did provide CNN and the rest of the left with a fairly effective rhetorical counter-punch to all the metaphorical body-slamming they’ve lately been taking from Trump’s “tweets.” During the campaign Trump had been caught “re-tweeting” some wildly and obviously overstated statistics about black murder rates from a fake source cited at an unabashedly racist web site, and it doesn’t look good that the president or any of his associates are still reading and “re-tweeting” from such sites. We’ll assume that Trump was only advocating a figurative body-slam of the media, but those shriller voices on the left could rightly note that a recent Republican congressional candidate was cheered on the by more new-flanged right when he did it literally. Not to mention that the president “tweeting” old video of himself participating in professional wrestling is pretty darned undignified, with or without a CNN logo superimposed.

Still, CNN also left itself open to some valid criticisms from all corners. The network learned HanA**holeSolo’s true identity and called him up for an interview, but when he apologized profusely for his past rants and promised to be more politically correct in the future they agreed not to reveal his real name but reserved the right to do so in the future. On both the left and the right there are people who stand for the right to be an anonymous a**hole on the internet, and they make a good case, so that took up a lot of the talk. Others on both the left and the right have no problem with people being held accountable in the court of public opinion for the opinions they state there, and they also make some good points, but pretty much everyone on both the left and the right agreed that CNN was coming close to blackmailing HanA**holeSolo from expressing his a**hole opinions.

That’s something to worry about, given all the efforts on both sides to suppress more reasonable views, but for now we’re more worried about that North Korean missile test and Trump’s upcoming European trip and face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump’s “tweeting” about that stuff, too, with the same undignified bluster of a professional wrestler, and the brief fame of HanA**holeSolo informs those stories in a worrisome way, so for all the network’s many faults we appreciate CNN’s daily reminder of how very weird are our times.

— Bud Norman