Five Days From Trumpaggedon

Let’s Take a Look at What Might Have Been the Craziest Week of This Entire Donald Trump Ordeal So Far

 

Last week, all of these things actually happened in the real world:

• America’s most revered living actress received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Globes and used her speech to criticise President-Elect Donald Trump.
• A dossier assembled by a former M16 Agent was released to the public via BuzzFeed in which (among other things) Trump was indicated to have ties to Russia beyond anything we could have reasonably conceived.
• The man himself gave his first press conference in six months where he ignored his most recent controversies, eschewed virtually any mention of Russia whatsoever and basically refused to divest himself of the assets that would cause a massive conflict of interest with his presidency.
• A Gallup poll was released that  indicated Trump might in fact be the single most unpopular President-Elect in modern history which, it being so early into his tenure, does not bode particularly well for his future endeavours.

There’s one, and only one, positive thing to be taken from any of this: one day, this is gonna make one helluva of a fucking movie. Beyond that, that’s a lot of significant and potentially nefarious information to unpack all at once. Without getting too dense or properly pessimistic about it all, let’s take a quick look at each of these issues separately.

Meryl Streep’s Speech

In a move that has garnered her equal parts support and criticism, Meryl Streep took Trump to task during her acceptance speech of the Cecil B. DeMille Award at last week’s Golden Globes. “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners”, she said, “and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” Some have called it a strawman argument, as Trump has not actually pledged to extradite all foreigners from the U.S., just those he considers inherently predisposed to commit crimes. Beyond that, Streep’s most direct remarks were reserved for Trump’s impression of a disabled reporter: “There was nothing good about it, but it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth.” As mentioned, some found Streep’s comments redundant or even reductive, but I would say that her calling for people all over the world to exercise empathy in these turbulent times was necessary and deeply poignant. Also, I can’t improve on this incredible tweet:

The Golden Document

Yes, I know I’ve already made the joke in the subtitle above, but let’s seriously get it out of the way: Trump may have paid Russian hookers to urinate in front of him. At it’s very best, this fact has led to some pretty solid scatological humour, but it does have the tendency to distract from the larger – albeit entirely unproven – narrative, which is that Russia may have the means of blackmailing the President into doing its bidding. As someone (and I’m sure I wasn’t alone) who got incredibly fucking tired of hearing people harp on about whatever they thought was the huge scandal behind Hillary Clinton’s emails, I am very hesitant to jump to any conclusions about Trump’s conduct based purely on an unverified document that claims to have evidence sourced from the very people who have specialised in muddying the waters these past six months. That said, let’s consider some things that make perhaps a little more sense in the context of this document having some truth behind it:

1. The report was credible enough that the CIA felt the need to brief both President Obama and Trump on its existence.
2. Trump has consistently refused to indict Russia for their widely accepted utilisation of hacking to sway the outcome of the U.S. election.
3. Despite assurances to the contrary, some of Trump’s top aides have indeed been in frequent contact with Russia.

So, at this point, I guess what I’m saying is… I’m just sayin’.

Trump’s Batshit Press Conference

Holy Jesus, someone owes me an hour of my life back. Watching the entirety of Trump’s recent press conference was akin to watching a toddler shit in my sunroof: I could do nothing to stop it, so I kept waiting for someone else to intervene while the strange, perverse hilarity of the situation curdled into abject misery.

Just as an example of the shitshow that was allowed to occur at an official address to journalists by the incoming fucking President, Trump began by giving evidence of his imperviousness to corruption in the form of an anecdote he relayed where he was offered a heap of money to engage in a business deal in Dubai. He sidestepped the fact that it most certainly would have seriously conflicted with his Presidency when saying that he heroically turned it down (“I didn’t have to…”) and genuinely seemed to expect applause for doing so. Then he shouted down a CNN reporter as being a propagator of “Fake News” for its report on the dossier detailing his potential ties to Putin.

Finally, while gesturing to an enormous table of clearly empty folders that he claimed represented the bulk of his major business dealings, Trump spoke of leaving his empire in control of his two sons in the form of a blind trust. Never mind that they’re both, y’know, his children, in which case a blind trust basically just relies on them all super-dooper promising not to discuss business dealings together. Additionally, once the non-partisan head of government ethics called Trump’s entire proposal “meaningless“, it became pretty clear how hard Saturday Night Live was gonna slam this wet fart of a conference.

Trump’s Absurd Level of Unpopularity

Polishing off this rancid, old turkey sandwich of a week, here’s a table of the results to the previously mentioned Gallup poll that asked Americans the question, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way … is handling his presidential transition?”:

 

	Approve	Disapprove	No opinion
	%	%	%
Donald Trump
2017 Jan 4-8 ^	44	51	4
2016 Dec 7-11	48	48	4
Barack Obama
2009 Jan 9-11	83	12	5
2008 Dec 12-14	75	17	8
2008 Dec 1 †	78	13	9
George W. Bush
2001 Jan 15-16	61	25	14
2001 Jan 5-7	65	26	9
Bill Clinton
1993 Jan 14-15 ‡	68	18	15
1992 Dec 18-20	67	15	18
1992 Nov 19-20 ‡	62	14	24

Yeah, Imma just leave these right here; don’t really feel like anything else needs to (or can) be said at this point.